Guerrilla memoirists: recovering intimacy in the margins of First World War memoirs

ABSTRACT

In the growing scholarship on marginalia, relatively little attention has been given to their function in military memoirs. This article proposes that modern military marginalia have a quality of their own, if we accept Yuval Noah Harari’s diagnosis of a ‘modern war culture’ emerging from the concurrent developments of an expanding book market and a post-Enlightenment epistemology that attributes special significance to the experience and remembrance of war. In the light of this ambivalent quality of modernity, the military annotator can be seen as a ‘guerrilla memoirist’, re-appropriating the intimate conversation among combatants in tacit challenge to the commodification and marketization of their shared experience. The article draws on historical examples of military marginalia and on Lewis Hyde’s account of the gift relationship to contextualize a case study: the annotations (including a pasted-in trench map) made by an American First World War veteran in a copy of Storm of Steel, the 1929 American edition of Ernst Jünger’s best-selling war memoir In Stahlgewittern.

KEYWORDS:

• Military memoirs
• marginalia
• First World War
• gift exchange
• military masculinities
• maps

Acknowledgments

This material was presented at two workshops in the context of the AHRC-funded Passions of War project. I am grateful for the comments of the workshop participants, and in particular to Jessica Meyer, who set me right on more than one occasion. I am also grateful to the editors of this special issue, to my colleague Andrew Plowman, and to two anonymous reviewers for their advice and suggestions. The article was completed during a period of residence at the Critical Global Studies Institute, Sogang University (Seoul), supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2017S1A6A3A01079727).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. We might presume that women in the military engage in the same practice of annotation, but the field is still too fresh to make definite statements. The cases I am exploring here are those of men.

2. Entry for Charles Baggott, Fourteenth United States Federal Census (1920), Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

3. 2/1st London Field Ambulance, War Diary, The National Archives, Kew, WO 95/2944/1.

4. I am grateful to Major Rob Ridley, Royal Engineers, for this observation.

5. The annotated copy is in the Wilfred Owen Collections, Bodleian Library, Oxford [Owen HO227]. Neither Owen’s letters nor Sassoon’s letters and diaries make reference to the gift, though Sassoon confirmed that he had read Adams’ book in a letter of 3 October 1917, to Robbie Ross (Sassoon 1983, 188).

6. I begged Storm of Steel from his widow, my great-aunt, on a visit to her Baltimore home in 1974. Any other books that belonged to him were presumably sold or discarded when the contents of her house were auctioned following her death in 1976 (Notice of sale of the estate of Pauline K. Baggott, Baltimore Sun, 27 June 1976).

7. See <http://www.army.mod.uk/firstworldwarresources/archives/661/trench-map-captain-siegfried-sassoon> accessed 16 April 2017, and 20 maps listed among Jünger’s papers in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, of which seven are annotated in various hands.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2017S1A6A3A01079727].