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ABSTRACT
Great War memoirs by both soldiers and nurses emphasise the role of eye-witness in establishing the authority of the account. This authority is acknowledged in the public response to these texts, which crosses both national and gender boundaries. However, the response is asymmetric between genders: soldiers were often blamed for insisting on the primacy of personal experience in their accounts, on the grounds that this made the war seem senseless, undermining the sacrifices made. Nurses, to the contrary, were not the subject of such attacks, with one noteworthy exception which is explained by the untypical nature of the memoir in question. The asymmetry derives from the attribution of gender-specific forms of authenticity in the memoirs: the authenticity of soldiers’ accounts derived from their own experiences, the authenticity of nurses’ accounts derived from what they did for the soldiers.
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Notes
1 Media archive searches found very few reviews of German nurse memoirs in wartime; in general, German wartime media paid little attention to nurses, unlike British and French media (Palmer Citation2021, 103–124).
2 The role of propaganda and censorship in the Great War is well-known; for a convenient, brief introductory summary see Knightley Citation1975.
3 Darrow Citation1996; Daniel Citation1997; Planert Citation1998; Thébaud Citation1986; Grayzel Citation1999; Braybon Citation1981. See also Palmer Citation2021, 103–126. There were significant differences between the three nations in this respect; however, this is largely beyond the scope of our analysis, with the exception of German nurses who published their war memoirs in the Nazi period, to which we shall return.
4 Les Annales Politiques et Littéraires, 31 December 1916; La Revue 119: 538–541; Le Radical, 29 January 1917. See also Figaro, 18 December 1916; Revue Bleue, April 1917; Revue Hebdomadaire, 29 September 1917.
5 The grammar is very condensed: it is the shameless sophistry that is hidden from us – i.e. the fact that the false Tommies, etc., are lies is hidden by writers’ complicity. ‘Rosalie’ was slang for a bayonet. This is a reference to a constant theme in early official propaganda about the French army, that they did best in charges with fixed bayonets that led to hand-to-hand fighting; the reality was rather different.
6 Palmer Citation2018, 93, 153–154.
7 The question of the reliability of such testimony lies to one side of our focus, which is the original public response to the testimony. While the question of historiographical accuracy is not relevant, the process analysed here is an example of the interaction between remembering and forgetting (Ricoeur Citation2000); analysis of the memoirs in terms of public opinion also points in the direction of the theory of collective memory, specifically the form sometimes called ‘cultural memory’; see the discussion in Ollick Citation2011. This matter massively exceeds the bounds of a study with our limited focus.
8 This account is taken from Grabolle Citation2004, 27–28, citing a 1980 study by D. Kassang, the first based on Unruh’s original version. Although there is no doubt that Unruh’s pacifism was genuine, along with his commitment to the post-war Republic and his opposition to its right-wing enemies, it appears that his political conversion came somewhat later than he claimed.
9 See the author’s Preface to the second edition, available at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id+mdp.39015005016855;view=1up;seq=13. See also Johns Hopkins library website: http://exhibits.library.jhu.edu/exhibits/show/hopkins-and-the-great-war/johns-hopkins-hospital/neutral-interventions/ellen-la-motte. The ban cannot have been entirely effective, since the book is occasionally mentioned in wartime media; see The Outpost VII (1), 1 June 1918, Labour Leader, 19 September 1918.
10 Apart from examples quoted here, I only came across the word once, in a French essay about recent German war books in Revue du Christianisme Social (1 January 1930, 57); the context is a contrast between ‘témoignage authentique’ and propaganda. The term is often used in recent secondary literature – e.g. Higonnet Citation2002 – but I know of no study which has analysed contested claims of authenticity in the original public response to the memoirs across the gender divide.
11 Original emphasis. See also Clennell Wilkinson, ‘Back to All That’, The London Mercury XXII, 540.
12 With the exception of recent German analysis of the nationalist interpretation of the war under Weimar; see e.g. Schneider Citation2004; Brückner Citation2017.
13 Two other reviews criticised Testament of Youth for excessive self-pity, but without invoking the principle that is so explicit in the New English Weekly, and that links to the nationalist attacks on soldiers’ memoirs: Country Life (2 September 1933), Daily Express (31 August 1933). One French paper criticised Clemenceau-Jacquemaire on roughly similar grounds – insufficient admiration for wounded soldiers’ heroism: Libre Parole, 29 June 1919.
14 That the focus was indeed on the soldiers has been demonstrated elsewhere, through extensive quotation from the memoir texts (Palmer Citation2021, 131–141). See also Acton and Potter Citation2015, 34. It is striking that these memoirs deal virtually exclusively with the nursing experience; any extraneous material is limited to their journeys to and from their postings and their days off. They share this exclusiveness of focus with the soldiers’ memoirs.
15 Watson makes a similar point: narratives of the war experience could have placed equal value on men’s and women’s experience, but the war in fact became ‘the soldiers’ war’ (Citation2004, 186, 220 ref.follows).
16 See also Hämmerle Citation2014, 91, 102; Panke-Kochinke Citation2004: passim; Hallett Citation2010.
17 I am assuming that memoirs published in the immediate aftermath of the war, such as Clemenceau-Jacquemaire (Citation1919) and QUAIMNS (Citation1922) are effectively wartime texts, since the short intervening period suggests they were written substantially in the war. The chronology of publication is in Palmer Citation2021, 4.
18 The later French texts were largely ignored: I have not found any reviews of Julie Crémieux’s frank but enthusiastic second memoir (Citation1934), and Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire’s second (Citation1931) received little attention.
19 Borden, reviewed Morecombe Guardian, 8 February 1930; Daily Herald, November 22, 1929; Aberdeen Press and Journal, 8 May 1930; Dundee Courier, November 5,1929; Yorkshire Post, 19 March 1930; Times Literary Supplement, 5 December 1929; Sunday Times, November 24, 1929; Dundee Evening Telegraph, 10 January 1930. Salmond, reviewed Times Literary Supplement, 12 September 1935; Times, 13 September 1935; Daily Telegraph, 8 October 1935; Aberdeen Press and Journal, 1 January 1936; Derby Evening Telegraph, 22 November 1935; Sunday Times, 22 September 1935; Country Life, 21 September 1935; Spectator, 20 September 1935. For an analysis of the reception of Riemann, see Palmer Citation2021, 167–168. One other German nurse published a war memoir in this period (Wenzel Citation1931); it is untypical as it narrates her time in Siberia inspecting prisoner-of-war facilities, one of several nurse memoirs on the same theme; on this literature, see Palmer Citation2021, 267–275.
20 In the case of two nurses who published both during and after the war, the second memoirs are notably franker than the wartime ones (Anon., i.e. Luard, K. Citation1915 and Luard Citation1930; Crémieux, J. Citation1918 and Citation1934). In addition, many of Borden’s reviewers thought hers was the first war book by a woman, which suggests that the wartime nurse literature was largely forgotten ten years later. The Frankfurter Zeitung made the same assertion about Riemann (11 November Citation1930).
21 The numbers are also striking: several large compilations contain extracts of more than 100 authors (Hadeln Citation1934; Senftleben et al. Citation1934; Pflugk-Harttung Citation1936). In addition, there were eight substantial individual memoirs and further compilations of reprinted extracts for use in schools (e.g. Schickedanz Citation1936).
22 This is partly because many German nurses served on the Eastern Front, where conditions were markedly worse, including for the medical system, than on the Western Front.
23 Two other nurse memoirs have some similarity in this respect. Elisabeth de Gramont’s 5 volumes of memoirs include one (Citation1932) about wartime, which includes her nursing experience, but gives it little space. Maria Pöll-Naepflin’s memoir of wartime (Citation1934) includes a substantial amount of material about other matters, but is dominated by her time as a nurse; it is the first of two volumes, the second of which deals with her life post-war (Citation1948).
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Jerry Palmer
Jerry Palmer was Professor of Communications at London Metropolitan University and Visiting Professor in Sociology at City University, London. He has also held visiting professorships and fellowships at Copenhagen University, Aarhus University, and Wesleyan University, Connecticut. He is the author of eight books on mass media and popular culture, including most recently two books on World War One memoirs (Memories from the Front Line; Nurse Memoirs from the Great War). He is the editor (with Mo Dodson) of a collection of essays on Design and Aesthetics and some 50 shorter essays on mass media, literature, popular culture and political communication.