Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Isonzo Front The First World War will, among others, remain inscribed in
historiography because, for the first time in history, it was
verbalized in one way or another by everyone whom it had
To the Eastern Front affected. This was, indeed, the very first watershed event in
the history of mankind that enabled the so-called “view from
WW1 in Writing below”. For the first time in history, some event, process or
phenomenon has left behind such a voluminous legacy of
testimonies of ordinary people that enables us to truly see it
from the point of view of mere mortals.
(Macdonald, 1988:137)
While we may never know the extent to which British girls and wives adhered to the instruction above,
the loving, anxious and sad letters to the front tell us (almost everything) about the life at home. From
diseases of children, the latest pub gossip, tense intergenerational relations, etc. to detailed descriptions of
the year’s harvest and weather.
The parts that are missing were usually deleted/removed/obliterated by censorship. Or, to be more
precise, censorship most often eliminated the unpleasant, confidential or otherwise “problematic”
information which was thus brought to light only after the publication of well-hidden diaries and other
postwar literature. Belles lettres, in particular, fit some crucial pieces into the portrayal of the everyday
plight, which had been kept concealed during the war. What would the relatives have thought if their
brother, father or son had replied as to where their army was: “in dung […] Up to our ankles […] nothing
but mud everywhere, a slimy road, a small station, wagons, people […] on the well-trodden streets
covered with mud slooshing up to our shoulders, chest, over our faces …” (Hofbauer 1935:32)
What would they have thought of this army, if their hero had confessed that, on their triumphant march,
they had also killed civilians; the elderly, women and children … And finally, what would they have
thought if, rather than having instructed them on how to write high-spirited letters, the propagandists had
sent them the verses of those who were the quickest to realize that much of the war propaganda was one
big lie. What if they had been sent the lines of Wilfred Owen:
Or if they had been offered excerpts from the war bestseller Le feu (Under Fire) written by a French
soldier-author who described the war primarily as “a nightmare of earth and mud” and wrote about “a
vision of horror of which one can know only after one has been under shrapnel and shellfire.” (Luthar
2000:62)
Had this been so, the contemporaries of the war could have already seen the war as clearly as we do
today, thanks to these men. For this reason the history of the First World War happened to be an
important episode in the history of writing.
LITERATURE
Brown, Malcolm; 1993, The Imperial War Museum of the First World War. A Great Conflict Recalled in
Previously Unpublished Letters, Diaries, Documents and Memories, Singwick & Jackson, London.
Luthar, Oto; 2000, O žalosti niti besede. Uvod v kulturno zgodovino Velike vojne, Založba ZRC,
Ljubljana.
Macdonald, Lyn; 1988 1914-1918. Voices and Images of the Great War, Penguin Books, London.
Silkin, Jon; 1996,The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, Penguin Books, London.