Academic literature on the topic 'World War 1914-1918 - Campaigns - Salonika'

The Allied expedition to Salonika was a controversial campaign of the First World War that diverted French and British resources away from the Western Front. To sustain this expedition without depleting existing forces, the Colonial Office approached the High Commissioners of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand and requested that each dominion consider raising a Serbian military contingent for service in Salonika. In the decades preceding the outbreak of war, South Slavs had settled in each of the dominions and the War Office hoped to exploit nationalist aspirations for a pan-Slavic state and mobilise South Slavs in the dominions. In raising these contingents, dominion governments weighed between fulfilling a demand of the Imperial war effort and jeopardising domestic stability by empowering a culturally-distinct minority that was the object of public paranoia. This article will examine how the legal status of South Slavs changed in the three dominions as a result of these recruiting efforts along with the conditions under which South Slavs were able to volunteer for service in Salonika. A comparative approach reveals how Southern Slavs were defined and how they defined themselves as they navigated the categories of enemy aliens, friendly allies, and subjects of the British Empire.

Learned Czechs on the Galician front: the experiences of the art historian Zdeňek Wirth and the lawyer Emil Svoboda The problems of the relations between science and war have belonged recently to the topics which are constantly present in Czech historiography. The same can not be stated, however, with reference to the problems connected with the participation of Czech representatives of the humanities in the Galician campaigns during the First World War. The aim of the article is to look at this topic and present the example of two learned men, who were called up to the front at the mature age of 36 years old as reserve officers. The first part of the text represents an introduction to the situation as well as a description of the basic bibliographic positions. Attention is mainly paid to the negative attitude of Czechs to the War, which had objectives that were in contrast with the Slavic feeling of the majority of Czech society. In a short essay, the perception of Galicia during the War is shown, with Czech soldiers valuing Galician towns more than villages. From a few sources, it can be stated that Krakow made the greatest impression, being regarded as a wonderful town, and its historic character was emphasized. The second part of the article concentrates on the wartime fate of the art historian and conservation specialist Zdeňek Wirth (1878–1961), which has been reconstructed based on correspondence. He was called up to the Galician front as a Landsturm officer (infantry battalion no. 214). He took part in the 1914 campaign, and later found himself mainly working in the support organizations for the front lines in Galicia and Lubelszczyzna, where his organizational and administrative skills were used. During the War (he was relieved of his duties in 1918), Wirth attempted to conduct as much scientific activity as possible; he wrote some articles on the current topics connected with conservation work (the confiscation of bells). He learnt Polish and also read Polish scientific literature. The third part of the article presents the half-year participation of the lawyer and philosopher Emil Svoboda (1878–1948) in the first Galician campaign of 1914–1915. The basic sources of information are his unpublished Memories with their strong anti-military character. Svoboda was also called up for military service as an officer of the Landsturm reserves (infantry battalion no. 213). Svoboda, as a company leader, took part in the fighting around Krakow, later in the offensive near Limanowa and, finally, spent part of the winter in the towns of Nowy Targ and Czarny Dunajec. In February 1915, he travelled to Prague on sick leave, and later was released from the army after an application by the University and Polytechnic of Prague.

This paper is part of a larger project exploring Australian literary responses to the Great War of 1914-1918. It draws on theories of embodiment, mourning, ritual and the recuperative potential of writing, together with a brief discussion of selected exemplars, to suggest that literary works of the period contain and lay bare a suite of creative, corporeal and social impulses, including resurrection, placation or stilling of ghosts, and formation of an empathic and duty-bound community. In Negotiating with the Dead, Margaret Atwood hypothesises that “all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality—by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead” (156). She asks an attendant question: “why should it be writing, over and above any other art or medium,” that functions this way? It is not only that writing acquires the appearance of permanence, by surviving “its own performance,” but also that some arts are transient, like dance, while others, like painting and sculpture and music, do “not survive as voice.” For Atwood, writing is a “score for voice,” and what the voice does mostly is tell stories, whether in prose or poetry: “Something unfurls, something reveals itself” (158). Writing, by this view, conjures, materialises or embodies the absent or dead, or is at least laden with this potential. Of course, as Katherine Sutherland observes, “representation is always the purview of the living, even when the order it constructs contains the dead” (202). She argues that all writing about death “might be regarded as epitaph or memorial; such writing is likely to contain the signs of ritual but also of ambiguity and forgetting” (204). Arguably writing can be regarded as participation in a ritual that “affirms membership of the collectivity, and through symbolic manipulation places the life of an individual within a much broader, sometimes cosmic, interpretive framework” (Seale 29), which may assist healing in relation to loss, even if some non-therapeutic purposes, such as restoration of social and political order, also lie behind both rites and writing. In a critical orthodoxy dating back to the 1920s, it has become accepted wisdom that the Australian literary response to the war was essentially nationalistic, “big-noting” ephemera, and thus of little worth (see Gerster and Caesar, for example). Consequently, as Bruce Clunies Ross points out, most Australian literary output of the period has “dropped into oblivion.” In his view, neglect of writings by First World War combatants is not due to its quality, “for this is not the only, or even the essential, condition” for consideration; rather, it is attributable to a “disjunction between the ideals enshrined in the Anzac legend and the experiences recorded or depicted” (170). The silence, we argue, also encompasses literary responses by non-combatants, many of whom were women, though limited space precludes consideration here of their particular contributions.Although poetry and fiction by those of middling or little literary reputation is not normally subject to critical scrutiny, it is patently not the case that there is no body of literature from the war period worthy of scholarly consideration, or that most works are merely patriotic, jingoistic, sentimental and in service of recruitment, even though these elements are certainly present. Our different proposition is that the “lost literatures” deserve attention for various reasons, including the ways they embody conflicting aims and emotions, as well as overt negotiations with the dead, during a period of unprecedented anguish. This is borne out by our substantial collection of creative writing provoked by the war, much of which was published by newspapers, magazines and journals. As Joy Damousi points out in The Labour of Loss, newspapers were the primary form of communication during the war, and never before or since have they dominated to such a degree; readers formed collective support groups through shared reading and actual or anticipated mourning, and some women commiserated with each other in person and in letters after reading casualty lists and death notices (21). The war produced the largest body count in the history of humanity to that time, including 60,000 Australians: none was returned to Australia for burial. They were placed in makeshift graves close to where they died, where possible marked by wooden crosses. At the end of the war, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) was charged with the responsibility of exhuming and reinterring bodily remains in immaculately curated cemeteries across Europe, at Gallipoli and in the Middle East, as if the peace demanded it. As many as one third of the customary headstones were inscribed with “known unto God,” the euphemism for bodies that could not be identified. The CWGC received numerous requests from families for the crosses, which might embody their loved one and link his sacrificial death with resurrection and immortality. For allegedly logistical reasons, however, all crosses were destroyed on site. Benedict Anderson suggested the importance to nationalism of the print media, which enables private reading of ephemera to generate a sense of communion with thousands or millions of anonymous people understood to be doing likewise. Furthermore, Judith Herman demonstrates in Trauma and Recovery that sharing traumatic experience with others is a “precondition for the restitution of a sense of a meaningful world” (70). Need of community and restitution extends to the dead. The practices of burying the dead together and of returning the dead to their homeland when they die abroad speak to this need, for “in establishing a society of the dead, the society of the living regularly recreates itself” (Hertz qtd. in Searle 66). For Australians, the society of the dead existed elsewhere, in unfamiliar terrain, accentuating the absence inherent in all death. The society of the dead and missing—and thus of the living and wounded—was created and recreated throughout the war via available means, including literature. Writers of war-related poems and fiction helped create and sustain imagined communities. Dominant use of conventional, sometimes archaic, literary forms, devices, language and imagery indicates desire for broadly accessible and purposeful communication; much writing invokes shared grief, resolve, gratitude, and sympathy. Yet, in many stories and poems, there is also ambivalence in relation to sacrifice and the community of the dead.Speaking in the voice of the other is a fundamental task of the creative writer, and the ultimate other, the dead, gaze upon and speak to or about the living in a number of poems. For example, they might vocalise displeasure and plead for reinforcements, as, for example, in Ella M’Fadyen’s poem “The Wardens,” published in the Sydney Mail in 1918, which includes the lines: “Can’t you hear them calling in the night-time’s lonely spaces […] Can’t you see them passing […] Those that strove full strongly, and have laid their lives away?” The speaker hears and conveys the pleading of those who have given their breath in order to make explicit the reader’s responsibility to both the dead and the Allied cause: “‘Thus and thus we battled, we were faithful in endeavour;/Still it lies unfinished—will ye make the deed in vain?’” M’Fadyen focusses on soldierly sacrifice and “drafts that never came,” whereas a poem entitled “Your Country’s Call,” published in the same paper in 1915 by “An Australian Mother, Shirley, Queensland,” refers to maternal sacrifice and the joys and difficulties of birthing and raising her son only to find the country’s claims on him outweigh her own. She grapples with patriotism and resistance: “he must go/forth./Where? Why? Don’t think. Just smother/up the pain./Give him up quickly, for his country’s gain.” The War Precautions Act of October 1914 made it “illegal to publish any material likely to discourage recruiting or undermine the Allied effort” (Damousi 21), which undoubtedly meant that, to achieve publication, critical, depressing or negative views would need to be repressed or cast as inducement to enlist, though evidently many writers also sought to convince themselves as well as others that the cause was noble and the cost redeemable. “Your Country’s Call” concludes uncertainly, “Give him up proudly./You have done your share./There may be recompense—somewhere.”Sociologist Clive Seal argues that “social and cultural life involves turning away from the inevitability of death, which is contained in the fact of our embodiment, and towards life” (1). He contends that “grief for embodiment” is pervasive and perpetual and “extends beyond the obvious manifestations of loss by the dying and bereaved, to incorporate the rituals of everyday interaction” (200), and he goes so far as to suggest that if we recognise that our bodies “give to us both our lives and our deaths” then we can understand that “social and cultural life can, in the last analysis, be understood as a human construction in the face of death” (210). To deal with the grief that comes with “realisation of embodiment,” Searle finds that we engage in various “resurrective practices designed to transform an orientation towards death into one that points towards life” (8). He includes narrative reconstruction as well as funeral lament and everyday conversation as rituals associated with maintenance of the social bond, which is “the most crucial human motive” (Scheff qtd. in Searle 30). Although Seale does not discuss the acts of writing or of reading specifically, his argument can be extended, we believe, to include both as important resurrective practices that contain desire for self-repair and reorientation as well as for inclusion in and creation of an empathic moral community, though this does not imply that such desires can ever be satisfied. In “Reading,” Virginia Woolf reminds that “somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in whatever is written down is the form of a human being” (28-29), but her very reminder assumes that this knowledge of embodiment tends to be forgotten or repressed. Writing, by its aura of permanence and resurrective potential, points towards life and connection, even as it signifies absence and disconnection. Christian Riegel explains that the “literary work of mourning,” whether poetry, fiction or nonfiction, often has both a psychic and social function, “partaking of the processes of mourning while simultaneously being a product for public reception.” Such a text is indicative of ways that societies shape and control responses to death, making it “an inherently socio-historical construct” (xviii). Jacques Derrida’s passionate and uneasy enactment of this labour in The Work of Mourning suggests that writing often responds to the death of a known person or their oeuvre, where each death changes and reduces the world, so that the world as one knew it “sinks into an abyss” (115). Of course, writing also wrestles with anonymous, large-scale loss which is similarly capable of shattering our sense of “ontological security” (Riegel xx). Sandra Gilbert proposes that some traumatic events cause “death’s door” to swing “so publicly and dramatically open that we can’t look away” (xxii). Derrida’s work of mourning entails imaginative revival of those he has lost and is a struggle with representation and fidelity, whereas critical silence in respect of the body of literature of the First World War might imply repeated turning from “grief for embodiment” towards myths of immortality and indebtedness. Commemorating the war dead might be regarded as a resurrective practice that forges and fortifies communities of the living, while addressing the imagined demands of those who die for their nation.Riegel observes that in its multiplicity of motivations and functions, the literary work of mourning is always “an attempt to make present that which is irrefutably lost, and within that paradoxical tension lies a central tenet of all writerly endeavour that deals with the representation of death” (xix). The literary work of mourning must remain incomplete: it is “always a limiting attempt at revival and at representation,” because words inevitably “fail to replace a lost one.” Even so, they can assist in the attempt to “work through and understand” loss (xix). But the reader or mourner is caught in a strange situation, for he or she inevitably scrutinises words not the body, a corpus not a corpse, and while this is a form of evasion it is also the only possibility open to us. Even so, Derrida might say that it is “as if, by reading, by observing the signs on the drawn sheet of paper, [readers are] trying to forget, repress, deny, or conjure away death—and the anxiety before death.” But he also concedes (after Sarah Kofman), that this process might involve “a cunning affirmation of life, its irrepressible movement to survive, to live on” (176), which supports Seale’s contention in relation to resurrective practices generally. Atwood points out that the dead have always made demands on the living, but, because there is a risk in negotiating with the dead, there needs to be good reason or reward for doing so. Our reading of war literature written by noncombatants suggests that in many instances writers seek to appease the unsettled dead whose death was meant to mean something for the future: the living owe the dead a debt that can only be paid by changing the way they live. The living, in other words, must not only remember the fallen, but also heed them by their conduct. It becomes the poet’s task to remind people of this, that is, to turn them from death towards life.Arthur H Adams’s 1918 poem “When the Anzac Dead Came Home,” published in the Bulletin, is based on this premise: the souls of the dead— the “failed” and “fallen”—drift uncertainly over their homeland, observing the world to which they cannot return, with its “cheerful throng,” “fair women swathed in fripperies,” and “sweet girls” that cling “round windows like bees on honeycomb.” One soul recognises a soldier, Steve, from his former battalion, a mate who kept his life but lost his arm and, after hovering for a while, again “wafts far”; his homecoming creates a “strange” stabbing pain, an ache in his pal’s “old scar.” In this uncanny scene, irreconcilable and traumatic knowledge expresses itself somatically. The poet conveys the viewpoint of the dead Anzac rather than the returned one. The living soldier, whose body is a site of partial loss, does not explicitly conjure or mourn his dead friend but, rather, is a living extension of his loss. In fact, the empathic connection construed by the poet is not figured as spectral orchestration or as mindful on the part of man or community; rather, it occurs despite bodily death or everyday living and forgetting; it persists as hysterical pain or embodied knowledge. Freud and Breuer’s influential Studies on Hysteria, published in 1895, raised the issue of mind/body relations, given its theory that the hysteric’s body expresses psychic trauma that she or he may not recollect: repressed “memories of aetiological significance” result in “morbid symptoms” (56). They posited that experience leaves traces which, like disinterred archaeological artefacts, inform on the past (57). However, such a theory depends on what Rousseau and Porter refer to as an “almost mystical collaboration between mind and body” (vii), wherein painful or perverse or unspeakable “reminiscences” are converted into symptoms, or “mnemic symbols,” which is to envisage the body as penetrable text. But how can memory return unbidden and in such effective disguise that the conscious mind does not recognise it as memory? How can the body express pain without one remembering or acknowledging its origin? Do these kinds of questions suggest that the Cartesian mind/body split has continued valency despite the challenge that hysteria itself presents to such a theory? Is it possible, rather, that the body itself remembers—and not just its own replete form, as suggested by those who feel the presence of a limb after its removal—but the suffering body of “the other”? In Adam’s poem, as in M’Fadyen’s, intersubjective knowledge subsists between embodied and disembodied subjects, creating an imagined community of sensation.Adams’s poem envisions mourning as embodied knowledge that allows one man to experience another’s pain—or soul—as both “old” and “strange” in the midst of living. He suggests that the dead gaze at us even as they are present “in us” (Derrida). Derrida reminds that ghosts occupy an ambiguous space, “neither life nor death, but the haunting of the one by the other” (41). Human mutability, the possibility of exchanging places in a kind of Socratic cycle of life and death, is posited by Adams, whose next stanzas depict the souls of the war dead reclaiming Australia and displacing the thankless living: blown to land, they murmur to each other, “’Tis we who are the living: this continent is dead.” A significant imputation is that the dead must be reckoned with, deserve better, and will not rest unless the living pay their moral dues. The disillusioned tone and intent of this 1918 poem contrasts with a poem Adams published in the Bulletin in 1915 entitled “The Trojan War,” which suggests even “Great Agamemnon” would “lift his hand” to honour “plain Private Bill,” the heroic, fallen Anzac who ventured forth to save “Some Mother-Helen sad at home. Some obscure Helen on a farm.” The act of war is envisaged as an act of birthing the nation, anticipating the Anzac legend, but simultaneously as its epitaph: “Upon the ancient Dardanelles New peoples write—in blood—their name.” Such a poem arguably invokes, though in ambiguous form, what Derrida (after Lyotard) refers to as the “beautiful death,” which is an attempt to lift death up, make it meaningful, and thereby foreclose or limit mourning, so that what threatens disorder and despair might instead reassure and restore “the body politic,” providing “explicit models of virtue” (Nass 82-83) that guarantee its defence and survival. Adams’ later poem, in constructing Steve as “a living fellow-ghost” of the dead Anzac, casts stern judgement on the society that fails to notice what has been lost even as it profits by it. Ideological and propagandist language is also denounced: “Big word-warriors still played the Party game;/They nobly planned campaigns of words, and deemed/their speeches deeds,/And fought fierce offensives for strange old creeds.” This complaint recalls Ezra Pound’s lines in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley about the dead who “walked eye-deep in hell/believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving/came home, home to a lie/home to many deceits,/home to old lies and new infamy;/usury age-old and age-thick/and liars in public places,” and it would seem that this is the kind of disillusion and bitterness that Clunies Ross considers to be “incompatible with the Anzac tradition” (178) and thus ignored. The Anzac tradition, though quieted for a time, possibly due to the 1930s Depression, Second World War, Vietnam War and other disabling events has, since the 1980s, been greatly revived, with Anzac Day commemorations in Australia and at Gallipoli growing exponentially, possibly making maintenance of this sacrificial national mythology, or beautiful death, among Australia’s most capacious and costly creative industries. As we approach the centenary of the war and of Gallipoli, this industry will only increase.Elaine Scarry proposes that the imagination invents mechanisms for “transforming the condition of absence into presence” (163). It does not escape us that in turning towards lost literatures we are ourselves engaging in a form of resurrective practice and that this paper, like other forms of social and cultural practice, might be understood as one more human construction motivated by grief for embodiment.Note: An archive and annotated bibliography of the “Lost Literatures of the First World War,” which comprises over 2,000 items, is expected to be published online in 2015.References Adams, Arthur H. “When the Anzac Dead Came Home.” Bulletin 21 Mar. 1918.---. “The Trojan War.” Bulletin 20 May 1915.An Australian Mother. “Your Country’s Call.” Sydney Mail 19 May 1915.Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 1991.Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. New York: Random House, 2002.Caesar, Adrian. “National Myths of Manhood: Anzac and Others.” The Oxford Literary History of Australia. Eds. Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998. 147-168.Clunies Ross, Bruce. “Silent Heroes.” War: Australia’s Creative Response. Eds. Anna Rutherford and James Wieland. West Yorkshire: Dangaroo Press, 1997. 169-181.Damousi, Joy. The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.Derrida, Jacques. The Work of Mourning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.Freud, Sigmund, and Joseph Breuer. Studies on Hysteria. Pelican Freud Library. Vol. 3. Trans. and eds. James Strachey, Alix Strachey, and Angela Richards. London: Penguin, 1988.Gerster, Robin. Big Noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992.Gilbert, Sandra M. Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992. M’Fayden, Ella. “The Wardens.” Sydney Mail 17 Apr. 1918.Naas, Michael. “History’s Remains: Of Memory, Mourning, and the Event.” Research in Phenomenology 33 (2003): 76-96.Pound, Ezra. “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.” iv. 1920. 19 June 2012. ‹http://www.archive.org/stream/hughselwynmauber00pounrich/hughselwynmauber00pounrich_djvu.txt›.Riegal, Christian, ed. Response to Death: The Literary Work of Mourning. Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2005. Rousseau, G.S., and Roy Porter. “Introduction: The Destinies of Hysteria.” Hysteria beyond Freud. Ed. Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G.S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.Seale, Clive. Constructing Death: The Sociology of Dying and Bereavement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.Sutherland, Katherine. “Land of Their Graves: Maternity, Mourning and Nation in Janet Frame, Sara Suleri, and Arundhati Roy.” Riegel 201-16.Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays Volume 2. London: Hogarth, 1966. 28-29.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005.
Document formatted into pages; contains xiii, 680 p. Includes bibliographical references. Abstract available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2006 April 22.

This study examines the changing perceptions of Anzac Day in New Zealand, Australia and Turkey in the twentieth century. Changing interpretations of Anzac Day reflect social and political changes in the nations over that time. Anzac Day is an annual commemoration which has profound significance in the Australian and New Zealand social landscape. It has undergone significant changes of meaning since it began, and may be regarded as being an example of the changeable script of memory. The thesis argues that memory and landscape intersect to influence the way commemorative gestures are interpreted. Personal and community memories are fluid, influenced by the current historical landscape. This means that each successive Anzac Day can have different connotations. The public perception of these connotations is traced for each of New Zealand, Australia and Turkey. Anzac Day reflects the forces at work in the current historical landscape. Within that landscape it has different meanings and also functions as an arena for individual and community agency. On Anzac Day there are parades and services which constitute a public theatre where communities validate military service. Individual and communal feats are held high and an ethic or myth is placed as a model within the social fabric. Anzac Day is contested and reflects tides of opinion about war and society and the role of women. It is also the locale of quiet, personal contemplation, where central family attachments to the loved and lost and the debt owed by civilian communities to the military are expressed. Generational change has redefined its meanings and functions. Anzac Day was shaped in a contemporary historical landscape. It reflected multi-national perspectives within British Empire and Commonwealth countries and Turkey. For Turkey the day represented a developing friendship with former foes and was couched within Onsekiz Mart Zaferi, a celebration of the Çanakkale Savaşlari 1915 victory in the Dardanelles campaign. As Anzac Day evolved, Turkey, the host country for New Zealand and Australian pilgrims, became the focus of world attention on the day. Gallipoli is now universally recognised as the international shrine for Anzac Day.

Constructions of memory, myth and legend relating to Gallipoli have dominated the academic assumption which suggests that this dimension alone has allowed for the reawakening of the exceptional interest in the Anzac tradition; a tradition that has converged at the physical site in modern day Turkey. While these intangible constructions have waxed, waned, and re-emerged over the Twentieth Century, possessing the site to commence the construction of an Anzac Battlefield Cemetery has been ignored in academic enquiry. This significant series of events from 1916 to 1965 were indispensable to memory perpetuation and essential to the commemorative primacy that this preserved headland now enjoys. The desire to repossess, and then own in perpetuity the battlefield in order to attach the appropriate masonry adornments, is in itself unique. This dimension has not been academically scrutinised by any historian until now. Nor has the deliberate desire to construct an Anzac shrine that would someday attract pilgrims from the Antipodes been studied. Present day site-sacralisation by rite-of-passage pilgrims, thoroughly emersed in the Anzac tradition, suggests the convergence of the two dimensions is complete. To counteract this problem of the �hegemony of the intangibles� this thesis explores primary sources, gleaned largely from archival records, then evaluates the significance of the history of �physical Gallipoli.� Thematic approaches based upon the lines of possession, preservation and pilgrimage argue that this parallel dimension has played an indispensable role in shaping the end result today. Tens of thousands Australasian travellers now flock to this preserved battlefield to encounter the actual physicality of the tradition. The battlefield cemetery, complete with botanical emblems of ownership, had been out of the reach of the very generation who had created, acquired and constructed the battlefield landscape. The New Zealand public had to be content with assorted forms of vicarious pilgrimage coupled with widespread domestic memorialisation. New Zealand�s post-evacuation experience at Gallipoli became a story completely distinctive from that of Australia or Great Britain. The deliberately constructed Anzac Battlefield Cemetery is a unique landscape artefact that a proud but mournful generation set out to create. They eventually achieved this end by a complicated mixture of conquest, occupation, careful preservation, and commemorative ownership. These efforts were assisted by the vagaries of economic happenstance and international politics that left this remote Peninsula isolated and off-limits to human encounter. Fortuitously frozen in time, this landscape artefact, so steeped in Classical history, has emerged as one of the most sacred, and perhaps the most recognisable, geographic features associated with Australasia. Overriding these plans for shrine construction had been the stated goal of securing a reverent final resting place for those who fell during the creation of the Anzac legend in 1915. Sepulture perpetuelle became the post-evacuation catchphrase that propelled this Great War generation to go almost to the brink of war to secure the principles of this phrase. This lofty goal of permanence, by passage of time and the re-appropriation of nature, had mercifully been completed before the current �second invasion� that commenced in the 1980s. The Anzac Battlefield Cemetery is now a victim of its own very successful physical preservation.

This thesis examines the relationship between the photographic archive of the First World War and Canadian war memory through an analysis of the production of photographs depicting the ruins of Ypres, Belgium and their postwar appropriation. Taken by official photographers in the employment of the Canadian War Records Office, the photographs were intended to act as both historical documents and, paradoxically, as publicity and propaganda images. Both functions of the photographs work to construct a unified image of the war and are similarly characterized by a repressive structure. Ypres, almost entirely destroyed during the war, was both the site of Canada's first battle and major victory as well as a contentious site connoting military mismanagement and wasteful loss of life. Resultantly, representations of the city's ruins are suggestive of a corresponding shift from a mythic to a horrific war in First World War historiography that took place in the decades proceeding it. Images of Ypres' ruins were filtered through both material censorship enforced by the military to elicit high morale and psychic censorship. Photographers made mechanized war conform to their visual expectations. However, the repressive structure literally contains that which it represses as an uncanny double and invariably allows for the possibility of its return. I argue that the anodyne and conventionalized image generated by official photographs of ruins also contains and signifies the destructive violence of modern warfare. Finally, I examine the construction of these conflicting narratives as they develop around the simultaneous processes of archivization and circulation ever-widening circles of mnemonic constructs such as postcards and tourist brochures at the same time that they were being archived. I argue that rather than contaminating and damaging the archival meaning of the photographs, the archive is an accumulative institution capable of incorporating a variety of conflicting narratives without ruining its authority.

This thesis re-examines and reconstructs the Anzac Landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 by applying a new approach to an old topic - it uses the records of a single battalion over a single day to create a body of evidence with which to construct a history of the battle. This focus on the battle's participants might be expected to shed light only their immediate experience, but it also creates a profile of the fighting on this day. This is in part due to the methodology developed to assess and compile accounts, but also to the fact that the chosen battalion, the 11th Battalion, 3rd Infantry Brigade, 1st Division, Australian Imperial Force, landed with the covering force for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, and its members fought from Fisherman's Hut to 400 Plateau, on Third Ridge and Battleship Hill. This study therefore places much of the battlefield under the microscope. The use of veterans' accounts to re-tell the story of the Landing is not new. Anecdotes are often layered over the known history, established in C.E.W. Bean's Official History of Australia in the War, The Story of ANZAC, Volume I, to colour narrative and connect with personal experience. Less frequently are they reliably used as historical evidence. In this thesis, letters, diaries, memoirs, manuscripts, photographs, maps, diagrams and other information, collected from private collections, libraries, museums, archives and period newspapers, the battlefield and many secondary sources, are used as evidence to construct events, chronologies and frames of reference in order to reconstruct the history of the day. This thesis will argue that eye witness testimony can be extremely unreliable when taken in isolation, but when verified, contextualised and validated by a thorough and robust methodology, can provide valuable information with which to re-examine some of the battle's significant events and outstanding questions. Why did the advance stop? Why was the high ground not taken? Why do the accounts of the adversaries of the best known clash of the day not match? The missing evidence may lie in the smallest of fragments - not in isolation, but when examined in aggregate. This shift in the way evidence is collected and analysed leads to a shift in the way the battle is interpreted. The Landing has not previously been studied at this level of detail. Bean amalgamated the disparate and confused accounts of that day into a canvas; this thesis digs deeper into the foundation data to analyse, verify, add to and reconstruct the day. It builds on and complements Bean's work, confirming and enriching some aspects of his account, filling gaps, and, in some aspects, potentially re-writing the history of the Landing. There has been much rhetoric over the years and many myths and legends surround this battle. This thesis will argue that even though nearly 100 years have passed since the Landing, and well over 1000 books written on the campaign, much can be learned by returning to the 'primary source, the soldier'.

This dissertation studies the First World War South African campaign in German South West Africa from 1914 until 1915. The campaign was characterised by the high mobility of the Union’s mounted soldiers which enabled swift advances and rapid envelopments. The German forces applied a defensive strategy relying on the lack of water and remoteness of the terrain to deter and prolong the Union’s invasion. The German force also relied on internal lines of communication to concentrate its forces on the Union’s advancing columns. The Union Defence Forces’s numbered approximately 50 000 compared to the German force of about 7 000. The campaign culminated on 9 July 1915 with the surrender of almost the entire German fighting force intact. This study analyses whether the victory can be attributed to the Union Defence Forces’s numerical superiority or the operational strategy and tactics which were applied during the campaign. It is argued that this operational strategy is congruent with the modern theory of manoeuvre warfare and that the campaign is therefore a textbook example of manoeuvre warfare theory
History
M.A. (History)