Grief in Wartime: Private Pain, Public Discourse

Grief in Wartime Private Pain, Public Discourse

Carol Acton

Grief in Wartime

This page intentionally left blank

Grief in Wartime Private Pain, Public Discourse

Carol Acton St Jerome’s University, Canada

© Carol Acton 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her rights to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–4696–6 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–4696–5 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Acton, Carol, 1958– Grief in wartime: private pain, public discourse / Carol Acton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–4696–6 (cloth) ISBN-10: 1–4039–4696–5 (cloth) 1. War and society. 2. War and literature. 3. War – Psychological aspects. 4. Grief. I. Title. HM554.A26 2007 155.9'3708835502—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2006051709

Contents

List of Illustrations

vi

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction

Part 1

1

War and Grief at ‘Home’

1

For Women Must Weep

17

2

Grieving the ‘Good’ War

47

3

Vietnam: The War at Home

80

Part 2 4

War and Grief at the ‘Front’

Mourning and Combat: ‘No One Sings: Lully, Lully’

105

5 ‘Can’t Face the Graves Today’: Nurses Mourn on the Western Front

132

6

Vietnam: Bringing Home the Front

154

7

Epilogue: ‘Mother to Mother’: The War in Iraq

176

Notes

199

Bibliography

209

Index

222

v

List of Illustrations 1.1 The Girl’s Friend: ‘For Women Must Weep’ 1.2 ‘Ladies can be true patriots’: Corsets advertisement 1.3 ‘The badge of sacrifice’ 2.1 Rouge advertisement: ‘When he’s home on leave’ 2.2 Odol Toothpaste: ‘Smile all the while’ 2.3 ‘Blitz-damaged nerves’ 6.1 Glenna Goodacre’s Vietnam Women’s Memorial, Washington, D.C. 6.2 Hart’s Three Fighting Men: Vietnam Memorial, Washington, D.C.

vi

19 21 22 54 55 70 172 172

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following groups and individuals who have assisted with this project: Briar Towers at Palgrave for her initial interest in and acceptance of my proposal and her useful suggestions for extending this study, and subsequently my editor Jill Lake and her assistant editor Melanie Blair for their continued support and patience during the writing process; also production editor Vidhya Jayaprakash; St Jerome’s University for travel funds that facilitated research at the Imperial War Museum and for a supportive collegial working environment; the archivists and staff at the Vera Brittain Archives, William Ready Collection, McMaster University; the Doris Lewis Rare Book Room, University of Waterloo; the Imperial War Museum Department of Documents and the Photograph Archives; John Baky and staff at the Imaginative Representations of the Vietnam War archives at the Connolly Library, La Salle University. Carolyn Dirks, St Jerome’s librarian, generously assisted with the indexing. Marilyn Knapp Litt provided invaluable help in tracing the copyright holders of the women’s poetry from the Vietnam War. In contributing to my work and the development of my ideas I would particularly like to thank Dr Andrea McKenzie for conversations about Brittain and Dr Subarno Chattarji for sharing his thinking on the Vietnam War. Above all, I want to thank Dr Jane Potter for her support throughout this project: her generosity included not only sending newspaper clippings and sharing books and scholarly expertise, but also warm hospitality (including excellent cooking) that gave me a base in London from which to work. I would also like to thank the following copyright holders for permission to reprint material used in this book: Bobbie Trotter for ‘The Muslim Mother’ and ‘How Do You Say I Love You in a War’; Penny Kettlewell for ‘Sister Mary’ and ‘The Coffee Room Soldier’. Quotations from the Vera Brittain material are reproduced by permission of Mark Bostridge and Rebecca Williams, her literary executors. Extracts from Love Letters from the Front are reprinted by kind permission of Mercier Press Ltd., Cork. Extracts from Letters from a Soldier are reprinted with the permission of Faber and Faber. A revised version of the chapter ‘Bodies Do Count’, originally published in The Memory of Catastrophe, appears with permission of Manchester University Press. Access to the personal papers held in the archives of the Imperial War Museum has been crucially important for vii

viii Acknowledgements

this project. I thank the following for permission to publish extracts from these collections: Joan Hadfield (Kirby); Denise K. Chapman (the papers of her late great-uncle, Private Arthur Higginson); Mrs Diana Hopkinson; K.M. Bigginton; V.M. Ball. The papers of Miss P. Warner, J. Westren and Lance Corporal William Anderson are also held in the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum; every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders but this has not been possible. The cover photograph ‘A service in a cemetery near a Canadian hospital’ appears courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders. Where this has not been possible I would be glad to hear from those who have not received due acknowledgement.

Introduction

Loss and the grief that attends it are intrinsic to the experience of war and, as Damousi asserts, share its characteristics: ‘As in the wider conflict where loss is born, grief leaves no one unaffected by its devastation: like combat there is no space to retreat and take refuge from the havoc grief unleashes among those who give and those who receive the news of death’ (1999, p. 9). Jay Winter claims grief as the crucial experience through which individuals ‘lived the “meaning” of the First World War’, asserting that ‘for millions … [t]heir war was imprinted with the wrenching experience of loss’ (1995, p. 224).1 Alan Wilkinson poses the crucial question of that war: ‘[what] was it that persuaded a democracy to accept bereavement on such a scale’ (p. 150). This book extends that question beyond the First World War to consider also the experience and representation of loss and grief in the Second World War, the Vietnam War and the American War in Iraq. How, in each of these differing wartime cultures, does ‘the wrenching experience of loss’ at the private level engage with the public discourses that must, as Chomsky puts it, ‘manufacture consent’ to the inevitable massive bereavement that accompanies war. Penny Summerfield reminds us that ‘cultural constructions form the discursive context not only within which people express and understand what happens, but also within which they actually have those experiences’ (p. 3).2 Setting the individual accounts through which people express and work through wartime experience, in diaries, letters and memoirs, alongside official and unofficial public discourses, we can read the lived experience of wartime grief and mourning and at the same time examine the interaction of private experience with that of public discourse. The subjection of the individual to official and unofficial forms of propaganda, policing of activity, recruiting and conscription that construct 1

2 Grief in Wartime

appropriate wartime behaviours has been the focus of several important studies, particularly in relation to gender.3 Dependent upon the willingness of its population to accept death either for themselves or for others, a wartime culture must be particularly vigilant in constructing grief and mourning behaviour in a way that supports rather than undermines the state’s pursuit of war aims. Psychologists such as Rosenblatt, Neimeyer and Rando point out that bereavement is itself an experience wherein not just mourning behaviour but also the private emotions of grief are culturally constructed and prescribed: ‘I know of no society in which the emotions of bereavement are not shaped and controlled, for the sake of the deceased, the bereaved, and others’ (Rosenblatt, quoted in Walter, 1999, p. 119). Extending this control to support the aims of war means that state constructions of the dead, what can be seen and not seen, and the rhetoric that surrounds both combatant death and the conduct of the bereaved have played an important role in the manufacture of consent in twentieth-century war in Britain and the United States, at least until the Vietnam War. In spite of anti-war protests, the same rhetoric operates in the twenty-first-century war in Iraq. Elaine Scarry’s claim that ‘the continuation of war is impossible without the disowning of injuring’ can be extended to include the obscuring, as far as possible, of the facts of death and the prolonged ‘devastations’ of grief that attend it (p. 64). When images of the war dead are connected with the grief of their families, especially mothers, receiving their bodies, they become particularly potent in their ability to undermine wartime aims. Thus, one of the most contentious issues in the early months of the American Iraq War (Second Gulf War) was the banning by the state of media coverage of soldiers’ bodies from Iraq arriving in the United States.4 The impact of such images, even when the actual body is obscured by a flag-draped coffin, derives from its ability to arouse powerful emotions: the viewers participate in the grief of the recipient families. Nicole Loraux’s discussion of gender, war and grief in ancient Greece and Rome offers an important commentary on the relationship between the present day state and its war dead. Specifically, the representation of a mother’s grief over the body of her son, a theme that recurs repeatedly in various versions throughout writing from the wars discussed here, demonstrates its potential to undermine state authority and control of the war dead. ‘To hold in their arms what is “bloody, but still the treasure of the mother”, such is the wish of Euripides’ suppliant mothers’ (p. 36). But to permit an unmediated return of the ‘bloody body’ of the son to his mother is to permit the dangerously uncontrolled expression of grief: ‘Long before

Introduction 3

the ritual, there is the mother’s crying, which accompanies the vision of the corpse that used to be a son’ (p. 36). Recognising that the returning of the son’s wounded and dead body to the mother was a particularly vulnerable moment for the state, visible evidence of the mother’s grief was thus contained within strict parameters: ‘The sight of the son’s corpse is pathos in the highest degree … the grief and the memory of the intimacy of those bodies produce excessive pain for the body-memory of mothers’ (p. 37). But, as a civic leader with the good of the state uppermost in mind, ‘Theseus will make sure that the [mothers] do not see those bodies disfigured by blood … they will have a right only to the bones of the funeral pyre, pure abstraction of the beloved body’ (p. 37). In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the bones as pure abstraction become the gold star and the flag that has covered the coffin, offered to the mother or wife in place of the ‘bloody body’, following a military funeral that has transformed the dead son or husband into a military hero. Official and unofficial discourses in wartime further transform the relationship between mother and dead son, rewriting the ‘story’ of death wherein, for example, the dead soldier becomes the sacrificed Christ of the Pieta, a common iconographic image during the First World War. Prescribing and controlling grief through consolatory rhetoric that emphasises the meaning of the death in the service of the state thus becomes an essential element in the overall ‘manufacture of consent’ through which the state persuades its citizens to participate in war. As Philip D’Alton reminds us: ‘In order to mobilize a population, and for modern wars to be fought, images of warfare must conform to a number of criteria that transmute the essentially nightmarish qualities of the experience for the participants, into affirmations of socially positive values’ (p. 48). The ‘bloody body’ is thus transformed as it carries the ideologies that elevate its service to the state; death and mutilation are translated into sacrifice and duty, affirmations in which the families as well as the dead themselves are allowed to partake. Ashplant, Dawson and Roper similarly assert that post-war commemoration must persuade its citizens that ‘sacrifice is the cost of belonging to a community’ (2000, p. 8). Their discussion of the relationship between politics and commemoration of the dead is equally applicable to the constructions of death that nations employ during war. The politics of war memory and commemoration always has to engage with mourning and with attempts to make good the psychological and physical damage of war; and wherever people undertake the tasks of mourning and reparation, a politics is always at work … [T]he

4 Grief in Wartime

commemorative rituals and patriotic rhetoric of the nation state are involved precisely in making particular meanings about death in war: the ‘noble sacrifice’ of ‘dying for your country’. (p. 9) Given the relationship between the management of war and the management of grief, this study examines how individuals narrate their grief, how societies at war manage that grief and how individuals respond, whether by internalising or by resisting cultural constructions of appropriate sensibility and its attendant behaviour. At times such constructions extend beyond the state, or are incompatible with state aims, as during the Vietnam War where, as Chapter 3 shows, the public discourse of protest became the most influential defining factor in the experience of family and friends grieving their war dead. To understand the relationship between the grieving individual and the larger wartime culture that constructs an appropriate narrative of grief, it is also important to consider the psychology of grief alongside theories of subjection. If, as Chomsky maintains, the ‘manufacture of consent’ relies on democracies’ successful creation of ‘a framework for thinkable thought’, then we must also consider the individual’s interaction with that framework (p. 132). Discussing the relationship between the individual and external power, what he calls ‘the governing of the soul’, Nicolas Rose claims that ‘our personalities, subjectivities, and “relationships” are not private matters, if this implies that they are not objects of power. On the contrary, they are intensively governed … Thoughts, feelings and actions may appear as the very fabric and constitution of the intimate self, but they are socially organized and managed in minute particulars’ (p. 1). Thus, he maintains, ‘we evaluate ourselves according to the criteria provided for us by others’ (p. 11). Furthermore, as Judith Butler asserts in The Psychic Life of Power, such ‘management’ involves ‘subjection’, a concept particularly pertinent to this discussion of the relationship between the individual and the state in wartime: ‘power that at first appears to be external, pressed upon the subject, pressing the subject into subordination, assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s self-identity’ (p. 3). Examining the individual’s conscious or unconscious willingness to be governed, what she calls ‘the desire of the norm for subjection’, Butler finds it in the ‘desire for social existence’ (p. 19). ‘Where social categories guarantee a recognizable and enduring social existence, the embrace of such categories, even as they work in the service of subjection, is often preferred to no social existence at all’ (p. 20). In wartime, what Butler refers to as this ‘regulatory power’ becomes more evident than in peace, but equally the individual’s need for ‘social

Introduction 5

existence’ may also be stronger, confronted with massive social upheaval and disruption of the norm. While, as Rose and Butler demonstrate, individuals are governed by or subject to the larger discourses that surround them and press upon them, at the same time, in engaging with these discourses, individuals necessarily participate in the construction of that wartime government to which they are subject. As Summerfield notes in her discussion of women in the Second World War, ‘drawing on the available cultural constructions we contribute to them’ (p. 15). In his analysis of the relationship between the individual and the social experience of bereavement, Neimeyer positions the grieving subject as a ‘discourse user’ within the ‘framework of thinkable thought’: ‘[I]ndividuals make meaning by drawing selectively on a fund of discourse that precedes them and is consensually validated within their cultures, subcultures, communities and families. Individuals are “discourse users”, agents who draw on the resources of their cultures’ (2001, p. 264). Examining private narratives of grief alongside the official public representations of grief and mourning alerts us to the extent to which wartime discourse promotes certain narratives and erases or severely curtails others, limiting the choices available to the ‘discourse user’ as well as subjecting them to consensual validation. If we consider this concept in relation to the exchange that happens when discourse users draw on certain constructions, we can examine how the grieving subject not only uses but also participates in the construction of the dominant discourses of grief and mourning. In wartime the available discourses and their validation are strictly limited, defined by wartime binaries of enemy and ally, masculine and feminine, front and home, while reinforcing public and private behaviour designed to support the war effort. An important part of this regulation involves subscribing meaning to wartime death that limits or silences grief and replaces it with abstractions of honour and pride. The individual writers represented throughout this book allow us to look at the extent to which private writing negotiates between the private experience of grief and loss and the attendant desire to impose meaning on death in war and the publicly prescribed parameters that both control and offer ways of thinking and feeling about death that is commensurate with the aims of the war. At times this amounts to a silencing of grief that might bring one to conclude, like Walter does in his discussion of death and grief in war, that mass bereavement through war tends to lead to the dead being left behind: there are so many of them and there is a war to be fought. By

6 Grief in Wartime

the same token, emotions have to be suppressed if the war effort is to continue, and with multiple loss an emotional switching off may be a natural defence mechanism when suppression of emotion becomes a national necessity during war, it may have a knock-off effect in the following peace. (p. 132) Such an argument suggests that the public face of wartime grief is an accurate representation of private affect, and further, that this claim can be applied to war in general when, in fact, bereavement in each war is intimately affected by the cultural climate of that war and its aftermath. Where Walter appears to equate public silence to a lack of private feeling, private writing reveals this to be mistaken. Thus, as Jenny Hartley draws our attention to the silence surrounding grief in Second World War women’s writing, so also does she stress the need to read the absent or silent text. On the other hand, as cultural historians such as Winter, Damousi, Cannadine and MacDonald have demonstrated, mourning as a response to the First World War was part of public commemoration during the war and in its immediate aftermath.5 The very different ways grief was appropriated in these two wars illustrate the problems that arise when discussions of wartime grief and mourning are generalised. As this study will show, each war is defined within cultural discourses that set it apart from other wars. The meaning ascribed to death can, therefore, differ in each war, as can the constructions of mourning for the bereaved, since these derive from the climate of the war itself. Constructions of grief and mourning may also change as the climate of the war changes. Thus, for example, deaths during the Vietnam War were perceived differently in the early days of the war when the population mostly accepted American foreign policy, compared with the later years when they were constructed in the context of massive public protest against the war. At the same time, we find that the scripts of sacrifice, heroism, duty and patriotism that transfigure war deaths in the Iraq War differ little from those of the First World War, showing in its persistence the power of such abstract ideology to offer meaning. To Examine the lived experience of wartime grief, this study sets letters, diaries and memoirs and, in the case of the Iraq War, blogs (web logs), message boards and web sites beside official and unofficial public discourses of wartime grief and mourning. Thus, we can see how prescribed narratives of grief and mourning construct the grieving wartime subject and hence that individual’s telling of the grief story, and at the same time how, in that telling, individuals contribute to the larger constructions of wartime grieving. Furthermore, a reading of these narratives shows how

Introduction 7

grief and mourning are prescribed as part of the larger gendered constructions of wartime roles for men and women. As Higonnet et al. have pointed out, war ‘must be understood as a gendering activity’ where different scripts are written for men and women based on a premise not borne out by the lived experience, that men fight and women wait.6 We cannot examine the individual experience of loss and grief without considering that experience as gendered, both in terms of the particular wartime environment and the more general way cultures prescribe different grief responses and mourning behaviour for men and women. Thus, for example, the behaviour of a soldier whose friend is killed beside him in combat is constrained within different discourses from those that prescribe the grief response of the dead man’s wife, sister or mother who in turn have culturally determined wartime narratives that differ from each other. It is noteworthy that, in all of the wars considered here, in the public discourse such ‘gendering’ privileges women, particularly mothers, as mourners and, equally, they position themselves as taking on what Damousi has called ‘the labour of loss’ in private. Although the private thoughts and feelings of the combatant or the civilian responding to wartime death are almost impossible to access, the nearest approach is through diaries and letters. Memoirs provide later reflection, at times acting as a commentary on diaries written during war, or rewriting original events from a later perspective. Although they are a much more distanced and mediated narrative, in allowing the writer to express experiences or views that would have been difficult to formulate within the languages available during the war or would have been subject to censorship, they are valuable in providing their reader with a means of filling in some of the gaps that are evident in diaries and letters as well as offering a considered narrative of feelings and events. In the immediate term, the recording of events, reactions, emotions and daily routine in diaries and letters provides a multiplicity of, often contradictory, reactions to wartime experience. When these are read against the dominant public discourses found in magazines, newspapers, radio and film, and more stridently in forms of recruiting propaganda, they offer a means of understanding the interaction between the individual wartime subject and the cultural constructions with which he or she engages.7 The diary emerges out of the writer’s need to control and order his or her experience through language and thus creates a narrative with self as a central character, hence allowing us to examine how that construction of self takes place in the larger context of a country at war. A diary is particularly important because it offers daily, or almost daily, recording of and reaction to immediate events. There is no hindsight or foreknowledge,

8 Grief in Wartime

no historical perspective through which to view the events as they happen. Such a record is particularly important when we note changes in perspective on an event when diary and later memoir are compared, as, for example, in diaries and memoirs by Cynthia Asquith and Siegfried Sassoon. Diaries also show how, even when written for a public audience as in the case of Nella Last’s Mass Observation diary from the Second World War discussed in Chapter 2, they become containers for private emotions that reveal the extent to which the private self is constructed through the dominant discourses of wartime Britain, even when they are in contention with it. A very concrete manifestation of such interaction is exemplified in the diary convention of marking of dates and times that in wartime also measures the emotions of waiting: drawing the reader into Vera Brittain’s days of anxious waiting for news of Roland Leighton, or Sassoon’s marking off the hours as he waits for an attack: ‘Written at 9.30 in the Hindenburg underground tunnel on Sunday night, fully expecting to get killed on Monday morning’ (1983, p. 155). In another instance, the litany of injured and dying crossing the pages of nurse K. Luard’s diary letters provide a measure of time defined entirely through a countdown to death. Diaries also reveal the extent to which individuals are shaped and shape themselves by the public discourses offered to them. Thus, Brittain acknowledges feeling ‘as if I were writing a novel about someone else, and not myself at all’ and narrates her story in terms of the dominant public roles defined for her as a woman: nurse and soldier’s sweetheart (1982, pp. 224–5). Nella Last positions herself as ‘mother’ in her Second World War diary, taking on the burden of mourning for her sons’ generation, and at the same time using this gendered role to resist dominant discourses and reject the war as sons killing other mothers’ sons. Having been wounded in the attack mentioned above, Sassoon is conscious of his role as an actor in the theatre of war: ‘[I]t seems inevitable for me to be cast for the part of “leading hero!” ’ (1983, p. 156). In large part, these features of the diary, marking time and constructing the self in the larger context of this theatre of war, derive from the diarist’s need to exert control over an extraordinarily uncontrollable situation. Exploring diary narratives of grief in Bitter, Bitter Tears, Rosenblatt notes how ‘diaries have especially great promise in the study of loss’ (p. 5) going on to maintain that as one writes about what has happened and how one feels, one is defining the situation and one’s reactions. The act of defining may be seen as an act of controlling, delimiting and shaping one’s emotional

Introduction 9

expression. One may also be controlling emotions through distracting oneself by composing one’s sentences, by distancing events enough in one’s thoughts so that one can write about them and by the physical act of writing. (p. 107) When that loss occurs in the context of a larger traumatic context like war, then diaries may become even more important in offering the diarist some level of control in how he or she tells the story of that grief and trauma. Letters are the other primary means by which individuals construct themselves through language, record events and emotions and attempt to control an unstable environment. Like diaries, they record fairly immediate responses to events, but writing for an addressee and in response to that addressee their content is organised and controlled according to the expectations of their specific audience. In wartime, moreover, they are subject to official and unofficial controls; most obviously their content is strictly controlled by wartime censorship, less obviously through public representations of appropriate content particularly as it applies to wartime constructions of gender. Thus, for example, during the Second World War in both Britain and America, women ‘at home’ were encouraged to write to their ‘man at the front’. Conscious of the external and official gaze of the censor, the writer may impose restrictions not just on what the state and military authorise can be written or not written, but on all aspects of the communication, constantly aware of the other reader intruding into an intimate conversation. Both Brittain and Leighton acknowledge the presence of the censor and its impact on their correspondence, as well as noting Leighton’s privilege as an officer that allows him to send uncensored letters in special envelopes reinforcing, once again, the problems for a later reader of relying on an already privileged voice. In spite of the limitations imposed on wartime letter writing, letters were crucial in creating community and maintaining bonds of intimacy. Examining French correspondence during the First World War, Martha Hanna describes how its importance went far beyond its content: ‘the letter was a physical artefact that could cultivate intimacy by making the absent correspondent seem almost palpably present. Even the simplest letter bore witness to the physical existence of the writer’ (p. 6). For Hanna, letters also demonstrate ‘how bonds of affection that made loss so painful were sustained prior to death in the face of extended absence … [T]hey … show how men and women shared their experiences of war, drew emotional sustenance from one another, and in the

10 Grief in Wartime

process transcended the gender divide imposed by war’ (p. 3). While Hanna finds much less evidence of intimacy in British writing, my own research strongly suggests otherwise. Thus, Eric Appleby, for example, clings to his sanity on the Western Front in the First World War by telling and retelling the story of his shared romance with Phyllis Kelly in his letters to her, a narrative that allows him to exchange the dominant discourses that would create him as artillery officer for the alternative, though equally culturally available, role of lover. In Appleby’s letters and elsewhere we also find that, in the specific circumstances of death and grief, letters exchanged between combatants and those at home created a community of mourners who sustained and supported each other, even in instances where there had been no prior connections. Both Appleby’s letters and those of Walter Robson to his wife in the Second World War show that personal letters of condolence to those at home provided an important means of sharing information and became dynamic sites of mourning. These exchanges go a long way in revealing the degree to which wartime deaths and the narratives surrounding them transcended notions of home and front and, as Hanna notes, of gender.8 During the Second World War, letter writing was promoted in both Britain and the United States as a crucial means of maintaining connection, but at the same time, paradoxically, not only were letters subject to censorship, but individuals were also encouraged to uphold the dominant discourse of keeping cheerful so as not to undermine the morale of the recipient.9 Such dominant discourses often further defined wartime roles by constructing letter writers as participating in a heterosexual romance between a man in the theatre of war and a woman waiting at home, while the actual exchanges of letters reveal the complex web of wartime separations and of relationships that challenged the status quo, such as between daughters and sisters overseas in the forces and fathers and brothers at home.10 Moreover, while letters did try and maintain intimacy between sender and receiver as Hanna claims, they also represented their separation and thus became material evidence of wartime upheaval and loss. Letters written to be delivered in the event of death offer bitter evidence of the finality of such separation. Moreover, where letters replaced actual experience with a reconstruction of events to avoid worrying the addressee, or where the writer was subject to third party control, as in the case of an evacuated child, letters could contribute to a complete breakdown of communication. Although it is too soon to find collections of wartime diaries and letters from the war in Iraq, though some memoirs have already been published, to a large extent one must expect that these forms will have been

Introduction 11

almost entirely replaced by e-mails and blogs. While these electronic forms are more ephemeral than diaries and letters of past wars, at the same time they offer new ways of making public the private experience. In particular, Internet technology during the present war in Iraq makes available multiple responses to wartime deaths in a way unprecedented in other wars. Blogs by soldiers and civilians, American and Iraqi, message boards that become sites of mourning for those killed and commemorative web sites offer a range of mourning sites. In addition, they occupy spaces that cannot be defined as either private or public since they share the characteristics of both. While it is impossible to draw any conclusions about such writings at this point in the war, these spaces appear to be offering less that is new in terms of constructions of war and grief than the use of technology itself might indicate. The collapse of definitions of public and private is an important characteristic of the technology, but it is set against conventional narratives of wartime death and grief that in many instances have changed very little over more than a century. In reading these sites, as in reading the responses of writers to previous wars, the negotiation between personal narratives and official discourse as individuals confront loss reveals the problems of finding a language through which to grieve and remember in wartime. Even while there are differences in writing online and writing on the page of a diary or letter, the impulse to control and order the chaos that comes out of loss and grief is the same. As Rosenblatt mentions, the very act of writing in a diary as well as the account itself becomes a means by which a writer can impose order and control over grief. We find the same motive in letters, though letters also look for a sympathetic response in the addressee. Similar characteristics occur in blogs and on message boards although they offer more extended space for dialogue between multiple audiences. In all instances, however, the circumstances of death involve a traumatic reaction on the part of the writer. Letters, diaries and to some extent blogs and message boards and privately constructed obituary web sites can then become a means of controlling the disruptive and traumatic experience that is intrinsic to death in war. However, the act of writing (even online), as well as offering a means of controlling the experience, demands that the writer revisit the trauma of the event, whether it is a family member hearing the announcement of the death or a combatant, nurse or civilian in a war zone witnessing multiple death and injury. Thus, K. Luard’s diary reveals the tensions between experiencing the trauma of attending to hundreds of terribly injured and dying men, needing to record it, but being unable, in the immediate aftermath, to relate it: ‘Couldn’t write last night: the only

12 Grief in Wartime

thing was to try and forget it all’ (1915, p. 88). Diaries also reveal the relationship between trauma, particularly traumatic bereavement, and the multiple narratives that individuals use to try and control it. This is particularly evident in Brittain’s ‘stories’ of Leighton’s death, wherein the act of writing is an act of mourning and the diary itself becomes the site of that mourning. Central to this writing and rewriting is, of course, the impulse for meaning making that is characteristic of grief. Explaining responses to sudden death, including death in war, Therese Rando stresses the connection between the collapse of the individual’s assumptive world and the consequent need to find meaning in the death of a loved one. The violation of one’s assumptive world, involving the shattering of global and/or specific assumptions, is a major aspect of mourning … [S]uccessful adjustment depends in large part on the ability to sustain and modify illusions that buffer against present and future threats. Specific coping strategies include redefining the event [and] finding meaning. (p. 579) If we look at this in the context of Neimeyer’s theories of meaning making, we are offered a way of understanding why grief narratives take the forms they do. Thus, for example, we can comprehend Brittain’s compulsion to write Leighton’s death in the available and meaning-making narratives of sacrifice and courage, even while he himself had rejected as obscene the attaching of heightened rhetoric to the death of an individual in combat. Where the state offers such easily accessible narratives through which the emotionally vulnerable individual can impose meaning on the death of a loved one, death is integrated into the larger manufacturing of consent that is so important in wartime. It becomes much more difficult for the state to sustain such meaning making when contesting discourses are intrinsic to wartime culture, as during the Vietnam War. Acceptance of death and injury for both combatants and the civilian population relies on the meaning accorded the war itself. Carol Lynn Mithers contends of the Vietnam War: ‘Not only did the reasons offered for the U.S. involvement appear too flimsy to support the weight of so much pain and death, the day-to-day reality of the war itself seemed insane and out of control’ (p. 77). Grief itself thus becomes a contested site where the bereaved, caught between the antiwar discourse of protest and the conventional ideology of sacrifice offered by the state and the military, are unable to grieve or to impose meaning on war death. Trapped between competing discourses, the

Introduction 13

bereavement narrative of the Vietnam War is defined by the traumatic shattering of an assumptive reality that cannot be restored. Damousi’s claim that wartime grief ‘leaves no one unaffected by its devastation’ indicates how bereavement is particularly well placed to contest conventional wartime binaries of home and front, masculine and feminine.11 Likewise, grief challenges the tidiness of parameters that would neatly define war as contained in specific spaces and times. For the bereaved, as Jay Winter has shown so poignantly in his study of First World War mourning and commemoration, the official ending of the hostilities may mark the beginning of a lifetime of mourning or, as some of the writers discussed here reveal, the end of the war comes to seem entirely irrelevant, given that bereavement has already robbed their lives of meaning. A further collapse of parameters is discussed in Chapter 2 which shows First World War grief merging with and informing responses to the outbreak of war in 1939. While this study is separated into sections on ‘home’ and ‘front’ then, the object is not to uphold these binaries, but, in setting them up, to reveal the extent to which they are resisted through exchanged narratives of grief. In their place communities of bereaved are formed, between women ‘at home’ and at the ‘front’ and men ‘at home’ and at ‘the front’. These may also transcend the binary definitions of ‘ally’ and ‘enemy other’ as a British nurse writes to a German mother on the death of her son in a British hospital or an American nurse writes a poem years after her time in Vietnam that interposes the image of a wounded Vietnamese child between herself and her infant son. As we read the narratives of war experience and loss, some unexpected similarities are revealed that break down official parameters even further. Thus, for example, the silencing of traumatic wartime experience is expressed in similar terms by Second World War American combatants from the Pacific and European theatres and by British child evacuees. In both instances the actual experiences have only been expressed in recent years because of the post-war cultural contexts that silenced these very different voices. While the soldier’s experience is usually legitimised and the child’s marginalised, here we find in both cases a cultural unwillingness to incorporate traumatic experience into post-war remembering that prevented the individuals from speaking. These seemingly very disparate experiences thus find themselves constrained within the same parameters. A closer consideration, however, leads us to consider the relationship between what war stories are legitimised and what are silenced. In both instances these individuals have cultural constraints imposed on what they can say because they do not fit the

14 Grief in Wartime

construction of ‘combatant’ or ‘evacuee’ through which their respective societies prefer to remember that war. The combatant’s expression of horror at combat does not fit the post-war narrative of victory in a just war; the evacuees’ negative experience is silenced because it does not fit the positive narrative of evacuation during the war and in the hierarchy of civilian trauma it has been overwhelmed by the Blitz experience. This study focuses primarily on women’s experiences of wartime grief and it does so with the purpose of examining how women are positioned and position themselves as conventional mourning figures, as mothers, wives or sweethearts of men killed in combat, while showing how those constructions serve to collapse the false dichotomy of ‘home’ and ‘front’. Women grieve at home and at the front; at times these are completely inseparable; they also transgress the boundaries of both as ‘carriers of a terrible knowledge’ in their revealing of war as injury that destroys rather than creates masculinity (Marcus, 1989, p. 126).12 In their acts of mourning they reveal the most terrible aspects of war: injury, trauma, death and the attending bereavement. In each case, these categories cannot be contained within parameters that place them as happening at home or at the front. Likewise, while the discussion of male grief focuses on combatant death, it shows how these narratives challenge conventional constructions of male grieving in wartime. Since gendered versions of wartime death position women as taking on ‘the labour of loss’, the discussion of male combatant mourning reveals men as carrying an equal, though often silenced, burden of grief.13 This study does not aim to be conclusive or definitive. Nor does it offer a comprehensive discussion of each particular war or ‘front’. Rather, it offers a way of reading the relationship between the individual and the state in wartime and tries to answer the troubling question posed by Wilkinson: what has persuaded and continues to persuade democracies to collude in the deaths of millions of their young population as well as in the deaths of those defined as ‘other’ and ‘enemy’. The focus here is on the multiple mourning voices forced to negotiate wartime loss and grief and what they have to tell us about that experience. Theirs is a collective storytelling of grief in wartime.

Part 1 War and Grief at ‘Home’

This page intentionally left blank

1 For Women Must Weep

On Saturday, 28 October 1916, Phyllis Kelly received this telegram: ‘Eric reported by wire this morning dangerously wounded Oct 27 is in casualty clearing station they cannot grant permission to visit.’ Her response is to write a letter to Eric that she knows he may never see. My own darling Englishman,1 I wonder why I’m writing this, which you may never see – Oh God, perhaps even now you have gone far away from your Lady – I wonder when another telegram will come; this knowing nothing is terrible, I don’t know what to do. I simply have sat and shivered with such an awful clutching fear at my heart since your dad’s wire came. … Oh my love, my love, what shall I do – but I must be brave and believe all will be well – dear one, surely God won’t take me from you now. It will be the end of everything that matters because, oh Englishman, you are all the world and life to me. But I must be brave like you, dear, but the words of your dad’s telegram will keep ringing in my head and squashing out hope. ‘Dangerously wounded.’ I say it over and over again till it doesn’t seem to mean anything … I tried very hard to pray but no words will come into my head, except ‘Oh God, give him back to me.’ This writing to you is the only thing that makes the waiting easier – everybody is very kind, I know, but I feel I would give anything to be just by myself. (Kelly, ed., p. 284) So paralysed is she that she cannot think or pray, Phyllis Kelly narrates the terrible fear and anticipatory grief that was the single most common experience – transcending the artificial categories of home and front, ally and enemy – throughout Europe and beyond during the First World War. Her letter would never be read by Eric, who died the same day, but 17

18 Grief in Wartime

it offers us a concrete enactment of what Damousi calls ‘the havoc grief unleashes among those who give and those who receive the news of death’ (1999, p. 9). It also emphasises the importance of the physical act of writing and the ensuing narrative that was often the only means of imposing some control over an uncontrollable situation. Further, it reveals the discourses that make up that narrative and through which Kelly tries to negotiate her impending loss: romantic love, religion and the military code of bravery. But Kelly’s letter is not just a series of discourses, it narrates the lived experience of wartime grief. Yet, confronting that grief, experiencing what for many individuals would be the most terrible event of their lives at the same time demanded a discourse through which that experience could be negotiated, both in public and in private. Such discourses were subject to a dominant pro-war narrative at official and unofficial levels that prescribed appropriate roles for men and women in a country at war. Although Kelly does not draw overtly on the dominant discourses available to her as anxious and then bereaved ‘sweetheart’, the cultural context within which she grieved (the discourse community to which she belonged in Ireland meant that she was subject to British war rhetoric) offered multiple narratives designed to console her by glamorising her role as bereaved sweetheart. Although at first glance a story from The Girl’s Friend, 29 August 1914, ‘Women must weep’, and the illustrations that accompany it, showing the woman waiting and weeping at home and the man in battle, follow the conventional stereotype of women’s role in war as passive and men’s as active, in fact there is another, more covert, but equally important narrative here: the woman who waits and weeps, and potentially mourns, is glamorised and given an elevated status as her emotions are set against the image of combat.2 The dominant motif here is sacrifice, not only the man’s sacrifice of himself, but also the woman’s sacrifice through him. In sacrificing him to the war, and possibly to the ‘supreme sacrifice’ of death, she is persuaded that she can participate equally in the mythology of her country. In the September 1914 issue of Woman’s World, women are reminded that ‘this is the time when every woman in England is called upon to be brave and self sacrificing’. Many romantic stories, as well as weekly advice columns, dwell on the heightening of emotions as war, love and sacrifice meet. One magazine story assures its readers that ‘he who fights best, loves best.’ Love may be intensified by its proximity to loss and death, but it is best expressed in marriage, however, as here in The Girl’s Friend: ‘But they were married. She was his, and he hers, irrevocably. That was the proud secret which they carried like a jewel in their hearts. She might never see him again. On some foreign battlefield or beneath the wave, he might soon lie dead.

19

Figure 1.1 The Girl’s Friend: ‘For Women Must Weep’

20 Grief in Wartime

But he was still her husband and she still his bride’ (9 May 1915). On another occasion the same columnist calls wartime marriage ‘the craving of two lovers to be made one before death should perchance separate them’(1 September 1915). In each of these roles loss and bereavement is idealised and romanticised in public discourse; public manifestations of grief are absorbed into the idealised narratives of women’s war experience.3 At the same time, representations of male and female roles here clearly return us to and reinforce gender binaries that had been challenged by the suffrage movement. The parameters of sacrifice are clearly delineated: the woman’s sacrifice takes place in the home and the man’s in the action of combat. Ironically, as the war progressed, the demands of everyday existence resulted in a public discourse that encouraged women’s participation in war work outside the home. Yet, the one area where the woman could be portrayed in conventional terms, even while she engaged in war work, was as mourner, a position that could incorporate an idealised feminine and thus remind the woman of her appropriate role in wartime.4 Although it is tempting not to take these romance narratives very seriously, the rhetoric that equates the love of a man to his love of country and in turn with support for the war is part of a much larger discourse of war, official and unofficial, that includes everything from consumer goods to Sunday sermons.5 Even the advertising of corsetry cleverly exploits the public discourse. An advertisement in The Times of March 1915 reminds its readers: ‘Ladies can be true patriots by insisting upon having British-made Corsets only, and thus keep maintaining the factories, wherein thousands of the sisters, wives and sweethearts of our gallant soldiers are employed.’ Such discourse prescribes the ‘framework for thinkable thought’ that was instrumental in manufacturing women’s consent to the slaughter and mutilation of millions of men (Chomsky, p. 132). Most significant within this framework is the rhetoric of sacrifice, a dominant discourse in all the belligerent countries. As Angela Moorjani comments on the German artist Kathe Kollwitz: ‘What she confronted was the powerful ideology that surfaces repeatedly to acclaim and justify death in war; the call for voluntary sacrifice of life, one’s own and that of family, friends, lovers, in the name of higher values, be it honor, freedom, religion, country … Far from being limited to male acclaim, the will to sacrifice was approved and promoted by women across the political spectrum’ (p. 1110). Women were both presented with and asked to participate in this sacrificial discourse on a secular and Christian level: to advertise and glamorise their connection with a man at the front by wearing a heartshaped coat pin entitled ‘The Badge of Sacrifice’, for example. This

21

Figure 1.2 ‘Ladies can be true patriots’: Corsets advertisement

22 Grief in Wartime

Figure 1.3 ‘The badge of sacrifice’

badge was also, of course, encouraged in place of mourning, so that in the public sphere grief is erased and replaced with state-sanctioned pride that gave meaning to death. An ideal scenario of a family grieving for a dead son is played out in the ‘Fireside chats’ column entitled ‘Smiling through their tears’ in a November 1914 issue of The Family Journal, ‘It wasn’t that they were not suffering agony for their personal loss’, but grief is elevated in the context of such sacrifice: ‘but they were very glad that they had given their best – yes, the very blood of their hearts – for the cause of Right.’ Such rhetoric points to the enactment of the relationship between the private self and public control that Rose and Butler explore, whereby the external rhetoric ‘assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s self-identity’ (Butler, p. 3). As already noted in the

For Women Must Weep 23

‘Introduction’, the public discourses offered to wartime bereaved limited the range of feeling and expression to emotions and behaviour that supported the war effort, silencing grief narratives that resisted those sanctioned by pro-war voices. Traditional forms of articulating grief and of mourning the dead, such as obituaries and exchanges of letters of condolence, were the primary means by which grief was shared during the war. But within a few months the unprecedented scale of death – thousands of young men whose average age was 19 – demanded additional or alternative forms of remembrance,6 particularly in the absence of a funeral service and a grave that provided rituals of closure, or even in many cases, lack of concrete information about the death itself. Many families and friends adopted ritual forms that attempted to negotiate losses. Thus, at the private level, memorial albums collected together letters from the dead man, obituary notices, letters of condolence as well as photographs, war records and perhaps a photograph of the grave in France if available. Some domestic space was often given over to photographs of the dead. It is worth noting that commemorative photographs usually showed the man in uniform (probably the most recent photograph of a son, brother, lover or friend), thus honouring the military role and giving a context for the death. More unusual forms of commemoration are also evident. Thus, the owner of a collection of war poems by Katherine Tynan, Flower of Youth: Poems in War Time, has pasted on the flyleaf between back and front covers a memorial composed of a dedication to ‘dear Billy killed in action December 30th 1917 in France’ with an obituary notice newspaper clipping and references to particular poems. Vera Brittain reports creating what she calls a ‘shrine’ to Roland Leighton’s memory composed of the books they had shared, within the confines of her cubicle in her London nurses’ hostel (1978, p. 248). More publicly, many families further employed the rhetoric of sacrifice for ‘King and Country’ or ‘in the cause of duty’ through memorial postcards and in the creation of street shrines honouring local men.7 While privately individuals often wrestled with contradictory feelings around the death of a loved one in combat, public narratives erased ambivalence. As we have already seen, although women did not fight and were thus not called on to make ‘the supreme sacrifice’ (although nurses, ambulance drivers and factory workers among others were killed in the war), images of mourning women could still be co-opted into serving the war effort and integrated into the sacrificial narrative. As a visible demonstration of sacrifice, the mourning dress itself could become part of the pro-war discourse in a 4 September 1915 photograph

24 Grief in Wartime

from the Daily Mail: the ‘waiting women’ are given agency by their status as mourners: The Women Who Waited: the throng that waited for over an hour for the opening of the door at Queen’s Hall yesterday. Many were in black, mourning for dear ones who had answered the call of country. They were surging into the hall to join in the plea that the men who hold back should make the sacrifice which they and theirs have already made. As Claire Tylee points out, even this kind of unofficial propaganda could be an effective form of subjection: ‘Propaganda had constructed not only women’s conception of war, but women’s conception of themselves in relation to it’ (p. 64). While women had traditionally been defined through their relationships with men, wartime elevated and capitalised these roles so that they were Sister, Wife, Mother, Sweetheart. It is worth noting that the most glamorous role for women during the war was the nurse who could combine all these roles in a very traditional form, nurturing the man and at the same time providing the possibility for women to serve their country through work that purported to give them the kind of excitement offered to men. Even after several years of nursing, Vera Brittain can still write to her brother. ‘As for nursing I love it now, & my uniform as well … having, as Mrs. Leighton says, “Earned the right to love them by suffering in them”. … Somehow no female figure in the whole of this War has such glamour as a hospital nurse, or such dignity’ (5 June 1918).8 And yet, of course, as so many women’s nursing accounts point out, the work was anything but glamorous – glamour had to be imposed from without, often in order to make the work and conditions bearable. The glamorisation of women’s roles was thus directly linked to the ideology of sacrifice, whether as a mother willing to sacrifice her son, or as a younger woman to emulate her sweetheart’s or brother’s sacrifice by sacrificing her own comfort and leisure to witness pain and suffering as a nurse. As much of the writing from the war illustrates, the secular and JudeoChristian narratives of sacrifice were closely interwoven. The established church was in a particularly influential position in promoting the ideology of sacrifice as a rhetoric of consolation within the ‘framework for thinkable thought’ prescribed for the civilian population. Thus, in accounts of Easter sermons from The Times in 1915 we find illustrated an erasure of dissent and a promotion of pro-war rhetoric couched in

For Women Must Weep 25

Christian terms. The following report of Dean Inge’s well-known Easter sermon in 1915, which first brought Rupert Brooke’s poetry to the attention of a mass audience, exemplifies quite literally a silencing of the voice of dissent and an elevation of the rhetoric of sacrifice: ‘When the Dean entered the pulpit a man in the congregation rose to his feet and began a loud harangue protesting against the war. He was quickly conducted outside the Cathedral.’ Commenting on Brooke’s poem ‘The Soldier’, beginning ‘If I should die, think only this of me’, which he read from the pulpit, Inge is reported as saying, It was a worthy thought that the dust out of which this happy warrior’s body was compacted was consecrated forever by the cause for which he died. Yet was there not a tinge of materialism in such an idea? The spirit of heroism and self-sacrifice knew no restrictions of this kind … the spirit of the martyr patriot was everywhere near, where there was a man to say ‘this is how I should like to live and die.’ (The Times, 5 April 1915) A Good Friday sermon consoles the bereaved by making a very specific connection between Christ’s sacrifice and the deaths of men at the front: ‘But there could be no thought of waste about these lives which had been so freely laid down for the public good. In their less human degree such deaths shared the greatness of the death upon the Cross. The true spirit of self-sacrifice was there and gave a spiritual completeness to the incompletely developed character’ (The Times, 3 April 1915). In Testament of Youth, writing of Leighton’s going to the front, Brittain felt it necessary to remind her readers, ‘For those who cared to remember such things it was the Wednesday in Passion week’ (p. 135). Ironically then, the very ideology that persuaded men to kill and die was presented as consolation for bereavement. As Kazantzis points out, ‘Christ, then, is crucified, and the duty of the woman, bereaved and despairing, becomes clear. She will live her life as the dead one bequeathed it to her. She will immortalise him in her obedience to the values for which he died. To question those values is to question the Sacrifice itself – impossible. For then his death becomes not only horrible but meaningless’ (Kazantzis in Reilly, ed., p. xix). Thus, when Alan Wilkinson asks, ‘[W]hat was it that persuaded a democracy to accept bereavement on such a scale’, we must ask to what extent and why women in particular came to rely on a construction of death that ultimately made them complicit in their own bereavement (p. 150). To examine this question demands that we consider not only

26 Grief in Wartime

the public roles presented to women during the war, but also the private narratives in diaries and letters that reveal the complex connection wherein the public discourse both conflicts with and informs the private language of grief. In spite of the restrictions on discourse during the war, as state controlled censorship and more subtly through informal censorship by communities and individuals themselves, Palmer and Wallis note that private diaries show that ‘[c]ensorship was never so tight that opposition to the war was totally muzzled, nor were the voices of one side totally inaudible in the other’ (p. x). Reading diaries and letters thus offers us perhaps the most complex narratives of wartime bereavement where we find that several ‘sides’ may well be contained in the same ‘voice’ within a diary or collection of letters. Moreover, as noted in the ‘Introduction’, the narrative impulse of diaries and letters is itself important in our understanding of how individuals wrote, rewrote and exchanged the ‘stories’ of their loss. This discussion reads published and unpublished writings by established names like Vera Brittain and Cynthia Asquith alongside writing from private unpublished collections to consider how women confront and then negotiate wartime bereavement. In spite of the limitations inherent in focusing on the particular situation of a woman who is narrating her war from the perspective of the privileged middle class, the multiple narratives through which Brittain tells her story and the availability of a wide-ranging correspondence as well as of Brittain’s diary, autobiography and fiction provides a valuable opportunity to interrogate the discourses that created the bereaved subject. Looking back on the war 15 years later, Vera Brittain could acknowledge her generation’s subjection to the popular rhetoric: ‘Truly the war made masochists of us all’ (1978, p. 154). As a 21 year old, deeply influenced by her male peers’ experience of the public school ethos of sacrifice, service and duty, and surrounded by a framework that prescribed ‘thinkable thought’, it was obviously difficult to formulate a response to the war that would reject the dominant discourse; it was even more difficult to reject such a discourse in the face of bereavement. It is to her enormous credit that she could, on occasion, think outside that ‘framework’ of pro-war discourse as in this letter to Leighton at the front: It all seems so wicked too – just a pure orgy of slaughter, of terrible and impersonal death, with nothing in the purpose and certainly nothing in the results to justify the perpetration of anything so horrible … It is quite impossible to understand how we can be such strong individualists … and yet at the same time countenance this

For Women Must Weep 27

wholesale murder, which if it were applied to animals or birds or indeed anything except men would fill us with a sickness and repulsion greater than we could endure. I suppose it makes matters worse to have such thoughts, but when you think how easily that pile of disfigured dead is heaped up in a few minutes by a sharp Artillery fire, and yet what an immense and permanent difference each single unit thus shamefully cut off makes to a whole circle of individuals, you feel that if you are not mad already, the sooner you become so and lose the power to realise, the better. (1998, pp. 136–7; 29 July 1915) Yet reading Brittain’s diaries and letters reveals an extreme conflict between this version of the war and the need for an alternative rhetoric of consolation, particularly as she anticipates Leighton’s death and then grieves for him. The problem for Brittain and other wartime bereaved was that the rhetoric of consolation offered in wartime made it difficult if not impossible to impose meaning on death unless it was narrated in language that upheld support for the war. As Jay Winter notes in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, ‘Irony’s cutting edge could express anger and despair … but it did not heal. Traditional modes of seeing the war, while at times less profound, provided a way of remembering which enabled the bereaved to live with their losses’ (p. 115). But traditional modes of seeing were more likely to lead to acquiescence than to questioning, leaving women open to charges of complicity even while their private writing shows a far more complex narrative of wartime death. Thus, while Brittain can reject the war and read the casualty list behind the newspaper announcements of victory (‘a year of war has taught me what these victories mean … At first it is all splendour & glory … and then the stories of horror … & long, long casualty lists in which each name means a home rendered desolate’ [1982, p. 355; 27 September 1915]), the more salient narrative of her war experience, particularly once she knows that Roland will soon leave for the Western Front, and after he goes to the front in April 1915, is of sacrifice, especially her desire to emulate his sacrifice. ‘But if he can face death let me show that I can face the fear of death, and work steadfastly with a tormented mind, as thousands of my country women are brave enough to do’ (1982, p. 202; 21 March 1915). During this period, she constructs herself not only in relation to Leighton as ‘special friend’, but in relation to him as soldier – a narrative where she becomes, as Deborah Gorham puts it, ‘hero’s beloved’ (p. 91). Afraid for his safety and mourning his absence and his potential death, she finds a certain

28 Grief in Wartime

consolation in writing their shared story in what Gorham calls ‘raised language’ (p. 94). Thus, for example, writing to Leighton, she can affirm that their lives are ‘bare of all but the few great things which are all we have left to cling to now – honour and love and heroism and sacrifice’ (ms: 26 May 1915). For Brittain, as for many other women, the anxiety of waiting for news, a preparedness for the death that might happen at any moment, amounted to an anticipatory mourning.9 That Brittain was not alone in this experience is illustrated in an article from The Times she transcribes for Roland called ‘The woman’s part’. ‘She must watch and wait in a long agony of uncertainty, not knowing the hour of her mourning, but knowing that already it may have struck. The very moment she sends her dearest out to war is the very moment of death’ (ms: 30 August 1915). Likewise, writing of Raymond Asquith’s going to the front, Cynthia Asquith describes his wife Katherine as in ‘abject despair … she might just have seen him into his coffin’ (1968, p. 91; 21 October 1915). Not all women could allow themselves the bluntness of Asquith’s remark. Anticipating bereavement as much as bereavement itself demanded the construction of meaning that would make daily living with the anxiety bearable. Grief psychologists affirm that, ‘In trying to make sense of the event [death] one is trying to interpret it as being consistent (or at least not inconsistent) with one’s world view, or fundamental beliefs about how and why such events occur’ (Neimeyer, 2001, pp. 143–4). In Brittain’s diary and letters we find that anticipatory mourning created a vulnerability that demanded some means of exerting control over an uncontrollable situation. After days of anxious waiting for news she tries to confront her worst fear: ‘Even as I write he may be dead, just one lifeless thing among thousands of others upon the battlefield’, but she cannot leave the image there, it demands mediation. She continues, ‘and all that is left to us who worship him is just some corner of a foreign field that is forever England’, ending ‘Death cannot conquer some things, and over them war knows no power’ (1982, p. 345; 17 September 1915). There is a particular irony here that supports the idea that consolation and confronting death directly are incompatible; only three days previously she had transcribed into her diary a letter from Leighton collapsing those Brookean sentiments she relies upon as he describes ‘the fleshless, blackened bones of simple men who poured out their red, sweet wine of youth unknowing, for nothing more tangible than Honour or their Country’s Glory or another’s Lust of Power’. He ends bitterly, ‘what a grand and glorious thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of hideous

For Women Must Weep 29

putrescence. Who is there who has known and seen who can say that Victory is worth the death of even one of these’ (1982, p. 344).10 That Brittain could not write Leighton’s death in his language, but instead relied on the received language of sacrifice and heroism, illustrates the importance of avoidance as a psychological strategy that would allow her to survive on a day-to-day basis as well as the need for a language of consolation that would make sense of the event. Even while Leighton deliberately invokes and rejects the most lauded poetry of 1915, Brooke’s ‘1914 sonnets’, Brittain’s diary and letters draw on Brooke throughout the war, illustrating the extent to which poetry that made meaning out of death became the discourse of choice in spite of the presence of an opposing voice from a lover whose opinions carried enormous import. Brooke’s poetry captured the public imagination precisely because it offered a way of understanding the war that fit with cultural ideologies already in place. For Brittain as for many others, including combatants, Brooke’s poetry was an available version of death in war that offered consolation through reinforcing the ideology of sacrifice. Combatant letters, from officers and men, probably quoted Brooke more often than rejected him. Geoffrey Thurlow, a close friend of Brittain’s brother, quotes Brooke as a means of coming to terms with his own impending death in his last letter and K. Luard, nursing terribly wounded men in France, prefaces her Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front 1914–1915 with an elegiac verse from Brooke, and particularly notes of a wounded young officer in her later Unknown Warriors that ‘his pocket-book [is] full of Rupert Brooke’ (p. 283). That Brittain could never entirely reject such meaning making, even years later when she was an uncompromising pacifist, speaks to its consolatory role in the face of traumatic bereavement. The availability of a heightened discourse that could erase Leighton’s blunt description and is then internalised by Brittain attests to the power of such language for a psyche made vulnerable by grief. As a ‘discourse user’ Brittain’s choice of discourse is less a conscious desire to accept the sacrificial heroic narrative than a grasping for meaning that will enable her to cope with the pain of bereavement. When Leighton is killed, Brittain moves between absolute despair and exaltation, a grief response that is of particular importance in the construction of his death in terms of the Christ-like hero. Relating the terrible scenario when Roland’s kit is returned to his family, including his bloodstained uniform, Brittain emphasises the knowledge of the front it contains: ‘Everything was damp & worn & simply caked with mud. All the sepulchres and catacombs of Rome could not make me realize

30 Grief in Wartime

mortality & decay & corruption as vividly as the smell of those clothes’ (1982, p. 382; 13 January 1916). But describing the discovery of his poems that have been returned with his kit, she erases the narrative of death and corruption and replaces it with a heightened rhetoric in a letter to her brother: ‘But I feel inwardly triumphant – exalted … For in them “He being dead, yet speaketh” ’ (1998, p. 214; 14 January 1916). As Neimeyer notes in his discussion of meaning making after loss, ‘whatever the status of an external reality, its meaning for us is determined by our constructions of its significance, rather than the “brute facts” themselves’ (2001, p. 263). Thus, for Brittain the brute facts of Leighton’s death revealed to her in these stinking bloody clothes cannot provide her with a narrative of death that offers meaning; she is compelled, here and elsewhere, to create her own site of mourning and leave taking in language that elevates that death above the brute facts. In particular, she begins a kind of worship of him that includes using a capital ‘H’ to refer to ‘Him’ in her diary and letters. Since I learned the details of his death I do not so much see him lying amid a heap of fallen soldiers with his white face turned up to the glory of the Eastern sky, and the Archangel in the heavens with his wings spread protectingly over him. Now I see a small room in a Hospital and a bed with all that remains of Him. And gradually filtering through the window with growing intensity the cold blue light of Dawn falls upon his dear dead face … upon the closed beautiful eyes … upon the firmly shut lips that I kissed in the first agonizing awakening of passion. (1982, p. 378; 1 January 1916) At the end of January she defines herself and Mrs. Leighton in relation to Leighton as a Christ figure: ‘ “Blessed art thou among women” applies to her for having made Him happen and to me for having gained His love’ (1982, p. 391; 27 January 1916). His elevation to a Christ-like sacrifice is even more evident 2 months later, as she describes assisting with an operation: ‘But it was from Roland’s wound that I saw the blood pour out in a scarlet stream (1982, p. 405; 13 March 1916).11 But between these two versions, further ‘stories’ of Leighton’s death from the front emerge and result in multiple narratives as Brittain writes and rewrites these in her diary and in letters to her brother. The writing and rewriting we find here, and in letters such as Phyllis Kelly’s quoted at the beginning of the chapter, exemplifies the way the narrative compulsion is a means of gaining control in the absence of any actual

For Women Must Weep 31

control over the situation. At the same time the multiple tellings of the long drawn-out and piecemeal narrative of Leighton’s death reveal the emotional toll on the individual trying to elicit specific information about the death of a soldier at the front. For Brittain the painful process is exacerbated by her position outside the socially sanctioned and therefore legitimate centre of grief that is positioned around the Leighton family and in particular Mrs. Leighton as ‘the Mother’. The details of Leighton’s death are almost entirely related to Brittain second hand through the Leightons who receive accounts from Roland’s colonel, captain and the Roman Catholic chaplain. She does, however, receive a sensitive if less detailed reply to her query from the chaplain and a letter from a Capt. Adshead who, as a friend of Roland’s, has deliberately requested her address because ‘as he is engaged himself … sympathises with me very deeply’. She goes on to note of his letter, ‘it is remarkable how it is possible to get from a stranger a kind of wonderful understanding which the people who have been one’s friends appear unable to give’ (1982, p. 389; 25–26 January 1916). As Damousi stresses, ‘Psychologically, these details were crucial; they carried the weight of reality and truth, providing a presence which filled the empty void of unknown events’ (1999, p. 10). A single death thus generates a complex interweaving of oral and written accounts, where information is itself a form of condolence and where the many versions of the death, ranging from the impersonal to the personal, reveal a shared narrative that extended between home and front, and men and women. At the same time, however, this correspondence and similar letters of condolence from the front allow us to note that the rhetoric of sacrifice and heroism offered as consolation was as much a product of the combatant narrative as it was of those who may have adopted it in their naivety at home. Of such an exchange, Damousi concludes, ‘The effort to mourn and then revive a persona bonded soldiers with the families of the fallen, and they became complicit in exalting the dead and resisting the finality of loss’ (1999, p. 9). While letters from Leighton’s commanding officers, Captain Adam and Colonel Harman, offer the facts of his wounding and death, they do so using the conventional language of heroism ‘the boy was wonderfully brave’, ‘he took it so bravely’, ‘I feel we owe you so much, and the only thing we can do is to offer you the sympathy of the officers, N.C.O’s & men of the company. But the example he set us will never be forgotten’.12 It is not until both Adam and Harman pay separate visits to the Leightons while on leave that the more painful details of his death

32 Grief in Wartime

are related. Having initially reported that Roland suffered no pain (an almost invariable practice in letters from officers to next of kin), they now discover that he was ‘writhing in the most terrible agony’ until given a hefty dose of morphia. From the chaplain we find an extended narrative that supplies a grieving mother and ‘Lady’ with the version of a ‘good’ death that includes them. Having described giving Roland absolution, he concludes but yet even if his lips did not utter your name you may be sure his troubled thoughts gathered round his Mother and his Lady in a love too intimate and too sacred to be voiced by a brave man. I know how desolate your heart must be and what a void in your life – how sympathy strikes cold and unavailing. But, after all, love is eternal; death does not destroy it, but rather lifts it to a higher plane. May God and the Mother of Sorrows lead you by gentle ways to a sweet resignation, and keep you by his wonderful consolations of our common faith.13 Yet, in attempting to present the information surrounding a death in combat as condolence, the letters from officers to next-of-kin often offered little more than official platitudes.14 The practicalities of trench life, the combatant desire to shelter those at home and the problem of actually describing conditions surely lay behind these. Junior officers writing letters of condolence and supplying details of a death, whether of a fellow officer or of a man they hardly knew, were rarely over 25 and more likely to be 19 or 20 and were often writing multiple letters under enormously stressful circumstances. The facts of the death were mostly brutal in the extreme and, in most cases, had to be related to a mother, father or wife unknown to the officer and who could hardly be expected to have any real knowledge of the situation in question. While meant to avoid distressing the recipient, the use of these formulae reinforced the narrative of ‘the good death’ in the cause of a ‘good war’ thus effectively erasing the reality of death at the front for the addressee. Ironically then, when civilians at home were being accused of having little understanding of conditions at the front, condolence letters, while purporting to communicate a very concrete event, death in combat, were in fact erasing ‘the brute facts’ and replacing them with an abstraction that contributed to the perceived gap in understanding between combatant and non-combatant. The following letter to Mrs. Dunning on the death of her son Pte. A. Higginson from second Lieutenant Rowland Hide is representative

For Women Must Weep 33

of condolence letters from the front: B.E.F 12th Aug Dear Mrs Dunning, It is with deep regret I have to inform you of the death of your son Pte A. Higginson which took place early this morning. We were going up into position when he was hit by a piece of shell death being instantaneous. His death is sadly felt by both his officers and comrades with whom he was very popular, being exceptionally devoted to duty and a thorough sportsman. Sympathising with you in your great loss in which we all join. Believe me to be Yours Sincerely, S. Rowland Hide 2Lt15 Particularly notable here is the affirmation that death was instantaneous and that the man was ‘devoted to duty’ and liked by all. Even in circumstances where further correspondence clearly shows that there was confusion surrounding a death, the initial letter offers the conventional narrative. The poignant story that evolves through correspondence on the death of Lance Corporal William Anderson in April 1917 allows us to understand how lack of information surrounding a death exacerbated the pain of bereavement, the inadequacy of condolence letters in providing the information needed and at the same time to witness the evolution of a community through letter exchanges. Writing increasingly anxiously about the lack of word from her husband whose correspondence shows him to be a prolific and concerned letter writer and sender of field postcards, Mrs. Anderson finally receives the following letter, dated 18 May 1917, from her husband’s commander, Captain Crees: France 18/5/17 Dear Mrs Anderson, Your letter to your husband of the 13th May has just reached me, and it is with deep regret that I have to inform you that your husband was killed on the 23rd April last. He died a hero’s death and all in ‘A’ Company feel his loss very much. I am relieved in the thought

34 Grief in Wartime

that he did not suffer at all. Your husband was very popular with all ranks, and we all miss him very much. I know that no words of mine can relieve your great distress, but I hope you will get some consolation out of the fact that you and your husband have paid the price of Empire. I have asked my future wife to write you a few lines, as I know, one woman can understand another woman’s feelings better than any mere man. If I can, at any time do anything for you please let me know, Yours sincerely J.M. Crees (Captain) D.C. A Coy (IWM 96/24/1) The appalling time lapse between Anderson’s presumed death and this letter reveals the problematic nature of death at the front, how news of the death was conveyed and the position of officers in offering information, condolence and help. The exchange of letters in this collection reveals that Mrs. Anderson’s husband had gone missing during an attack or raid on enemy trenches, but does not appear to have been officially posted either missing or dead. Certainly the fact that Mrs. Anderson had written several letters since the death suggests that she had not received official notification. She is concerned that he might be missing and taken prisoner as had some other members of the company during the same attack. Her subsequent appeals for information focus on her desperate hope that he might still be alive. In Crees’s letter, the emphasis is on the ‘hero’s death’ that replaces her ‘missing’ information. While acknowledging the inability ‘of words of mine [to] relieve your great distress’, a form of condolence is offered in ‘the fact that you and your husband have paid the price of Empire’. A further letter from second Lieutenant Shanahan [Shanrahan?] who knew Anderson affirms that ‘He was killed instantly, and died as any one of us might be proud to die.’ Further appeals for information reveal that the officers’ letters conceal the ‘brutal facts’ of the chaos during the attack in which Anderson was presumed killed. A letter by Mrs. Anderson to Shanahan requesting further information is returned marked, ‘Wounded whereabouts unknown’, revealing the problematic conditions within which the information must be sought out and the context within which letters of condolence are sent and next-of-kin notified of deaths. A letter from a fellow soldier, Pte. Cooper, finally confirms that Anderson was killed. ‘I am very sorry to inform you that your husband L/C Anderson was killed in action on April 23rd and was buried by the Northumberland Fusiliers. I do not know the place where he was buried, but you can rest

For Women Must Weep 35

assured that he was buried respectably. We do not know the place where he was buried and nobody seems to know how he got killed!’ The emphasis on Anderson’s burial here suggests both Cooper’s desire to console her in the fact that her husband was buried properly and to confirm his death. Moreover, this letter also draws attention to the formulaic nature of the officers’ letters since, we discover, no one actually knows how Anderson was killed. At least until this letter Mrs. Anderson seems to have been clinging to the hope that her husband might still be alive in spite of word to the contrary, which gives some sense of the difficulty in accepting death in the absence of concrete evidence. Her letters also show the predicament of a woman at home searching for information from people she does not know and who are male and upper-middle class whereas she is lower middle class or working class and a woman.16 Writing for herself and her baby daughter, her plea for information combines a sense of desperation with a necessary formality. She both reveals and contains her emotion in the standard phrase, ‘We were a very devoted couple.’ In spite of this gap in communication, however, the correspondence also offers a striking example of the temporary relationships bereavement forged between men and women, home and front. Captain Crees’s letter acknowledges her sacrifice alongside that of her husband. In addition, while his letter is stiff and formulaic, Crees’s request to his fiancée shows a sincerely sympathetic response to his lance corporal’s wife that takes his letter beyond the platitudes with which he begins it. It implies very strongly that there is much more to be said, but that he cannot say it. Although this practice of asking a wife, mother or fiancée to write to a grieving woman would have been more common in situations where the individuals involved came from the same area, it is difficult to know the extent to which it was routine. One can only imagine the pressure on a very young and probably sheltered young woman to write an appropriate condolence letter to a woman she had never met and who was often in very different social circumstances to her own. While not knowing the name of the woman to whom she is writing (a peculiar aspect of the letter that suggests in his haste and the pressures of the conditions under which he was working that Crees must have forgotten to give it to her – we must also remember that at about the same time his second lieutenant was wounded), rather than prolong the situation by writing back to her fiancé requesting Mrs. Anderson’s name, Dorothy Cartwright writes immediately, her letter being dated 22 May. The immediacy of the response indicates that Cartwright is profoundly moved by the situation and sees her own worst fears mirrored in this

36 Grief in Wartime

woman’s situation.17 What is striking here is not only Dorothy Cartwright’s willingness to write immediately, and her taking very earnestly Crees’s request, but also the relationship her letter forges with a woman whose name she does not know, but who is, with her, one of the waiting and now grieving women who make up a virtual community created because of their close relationship with men at the front. Thus, the terrible circumstances and long drawn-out anguish that mark Anderson’s death for his wife and Crees’s desire to mitigate as far as he can her pain, breaks down the binaries of front and home and further of class divisions at home. Dorothy Cartwright’s letter tells the story of the shared pain of waiting and grieving. It is not only empathetic, but also unexpectedly angry. And to a very great extent it undermines the consolatory rhetoric employed by Crees that focuses on abstractions of king and empire. It is a woman’s declaration of her situation that can only be shared by another woman. If, as Leighton reminds Vera Brittain, only one who has ‘known and seen’ can comprehend death at the front, only the bereaved woman and the waiting woman can ‘know’ what it is to experience death at home. 43 Kensington Rd Southport Lanc 22. 5. 17 My dear Mrs _____, I do not know your name, but I do hope my letter will reach you safely. My fiancé Capt. J. M. Crees, has written and told me of your terrible, terrible trouble and I am writing you these few lines to let you know how I really do feel for you, I know the awful anxiety, every day and every night, the same question running through our minds, ‘I wonder where he is now’, I wonder what is happening, Oh God I do know, but all we poor women get is to wait, wait, wait, dreading each post or telegraph boy we see, will bring us the worst news. You are one of the poor brave women, who have given their all, their mate, the one person to look up to and your baby’s father, I don’t know how to console you, what can I say? The people who have no ties fighting for them would say, well he died for his King and Country, yes he did God rest his soul, but I know what this awful thing means to you and I cannot take your hand to try to console you

For Women Must Weep 37

but please always remember that, I understand and know at the present moment what you are suffering, so if this is any consolation to you I shall be so glad. I am not married, but I may one day receive the awful news like you did, but if it is so, I shall think of the poor soul in Crumpsall who is suffering the same. With all my sympathy to you both, Yours faithfully, Dorothy Cartwright Combatant writing from the trenches often shared further in this community of bereavement when a man wrote to the wife or ‘sweetheart’ of a friend or fellow officer killed at the front as we have seen in Brittain’s case. Thus, Eric Appleby writing to Phyllis Kelly expresses his own grief for his captain, Burrows, who had been killed earlier in the day, alongside his distress for Burrows’s fiancée to whom he has just written: ‘Oh! Phyl, it’s awful to think of his fiancée, an Irish girl from Dublin. They were to be married next month, or as soon as Burrows could get leave. I had to write to her and tell her about his death, as he asked me once if I would do so, should anything happen to him. I just don’t know how I wrote the short note to her, and God knows, I’m a poor enough hand at that kind of thing at the best of times’ (Kelly, ed., p. 241). This community of anxiety and grief exists both at the private level of letters and diaries and, as already noted, at the public level where the attendant emotions are conveyed through the wearing of mourning dress, formal obituary notices and less formal but equally public displays of street shrines and other commemorative forms that lent to and incorporated discourses of grief and mourning. If the public discourse of bereavement favoured stoicism and the rhetoric of duty, honour and sacrifice, private accounts such as Cartwright’s letter and Brittain’s diaries reveal the conflict between prescription and feeling. Further, we must acknowledge that abstract platitudes were not only the province of those at home, but also often came directly from the front where they stood in place of what could not be said. Although Durkheim claims that ‘mourning is not a natural movement of private feelings wounded by cruel loss; it is a duty imposed by the group,’ Walter and Neimeyer contend that the seemingly ‘private feelings’ of grief are also subject to external control (Durkheim, quoted in Stephenson, p. 142). The private narratives we have looked at show the extent to which the grieving individual experienced conflicting emotions;

38 Grief in Wartime

public mourning, on the other hand, left little room for ambivalence: stoic acceptance and pride was the public face of grief. While enacting ‘the duty imposed by the group’ could offer consolation, the discrepancy between public form and private feeling in a wartime environment demanding stoicism could equally result in enormous stress on the bereaved. This could be particularly the case where the bereaved’s relationship with the dead did not have official status or where public roles and responsibilities demanded an extreme level of control. Brittain finds a bitter satisfaction in the public display of her role as ‘hero’s beloved’ that had been primarily a private construction: ‘But somehow I felt sadly distinguished and infinitely lofty in the midst of that overdressed chattering crowd in the hotel; they showed their vulgarity by gazing inquisitively at my mourning as I went by’ (1982, p. 377; 1 January 1916). Her buying and wearing a mourning engagement ring allows us to examine conflicting aspects of mourning as ‘duty’, as well as understanding how conforming to duty offered meaning at a time when she feels her life has lost all meaning. Where she had refused to wear an engagement ring the previous August on the feminist grounds that it identified her as the man’s possession, the need to position herself in the culturally validated narrative of bereaved fiancée now demands an acceptance of the status quo. At the same time, the very act of choosing, buying and having the ring engraved with Roland’s date of death gives Brittain agency and allows her the consolation of being able to claim a certain public status as Roland’s mourner, all the more important to her since, not being his wife, she had no socially sanctioned claim over him.18 The desire for public agency is even more understandable when we witness the frightening lack of control that comes with such a bereavement and which she relates only in the privacy of her diary: ‘I wonder if ever, ever, I shall get over this feeling of blank hopelessness, of feeling it is cruel I should have to suffer so, of wishing I had never been born at all … In the utter blackness of my soul I seem to be touching the very depths of that dull lampless anguish which we call despair’ (1982, p. 393; 30–31 January 1916). The traumatic wartime death of the loved one is experienced, and hence constructed and narrated, in contradictory languages: the language of despair and the received language of sacrifice and heroism. Such a response is rendered more complex by the fact that the received language undoubtedly provides necessary consolation and bestows status on the bereaved. In her desperate need for a narrative that imposes meaning on loss, however, the discourse user’s choice is limited to the rhetoric that manufactures consent to her own bereavement.

For Women Must Weep 39

In a more obvious way, conflicting responses to death can also be manifest as contradictions between public and private behaviour. These instances demonstrate the extent to which women tried to fulfil a public role of stoic acceptance that was clearly at odds with their private feelings, even while those ‘private’ feelings were subject to the range of public discourses already identified. Ironically of course, the willingness of individuals to adopt the prescribed public face itself contributed to the discourse of stoic sacrifice. Of Ettie Grenfell, whose two sons Julian and Billy had been killed early in the war, Cynthia Asquith writes, I had a long talk with Ettie in her bedroom. She was wonderful and most touching. It is so amazing the way in which she, externally, is absolutely normal in company. The same old extraordinary zest unimpaired … One begins to wonder and think it inhuman, but directly she is alone with one she is just a simple, effortless woman with a bleeding heart. Tears pour down her cheeks, and she talks on and on about the boys. (1968, pp. 102–3; 21 November 1915) Although the narratives of grief such as we find in Asquith’s and Brittain’s diaries are necessarily limited by the writers’ social positions and thus cannot claim to be representative of all women’s feeling or experience, they do allow us to look at responses to death, the conflict between private pain and the public demand for stoic acceptance, and the rewriting of the narratives of death in a language that allows for consolation. The very existence of these narratives is, of course, a result of the writers’ leisure time and education. They remind us that the lack of working-class voices in this history is less an academic privileging of middle- and upper-class accounts per se, but the result of the social conditions that have made it difficult for working-class women to have contributed to the private narrative. Asquith’s diary in particular allows us to see a community in mourning, an elite community, of course, but legitimate parallels could be drawn with other closely knit communities throughout Britain. Winter calls this ‘a bond of bereavement which transcended distinctions of class or caste, for what mattered was not that the war had destroyed potential leaders or poets, but that it had cut a swathe through an entire generation’ (1986, p. 305). While this swathe was being cut, Asquith’s diaries reveal the private and specifically female responses to those deaths. As close relatives and friends are killed, including her two brothers, she moves almost literally from bedside to bedside in her role as comforting friend

40 Grief in Wartime

or sister or daughter. What is striking is the representation of a female community here wherein Asquith’s diary allows us to participate in the deepest grief that is revealed only in the privacy of the bedroom and amongst women. While it evokes a leisured social class and a close-knit family, it also recalls the sharing of one woman’s anguish by another in Dorothy Cartwright’s letter to Mrs. Anderson. After hearing the death of her brother confirmed, after months of waiting and rumours, Asquith describes in detail breaking the news to his wife Letty, and her reaction. The next day, having spent the night with Letty, she begins, ‘Ghastly awakening. She began moaning in her sleep, “Don’t let me wake up to this ghastly day – I don’t want to wake up … Oh God, the pain of it! I’m so frightened” ’. Asquith then comments, ‘the agony of one’s impotence to help’ (1968, p. 184; 2 July 1916). When Raymond Asquith is killed in September 1916, she writes, ‘Now I feel I have really relinquished all hope and expect no one to survive. Katherine [his wife] is the most awful thought’ (1968, p. 218; 19 September 1916). Unlike Brittain, Asquith finds she cannot employ the rhetoric of sacrifice and heroism as a form of consolation, although given her social position and the status of the men she grieves for she would have been especially subject to it. A year after Raymond Asquith’s death, she describes ‘a long hair combing with [Katherine]. She lifted the veil and revealed such a depth and intensity of suffering … it was so difficult to find anything to say to her – it seemed presumptuous and impertinent to offer any of the things one does to other people’ (1968, p. 327; 16 August 1917).19 Here again we are reminded of a letter to Mrs. Anderson from a family friend who comments, ‘We can only faintly imagine what a blow the sad news must have been to you. There is very little consolation to you in writing the usual platitudes & others will be doing that anyway’ (IWM 96/24/1). In 1915, when Asquith’s younger brother Yvo had been killed, she had become acutely aware of the inability of received language to offer consolation: Oh the anguish of waking to such heartache and how immune my life has been! … Somehow with the others who have been killed, I have acutely felt the loss of them but have so swallowed the rather high-faluting platitude that it was all right for them – they were not to be pitied, but were safe, unassailable, young, and glamorous forever. With Yvo – I can’t bear it for him. The sheer pity and horror of it is overwhelming … It hurts me physically. (1968, p. 91; 20 October 1915)

For Women Must Weep 41

Yet, when Asquith came to write Haply I May Remember in 1950, she returns to the language she had rejected: It was about Yvo that my husband wrote ‘The Fallen Subaltern’ of which one verse is: And those who come this way in days hereafter Will know that here a boy for England fell, Who looked at danger with the eyes of laughter, And on the charge his days were ended well. (p. 177) As with Ettie Grenfell, Asquith’s public face here is in conflict with the private. It is, perhaps, easier to adopt the public rhetoric when articulating public mourning much later in life, than to revisit the intensity of the earlier grief. Yet, as Asquith herself was aware, the end of the war and the years that followed did not necessarily bring an end to grief. In September 1918, she writes, ‘I am beginning to rub my eyes at the prospect of peace. I think it will require more courage than anything that has gone before … / … one will at last recognise that the dead are not only dead for the duration of the war’ (1968, p. 480; 28 September 1918). It is clear that even before the glut of war books published in the late 1920s and early 1930s, war loss dominated the British psyche.20 War memoirs and fiction were the means by which survivors, men and women, negotiated war deaths and it is in these that we see a continuation of the mourning as well as a re-examining of wartime loss from a post-war perspective. The popularity of R.C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End (one of the first post-war representations of the combatant experience), which began its London run in 1929, attests to the need for a generation to grieve after a 10-year repression of the war experience. The story of five officers in a dugout waiting for an attack that will almost certainly kill all of them, the play ends with the representative death and subsequent entombment in the dugout of the youngest officer, Raleigh, in the retaliatory bombardment that accompanies the attack. Reports of audience reaction show that collective weeping often took the place of applause.21 With the exception of Brittain’s Testament of Youth which, since its publication in 1933, has influenced our reading of the war and particularly of the ‘lost generation’ myth, the elegiac role of women’s post-war writing has largely been ignored. Most criticism in this area has tended to look at the experience of war work rather than considering the emotional history of women’s bereavement, grief and mourning. Even though, during the war, the emotional labour of grieving and mourning was depicted as the woman’s task, post-war writing has privileged the male combatant as

42 Grief in Wartime

survivor and mourner. Yet, as Damousi’s studies of post-war Australian bereavement illustrate, women carried an inordinate emotional and economic burden as post-war survivors. While most of this chapter has concentrated on women’s grief and mourning during the war, grief, as Cynthia Asquith intimates, cannot be neatly delimited by time and space. Negotiating grief through the memoir and fiction of the late 1920s and early 1930s makes clear that what Winter calls ‘the legacy of loss’ collapses parameters that attempt to define war by dates. Testament of Youth and Irene Rathbone’s We That Were Young (1932) are generational elegies that, while written from the woman’s perspective, do not privilege it. They return to the war experience and its immediate aftermath to explore bereavement and the cultural context within which it took place, and to question their own relationship to the rhetoric that manufactured consent to the terrible losses. Although loss for the young middle-class women of both these books is primarily an emotional experience and does not include an exploration of the relationship between pain and loss of bereavement and ensuing economic hardship for many families, they do evoke the common experience of anxiety, grief and finally absence, not only of lovers and potential husbands, but also of brothers, cousins and friends. The men of their acquaintance who did return were often lost to them in other ways. As Storm Jameson’s post-war writing shows, combatant survivors still existed more in the past than in the present: She saw that certain names of places, Bapaume, Gommecourt, Arras, Bucquoy, had for him more than the significance of poetry. With them was involved depths of an emotion into which she could not enter, by any effort … It was occupied territory. With despair she understood that the War had taken the fullness of his life and energy. Less than a whole man survived. She saw that women have more than one reason to fear war. (1935, pp. 34–5) For women like Brittain who had loved men killed in the war, loss deprived them of the individuals themselves and at the same time filled that absence with an idealised presence that made later relationships difficult or impossible. Reading Brittain’s biography of Winifred Holtby during the Second World War, Frances Partridge notes in her diary, ‘Vera Brittain writes of the number of women now happily married and with children who still hark back to a khaki ghost which stands for the most acute and upsetting feelings they have ever had in their lives. Which is true, I think, and the worst of it is that the ghost is often almost entirely a creature of their imagination’ (1978, p. 26; 25 January 1940).

For Women Must Weep 43

If Partridge’s comment connects the ghosts of one war to those of the next for later readers, the purpose for both Brittain and Rathbone is to retrieve those ‘khaki ghosts’ and make them visible both to the generation to which they belonged as well as to ensure that future generations would not forget. Although disillusionment in the last years of the war and immediately post-war was not as pervasive as the trope of ‘enthusiasm to disillusionment’ would have us believe, it is clear that the climate of questioning the motives and purpose behind the war allowed writers to revisit their experiences outside those prescriptions that manufactured consent and silenced dissent during the war. At the same time, however, post-war mourning meant that individuals were caught in a paradox where the value of the war deaths was questioned on the one hand and yet, as in the war itself, needed to carry meaning for the survivors. This dilemma reveals itself as irreconcilable in Brittain’s Testament of Youth, a memoir that is written with the purpose, perhaps unconsciously paradoxical, of imposing meaning on the war deaths while rejecting the war itself. Irene Rathbone’s We that Were Young is a fictional version of her own experience that goes beyond Brittain’s focus on her own immediate situation and, where Brittain’s work is a eulogy for those who have died, Rathbone focuses more fully on a community of women who, one by one, are bereaved. The official ending of the war is blurred and questioned in the situation of Rathbone’s fictional self, Joan, when her brother dies in France of the Spanish flu and her fiancé is killed fighting in Iraq. As an onlooker and, finally, a participant in grief, Joan bears witness to bereavement, forcing us to look directly at the grief of others as well as of herself. Rathbone continually reminds her reader of the state of bereavement as a general condition of the war as well as specific to her central characters: ‘Everyday one or more of the girls on the 1st London General would hear of the death of a brother or a fiancé, be granted two days leave, and then return and carry on. Oh, a fine time to be young in, that summer of the Somme!’ (pp. 202–3). In the following passage one character’s angry response to the death of her fiancé legitimises women’s anger at such loss rather than upholding the discourse of sacrifice and stoicism. Writing outside the constraints of wartime rhetoric and not subject to the erasure of censorship, Rathbone can bring her post-war perspective to bear on bereavement during the war itself. Though, of course, even here we need to remember the constraints imposed by the alternative version of the war that was being written at the time: the narrative of disillusionment. In the following passage the discourses of consolation are stripped away and death at the front can no longer be couched in terms of honour, duty,

44 Grief in Wartime

king and country, but murder: The fury gripped and shook her. Her voice came tearing through her throat, hoarse, primitive, unrecognisable. Her fists beat the bed where she was sitting. ‘Hell take the whole bloody army! What did they want Ginger for? Why Ginger? There were lots of others. I ought never to have let him go back. He was mine, we were going to be married, we loved each other, and they’ve murdered him. Curse them to hell.’ (p. 147) The murderers are not the enemy, but the whole system that sends young men to kill and be killed. Thrush’s subsequent rejection of the war and her own war work after the death of her lover allows Rathbone to question further the prescribed behaviours surrounding grief and the reinforcement of those responses within the female community that supports and comforts the bereaved. Joan felt wretchedly baffled. In the face of such an attitude it was impossible to put forward general pleas of duty and patriotism. Grief took different forms, and the form which it took with Thrush was not a comfortable one to come into contact with. Those people who felt as deeply, but whose code it was to ‘keep a stiff upper lip’, and to ‘carry on’, made sympathy a much easier thing for their friends. (pp. 148–9) Here, where the bereaved woman refuses to adhere to the ‘code’ she becomes marginalised. Ultimately the novel concludes with Thrush lost to herself and to the community of women to which she had once belonged. In her search for closure after the war, Brittain, like thousands of others, participated in what was probably the single most common mourning behaviour: visiting the war graves and memorials. Yet, while Brittain interrogates the message presented by the immaculately kept cemeteries, calling them ‘a cheating and a camouflage’, for others the carefully tended graveyards offered a satisfaction and closure after years without what Winter calls a ‘site of mourning’ (Brittain, 1986, p. 135). The following narrative of a visit to a gravesite brings together an acknowledgement of a grief that has for years been silenced and, in place of the military and imperialist values of courage, king and country that dominated the wartime rhetoric of consolation, looks to Christian ideology to mitigate that grief. A letter to a Miss Ann[ie?] O’Neill dated 17 August 1926 tells the story of a W.J. Williams who was posted

For Women Must Weep 45

missing on 15 September 1916 (IWM Misc. 100 item 1556). The detailed description of the visit to the gravesite and the inclusion of Miss O’Neill’s name on the card left at the grave suggest that the addressee is the fiancée or sweetheart of the dead man. It is not clear whether Williams’s body had recently been recovered and buried or was found and buried at the time, but this is very evidently a crucial family pilgrimage where, 10 years after the actual death, the family is participating in something approximating their own burial service. It is particularly important to note the inclusion of Miss O’Neill as a participant in the bereavement since in most instances relationships other than marriage are not mentioned in public obituaries even while popular culture idealised and glamorised such relationships, especially for propaganda purposes. Here the family carefully note in the letter to her that ‘the wording of the card [left at the grave with a wreath] is Father, Mother, Brother, Miss Ann[ie] O’Neill/a silent thought, a secret tear’. Furthermore, the detailed description of the grave and the relating of the emotional response and reference to the words of the funeral service all include her in the community of bereaved and in the satisfaction and closure that comes with finally seeing his grave: ‘And it was very easy to find the grave of our Dear William John, as we were going from the entrance … there stood his name, his rank, regiment and no 13369 quite clear, and every letter correct, as we wish to inscribe on his tombstone’. The emphasis on correctness here suggests both the confirmation that this is their son, obviously important if we consider that he had originally been missing, and also that errors were sometimes made. Once the concrete evidence is in front of them, the family now allow itself to grieve spontaneously. After 10 years they finally have a concrete ‘site of mourning’ and in the laying of a wreath and flowers described earlier in the letter are able to enact a public mourning which, the poem on the card implies, had previously been ‘silent’ and ‘secret’. ‘Now came the burst of tears, but with a hope to meet our dear, brave lad again in a far and better sphear [sic], than this world, where there is no sorrow, nor tears, nor cruel wars, where we shall enjoy everlasting life, when God will wipe every tear. We parted from the Cemetary, very much satisfied and lot better after we seen [sic] his last resting place and see the care is taken by our Government of the Cemetary’ [sic]. Unlike Brittain’s denunciation of the false neatness of the cemetery, this family does not participate in the narrative of disillusionment, finding instead that the carefully tended graves are a mark of respect for the dead and an acknowledgement of their importance.

46 Grief in Wartime

Neither Irene Rathbone nor Phyllis Kelly married. Kelly slept with a picture of Eric over her bed until her death at the age of 99. Vera Brittain continued to memorialise her dead through her writing and political action for the rest of her life, but her immediate mourning is conveyed in a memorial journal she began even before the war ended. The opening entry, obviously added after her brother’s death in July 1918, is headed ‘I, too, take leave of all I ever had’ and underneath lists the names and dates of death of the young men who had been such an important part of her life: Roland Leighton, Geoffrey Thurlow, Victor Richardson and her brother Edward. The journal records each death and includes names and memorial verses, newspaper cuttings and pressed flowers, but blank pages between each entry set absence against presence, allowing her to represent the paradox inherent in bereavement. Ultimately, no construction of death could console her for their loss, although her later writing of Testament of Youth allowed her to create an elegy to her generation around them. The private collections of letters and memorial albums housed in the Imperial War Museum and in family collections tell the same story: a lasting reminder of the devastation of grief.

2 Grieving the ‘Good’ War

The memoirs, diaries and letter exchanges discussed in Chapter 1 reveal the fallacy of defining war through the traditional boundaries and binaries of home and front, civilian and combatant, beginning and ending. At the same time, such boundaries still persist in delimiting spatial parameters and in creating a legitimacy surrounding voices that are given permission to speak and voices that are silenced. As both Damousi and Winter show, and as we have seen in the private writings of women such as Vera Brittain and Phyllis Kelly, the emotional history of war involves a particularly poignant collapsing of conventional boundaries of time and space, illustrating how the war experience extends long past its official ending not just in terms of public memory in the form of memorials, for example, but also in private struggles to deal with loss both emotionally and economically. The popular success of Sherriff’s play Journey’s End in 1929 and Brittain’s Testament of Youth in 1933 further testify to the need for a shared public expression of private anguish long after the official end of the war. To consider grief and loss in the First World War and Second World War as distinct would, therefore, be to ignore those voices of mourning from the First World War that extend to and then merge with grief as it is anticipated and experienced in the second. The scale of post-First World War psychological damage, both of bereaved civilians and combatants suffering physical debility as well as multiple post-trauma neuroses, has received very little attention outside war memoir and fiction, but there is evidence to show that it was overwhelming. Cannadine notes the ‘massive, all-pervasive pall of death which hung over Britain in the years between 1914 and 1939’ (p. 230) and anecdotal evidence draws attention to this ‘pall’ and the psychological effects of the war on a more private level. Charles Causley describes 47

48 Grief in Wartime

the presence of the First World War in his own father’s slow death from TB contracted in the trenches and in the ‘shell-shocked’ men of his town.1 Similarly, exploring the poet Ted Hughes’s childhood, Diane Middlebrook notes his claim that living amongst the First World War combatants in the Calder Valley was like living with mental patients (p. 56). At the same time, she hypothesises on the ‘historical meaning’ of ‘a mother’s weeping’ in Hughes’s poetry: ‘the women were melancholics. For them, the First World War survived as the presence of innumerable ghosts of men cut down in their prime’ (p. 69). On the outbreak of war in 1939 then, we find that British emotional response necessarily merges with a still raw memory of the First World War, the legacy of that war informing the way the Second World War is received and responded to at the emotional level. If discourses of bereavement and mourning in the First World War were, at least initially, offered by a multiplicity of unofficial forms of propaganda, bereavement discourses in the Second World War were necessarily informed by private experiences of the first. In a journal entry of 11 May 1940, Storm Jameson, in her twenties during the First World War, articulates the complex emotions that attend this merging of past grief with anticipatory grief in the present: It is only now, when our army is back in Belgium, that I feel the acute ceaseless anxiety, the anguish, that I did not feel during 1914–18, when it was my own friends, the young men of my age, who were there. Twenty-five years after they were killed, I begin to be afraid for them in the living bodies of boys I don’t know … It seems to me that my friends, those young men, with their illusions, gaiety, desires, faults, hopes, are now really dying in the deaths of another generation. And I have even heard these new ones say of ours that they were romantic about war and went blindly […] to Loos and Passchendaele […]. (1961, p. 142) Although much younger than Jameson, Margery Allingham similarly merges the past with the present on the outbreak of war in 1939: I was ten years old in 1914, and very vivid impressions received at that age never alter. … War simply meant death to me … It was not ordinary dying, either, nor even death in its more horrible forms, but death final, empty and away somewhere. I had a sudden recollection of women and old people all in black … standing about in the village street reading enormous casualty lists in a very

Grieving the ‘Good’ War 49

small type which seemed to fill whole pages of the paper; a boy on a bike with not one telegram spelling tragedy but sometimes two or even three at a time; and long sad services in the small church … It was a dreadful picture of annihilation, of ending off, of the hopeless destruction of practically all a whole human crop. I remembered names I had not thought of for twenty-five years … but the principal thing was the hundreds and hundreds of far away deaths. (pp. 20–1) Allingham further notes the cynicism that her generation inherited and carried forward to the next war: ‘Those of us who were in our ‘teens when the war ended came out … into a disillusioned world wherein everything, including God, was highly suspect … there was nothing but broken planks wherever we trod’ (p. 21). ‘That evening in the yard the prospect of another war, of the generation after us going the same way as the one before us, was not only horrible but seemed hardly to be borne’ (p. 23). Private accounts reflect the same confluence. Thus, the unpublished memoir of J. Westren, a VAD in the Second World War, opens with mourning for the dead of the Great War that she makes at once personal and general; it in turn merges with the anticipation of the same slaughter in the next war: ‘with its massive slaughter of Servicemen, among them my cousin, who aged 17 and in the Royal Flying Corps, was shot down in flames … those men were still mourned, even in our time, and spoken of as “The Nation’s cannon-fodder”. … As for the rest of us, we of the new cannon-fodder generation’ (IWM 91/4/1, pp. 2–3). Yet, at the same time as individual women were drawing on their experience of death and mourning in the First World War for a language through which they could articulate anger, despair and anticipatory mourning at the outbreak of a second war, the public discourse was constructing very different roles for women than it had in the first. On the most practical level, of course, this was determined by the recognition of the necessary role women would have to play in wartime production as well as in auxiliary roles in the armed services, yet this difference is particularly evident in the striking contrast between the glamour attending grief in the First World War that persisted alongside the discourse of stoicism, the means by which a woman participated in the culture of sacrifice, and the erasure of such a representation in the Second World War. The involvement of civilians on the ‘frontlines’, both as casualties and workers, meant that morale, and ultimately the manufacture of consent necessary to carry through the government’s V for Victory campaign, depended on the silencing of those emotions that had been such an

50 Grief in Wartime

important element in public and private discourse in the earlier war. In a wartime essay, ‘They that Mourn’, Vera Brittain identifies the relationship between the hiding of wartime grief and the discourses of concealment that operate in all war reporting: The mourners of today, though they form a worldwide multitude, are not easily discovered by their would-be comforters … [O]ne purpose of modern war propaganda is to conceal personal suffering as effectively as it hides the horror of every war-time ‘incident’. To the popular collective nouns in which individual losses are submerged, the Press and communiqués have added a now familiar series of conventional phrases designed to reassure by their studied vagueness. (2005, p. 62)2 Such a radical change in public rhetoric exemplifies the way publicly sanctioned discourses that construct the behaviour and private responses of men and women in wartime are created in response to that specific war’s needs. Introducing her anthology, Hearts Undefeated: Women’s Writing of the Second World War, Jenny Hartley notes the degree of silence surrounding women’s grief in private writing and in public discourse during the war. [G]rief seems strangely absent from women’s war writing. In the public arena at least, women seem to have felt the pressure of male codes of behaviour, to the extent of being unable or unwilling to show grief openly … Public grief would have been unpatriotic, feminine, weak … The low visibility of grief in their published writing shows how women’s values and emotions can never wholly enmesh with those of a nation at war. Part of women’s public war language must be silence. This was almost national policy, with restraint and suppression impressed upon wives writing to their husbands away on active service. (p. 7)3 Hartley goes on to note, however, that ‘[w]ith careful attention the significant gaps and silences reveal themselves’ (p. 7). As might be expected, such gaps and women’s consciousness of the struggle between suppression and expression of grief are found in unpublished writing, and in accounts written or published after the war when such silencing no longer dominated public responses to wartime experience. It is to this writing that we must look to examine the relationship between public and private discourse and the extent to which women and children accepted and resisted the public admonition to hide grief with a veneer

Grieving the ‘Good’ War 51

of brightness and cheerfulness. Moreover, as already noted in the ‘Introduction’, in their responses to dominant wartime discourses, women also contributed to their formation, as Summerfield asserts in her discussion of British women in the Second World War: ‘Just as it is important to acknowledge that there is not likely to be a single discourse at any one time which directly determines consciousness, so it is the case that as well as drawing upon the available cultural constructions we contribute to them’ (p. 15). Silence as well as speech was, of course, a contribution to these cultural constructions that defined the appropriate behaviours surrounding loss. The absence of a publicly sanctioned discourse through which women could legitimise their mourning in the Second World War points to the importance of such discourse (or its absence) in the larger construction of gender roles in wartime. Initially, at any rate, constructions of appropriate behaviour for women in the First World War drew on long-standing conventions where, for example, men must fight and women must wait and weep, even if they were asked to smile through their tears in recognition of heroic sacrifice. In the Second World War, the constructions of the woman’s role as private and domestic continued to sit alongside contradictory demands that asked women to move into the public arena and contribute directly to the war. In the context of the Second World War, the contradictory character of the discourses constituting ‘woman’ is particularly visible. This ‘total’ war stimulated a rhetoric concerning ‘the people’, all of whose efforts had to be mobilised. Within this process, contradictory demands were placed on women. They were required both to be at home, keeping the home fires burning as they watched and waited for their menfolk to return from the front, and they were expected to ‘do their bit’ in the war effort, in paid or voluntary capacity. They were expected to be carers and mothers, but they were also under pressure to be soldiers and workers. There were demands for women to wear dresses and look feminine, but also to put on uniforms, the wartime emblems of citizenship. (Summerfield, p.14) Thus, manufacturing consent no longer involved glamorising the vicarious experience of sacrifice through male death on the battlefield, but rather the sacrifice of individual goals in the interests of the war; consent included not just an acceptance of male deaths in combat, but also of deaths of friends and family in bombing and loss of children to evacuation as well as the daily routine of long work hours and queuing for food.

52 Grief in Wartime

While Phyllis Warner tells us that an official government poster ‘Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory’ alienates many people by suggesting that the sufferings of the masses would benefit ‘the gang at the top’, films and radio plays and programmes were a much more successful way of persuading individuals to internalise an ideology.4 Paul Fussell claims of both the United States and Britain that ‘the war was mediated and authenticated by spoken language whose conduit was the radio’ (1989, pp.180–1). In addition, women’s magazines offered women narratives of appropriate wartime behaviour and romance, and films were a useful way of reaching a largely young audience.5 The grieving roles offered to women by wartime propaganda were as paradoxical as other wartime constructions of ‘woman’ in that they represented her as carrying the burden of emotional labour and at the same time demanded that she subjugate private grief in the larger aims of the collective war effort. Thus, propaganda films primarily aimed at the ‘home’ audience, such as In Which We Serve (1942) and Millions Like Us (1943) exploit the narrative of wartime loss to convince their audience that private emotions must give way to the larger communal and patriotic necessity of victory. As Calder notes of several films in this genre, ‘[a] central and very moving motif in such movies … is the individual’s choking back of grief over the death of a loved one and resumption of teamwork towards victory’ (p. 237). Of course, the arousal of such affect through the emotional involvement with the characters of a feature film allows for the viewer’s vulnerability to the message being presented. In Millions Like Us, the central female character Celia is taken from the private domestic world of home into the communal public world of hostel and factory as she participates in working for victory. Yet, even while a central message of the film is the importance of women’s work to the war effort, through Celia the audience is offered contradictory representations of appropriate roles for women. Her romance with an RAF gunner provides a conventional plot wherein her work world is perceived as temporary: her post-war idyll positions her within the private realm of the home as wife and mother. This dream collapses when her gunner husband is killed on a bombing mission. Her idyll snatched away, Celia is depicted once again in her public role as a war worker. In that role she is denied the right to private feelings in so far as their expression undermines her position in the community of factory workers and hence of the collective resolve to win the war despite private suffering. In the final scene, Celia is shown sitting in the factory canteen, caught up in her private grieving and unable to join in the collective singing of, particularly poignant for her, ‘There was I waiting at the church.’ Her initial refusal to

Grieving the ‘Good’ War 53

participate represents her grief as isolating and suggests an unwillingness to subordinate her private emotions to the public good: participation in the war effort. With the encouragement and support of the women around her, she gradually joins in and finally smiles as she takes her place again in the collective camaraderie that defines the woman’s place in the war effort. The message to the audience is that private pain must be subservient to the cause of the war. Further, that pain is erased and replaced as Celia’s recovery, indicated by her smile, occurs in the context of the wartime community and, it is implied, is precipitated by her resolution to ‘carry on’. Unlike the dramatic image of the woman overwhelmed by her anguish in the magazine stories from the First World War, the message to the female audience at which the film is directed is clear: loss is an inevitable part of war which must be borne stoically and any public admission of anguish is inappropriate, in fact, unpatriotic. Moreover, community support will sustain her and heal the loss. Having shared Celia’s dreams and pain, the audience is thus also persuaded to share her stoic response. Even as the film plays out Butler’s connecting of the ‘desire for social existence’ with acquiescence to subjection, the audience itself, rendered emotionally available to persuasion, is being asked to share in that subjection. Now, the final scene suggests, her personal grief is transformed into a reason for ‘carrying on’ as we see the shadows of the bombers pass over the factory as Celia joins in the singing. The discourse of keeping cheerful represented in Celia’s smile is a constant presence in writing throughout the war and reflects a public discourse that promotes it as essential wartime behaviour for women. Writing in 1942, Theodora Benson maintains that women ‘have a dual importance. As women they have to keep alive, so long as they can, grace and tenderness, sweetness and fun, some proportion of softness and sanity in the hard world; and as human beings they have a multitude of honest-to-God jobs to do’ (p. 15). The sense that it is a woman’s duty to uphold the roles prescribed here is reinforced throughout official and unofficial discourses. Thus, an advertisement for rouge in Glamour magazine, 18 May 1940, advises ‘When he’s home on leave he wants warmth and gaiety, loveliness and laughter. And you want to make him happy, to see the love shining in his eyes. So away with pale, wan cheeks – away with every sign of weariness’; Odol toothpaste more stoically advises readers of Housewife in July 1941 to ‘Smile all the while’ since ‘Whatever the day brings we’ve got to keep smiling.’ Radio programmes similarly were instructed to, ‘just try to make the period one of unrelieved BRIGHTNESS AND CHEERFULNESS’ (Nicholas, pp. 82–3). Given the inevitable clash of private feeling with the public mask, it is not

54 Grief in Wartime

Figure 2.1 Rouge advertisement: ‘When he’s home on leave’

surprising to find that individual accounts of grief often reveal extreme conflict between private emotions and public behaviour that follows the mandate of silence. Thus, after the death of her husband in action, one woman replies to a condolence letter from his close friend: ‘I am being brave. No one ever broke their hearts with less fuss before. You wouldn’t guess my world was in ruins when I discuss the good war news with people.

55

Figure 2.2 Odol Toothpaste: ‘Smile all the while’

56 Grief in Wartime

You would never think that as far as I am concerned it can go on for ever now’ (Robson, p. 130). In her post-war memoir, J.Westren describes how this extreme discrepancy between private pain and the public face was generalised in all wartime behaviour: I shut out as best I could the thought of the sadness that was everywhere, behind all the music and laughter that we used as a barrier between ourselves and it. And knew inescapably that life now for everyone wore two masks, one the merriment that we pretended, and beneath it the tragedy that we all knew was actually present. (p. 31) Hiding behind the mask is necessary for daily survival, Westren implies. At the same time, however, that silencing of emotion sustains the public discourse of stoic cheerfulness wherein those who hide their grief become complicit in the public discourse of silence as they contribute to sustaining it. The experience of wartime grief is thus often hidden until the cultural context post-war allows it to be revealed. Interviewed in the 1980s, one woman recounts witnessing the hidden private anguish in this account from War Wives: Sally had lived for the time that Tommy [her husband] would come home. I called to see them a short while after they received the news of his death. Sally was crouched in the middle of their bed, still undressed and wailing incessantly, ‘I want my Tommy’. She was just helpless, looking at everyone for help, yet with vacant eyes. It was terrible. No one could help. She was distraught and never recovered. One half of her died with Tommy. The little of her that was left died shortly afterwards. Hearts do break. (Townsend and Townsend, p. 97) This account is strikingly similar to Cynthia Asquith’s recording of her sister-in-law’s grief discussed in Chapter 1. Yet, the tone in which the story is narrated points to subtle differences between the two that are a direct outcome of the differing constructions of women’s grieving in the two wars. Although both take place in the innermost private space of the bedroom, Asquith sets up her account by anticipating the extreme grief that she expects Letty, her sister-in-law, to feel. The ensuing image of her ‘moaning in her sleep’ and weeping inconsolably reinforces cultural expectations concerning the behaviour of a bereaved woman in wartime. In the above account, on the other hand, the witness uses the image of Sally crouched helplessly on the bed to reinforce her final point

Grieving the ‘Good’ War 57

‘hearts do break’: a gesture that subverts the dominant ideologies of ‘carrying on’ and community support that are central to the public narrative of women in the Second World War. The focus away from mourning and towards war work, encouraged by propaganda, may account for the surprising absence of grief and related emotions that Brittain identifies as a particular feature of this war, and that Hartley notes in published memoirs and letters and diaries. While the deaths and injuries suffered by combatants were actually lower than those of civilians in the first year of the war, though they were still happening on a large scale, unprecedented numbers of civilians were being killed and injured in bombing attacks throughout Britain. Published memoirs and collections of letters, such as F. Tennyson Jesse’s London Front, Betty’s Wartime Diary: 1939–1945, Vere Hodgson’s Few Eggs and No Oranges and even Edith Base’s letters collected as Dearest Phylabe: Letters from Wartime England, which do at times mention the suffering and psychological consequences caused by the Blitz, pay little or no attention to bereavement, focusing more on everyday activities, rationing and war work.6 A notable exception is Naomi Mitchison’s Mass Observation diary, edited as Among You Taking Notes.7 At times, the omission of a bereavement narrative is particularly noteworthy. In One Family’s War, the Mayhew family’s wartime story is told through narrative and extracts from family letters, purporting, as Christopher Mayhew says in the introduction, ‘to describe war in the most appropriate way, by looking closely at its impact on individual people’ (p. x). Yet, this impact does not overtly include grief; the death of one family member, Paul, a fighter pilot in the RAF, is recorded briefly and subsequently represented only as a gap in the narrative. Thus, while the narrative framework through which the family story is told, using extracts from letters linked by post-war recollection, lends itself to multiple representations of grief when Paul is killed, the reader is offered only silence; death is represented literally as an absence of text. Paul’s death ends one section and the next section picks up with no further mention of him or of his young widow. Although the absence of a grief narrative is startling to the reader given the emphasis on a story told through private correspondence, it reflects the suppression of private emotion noted by writers such as Westren even though it was edited and published long after the war. In reading it we must exercise what Hartley calls the ‘careful attention’ needed to uncover the unseen text in the ‘significant gaps and silences’. From this perspective, One Family’s War can be read as a memorial to Paul. His letters in the early part of the book are granted more space and his portrait is larger and more prominent

58 Grief in Wartime

than those of any other family member. Moreover, because Paul is such a strong presence in the first part of the book, his absence from the family narrative reflects for the reader his loss as a member of the family. A dynamic presence in the vivid extracts from his letters on his experiences as a fighter pilot, the loss of Paul’s story is a literal space in the text. On the one hand then, his complete absence from the family story after his death suggests an unwillingness to make public the family’s grief (either in their letters during the war or in the editing of the letters for publication long afterwards), but this absence from the text can also represent the space he leaves in the continuing family story. No consolatory rhetoric is offered through memorialising Paul: he is gone and no presence of exchanged condolence, such as must surely have been part of the family history, mitigates his going. Even while silence is the dominant public discourse surrounding death and grief in this war, and while accounts like the Mayhew’s, as well as private diaries and letters, maintain this silence, we also find that diaries, letters, unpublished memoirs and much later oral histories are sites of resistance to that silence as well as to its disguise under the mask of ‘brightness’ and ‘cheerfulness’. While the First World War constructions of women and grief arose directly out of clearly delineated hierarchies of suffering and sacrifice with the frontline soldier represented as making the ‘supreme sacrifice’ and the civilian woman participating vicariously through her grief for him, there could be no clear hierarchy when, in the first 2 years of the war, civilian casualties in Britain vastly outnumbered those of combatants. Of that civilian experience, Mackay notes in Half the Battle: Above all, people in the Blitz became familiar with sudden, violent death. If they did not actually witness it they unavoidably came close to it through the steady toll among family, friends, neighbours and colleagues … Many more people were injured by bombs than killed by them. This, too, became a firsthand or secondhand matter for millions of people. To live through an experience in which, all around, others were being killed or injured, was to carry a burden of fear that one’s own survival was uncertain. (p. 69) In articulating the experience of aerial bombardment, civilians in the Blitz very consciously employed tropes from the First World War trench experience to claim the legitimacy of their position in a war zone, at the same time deliberately collapsing those home/front binaries that had been established in soldiers’ memoirs from that war. Phyllis Warner’s

Grieving the ‘Good’ War 59

entry for 14 September 1940 in her ‘Journal under terror’ draws directly on images from the First World War: We pass our evenings in dug-outs, trying to read or talk or play bridge, so far as the rattle of guns, the roar of planes and the crash of bombs will allow. Yet this part of the night is better than the long hours of darkness when we try to sleep through the horrors that surround us. This is the front line, this is the ‘Journey’s End’ of this war, and men, women and children, we are trapped in it. (IWM 95/14/1) Frances Faviell’s war memoir, Chelsea Concerto, makes plain that living through the Blitz confronted civilians with the kind of random death, injury and fragmentation of bodies that had been such a central part of First World War combat. Serving as a VAD, Faviell came into contact with the terribly wounded as well as, on occasion, having to piece together body parts for identification and burial. Writing her memoir after the war, she comes to the same conclusion as many First World War soldiers: The stench was the worst thing about it – that, and having to realize that these frightful pieces of flesh had once been living, breathing people … I think that this task dispelled for me the idea that human life is valuable – it could be blown to pieces by blast – just as dust was blown by wind … it seems monstrous that these human beings had been reduced to this revolting indignity by other so-called Christians, and that we were doing the same in Germany and other countries. The feeling upper most in my mind after every big raid was anger, anger at the lengths to which humans could go to inflict injury on one another. (p. 115) Faviell can express this anger in her post-war memoir, but giving way to the public expression of the shock and grief that attended this massive loss of life and injury could be considered shocking in itself during the war. Having described her own very narrow escape when her house is destroyed by a mine and friends are killed, Faviell angrily recalls the silencing of an old woman waiting with her in the Assistance Office. Here the official voice and the woman’s expression of her anguish represent the cruel gap between human suffering and the official censorship of its expression that treats it as ‘something obscene’. There was a little woman from Dovehouse Street sitting huddled on a bench waiting her turn … Suddenly her control gave way and she

60 Grief in Wartime

began screaming in a frenzy of grief […] ‘He’s gone […] He’s gone and I’m all alone and no home. Nothing. No one wants me […] Why didn’t I go with him, it’s cruel, it’s cruel, cruel. Why? Why?’ Her anguish was terrible. In the appalled silence with which officialdom treats such outbursts – almost as if she had said or done something obscene – a sleek, welldressed clergyman standing there … went up to her and told her sternly to desist – that what had happened was God’s will … She looked at him in dazed misery as if he spoke a foreign language and began screaming again even more wildly. ‘God! There’s no God! There’s only Hitler and the Devil!’ (p. 245) Faviell’s portrayal of the woman allows her both to question the cultural parameters within which grief is expressed and constrained in wartime Britain and to represent a social and gendered power structure that control such parameters. In the ‘appalled silence’ and the clergyman’s response that greet this outburst, she further represents the public fear that surrounds the expression of wartime grief. In making visible her distress, the woman not only transgresses the cultural sanctions on the expression of grief that demand it should be borne privately, but she also refuses to be subjected to the public rhetoric, religious and secular, that would silence her. Further, Faviell’s recounting of the event requires her reader to rethink the hegemonic structures surrounding the expression of grief and trauma in war: who is authorised to speak and whose expression is, in turn, silenced. During the war, the semiarticulate, uncontrolled verbal expression of an older ‘little woman’ is silenced by the ‘foreign language’ of the dominant male representative of official religious doctrine, while Faviell’s placing of it in a literate written account, coming after the war, allows it a public audience. The voice of the ordinary civilian is only given space because Faviell recounts her story for us. Like Faviell’s account, J. Westren’s memoir is informed by her work as a VAD, and by significant war-related traumatic events. The opening of the memoir with the legacy of grief from the First World War superimposed on the war experience of her own generation, constructs it as essentially a site of mourning: grief at the losses in one war define her initiation into the next, and grief and trauma are central to her own war experience. Here, the deaths of family and close friends is, for those left, a loss of youth: ‘Our lovable RAF friends as well as some of our relations … were among the First of the Few, and were killed in action in the Battle of Britain, every one of them.’ Although the phrase ‘First of the Few’ alludes to the heroic aura surrounding the fighter pilots,

Grieving the ‘Good’ War 61

Westren focuses instead on the pain of loss: ‘Not only did those of us who were left untimely lose our youth, but because we had never known a death close to us, as suddenly learned what it was to experience the shock and deep sorrow of bereavement grinding into us, permanently to live with grief, and to hide it from others for their sake’ (pp. 3–4). Grief is deep-rooted and ever present, but ‘hidden’ from public view and hence silenced in all but the most private forms, a representation that is constantly repeated in letters and diaries from the Second World War. Collections of letters, such as those of the Mayhew family, present death and grief as unmentionable, but other accounts show how letters, as a means of mediating between private emotions and a public though restricted audience of family and friends, can become a safe space within which to articulate grief. At the same time, they may also show the writer’s struggle between her private emotions and the larger public discourse that exhorts her to silence in the interests of morale, as Westren says, ‘to hide it from others for their sake’. Westren does not break her silence until after the war; Joan Kirby’s unpublished letters written to her family during the war allow us to trace her immediate responses to the deaths first of her brother and then of friends, and to witness the wearing down of emotional defences to multiple deaths as she responds to the news of one more friend killed. In a reply to her father’s letter carrying this news, she writes on 29 July 1944: My dear all, I was very shocked to read your news about Mac – poor boy he doesn’t deserve it, as if any of them do … words can’t express how I hate this war, the parting from people, the loneliness that is always with you, the losing of people you love and who love you without even saying goodbye. Sometimes I feel so sad that I almost wish I were dead too.8 (IWM, Con Shelf) Such an acknowledgement contrasts with her letter to her parents immediately after her brother’s death a year earlier where, while acknowledging the pain they must be feeling, she writes, ‘I can’t say forget things as that’s impossible but keep as bright as you can’ (8 July 1943). Although Kirby in a later letter tells her parents not to avoid expressing their pain to her, her letters also show her caught between the extreme anguish she expresses above and a degree of guilt or embarrassment at expressing it. On responding to yet another friend’s death, she makes her grief apparent, but ends with a retraction: ‘I suppose I’m too sentimental but I feel so [word unclear] anyway since I got your letter.

62 Grief in Wartime

I just can’t help having [word unclear] weeps. Practically all my friends have gone now – don’t take any notice if this letter is too drippy but I feel awful’ (26 August 1944). On the one hand, she obviously needs to express her emotion here, in fact, seems unwilling to try to be ‘bright’, at the same time she asks her father to ignore the extent of her emotional expression if it is ‘too drippy’. The concern over expression of emotion as inappropriate, particularly as part of an unwritten code of behaviour in the women’s auxiliary groups, is explained more fully by Westren: ‘we didn’t “emote” as we called emotional behaviour – and hadn’t done since we joined up, having become conditioned. We stayed on the surface of everything all the while, it had become a way of life’ (p. 159). Verily Anderson, admitting her fear not only for friends in the forces but also for her family at home, recognises that the army offers an avoidance of emotion. ‘In the F.A.N.Y.s I should be safe from the impact. Somebody else does your thinking for you in the army, and even your feeling’ (1995, p. 86). Caught between the need to express her feelings and her wartime training ‘not to emote’, Joan Kirby can express her emotions in the relatively private form of a letter to her parents, but the release of that emotion clearly makes her uncomfortable. The inability or unwillingness to express emotion is, for both women, not only a result of the cultural environment that silences such expression, but it is also a psychological response to the trauma surrounding their war experience as they helplessly receive news of friends’ deaths as well as witness trauma in their work: Westren as a VAD nurse taking care of wounded soldiers in a British hospital and Kirby as a signaller in the WRENS, constantly receiving and transmitting details of the missing and casualties. While Kirby, overwhelmed by the burden of multiple bereavements, can suggest that perhaps it would be easier to be dead, Westren ends her memoir with the loss of feeling that dulled her emotions late in the war, to the extent that she could no longer respond emotionally to a man she clearly loves. Westren’s post-war memoir can use the word ‘trauma’, a term that would have been inaccessible to her at the time, as a definition of psychic rather than physical hurt. ‘I realised that the war [including being bombed and gunned by enemy aircraft on a train and witnessing the crash of two American bombers and the killing of the crew in the ensuing explosion] had gradually taken away my ability to feel deeply any more’ (p. 167). As Vera Brittain in Testament of Youth describes her automaton state in the last few months and immediate aftermath of the First World War, so Westren records feeling ‘rather like a ghost’ (p. 169), an image that expresses her

Grieving the ‘Good’ War 63

acute sense of displacement and, like Kirby, reveals her emotional identification to be more with the dead of her generation than with the living. An unpublished poem by Westren expresses feelings of anger and resentment towards her parents’ generation that are not overtly expressed in her memoir and recalls the bitterness of much First World War writing. Thinking at Family Hymns. 1943. I have seen death lying like a bundle of rags flung down in the roadway staining the gravel crimson as peonies, (how far down did the slow stream seep?) I have seen the dead scattered across furrows humped and crooked as cabbages, the eyes gazing so astonished at the sky: and heard death, and lifted it onto stretchers, and read of it daily in the papers, whole battalions, air-crews and ship’s companies in that case, and now he is dead, was anyone there to staunch the red? He was broken, too, then someone buried him, did their best and gave him a soldier’s grave, which is still no more or less than an end Union flag or otherwise. Because of him it as though I, too, am lying silently seeping in a pool of peony. Yet you who have not seen these dead can smile and say – ‘SHALL WE SING? YOU MUST CHOOSE OUR HYMN! SOMETHING NICE AND CHEERFUL, DEAR, THE NEWS IS RATHER BAD, I FEAR. PAPA, THAT REALLY IS A SPLENDID CHORD! NOW FOR HIS MERCIES LET’S PRAISE THE LORD.’ (p. 24) While Westren’s poem emphasises the gap between her generation, ‘the cannon-fodder generation’, and that of her parents in comprehending their trauma and grief, Nella Last’s diary originally written for Mass

64 Grief in Wartime

Observation and subsequently published as Nella Last’s War: A Mother’s Diary 1939–1945, speaks for the parental generation that must witness the conscription of their children and their potential deaths, injuries or prisoner-of-war status, as well as endure bombing and take on volunteer work in aid of the war. Where Faviell records the silencing of an older woman by the voice of patriarchal authority, Last’s diary claims the legitimacy of those emotions and their expression. As a middle-aged woman and mother (Last was 50 at the time of outbreak of war and had two sons of military age), her diary fills an important space in the multiple wartime voices; moreover, in contrast with collections such as the Mayhew letters and published wartime journals such as Betty’s War, her diary is unusual and rewarding in offering an ongoing record of the everyday emotions of a civilian woman in wartime. The making public of these emotions in the context of Mass Observation for which the diary was written provides a useful counterpoint to the silences Hartley notes, and at the same time Last deliberately draws our attention to the veneer of cheerfulness she employs to silence distress when interacting with others in her community. Last’s diary is remarkable for its unselfconscious revealing of the inseparability of the private and public. Her entries epitomise what Judy Long defines as ‘the dailiness of women’s narratives’. ‘Dailiness in women’s autobiography embraces the web of relationships in which women are embedded and the fabric of daily tasks. It reflects the episodic experience of work and relationships, the lack of closure, and the nonlinear experience of time that characterize women’s daily life’ (pp. 45–6). In wartime, when the tendency is to record the extraordinary and dramatic rather than the ordinary, the public rather than the private, Last admits her readers into the ‘dailiness’ of the private domestic space of her home, and thus into her private annoyances and fears; at the same time, her almost daily accounts reveal the extent to which these are tied to the larger cultural pressures of a country at war. Thus, for example, the news of deaths of her sons’ friends are rendered real and poignant as she recollects them eating her homemade scones and jam; watching her son read the newspaper exemplifies for her the intrusion of the war into all aspects of the private domestic arena: ‘I looked at my own lad sitting with a paper, and noticed he did not turn a page often. It all came back with a rush – the boys who set off so gaily and lightly and did not come back – and I could have screamed aloud’ (p. 13). Last extends the domestic image to the larger arena of war, seeing combat in terms of these domestic images of mother and son. Killing is not perceived in terms of overcoming an enemy, but through the grief

Grieving the ‘Good’ War 65

of their mothers: ‘to go and kill other women’s lads, to wipe all the light from other mother’s faces’ (p. 257). Thus, rather than speak of her son going to fight against fascism or in defence of his country, her representation of his participation in war is clearly informed by her sense of a common humanity that defies the ally/enemy binary necessary for the conduct of war: ‘It’s dreadful to think of him having to kill boys like himself – to hurt and be hurt. It breaks my heart to think of all the senseless formless cruelty’ (p. 15). A few months later she sums up the war again: ‘Kill, kill, kill, sorrow and grief and loneliness, senseless cruelty and hatred, drowning men, mud, cold and a baffling sense of futility – what a Hell broth’ (p. 44). Images of the First World War merge here with news of fighting in northern Europe, but at no point do we see Last employing the public discourses of victory or ‘Britain can take it’ stoicism, or anti-Hitler diatribes. Her focus is on the killing and dying that will be done by young men, her son and others like him on both sides and on the lasting grief and sorrow for other women like her, whether enemy or ally. As with Westren, Last’s initiation into death in this war is through RAF crew: local boys she had known since their childhood. But while Westren writes from the position of the generation that is ‘the new cannon-fodder’, where grief incites anger at such loss, Last grieves as a mother whose sons and friends’ sons are dying or may die and her tone is one of profound sadness along with a hint of anger at the reverse of the natural order of things. ‘The dinner-time post brought a bidding to a funeral … He was just one of those pilots reported missing … I felt misery and pity grip me … Old Mr Dickinson and his two sons were there with crowds of elderly worn-looking relations, and yet it was bright-eyed John who was lying there’ (p. 73). This tone is reinforced as she continues, ‘I felt I’d had enough sorrow for one day, but when I picked up the local “Mail” it was to see portraits of two bright-faced boys I’d watched grow up from babies who were reported “missing” – both air pilots’ (p. 73). In each instance the deaths intrude into the domestic routine: ‘[t]he dinner time post’, the opening of the local paper. For Last’s generation, the mothers of the generation doing the fighting, the war means constant anxiety and almost daily the news of missing or dead, of their own sons or those of others. Brittain’s definition from the First World War of the ‘home front’ as a ‘community of anxiety’ can equally be applied here, though the anxious waiting belongs more completely to those over 50, like Last, who are above the age of conscription and who, as part of a close-knit community and as volunteer war workers, are in contact with other women whose sons are in danger. Last’s diary constantly

66 Grief in Wartime

draws attention to women who work with her at the soldiers’ canteen and whose sons are missing or reported killed, including the apparent suicide of one mother after the news of her son’s death, as well as to the loss of familiar canteen customers. Unlike many memoirs written by and about the generation who fought the war in a more obvious way, Last’s diary provides the perspective of an older generation helplessly watching its children die. Moreover, combatant deaths are not the only war-related bereavements. The immediate shock of hearing that a young neighbour has been killed in a bombing raid moves Last to claim, like Warner, that this is total war: ‘I’m not a fainting woman, but I felt for one split second that I’d melt and pour out of my clothes. Kathie Thompson – the gayest, sweetest and most lovable of all the nice young things that came and went when the boys were home … and only twenty-one now. We are, indeed, all in the fighting line’ (p. 145). While rhetorical convention is available to ascribe meaning to combatant deaths, there are no words to recognise these civilian deaths: ‘I could only stammer feebly how sorry, how very sorry, I was to her brother – what can we say now’ (p. 145). In the face of such stress and bereavement, a later entry emphasises the difficulty of maintaining the required mask of morale: ‘To be bright is a real physical, as well as mental, effort’ (p. 185). While the older generation grieves for its children and the children of friends, it also participates vicariously in the grief experienced by its own children on the death of friends. Last’s entry of 19 March 1942 responds to a letter from her son telling her that his closest friend ‘has been killed in an operation over Gib[ralter]’ (p. 195). As she documents her son’s grief, she allows her reader to enter her position as the observer of a young generation grieving for friends. Young women such as Westren and Kirby reveal their own shock at their first experience of grief; Nella Last watches her son wrestling with this pain, privileging his experience with a much more extended narrative than she allows for her own response to deaths: My heart aches for him. He seems to have lost his wide smile; his lips fold quietly and firmly, and his face looks thinner … he said ‘I never knew death before – did I? – that dreadful “nevermore” feeling, I mean’. He went on, ‘So much is gone. I cannot linger round a bookshop, or wonder what I could choose … sometimes I find myself in an ordinary routine and forgetting George, and post-time comes and I eagerly think, ‘I wonder if there will be a letter from Gib’. … It is dreadful to see distress one cannot do anything to help or comfort. Words are hollow and brittle things … So much sorrow and pain and loss – so much passing that was beautiful and good. (pp. 196–7)

Grieving the ‘Good’ War 67

Here the immediate specific pain over the loss of one individual becomes generalised to ‘so much … so much’ and is representative of the grief that is experienced at all levels and in all families, but which had little place in public discourse. In fact the public discourse that Last engages with is presented cynically as ‘big talk’ that obscures the deaths of individuals and brings Last close to Westren’s image of cannon-fodder: ‘not all this big talk of next year and the next will stop our lads dying uselessly. If only mothers could think that their poor ones had died usefully – with a purpose’ (p. 209). The degree to which her thoughts resist the dominant discourse is emphasised when set against the following sentiments from an Englishwoman in a letter to an American friend: My anxiety is twenty times compensated by the pride I feel in Michael. 140 Germans down yesterday to 16 of ours with 8 of our pilots safe. The success of our fighters has done us a world of good, and everyone … gives voice to his or her patriotism vicariously through the Michaels of this war … Do be proud of Michael, rather than worried about him. Life may be short for him, but how glorious. He is a wonderful pilot and a sure one and he knows and loves his machine, and if he is killed, he has gone down fighting against great odds, and to do anything so petty as to worry and fidget is insulting. (Forbes-Robertson and Straus, Jr., p. 121) Such stoicism is reflected in advertising from the National Savings Committee directed at the woman with a son in the RAF who is urged to use the ‘War Savings Campaign’ to let her ‘chase Messerschmitts’ like ‘her boy’ who is a ‘fighter pilot’, reminding readers of Mother and Home that ‘Every enemy plane he kills is a stroke for our freedom. We owe him a great deal – more than we shall ever repay. Our savings – which we merely lend – what are they compared with what he gives? … Don’t measure your savings by what you can spare – think instead of what you OWE’. While Last suggests that being able to impose meaning on death offers some comfort to the bereaved mother, she herself refuses to allow deaths in war to be represented as meaningful. News of close friends killed or seriously injured receives an angry response: ‘I think of the millions of bereaved parents and wives, and my heart ticks with the futility, the waste’ (p. 225). Last’s position here is in defiant opposition of the demand by popular propaganda that such deaths must be accepted as the price of victory. In recording her own pain and her vicarious apprehension of the pain of others, Last’s diary is an important record of a private experience that, unlike the letter quoted above, refuses to internalise the larger public discourses. Although Last never appears to take an overtly political position

68 Grief in Wartime

or to espouse pacifism, the language through which she writes war is the language of pain, loss and grief and offers resistance to the dominant discourse of ‘carrying on’ and ‘Victory’. While her diary also recounts housekeeping, rationing and her war work at a local canteen and a Red Cross shop, her significant narrative is emotional: a recounting of loss and its impact on parents and friends as well as the loss of individual lives themselves: ‘Why should children be borne at all if they are to be mown down in the early morning of their bright lives?’ (p. 225). If Last’s recording of private emotions offers resistance to the dominant discourses of wartime, Frances Partridge’s pacifism and her physical isolation from the war represent a much more complete rejection of war culture. Positioning herself outside the language and behaviour that supports the war, Partridge presents her diary, A Pacifist’s War, as an alternative war story. But although her nominal position is outside the war, her account shows the extent to which it is impossible for anyone in a country at war to stand outside it or to disengage from emotional participation. Thus, she experiences vicariously in the pain of separation and grief endured by women close to her. Writing of a friend ‘missing believed killed’ in North Africa, she expresses the relationship between her own grief and her entering into the grief of others: ‘Gradually a sense of crushing grief descended on me … the misery they must both be feeling must be near the peak of human suffering’ (p. 155; 11 January 1943). Her diary also reveals the private feelings hidden behind public silence as in the conversation she records with a woman in Cornwall who acknowledges: ‘I think we ought to get together and make peace now. Of course I wouldn’t say that in a bus, but one must say what one thinks sometimes’ (p. 83). Like Nella Last, Partridge confronts war as an exchange of killing – stripping away any narrative that might reframe it as a fight for victory. On holiday in Cornwall she notes the incongruity of sitting in front of a warm fire while hearing the noise of gunfire and aeroplanes and confronts the complacency that such a position can engender: ‘And I was horrified to realize that we were sitting over our nice warm fire, listening quite calmly to this sound – which was after all the noise of human beings trying to kill other human beings’ (p. 83; 3 March 1941). As Last also implies, it is precisely this perspective that is silenced when the expression of grief is silenced. Grief acknowledges the result of human beings killing other human beings and in doing so transcends constructions of ally and enemy. When this acknowledgement is silenced in the interests of sparing others emotional pain, then the consequences of killing are denied. Nella Last focuses primarily on the anxiety and grief of mothers over their sons in the forces, and Westren and Kirby on the deaths of

Grieving the ‘Good’ War 69

contemporaries; the less easily defined experiences of anxiety and loss through other forms of separation (including waiting for news of the ‘missing’) receive little space in the war story, though these were broadly pervasive. In addition, children’s experiences of loss, separation and bereavement have received scant attention in the cultural history of the war, in large part because the hegemonic structure through which war is told and remembered disenfranchises those groups who do not have the tools to articulate their experience. To find that experience, Mackay notes, we must look again to ‘the testimonies of individuals – diaries, letters and recollections – … a patchwork of “stories” each of which discloses the private anguish of one separation but which together represent the common lot’ (p. 97). No aspect of the long-term strain of war was as universally experienced as the enforced separation of people – of spouses, lovers, of friends, of parents and children … Loneliness, anxiety and waiting became fixtures of daily life. When danger and deprivation in any case made that life more trying, the removal of the sustaining props of kinship and affection was a cruel aggravation. (p. 97) Official and unofficial propaganda encouraged silent acceptance of such losses, requesting men in the forces, women at home or in war work and evacuated children to hide emotions behind a cheerful exterior. Even severe psychological responses to the Blitz could be treated by a tonic or a warm bath as an advertisement in Housewife, December 1941 suggests: ‘A blitz leaves more than bomb damage behind – it leaves nerve damage, too, and over a much wider area. That’s why thousands of Britain’s front-line women are building up nerve strength and vitality with Wincarnis’. Similarly, the following reply is offered to an anxious inquiry to ‘Nurse Rachel’ in Woman’s World, 8 March 1941: Since being evacuated with my children from a bombed area to the country I have slept badly and get terrifying dreams, full of horrors, so that I wake upset and shaken. What do I do about this? No doubt you are worried over the safety of other loved ones from whom you are separated, and you are still being influenced by the memory of the horrors you have recently encountered. Go and have a talk with the local doctor, and you will find that the airing of your fears will help you considerably. Ask him to make you up a soothing mixture to take at bedtime. This, together with a warm sponge-down and a hot drink, will help you to settle down to peaceful sleep, from which you will wake refreshed and restored.

70

Figure 2.3 ‘Blitz-damaged nerves’

Grieving the ‘Good’ War 71

The one form of communication that could bridge the separation could become complicit in such silencing even while it purported to maintain intimacy. Exchanging letters with her husband in the forces, Diana Hopkinson’s unpublished memoir ‘Love in War’ reveals what she calls ‘the private anguish of one separation’ even while they use letters to maintain their relationship as well as a semblance of family that included their baby son. Yet, although letters can go some way towards compensating for their separation, they are, equally, tangible evidence of their absence from each other and the loss of the time they should have together. Preserving the immediate wartime experience as she writes her post-war memoir, Hopkinson notes, ‘We had now each passed our 100th letter, but sometimes I wanted to throw away my pen’ and then quotes from a letter to her husband: I hate it as the symbol of the inadequacy of our communication compared to what our life in each other’s presence might be. Then it seems a miserable crutch for an unhappy cripple. At other times I cling to it – the one thing that can forge a visible link, almost a messenger itself – a life belt. You know only too well the awful weariness that comes over one from writing – its one dimensional dissatisfaction. (IWM 86/3/1; p. 160) Although American civilians were not under the same threat as their British counterparts or dealing with material deprivation, they still needed a means of negotiating loss. Moreover, wartime mobility of populations across huge distances at home and abroad meant that many relationships were sustained only by letter. As in Britain, letter writing as the ideal form of communication was encouraged in the popular media, and particularly in women’s magazines.9 Furthermore, in spite of the reality of a situation where separation involved friends, siblings and parents, popular images of letter writing were constructed around romantic heterosexual relationships that assumed a wife at home and a man in the forces. It is not surprising then that response to news of a soldier dead or missing would take the form of a letter distilling grief into a leave taking and, as we note in First World War writing, creating a site of mourning in the absence of a body or a grave. Where definite news of a death is confirmed, the bereaved can begin the process of grieving even in the absence of a body or a grave, but when an individual is listed as missing, even where death is almost certain, then there can be no final enactment of a leave taking. Hopkinson articulates the extent to which the act of writing is, paradoxically, both an adherence to public dictates

72 Grief in Wartime

to write and a defiance of war-imposed separation. For her, and for American Marjorie Gaunt writing to a ‘missing’ husband, letter writing is also paradoxical in that it simultaneously represents communication and its breakdown. The wartime environment in the United States was very different from Britain; in spite of some rationing and the movement of troops and women into war work, the war itself was remote. Alexander Nemerov observes, ‘On the home front the war remained curiously abstract, almost as if it were not happening. Agee wrote in 1943 that Americans at home “remain untouched, virginal, prenatal”, about the war, and that “our great majority will emerge from the war almost as if it had never taken place” ’ (p. 3). At the same time, as in Britain, official rhetoric encouraged the silencing of private pain and the adopting of a public mask of ‘brightness’. Nemerov describes how ‘the inchoate sway of sadness … remained inarticulate and concealed amid the unsettling gleam of brave smiles and clenched teeth’ (p. 5). Noting the degree to which ‘various outlets of popular culture behaved almost entirely as if they were creatures of governments’, Paul Fussell goes on to maintain that ‘radio, popular music, films, and magazines (whose essence reduced largely to their advertisements) conveyed the same sanguine message about the war as the singing commercial of the period delivered about housewifely chores: Rinso white! Rinso white! / Happy little washday song’ (1989, p. 180). The context of Gaunt’s letter is thus similar to and different from her British counterparts. Grief is silenced, but at the same time the war is remote. Her inner distress is offered no outer reflection in bombed buildings and general drabness. The only container for the feelings she must hide from public view is a letter she will never send. As a final communication with her husband, Gaunt’s letter reveals the complex process of grieving that attends the notification of ‘missing in action’ status. The letter moves towards an acceptance of what ‘missing’ or, as she defines it, ‘lost’ means, though she never directly acknowledges his death. Gaunt’s letter documents the impossible position of being caught between hoping a loved one is alive and at the same time trying to confront his death. Comparing Gaunt’s letter to Phyllis Kelly’s we can see how this letter-writing impulse is shared by women in both wars; they direct their distress to the person whose wounded or missing status has caused that distress, even though in each case they know that it will never be read by him. The habit of writing has become their first means of expression even though they are writing into a void. For Gaunt writing in the absence of definitive news of death, it carries on the narrative of her relationship with her husband. Beder notes that ‘Deaths in which there are no remains to bury and no definitive confirmation of death

Grieving the ‘Good’ War 73

can extend the grieving period for mourners, can produce complicated or pathological responses to bereavement, and can cause prolonged family and personal anguish’ (p. 400). Thus, mourners are deprived of the necessary rituals surrounding death and even of the conventional military condolences and honours accorded to those ‘killed in action’. Gaunt’s letter to some extent stands in place of the conventional mourning ritual, though at the same time it reveals its own inadequacy, in that she can never quite bring herself to change his status from ‘missing’ to dead. Without an official announcement of death which in wartime necessarily took the place of the visible evidence of physical death, it is impossible for her to abandon herself entirely to the idea that her husband is dead. Gaunt’s letter moves back and forth between almost confronting the concept of his death and longing for his return. As in many war letters, the longing is a physical one: ‘We are not truly separated from one another, for spiritually we are very close, but how my heart aches for the physical things – just the touch of your hand, the rough fabric of your coat’ (Gaunt in Litoff and Smith, eds, 1991, p. 251). To support herself, however, Gaunt draws on a much more abstract faith in God: ‘I know in my heart that you are safe and that God is caring for you … I’ve prayed continually for His protection over you and His guidance during these long trying months’ (p. 251). The language through which she negotiates her position in relation to their separation and his ‘missing’ status is drawn from her religious faith rather than from any wartime rhetoric of sacrifice, though the two languages tend to be conflated during war.10 Her final appeal reflects the contradictory emotions that attend his ‘missing’ status; it is both a longing for his physical presence and a giving him up to God in language that reflects a burial or memorial service and at the same time merges with the public wartime language of victory: ‘May God give you courage, patience and strength that will carry you … to lasting peace … Here is my hand and my love, darling. Hold to it tightly as I will yours and surely ours will be a glorious victory’ (p. 252). Even as Gaunt negotiates her grief, she reveals the social pressure to conform to the ideal of the bereaved wife. The same mask of stoicism noted in Robson’s letter from Hilda quoted earlier in the chapter is supported here by public approval, even while Gaunt is fully aware of participating in the discrepancy between this public face and her real feelings. People say I’m brave and a brick, and all sorts of things, but I’m not. I’m hating and fighting every movement that you are lost. I do go on

74 Grief in Wartime

working, and reading and talking, but honestly I don’t know how or why I do it. The way I feel, time stopped for me last March when that hateful telegram arrived. (p. 251) For adults such as Last, Hopkinson and Gaunt, the expression of loss finds a place in diaries or letters; the same space was not readily available to children who endured bereavement through death or separation. Those who wrote of their experiences after the war stress the silencing of their voices at a time when, as one evacuee, Mrs. K.M. Bigginton, stated ‘children were seen but not heard and did not question adults’ (IWM 99/41.1). Moreover, many children did not have a language through which they could express themselves. The evacuation process was designed to silence dissent from children, their parents, particularly mothers, and from the women who would receive them. While the motive to evacuate was clearly a practical consideration to save children’s lives, little or no consideration was given to the psychological stress on those involved. In spite of several published accounts of evacuee experience during the war it has only recently been given attention, perhaps because the voices of those involved are conventionally marginalised within society and even more so in wartime.11 Evacuation was represented to the children as a holiday in the country or overseas and in both instances it was framed in a discourse of advantage and improvement, particularly in the case of poor inner-city children. This framing represented a middle-class perspective wherein the binaries of advantage and disadvantage were decidedly classist. Such discourse left little room for an alternative perspective: that close bonds between parents and children would be broken – if evacuation was represented as being for the children’s own good, then the discourse of separation and loss had to be silenced. While there were expectations of some homesickness represented as bedwetting, the long-term psychological effects of separation on parents and children were not confronted. The popular sentimental image of the evacuated child represented by Mabel Lucy Atwell’s illustration in The Queen’s Book of the Red Cross, an exceptionally pretty and drowsy blonde tot just waiting to be gathered up into the waiting arms of an adoring foster mother, further separated the image from the real needs of evacuated children.12 In addition, separation of children from parents for as long as 5 or 6 years, especially in the case of overseas evacuation, made for family difficulties on their return that could result in permanent estrangement or confused attachment. This led some evacuees to define their evacuation not only in terms of the loss of 6 years of childhood with their parents, but also of loss of a close

Grieving the ‘Good’ War 75

family relationship post-war. For children whose parents were killed in the blitz or whose fathers were killed in action such loss was even more extreme, although in this latter instance there was at least a language available through which to express mourning. At the public level, postwar silence surrounding separation meant that children were not offered a language in which to articulate the bereavement that occurred through separation from parents. While a death could be mourned, the loss of developing bonds between parents and children and parents’ loss of 5 or 6 years of their child’s growing up had no recognisable form within which to grieve. While evacuee stories have been published, most notably in two anthologies of oral histories collected and edited by Ben Wicks, No Time to Wave Goodbye and The Day They Took the Children, and accounts exist in the Imperial War Museum documents collections, little critical attention has been paid to wartime evacuation as a form of loss that was attended by grief on the part of children and parents. Moreover, little attention has been given to evacuation as a social phenomenon, especially the degree to which it further extends conflicting roles for women during the war and the extent to which evacuee accounts reveal the silencing of the most powerless members of society: children. It is noteworthy that attempts to give evacuees a voice are mostly to be found in fiction for children, itself a form given secondary status in the literary canon. Thus, C.S. Lewis returns power to his four evacuees in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) by allowing them to fight and win their own war against a fascist regime; Nina Bawden explores the psychological trauma of childhood evacuation in Carrie’s War (1973); Canadian writer Kit Pearson’s The Sky Is Falling (1989) emphasises the silencing of the child’s voice when her protagonist, evacuated to Toronto, is allowed to send a telegram home. The children are given prearranged options to choose from (a kind of field postcard for evacuees!) already determined by Children’s Overseas Reception Board (CORB) and Nora is informed by her foster parents that they have chosen and sent the phrase ‘Now in school and liking it’ to her parents, thus doubly removing her voice from the message and silencing the 11-year-old’s fear, homesickness and hatred of her new school and surroundings. For children, this silencing was part of a deeply embedded cultural norm that Mrs. K.M. Bigginton recounts in her post-war memoir. In wartime, as another evacuee, Mrs. V.R. Ball, recognised, the trauma of evacuation was subservient to the larger conflict: ‘We knew that our pain was insignificant in the general orgy of evil unleashed in that war’ (IWM 99/66/1). Writing in 2000, Mrs. Ball notes that she had self-censored an

76 Grief in Wartime

earlier account of her evacuee experiences because it had been told to her 15-year-old daughter as a school assignment and she was known to her daughter’s teacher. The language in Ball’s 2000 account shows how an understanding of the psychology of trauma simultaneously influences the language she chooses and legitimises her experience, giving her a voice to speak publicly: ‘Many people deliberately suppressed their memories and a trigger is needed to revive them. Once the war was over everyone tried to behave as if it hadn’t happened. Perhaps only in old age as one comes to work out the significance of your life is that taboo lifted.’ Similarly, Bigginton is only able to articulate her experiences long after the war in an account that brings together the later adult awareness of trauma and the inchoate despair of the child she was: ‘I had always wondered why bars were put up at the windows at the place where I was fostered. I must have been trying to escape. I relived this horror as though it was just happening [time of writing] I was screaming inside for my parents, but they didn’t come’ (IWM 99/41/1; emphasis added). Further, on recounting sexual abuse by a host parent, she notes, ‘War does not stop suddenly when the Armistice is signed. Those experiences will stay with me forever.’ Even when children were well cared for and obviously happy in their foster homes, parents necessarily felt the separation acutely. The letters exchanged between Mrs. Kemp, mother of Julia Kemp who had been evacuated to Vancouver, BC and Julia’s foster mother make this clear. It is noteworthy that Julia’s perspective is only available in short letters and cards she sent home. There is no account of her feelings about the separation; the exchange is between the two ‘mothers’. Mrs. Kemp’s first letter demonstrates her concern and feelings of loss. After that such feelings are revealed more through multiple practical concerns about Julia than are articulated directly. Yet, it is in such detailed concerns that we must read her sense of loss and her attempts to mitigate that loss by scrutinising photographs and commenting on them, discussing the importance of a Catholic education and religious instruction for her child: bringing her up by proxy, so to speak. In her account of Julia’s return after the war she notes that on greeting her parents Julia immediately recognises her father who, as a ship’s captain, had been able to visit her several times during her evacuation, but must ask ‘Mummy?’ as her mother approaches (IWM 99/10/1). As with evacuation, a child’s grief at the death of a parent has been given very little space in the history of wartime bereavement. Furthermore, the American homefront experience is given less attention than the British,

Grieving the ‘Good’ War 77

possibly because civilians were not under attack and could not claim the same degree of wartime participation. Richard Haney’s recently published ‘When Is Daddy Coming Home?’: An American Family during World War Two (2005) is thus important in drawing attention to an American wartime childhood and bereavement in bringing together a memorial to his father, J. Clyde Haney, who was killed in Germany in 1945, and his memory of his father’s death when he was 4 years old. The opening lines of Haney’s preface are designed to draw the reader immediately into the impact of wartime death on a family: ‘The arrival of the heart-rending War Department telegram is planted deep in my memory, even though I was only four years old. The death of my father became a defining moment in the lives of both me and my mother’ (p. ix). Writing long after the event, Haney acknowledges the various narratives, particularly those told through letters, that come together in shaping what is both his own memoir of his childhood and a memorial to his dead father: ‘[My mother] kept all his wartime letters. It is those letters, her recollections, and my memories that I have used to construct this story’ (p. ix). He also very carefully constructs the legitimacy of his narrative. His memoir takes that legitimacy from his position as the bereaved child of a father who died in a historically significant event. Crucially important to his story is the relationship between the child’s private experience and the public coverage of the war in Life magazine that published a full-page photograph of his father in his dying moments. Juxtaposing this death with the book’s subtitle, An American Family during World War Two, Haney presents his father’s absence and then death as integral to the experience of ‘an American family’ in wartime. Haney stresses the importance of letters as the only means of defying separation; moreover, they not only provide a narrative of that separation, but may also become the only substitute for the dead left to a grieving family. He uses the letter-writing ritual to emphasise the connection between his parents, ‘my parents were linked to each other by the chain of letters that the two of them wrote almost daily’ (p. 53), and at the same time positioning himself as an equal participant in the exchange, writing ‘a “letter” composed of scribbles’ alongside his mother’ (p. 53). Haney’s memoir makes public the private experience of a family’s bereavement, but at the same time he reveals the connection between the public narrative of the war, particularly as it was brought home to the civilian population through stories and photographs, and its relationship to private experience, in his relating how, a few weeks after his father’s death, ‘a full-page Life Magazine photo showed my father lying next to the glider wreckage, wounded in the head, neck, and chest, with

78 Grief in Wartime

a medical corpsman kneeling over him’ (pp. 82–3). The immediate circumstances of his father’s death, in effect his father’s dying moments, are thus not only experienced privately, but are also made public as he becomes the representative wounded soldier. Although Clyde Haney was buried in Europe, his body is made available to his family in the very public photograph. Haney’s memorial autobiography can thus be seen to take on the task of telling the private and at the same time representative narrative of wartime death and bereavement that consciously bridges the gulf between civilian at home and soldier in combat. Drawing on the image of his father’s death as it is portrayed in Life magazine and on his own family story, Haney re-creates his father’s dying moments, allowing the reader to see the public and private narratives simultaneously. Included with his personal effects are ‘photographs of Mom and me, with his bloody fingerprints on them’. These photographs, even more than the Life photograph of his father, become the salient connection he keeps with his dying and dead father: ‘As he lay on the battlefield bleeding to death, he was holding those photos in his hand. His last thoughts were of us’ (p. 89). Photographs, thus, become central in the bereavement narrative, linking the dying and dead soldier and his family as well as linking home and front. In spite of or perhaps because of the Life photograph, Haney junior re-creates the ideal soldier’s death in depicting his father focusing on his family in his final moments; the memoir therefore becomes the ideal consolatory narrative as the child writes himself into the story of his father’s dying.13 Private writings thus reveal how experiences of loss, grief and related trauma collapse the official boundaries that would purport to delimit war in terms of space and time and hence reveal their artificiality. Storm Jameson’s autobiographical writings speak to this collapse of boundaries as representative multiple narratives of grief in her own family reveal loss crossing wars and generations, extending from the death of her brother in the First World War and of her sister in the second to the post-war motherless future of her nephew and niece already displaced from family and roots by evacuation to America. Her family history serves to illustrate how war reaches beyond its official parameters back into the past and forward into the future. Jameson consciously draws the reader’s attention to this collapsing of official boundaries by making it central to her narratives of her sister’s death in a bombing raid in her journal, The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell (1961/1945), and in her later autobiography, Journey from the North Volume II (1970). These versions of her sister’s death merge with her brother’s death in the First World War and, at the same time, extend forward into the missing story that is her sister’s future

Grieving the ‘Good’ War 79

and the future of her evacuated children. The evacuation of her sister’s two young children to America and the doll’s house her sister is in the process of creating for her daughter’s return to Britain become the focus of Jameson’s grieving post-war. Further, the unfinished doll’s house, a tangible symbol of her sister’s unfinished future, is also a poignant symbol of her sister’s anguish over the separation from her children and, after her death, of their separation from her, as Jameson fears that the daughter who is to receive the doll’s house will never know whose hands created it. The family story that Jameson narrates as she negotiates her own losses consciously presents itself as a representative narrative of the lived experience of two world wars in Britain. Jameson’s grief at her sister’s death moves back and forth between her relationship with her sister and her sister’s lost future and Jameson’s fear that her sister’s evacuated children will forget their mother. In her journal entry for 24 February, she repeats: ‘It is not true that, two weeks ago, an air-raid killed my young sister … It is not true that she is dead … When old people die, surely with nothing left to want … one’s anguish is without disbelief … But there was so much she wanted … From everything of hers we touched, afterwards, it was the future sprang out’ (1945, p. 221). More than 20 years later in her autobiography she returns to this lost future: ‘Unlike every other house I have cleared up after a death, what I touched and folded and sorted in hers was the future, only the future’ (1970, p. 133). No consolation is available in the face of such death. In her journal Jameson’s subversion of the ideology of wartime consolation is made to represent the post-Second World War impossibility of imposing meaning on death. Taking Laurence Binyon’s familiar line from ‘For the Fallen’ of the First World War she reinscribes it as an emphatic denial of the comfort that could be offered to the bereaved of 20 years earlier, but which, after two wars, can no longer carry its intended consolation: ‘And now I know that what we say of the young dead, They shall not grow old, says only that the agony of their solitary going away remains, unchanged by time’ (1945, p. 222).

3 Vietnam: The War at Home

Writing to her missing husband in the Second World War, Marjorie Gaunt, like millions of others mourning the missing and the dead, must confront his absence and at the same time maintain a public face that erases her private pain. Vietnam grief narratives, mostly written after the war, also emphasise the silencing of grief, not in the interests of morale, but because the political climate was so divisive that to claim grief was to claim a shameful connection with the war. Yet, once that silence is broken, long after the war, the missing body that is Gaunt’s husband is replaced in postVietnam War grief narratives by the public representation of the body as it legitimises and makes visible the grief and loss that was silenced during the war. Arguably, the display of bodies that has become a trope of Vietnam War writing, by combatants and non-combatants, is also a revealing of those bodies that were concealed by censorship in earlier wars. Moreover, while grief may have been silenced during the war, post-war writing puts bodies on display in an angry protest against what Scarry calls ‘the disowning of injury’ that happens in all wars. Thus, we find in narratives that come long after the war, such as Heather Brandon’s collection Casualties (1984) and Laura Palmer’s Shrapnel in the Heart (1987), as well as in the fulllength memoirs Mullen’s Unfriendly Fire (1995) and, much more recently, Laurent’s Grief Denied (1999) and Spears Zacharias’s Hero Mama (2005), the dominant motif is making public a grief that was silenced during the war and in its immediate aftermath; central to that motif is the dead body of the son, husband, father, brother, friend or boyfriend. As noted in the ‘Introduction’, the private experience of bereavement and its expression are ‘shaped and controlled’ by the public validation of some forms of behaviour and the erasing of others. During the Vietnam War, the private emotions of grief were constructed and constrained by the specific public climate as well as more generally by social 80

The War at Home 81

norms surrounding mourning. As Laurent repeatedly notes, American culture denies death and thus the individual’s right to experience grief privately, as well as to express it publicly. In addition to such denial, the political context of protest particular to the conflict in Vietnam left family and friends unwilling to make known their connection to the war; it became, as both Zacharias and Laurent iterate, a source of shame. Widdison and Salisbury’s study of delayed stress and grief in the Vietnam War, even as it focuses primarily on returning combatants, supports the anecdotal accounts in memoirs. ‘American culture, coupled with the military experience, made the immediate experience of loss and grief resolution virtually impossible.’ They go on to affirm the problematic relationship between that repression and the cultural context: ‘The general negative feeling of the American public toward the Vietnam war and anything symbolic of the war, further negated the expression of grief, thus setting the stage for repressed grief reactions to emerge months and even years after the original losses’ (pp. 295–6). In addition to this cultural silencing, because the war affected families in an isolated fashion, there was no immediate community available to share in and legitimise the grief as there had been in the Second World War where, even as grief is silenced, the accounts discussed in Chapter 2 recognise a shared pain and sorrow beneath that silence. The writing of memoirs and the putting together of oral history collections long after the official end of the Vietnam War is thus driven by a need to break the silence, legitimise the grief and establish community. Introducing her oral histories of grief with an extract from a piece written by a Vietnam veteran she interviewed for her collection, Heather Brandon emphasises the relationship between enforced silence and the invisibility of grief: What America doesn’t see are the mothers and fathers who fainted when they opened their doors to see a uniformed military officer and their local religious leader standing there with practiced looks of sorrow and compassion. What America doesn’t see is the young wife, four months pregnant, who miscarries with the news that her nineteen year old husband is dead … What America doesn’t see are the surviving families who now dread the unspoken words and melancholy that surround their holidays. What America doesn’t see are the 57,939 shrines of pictures and medals, in houses and apartments from Maine to Hawaii … What America doesn’t see are the 115,878 mothers and fathers, 231 grandparents, the uncounted brothers, sisters, daughters, sons, friends, lovers. (pp. vii–xix)

82 Grief in Wartime

Likewise, in her introduction to Shrapnel in the Heart, Laura Palmer legitimises the right of the bereaved to speak war: ‘Now it is the turn of the people who lost the most and said the least: the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, children, friends, wives, sweethearts, and buddies of the men who died in Vietnam’ (p. xi). As she goes on to remind us, ‘[t]he flag on the coffin covered only the obvious tragedy’ (p. xiv). In the Second World War the community at large offered consolation through asserting pride in the death of a soldier fighting the forces of fascism and defending the country. Although this representation of death carried its own form of silencing, there was still the knowledge that others were suffering equally. In the Vietnam War the conflict at home that left the bereaved with shame as well as grief became a complicating element in their emotional response, leading to a burden of isolation and disenfranchisement not carried by bereaved in other wars. This isolation and disenfranchisement began with representations of death in Vietnam as well as with the origins of the dead. With the infamous ‘body count’, sons, husbands, friends became numbers, a means by which the military represented and misrepresented its activities in Vietnam. Moreover, those numbers themselves represented the losing numbers in the draft lottery: young men who could not avoid combat in Vietnam. Baskir and Strauss note, ‘Going to Vietnam was the penalty for those who lacked the wherewithal to avoid it. A 1971 harris survey found that most Americans believed that those who went to Vietnam were “suckers, having to risk their lives in the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time” ’ (p. 8).1 Furthermore, ‘[o]ver the course of the war minorities did more than their share of the fighting and dying. Yet the most serious inequities were social and economic. Poorly educated, low-income whites and poorly educated, low-income blacks together bore a vastly disproportionate share of the burdens of Vietnam’ (p. 11). As James Fallows makes clear in his well-known essay ‘What did you do in the class war, daddy’, in spite of the draft lottery, middle- and upper-income college students carefully manipulated draft deferment or avoidance strategies that other less influential groups did not have access to (p. 11). (Ironically, however, given the sense of isolation and lack of community suffered by the bereaved, communities were closely involved in the draft process that sent their local young men to war.2) Fallows draws a clear connection between the length of the war and the politically and economically disenfranchised groups mostly doing the fighting and dying: As long as the little gold stars kept going to the homes in Chelsea and the backwoods of West Virginia, the mothers of Beverly Hills and

The War at Home 83

Great Neck and Belmont were not on the telephones to their congressmen, screaming you killed my boy, they were not writing to the President that his crazy, wrong, evil war had put their boys in prison and ruined their careers. (p. 20) In all wars, acceptance of the abstract ideology attending those ‘little gold stars’ or their equivalent is the only means a government has of persuading the bereaved that the soldier’s death had value. After the First World War, particularly in Britain, the ideology of sacrifice came to be considered a sham, and many of the generation who had borne the brunt of the war concluded that their innocent belief in duty, honour and country had been manipulated by politicians. In the United States, the ‘myth of the good war’ arguably erased any scepticism that had haunted the American 1914–18 generation, probably because the United States had not suffered enough loss in that war for it to have had a lasting impact on the dominant cultural memory of the war. Many of those who went to Vietnam out of a sense of duty had fathers and other family members who had fought in the Second World War. In anecdotal accounts this evidence of service, along with government representation of the communist threat that used language borrowed from the Second World War, was instrumental in convincing some members of the next generation of young Americans that it was their duty to fight, at least early in the war. The re-telling of the Second World War in John Wayne’s films and his subsequent heroic portrayal of Americans in Vietnam in The Green Berets (1968) along with the silence of veterans about the horror that was inherent to the so-called good war, generally erased the story of massive death and injury that, for example, had been an essential part of the cultural memory of war in Britain since 1918, and replaced it with abstractions of duty, honour and, particularly, victory. Wartime reporting combined with post-war silence about what he calls ‘the real war’ brings Paul Fussell to the conclusion that ‘America has not yet understood what the Second World War was like and has thus been unable to use such understanding to re-interpret and re-define the national reality and to arrive at something like public maturity’ (1989, p. 268). In The Male Body at War, Christina Jarvis, quoting Susan Faludi and Suzanne Clark, sees the willingness of the United States to engage in the conflict in Vietnam as arising directly from this lack of knowledge: For Faludi, the greatest problem stemming from the preservation of wartime ideals and the lack of introspection in postwar victory culture was the lack of communication between World War II veterans and their sons. … She writes ‘Post war culture denied its returning

84 Grief in Wartime

soldiers the opportunity to grapple publicly with their horrific secret burden … thereby denying them a moral knowledge to pass down to their sons. All they could do was to rerun the moment of victory’. … For Suzanne Clark, the victory culture’s inability to relinquish its warrior ideal led to ‘the hypermasculinity of national policy’ during the cold war. (p. 188) Jarvis goes on to examine the relationship between this private silence and the public policy on Vietnam: ‘Nixon … frequently positioned World War II as the touchstone for Vietnam. In televised speeches on April 20 and 30, 1970, Nixon addressed the implications of his Vietnamization program and his decision to invade Cambodia, justifying his policies in terms of American power and past military victories’ (p. 189). As Jarvis further suggests, the influence of film culture in particular took the place of realistic war stories, leading soldiers and journalists, such as Michael Herr, to explore the incongruous presence of John Wayne’s Second World War character and his representation of war as heroic in ideals of combat taken to the war in Vietnam (Herr, 1979/1968). Yet, as the war continued without any measurable progress except for the notorious body count, it became increasingly difficult to find meaning in the deaths of young soldiers, either for their families or for the soldiers themselves. The profound discrepancy between the abstract platitudes articulated in official condolence letters through which the military imposes meaning on death, and the nature of death in war is, of course, present in all wars, but it was particularly incongruous in the Vietnam War. Such letters upheld the conventional language of heroic sacrifice for the cause of freedom and democracy even while at home violent protests demanded an end to the war. Moreover, nightly newscasts that allowed the American civilian greater access to war than in any previous conflict including, later in the war, atrocities committed by Americans, undermined the conventional condolence formulas to the point where, for many families, they became part of the perceived exploitation of the very values the letters asserted their loved ones had died for: freedom and democracy. The language itself was seen as contributing to the erasure of an alternative language of protest against the American presence in Vietnam and against the death and injury of young American men. Although some families accepted the condolence formula in the absence of any alternative meaning, others, like Peg Mullen, angrily rejected it and found a focus for their grief and anger elsewhere, Mullen turning to a long crusade to uncover confusing evidence about her son’s death by

The War at Home 85

‘friendly fire’. This euphemism itself came to represent for her the lies by which the government and military covered up what was really happening in Vietnam. Following their son’s death in 1970, the Mullens received the standard letter signed by General Westmoreland: Dear Mr and Mrs Mullen: Please accept my deepest sympathy in the loss of your son, Sergeant Michael E. Mullen, on 18th February in Vietnam. I know that the passing of a loved one is one of life’s most tragic moments, but sincerely hope that you will find some measure of comfort in knowing that your son served the Nation with honor. His devoted service was in the finest traditions of American soldiers who on other battlefields and in other times of national peril have given the priceless gift of life to safeguard the blessings of freedom for their loved ones and for future generations. In Vietnam today brave Americans are defending the rights of men to choose their own destiny and to live in dignity and freedom. All members of the United States Army join in sharing your burden of grief. (Bryan, 1976, pp. 99–100) The Mullens’s response was to take out an advertisement in the Des Moines Sunday Register that protested the language offered them in place of their son. They challenged the empty language of standard condolence and euphemism, itself a form of silencing, to uncover the many silences surrounding death in Vietnam. Using black crosses on a white background to represent all the Iowans killed in the war, the numbers totalled ‘114 more … than had been included in the weekly totals released by the Pentagon’ (Bryan, p. 32). Above these was a caption that brought together grief and protest against the war: ‘A SILENT message to the fathers and mothers of Iowa: We have been dying for nine, long miserable years in Vietnam in an undeclared war … how many more lives do you wish to sacrifice because of your SILENCE? Sgt Michael E. Mullen – killed by friendly fire’ (Bryan, p. 33). The caption combines with the black crosses to recognise each individual death and the grief it has caused, using the stark image of death and grief to break what the Mullens see as silence surrounding these deaths in Vietnam. In its recognition of all the dead, including those like Michael Mullen not included in the official casualty numbers, it is a call to protest. The relationship between the dead body of the soldier and protest that occurs throughout Vietnam War writing is, at least in part, due to the

86 Grief in Wartime

practical circumstances surrounding the repatriation of bodies in that war. In both the world wars families in the United States had the option of having a soldier’s body buried near the site of death in an official war cemetery or, where a positive identification could be made, returned home at the end of the war. Many families chose to let their soldiers’ bodies remain with their comrades in war cemeteries resulting, after the First World War, in what became known as the Gold Star Mother’s Pilgrimage – a government subsidised journey for mothers and wives to visit the graves of sons and husbands buried overseas.3 An important part of the mourning process thus became a post-war visit to the war cemeteries where women, as privileged mourners, were offered some sense of consolation in seeing their sons or husbands as part of a community of dead comrades. In Europe during and after the Second World War, images of the war cemeteries were constructed so as to narrate a story of courage and heroism as well as loss, presented to the American public as a reminder that the men were buried in land that they had retrieved from a fascist dictatorship. During the Vietnam conflict as far as possible bodies were returned unless the individual was posted as missing. Representations of grief from this war thus tend to be centred around a four-part narrative: the announcement of death followed by the official telegram; the wait for the return of the body from overseas along with an often problematic bureaucracy; the actual return of the dead body and whether or not it was viewable; and the choice of a civilian or military funeral. While most individuals with a friend or family member in the war zone lived in anticipation of his death or injury,4 there was, as in all wars, the peculiarity of the delay between the moment of death and the notification of next of kin. As writers from other wars remind us, the death is not actual for the bereaved until the moment of notification, but once the bereaved are appraised of their bereavement they are forced to revisit the time lapse between the moment of actual death and the moment they knew of it: a time period that must now be re-experienced through the knowledge of death.5 Accounts from the bereaved often note the incongruity of their going about everyday activities thinking that their son or husband or brother was alive although he was already dead. Other accounts record premonitions of death on the actual day of death. Those members of the military whose task it was to notify the next of kin recognised the extent to which the notification of death rather than the moment of death itself is the point at which the individual dies for the family; the announcement of death thus makes the announcer complicit in the death. As Harry Spiller writes in Death Angel, they literally bring

The War at Home 87

death to the house: That morning, when he pulled up to the front of their house, Mrs. Williams’s son was alive. For a moment, just a moment, as Spiller walked across the field that beautiful spring morning, Spiller felt like a death angel. Until he reached Mr. Williams, young John Williams was doing fine and would be home soon. But the moment Mr. Williams acknowledged Spiller’s presence, the closer Spiller came to him, the closer Williams’s son came to death, and when Spiller finally said it, there was nothing else to say. (p. 168) The protocol surrounding the official announcement of death illustrates the state’s control not only over the combatant body, but also over the family’s mourning. In Winners and Losers, Gloria Emerson describes how the language surrounding the official notification of death during the Vietnam War upheld such control: ‘The Secretary of the army has requested me to inform you … The idea was to convey regret – deep, official masculine regret – but not regret that sounded too regretful, too mushy, as if death had been a waste’ (p. 143). After the official notification came the wait for the return of the body, or often body parts, which could be as long as 2 weeks, during which time the bereaved remained in a kind of limbo state, planning a funeral but not quite sure when it would take place; without concrete proof of the death in the form of a body, the actual fact of the death was difficult to accept. Given that the period immediately following a death is one of avoidance, numbness, disbelief and denial, particularly in the case of sudden, violent death (Rambo, p. 33), the wait for the return of the body could contribute to that denial. Many individuals report hoping that there had been a mistake or refusing to accept the death when the body was returned but unviewable. In order to confirm the death then, after a period of potentially prolonged avoidance or denial, for many bereaved it became crucially important to see the dead body. Stories of body parts or fragments that might not be those of a son or husband or brother made families determined to identify the remains as ‘theirs’. Where coffins were sealed shut and remains marked ‘unviewable’ families not only suffered from not being able to see and thus comprehend the death, but were also unable to confirm the body as theirs. Without seeing the body, it was possible to prolong denial to the point where mourning was at least partly deferred and, as in other wars, the bereaved report expecting the dead soldier to return years after the war ended. On the other hand, viewing the body confirmed for families that the soldier had died in combat. Peg Mullen relates how the absence of

88 Grief in Wartime

visible signs of injury on her son’s body made it difficult to realise that he had died in a war (Mullen, p. 26). She needed injury to convince her of his death. In another account a young widow is thankful that she could not only view the body, but also see the signs of injury to the body, since this made real the death of her husband (Brandon, p. 4). The focus on the body, seen or unseen, thus takes on a more central role in Vietnam narratives than in those from other wars. The political dangers Loraux points to when grieving mothers put the bodies of their dead and mutilated sons on public display is reflected in narratives such as Mullen’s Unfriendly Fire, oral accounts in Casualties and Shrapnel in the Heart and the child’s recollection in Hero Mama that continually thrust the dead bodies of husbands, fathers and brothers into the reader’s gaze. Such a retrieval of bodies from the anonymity of the body count for political ends is legitimised in combatant and nurses’ writing; this very similar act on the part of the ‘home’ bereaved is a further example of the slippages between definitions of home and front. Soldiers and nurses know the war dead in terms of their immediate presence in the war zone; families write histories of the dead, memories of childhood, school and adolescence in a way that allows the dead an existence outside the war. They are more than war dead: they are husbands, brothers, friends and lovers. Each of these narratives is of a life cut short and, for the bereaved, of a future irrevocably damaged. Angela Prete tells Laura Palmer what the death of her fiancé meant: ‘I was supposed to marry Joey Sintoni. I didn’t find it easy to progress to plan B. Marriage was killed in action’ (Palmer, p. 15). But it is only long after the initial mourning that she recognises the extent of her loss: ‘I was mourning the loss of Joey Sintoni, and I didn’t even think about mourning the loss of marriage and children and all the other things that were given up at the same time’ (Palmer, p. 15). For parents the son’s death could become an end of everything: a kind of living death. Salvatore (Sammy) Cammarata’s father explains: ‘When we lost our boy, it was quite a bit. We lost our minds. We lost all track of everything, went out of balance and everything, out of control, physically and mentally, all of it. His mother is still in it. This is a house that will never see light again’ (Brandon, p. 21). As Sammy’s widow Kathy tells it, his father literally attempted to change places with his dead son: ‘when he was at the cemetery that day, he just started digging. His hands were all raw, sore, and he said he would rather be there than his son. He said “I’m going to take him out of here” ’ (Brandon, p. 7). Such extreme and lasting grief is a common, but rarely recognised, response to the loss of a son in war. In one of a very few investigations into parental response to such a death, Florian notes that 2–3 years after the loss, ‘the majority of

The War at Home 89

bereaved parents changed their social habits and seldom “went out the front door”. … [A] clinical evaluation of their scores indicated that they tended toward depression and would easily break under pressure … These findings suggest the opposite of the common sense notion and widely held belief that time “heals” grief among bereaved parents’ (p. 93). Kathy’s account of her own experience emphasises the need to confront the physical actuality of death. At war, the loved one is experienced as an absence, present only through letters and, in her case, through her baby born in the interval between the notification of Sam’s death and the return of his body. Once the body is returned the dead soldier is now simultaneously present and absent. His body has returned, but he is absent. The importance not only of viewing the body, but seeing and touching him as a means of believing in the death and recognising this paradoxical presence and absence, is emphasised by Kathy. Her claim on her dead husband’s body demands that she defy family and friends’ idea of what is best for her, and defy the military regulations surrounding the return and burial of the body. ‘They sent his body home, and they wanted to take him and bury him before I got out of the hospital [after the birth of her child]. I said ‘There’s no way. I better attend; otherwise, I’ll never believe it” (Brandon, p. 4). As she continues she claims, ‘I was fortunate in that I did have an open coffin, and that I did something I shouldn’t have done. I broke the glass and put him in another coffin. … Maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but I did it’ (Brandon, p. 4). Kathy’s account illustrates the problematic nature of the relationship between the military and the family of the dead soldier. Describing breaking the glass on the coffin she notes that ‘I was fortunate in doing it even though I shouldn’t have’. Her literal breaking of army regulations is crucially important in her own grieving in that it allows her to see and touch her dead husband and acknowledge his body, and also to witness the mutilation to his body. In recounting she moves between distancing herself from her actions and relating her intimacy with her husband’s body: ‘I proceeded to find out where he was shot … It looked like he was perfect … then I saw his whole stomach was blown right out, and his legs were off and there was all paper inside’ (Brandon, p. 4). She then returns to the transgression involved in her actions. ‘I don’t think I really should have done it’ (Brandon, p. 4). But she acknowledges that this action and the knowledge it brought was a crucially important part of her grieving. ‘I saw him, and I was able to touch him, to know that it was him, and to verify that it was him. Otherwise, I probably to this day would never have believed it’ (Brandon, pp. 4–5). Seeing and

90 Grief in Wartime

touching is knowing in a way that was generally denied those who abided by the rules. Moreover, it allows Kathy to represent her husband’s injuries as well as to confirm absolutely that the body she has received is that of her husband: ‘I can be at peace, knowing it was him’ (Brandon, p. 5). Such interaction with the dead body is particularly important in that the official notification often did not use the term ‘dead’. In the same way that euphemisms, such as ‘friendly fire’, ‘nonbattle casualties’ or ‘died of postoperative complications’, were employed to deliberately distort the numbers of dead, to some bereaved it seemed as if, in refusing to use the direct term, the military were refusing to acknowledge the death. Pauline Laurent remembers bitterly: What they couldn’t tell me when they came to my door that day – what they couldn’t say was DEAD The military informed all those 58,196 families of the death of their loved one without even using the word dead. Denial of death in our culture is deep. Fatally wounded or mortally wounded aren’t clear enough words for me. (pp. 146–7) The protocol surrounding the notification of death and the return of the body thus reinforces the cultural sanctions and denial surrounding death. Even when a body is considered ‘viewable’ it is not physically accessible to the bereaved without transgressing regulations. The body, visible and invisible, present and absent, marked and unmarked, thus, becomes the locus not only of grief, but also of attendant anger and of the political tensions surrounding the war. When Michael Mullen’s body, with only a small wound in his back and the cause of death ‘friendly fire’, is returned, it sets off Peg Mullen’s years of searching for answers surrounding the exact cause and context for her son’s death and her attendant protest of the war. The image of her dead father as a man she does not recognise follows 9-year-old Karen Spears (Zacharias) through subsequent years of grieving: I didn’t know this man. I wasn’t even sure he was real … He was awful cold-looking … I’d never seen anyone that blue. His lips were almost purple … There are still times when I weep for my father the way I did that day at Nash-Wilson Funeral Home, the day I saw him lying all cold and purple-blue in that casket. (pp. 42–3)

The War at Home 91

For Spears (Zacharias) her father is not present in the dead, discoloured stranger. Asking her mother why the man is so blue and cold looking, her mother ‘turned and yelled: “Because he’s dead!” ’(p. 42). Death has made her father a stranger. It seems as if her weeping then and later is in part related to her inability to find her father in the returned body. Unlike Kathy Cammarata’s comprehension of death in the physical presence of her mutilated husband, Karen Spears Zacharias’s inability to recognise her father in his dead body results in the perpetuation of the normal denial process that attends grief. These narratives reveal that a degree of denial of death at some level persists for most of the bereaved. Such denial is often manifest in recurring dreams of the dead man as alive but absent or mutilated and out of reach. First and Second World War accounts show these dreams to be common in the war bereaved. Psychologists such as Therese Rando suggest that it is impossible for the psyche to comprehend completely the sudden death of someone young and healthy: ‘She is unable to grasp the full implications of the loss: It is inexplicable, unbelievable, and incomprehensible. Although intellectually the mourner knows her loved one has died, she cannot accept this fact emotionally’ (Rando, p. 554). Alongside the difficulty of comprehending death comes the collapse of assumptive reality. Rando asserts, ‘The assumptive world is violently shattered: Without time to incorporate the change, the mourner’s assumptive world is abruptly destroyed. Control, predictability, and security are lost, and the assumptions, expectations, and beliefs upon which the mourner has based her life are violated’ (p. 555). For Spears Zacharias, this collapse happens at the practical and emotional level: ‘It’s hard to explain what losing a father does to a family. Daddy’s death is the road marker we kids use to measure our life’s journey. Before his death, ours was a home filled with intimacy and devotion. After his death, it was filled with chaos and destruction’ (p. 14). This experience is further articulated by Sally Stoll, an adult when her younger brother David was killed in Vietnam: ‘It was like the whole world changed. Losing my brother was like being hit over the head with a sledgehammer, saying, “Everything you thought before just isn’t true anymore. Everything you believed in and your hopes for the future, that’s not the way it’s going to be” ’ (Palmer, p. 173). Stoll’s account links the collapse of her own assumptive reality to the body of her dead brother. For her he represents the ‘indecency’ of a situation where ‘kids’ must die. ‘When we viewed his body – it seemed indecent that such a young kid should have been lost in a war that men made. I thought that surely anyone who saw or handled his body should have felt shock, outrage,

92 Grief in Wartime

and extra grief, at that sweet and innocent childlike face’ (Palmer, p. 173). While Stoll uses the third person to stand outside the ‘shock and outrage’, as a viewer of his body she participates in what she feels should be anger at the ‘men’ who are responsible for her brother’s death. At the same time, however, Stoll’s narrative paradoxically supports her brother’s experience in the army. ‘The Army was really good for David’ (Palmer, p. 172). There is a clear disjunction here between the army as a career, ‘a sensible option’ that would allow him to ‘have his college education paid by the GI bill’ (Palmer, p. 172), and the price of that choice. Her brother’s body is not the body of a trained killer, but represents for her the ‘sweetness’ and ‘innocence’ of their childhood together. Likewise, Spears Zacharias separates her life into the idealised ‘before’ and the terrible ‘after’. Stoll’s account of her brother’s death points to the complexities and incongruities surrounding death in war and the memory of the dead. Her narrative presents her brother as she wants to remember him, innocent and child-like, an image that links him to their happy pre-war childhood. His body becomes the container for this memory as well as for the anger that attends his death. What is absent from this narrative, but present in others in this collection, is the narrative of the war itself and the role of the military in her brother’s death. As the child of a father who had a career in the air force, and the wife of a pilot who flew in Vietnam, Stoll can only express her anger obliquely. She avoids the questions that would disrupt the contradictory narrative she has created. Who are ‘the men’ who are instrumental in her brother’s death: her father; the government; the military with which her whole life is so intimately connected. To what extent was her brother responsible for his own death. He was not drafted; he was already part of the army. Stoll’s grief stands in the way of such questions. She needs to remember her brother as a child because this allows her to retain their childhood relationship as big sister and younger brother. It also means that she can express anger at his death and articulate the collapse of her assumptive reality without completely destabilising the life she has created for herself. Moreover, his posthumous Silver Star further confuses her response to his death since it is the means by which the military offer her meaning and consolation for his death. To collapse the status quo would be to undermine that meaning and dishonour the dead and take away what Dawson has defined as the ‘composure’ she has achieved to enable her to live with the death. Examining the construction of war memories, Dawson and Thomson use the concept of composure to explain not just how war experiences are remembered in a certain way, but why some narratives gain precedence

The War at Home 93

over others at the individual and collective level. We compose our memories to make sense of our past and present lives. ‘Composure’ is an aptly ambiguous term to describe the process of memory making. In one sense we compose or construct memories using the public languages and meanings of our culture. In another sense we compose memories that help us feel relatively comfortable with our lives and identities, that give us feelings of composure. (Thomson, 1994, p. 8) Dawson also affirms: ‘The story that is actually told is always the one preferred amongst other possible versions, and involves a striving, not only for a formally satisfying narrative or a coherent version of events, but also for a version of the self that can be lived with in relative psychic comfort – for, that is, subjective composure’ (1994, p. 23). It is important in our understanding of grief narratives, therefore, that we examine the reasons why discourse users choose certain discourses and disregard others, not just in relation to the larger social context, but also in relation to the individual’ needs. Thus, in comparison with a sister’s response in the Stoll death, we find other families less ambiguously console themselves with the idea that their son, brother or husband died in his chosen occupation and for a cause. In spite of his profound grief at his son’s death in Vietnam, the father of Euripedes Rubio, Jr. claims, ‘he went ahead to accomplish what he wanted and liked … He also knew he could contribute to a victory for the USA there. When I think about this last point, it’s good for me. It serves as a consolation. The truth is that he had a choice, and he volunteered to go to Vietnam’ (Brandon, p. 201). His mother reinforces this: ‘I am sad for his death, but I hope it has not been in vain. I am proud he died defending democracy’ (Brandon, p. 201). Certainly this language echoes the conventional military discourse of condolence sent to families, as we have seen in the letter to the Mullens. What is striking is that, in the aftermath of the war, these parents do not appear to interrogate the language they speak or acknowledge that their son did not contribute to victory. In their desire for meaning and to maintain the ‘composure’ Dawson and Thomson find inherent in war stories, they have internalised the official language to the extent that the alternative languages of protest or disillusionment cannot enter into their narrative of their son’s death. Conversely, other families resist the military rhetoric and not only refuse to accept the validity of death in the war in Vietnam but completely reject all ideology surrounding military service. Unlike the

94 Grief in Wartime

Rubios who find consolation in the rhetoric of freedom and democracy, others perceive such language to play a salient role in what they have come to see as government and military deception surrounding the war. In place of meaning we find a profound rejection of those values that were perceived as being complicit in the soldier’s death. Thus, Patrick Finnegan, also a Vietnam veteran, ends his account of his brother’s death there with the focus on his (Finnegan’s) son: ‘the government has a better chance of water-skiing in the Sahara than they do of getting their hands on Mikey. Thanks, but no thanks. Our family doesn’t need any more folded flags’ (Brandon, p. 282). The rejection of the folded flag is not only a measure of his loss, one he does not want to see repeated, but it is also a categorical rejection of what it stands for: the ideology of sacrifice and patriotic pride and duty to country. When families grieve, the individual desire to impose meaning on death, in addition to family loyalties, can create divergent responses to Vietnam deaths. Thus, the exchange between Vallette and Jeanene Jacques on the death of their brother Donald reveals deep-seated conflicting responses to the military and their brother’s death. The following conversation takes place even while both sisters’ sons are in the marines: Jeanene: I don’t think it hurts anybody to have pride in themselves or their country. If they [the marine corps] can build that in a person, that’s good … He [Donald] knew that he was really something when he went in there … We thought the marines were the best, therefore there wasn’t any possibility Billy [her son] and Matthew [Vallette’s son] would do anything else. Valette: This is all propaganda and salesmanship. Three quarters bullshit. (Brandon, p. 63) The narratives in Casualties and Shrapnel allow the bereaved to tell their private stories to a listener who in turn makes them public. The relationship between interviewer and interviewee breaks the cultural silences surrounding grief as well as the silence about the war itself. These oral histories thus become part of the mourning ritual surrounding death in war. As collections, however, they are ordered and controlled by the interviewer and editor of the collection and framed within an introduction that presents a collective rather than individual mourning narrative. These are mourning communities manufactured by Brandon and Palmer, where each individual narrative is subservient to the collective. The stories are not just the stories of individuals, they are edited and ordered to fit the overall purpose of the volume; each individual story gains

The War at Home 95

meaning from its juxtaposing with other stories. In each instance, Brandon and Palmer replace wartime isolation with communities of grief post-war. While the accounts of death in Casualties and Shrapnel in the Heart were sought out by Brandon and Palmer, respectively, Peg Mullen’s Unfriendly Fire,6 Pauline Laurent’s Grief Denied and Karen Spears Zacharias’s Hero Mama are written out of an individual need to explore and then publicly articulate the impact and consequences of one man’s death on an individual life, what Damousi calls ‘the havoc’ that death in war wreaks on the bereaved. It is noteworthy that these, along with Barbara Sonneborn’s 1998 film documentary ‘Regret to inform’, apparently the only state-side narratives of personal grief and mourning, are written by women. Clearly, as in other wars, women take on the emotional labour of loss, following the dominant cultural paradigm surrounding grief and particularly grief in wartime. Palmer stresses that the bulk of the letters left at the Wall are from mothers, even while both she and Brandon, in putting together their collections, note the disenfranchisement of brothers, sisters and friends and often fathers from the expression of grief. Even though these memoirs are written by socially sanctioned wartime mourners, mother, widow and daughter, in each instance the bereaved woman positions herself as disenfranchised mourner, isolated and denied expression of grief because of the bitterness surrounding the war. The recent public expression of private isolation and denial experienced during the war claims the legitimacy of a public voice of mourning for the Vietnam dead. Furthermore, the memoir form allows each writer to explore the sustained effect of the war death on her life; it influences both her future and her memory of the past, since she can never again see her own pre-war-death existence outside the lens of loss. If each memoir establishes the war death as the profound shattering of assumptive reality, the writing becomes a means of re-establishing order over that chaos as well as a means, as Laurent notes, of expressing grief in a society that silences it. ‘In writing I finally found a container which could hold my grief. The blank page never told me “Stop crying” or “You should be over it by now” ’ (p. 112). Like Mullen and Spears Zacharias, Laurent represents her move from the blank page as a ‘container’ for her grief to the legitimising of that grief in making it public, as crucial in collapsing the isolation of the bereaved. Speaking publicly about her experience of grief as a Vietnam widow, she is aware of challenging the cultural taboos that surround grief and the war. She notes the ‘aversion people have to death and grief’ that denies its public expression: ‘the unspoken rule about grief. Don’t do it in public’ (p. 134) and reiterates that her own denial of grief occurred in the context of military and cultural denial

96 Grief in Wartime

where ‘it was … unacceptable to grieve’ (p. 135). As noted earlier, she stresses the exclusion of the word ‘dead’ from the official announcement of her husband’s death: ‘What they couldn’t tell me when they came to my door that day was DEAD’. The focus on the dead body so prominent throughout all these accounts reflects the individual need to claim the experience of death that is denied them; in particular, the dead body is taboo, but the grieving individual must display it to expose death in war. Laurent may not be entirely accurate in her claim that the military avoided the use of the term ‘dead’ in their announcement, since the official announcement to the Mullens includes the phrase ‘died as a result of friendly fire’ (Mullen, p. 20). Laurent’s point is important, however. The military prefers to represent death through language that obscures the fact of death and, as Emerson shows, that renders regret illegitimate. Official letters of condolence, as we have noted, were no different in the Vietnam conflict than in other wars. The brief fact of death is obscured by the rhetoric of sacrifice and duty that asks the recipient not to grieve loss, but to celebrate the nobility of the cause and the courage that attended the death. Where this is not possible, as in the Mullens case where their son is killed in his sleep by friendly fire, there is no focus for their grief other than an investigation into what seems to them to have been a cover up on the part of the military as to the cause of their son’s death. As Laurent rejects terms like ‘fatally wounded’ that fail to pronounce the death, so the euphemistic ‘friendly fire’ becomes the focus of the Mullens’s anger and grief. At the most basic level of accountability they find that this term allows the military to avoid reporting those killed by their own side as American casualties; they are unacknowledged in the body count, leading to their omission in the official numbers reported in the home media. Deaths in Vietnam were further obscured by the methods of reporting. Thus Bryan reports in Friendly Fire: Peg … knew that one planeload of bodies landed in Oakland on Monday and two more landed Tuesday the week Michael’s body arrived. The planes carried 75 bodies each. And yet the official casualty figures released for that entire week listed on 88 Americans killed in Vietnam. When Peg contacted the parents of that week’s seven other Iowan casualties, she discovered the majority of them, too, had been told their sons were ‘nonbattle’ causalties. (p. 113) The legitimacy of grieving is thus made more complex by the sense that this death is ‘uncountable’; it cannot be represented officially. While the Mullens’s journey of grief takes the form of a political quest to

The War at Home 97

uncover the truth about their son’s death they ultimately find that, while there was no deliberate attempt at a cover-up, there were multiple denials and silences surrounding the conduct of the war, the process of reporting deaths and the interaction of the military with bereaved families. The unwillingness of the military bureaucracy to engage with the Mullens is one form of silencing and isolation they experience; the other, equally important and experienced by all bereaved, is the isolation of those experiencing death in this war. While in the Second World War the whole country was potentially part of a community of sorrow, in Vietnam, reflecting the groups doing most of the fighting, death was visited upon individuals in an isolated fashion. Few bereaved knew others in the same situation. Communities were only created when isolated individuals such as the Mullens sought out others who had experienced the same loss or brought them together in a symbolic way as in their newspaper representation of the Iowa dead. For the most part, the dominant social experience of death in this conflict was one of isolation. With the rhetoric of the protest movement a dominant discourse through which the war came to be understood by a high proportion of the population, for both Laurent and Spears Zacharias, isolation was exacerbated by shame at their connection with a soldier in Vietnam. As a child suffering from her father’s death Spears Zacharias reports her inability to separate her father from the anti-war feeling she witnesses on television and the ensuing sense of isolation and shame: There was nobody sitting beside me explaining that the protestors burning effigies of U.S. soldiers or shouting obscenities about the Vietnam War weren’t necessarily angry at my father. Their rage against the soldiers returning from Vietnam terrified me. The more virulent the protestors became, the more shame I felt over my father’s death. I feared telling anyone about Daddy’s death. I worried that they would label him a murderer and me the killer’s daughter. (p. 155) Laurent similarly internalises the external social and political responses where shame compounds the pain and isolation of grief: ‘The growing dissension about the war also added to my confusion and isolation. My husband had died in a war that our nation was losing. This compounded my shame. I stopped watching the evening news because all I saw was continued fighting and unrest about the war’ (p. 52). Laurent deliberately draws attention to protest and political unrest as alien to her upbringing, emphasising the extent to which she accepted

98 Grief in Wartime

the roles prescribed for women by her culture and religion: ‘I’d always been such a good girl following the dictates of my mother, the Catholic church and my country – graciously sending my husband off to be slaughtered in Southeast Asia’ (p. 57). On the death of her husband, Howard, she continues to follow the prescribed public narrative of the grieving widow: ‘After Howard’s funeral I began serving my life sentence as a war widow – a solemn, stoic woman. I modelled my behavior after Jackie Kennedy – maintaining a stiff upper lip and a stance of enormous strength’ (p. 41). She recognises in hindsight that the silence imposed on her grief, necessary to the stoic stance, is a form of a pervasive culturally sanctioned denial of death. In the instance of war death such silence has much larger political implications. Bereavement narratives from Vietnam continually emphasise how the silencing of grief in war, whether through the cultural associations of shame or through official military practices that obscure the facts of death, allows governments and military to keep hidden the far-reaching hurt that war inflicts on all those involved. While it could be argued that the silencing of grief in the Second World War served the practical purpose of maintaining morale and a workforce dedicated to the cause of victory, given the already divisive response to the war in Vietnam, silencing the grief of the bereaved served primarily to deny the enormity of the impact war had on individuals and families. Nor was grief co-opted by the protest movement as it has been in the Iraq War. The social divisions caused by the war tended instead to isolate those immediately involved in the war from the protestors, at least until returning veterans in the form of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) became involved in the peace movement. Ironically then, both government and the peace movement unwittingly colluded in forms of silencing that disenfranchised those Americans most hurt by the war. The problematic interaction of war involvement and protest and the emotions of grief are represented by Laurent in her account of a campus anti-war demonstration that involves the carrying of a coffin across the campus at Southern Illinois University in May 1970. Where are you going with that coffin? That dead body? That body of my husband. He died there – he didn’t know any better; don’t punish him, don’t hurt him … I want to join with you in protest, but my husband died there. He went there to defend his country. Isn’t that why he went? Isn’t that why the war is going on? … Please don’t tell me he died for nothing – no reason, no cause – just another casualty of our government … Don’t tell me it’s all for nothing. (p. 56)

The War at Home 99

Being caught between a rejection of the war as voiced by the protest, and allegiance to the dead, especially to the need to retain meaning in their deaths, resulted in years of silence for Laurent and others. While Laurent feels guilt and shame, a sense that her passive acceptance of the status quo implicated her in her husband’s death (a common emotion for women in wartime as noted in Chapter 1), Peg Mullen also acknowledges her role in her son’s death: ‘It’s not that we didn’t want Mikey to go, it’s that we – we let him go! … We raised Mikey in the belief that an individual, a man, obeyed. That you didn’t question … this was so wrong … Mikey never went against an order. And this, this is our anguish! That we ever did such a thing to our child’ (Bryan, p. 126). The guilt both Laurent and Peg Mullen take on here is absent from writing from the Second World War, where the military obligation was almost universally accepted. Yet it does hover at the edges of civilian writing from the First World War given that blame for the creation of a cultural milieu that persuaded young men to fight is a recurring trope of British combatant memoirs, but it is not until the protest environment of the Vietnam War that the relationship between civilian guilt, support of the status quo and death in war is confronted directly. Grief thus cannot be examined outside the complexity of political responses to the war. The grief response is further problematised by the individual desire to impose meaning on death. To wrestle with the idea that a soldier died for nothing is a feature of post-First World War writing, but in the Vietnam War we find individuals struggling with the complete breakdown of meaning surrounding death in war – a struggle made more difficult by the upholding of conventional consolatory rhetoric in form letters of condolence and by the use of medals to reinforce such rhetoric. While grief is in itself an isolating experience, the grief experienced by Vietnam bereaved was exacerbated by the lack of a wartime community of suffering. The shame that writers such as Laurent and Spears Zacharias identify forces them to retreat into an isolated silence. In subsequently speaking their experience of grief they take on the private and public role Herman claims as testimony, in that it articulates both for the individual and her audience what has been unspoken at the level of the individual psyche, not just with regard to the war, but also to grief and mourning as an experience (Herman, 1992). In claiming the legitimacy of their experience long after the war, the memoirs are necessarily political. In doing so they ‘communalize’ their grief, as Laurent puts it, and force their wounds into the public gaze. Notably, Laurent represents this making public of her private experience with a dream image that is part protest march, seemingly a reclaiming of the protests

100 Grief in Wartime

against the war that she could not participate in at the time and an image we will see repeated in Vietnam nurse Lynda Van Devanter’s Home Before Morning. In her dream Laurent sees a news story headline that reads ‘Invisible casualties in Vietnam’ and describes ‘a live scene in a desert with hundreds of people marching, some in wheelchairs, some on crutches, some with blank stares in their eyes and looks of desperation on their faces’ (p. 139). Clearly, the protest movement and marches of the era offer a discourse through which these writers legitimise their grief and through which they enact it in the realm of political activism. For writers like Spears Zacharias and Laurent, recent public awareness of trauma has provided an environment receptive to their responses and a language through which they can write. Peg Mullen’s anti-war activism, for which her son’s death was the catalyst, provided her with a way of enacting her grief even while she admitted that the anger that spurred her on was a way of confronting his death. Each writer’s account also implicitly supports recent research that recognises grief as a constant presence and acknowledges the impossibility for the bereaved of separating from the dead. The Vietnam Memorial, the Wall, testifies to this ongoing connection between the living and their war dead. Furthermore, for many of those involved in the Vietnam War, it was not until the unveiling of the Vietnam War Memorial, ‘the Wall’, in 1982, that they could express the conflicting emotions of grief and protest. The Wall provided, above all else, a public discourse of mourning. From the point of its unveiling, personal accounts and memoirs of the war have focused on grief in a way unprecedented in the aftermath of the two world wars, even though the casualties were fewer. The continued rituals of grieving that take place at the Wall suggest that society sanctions grief after a ‘lost’ war more completely than after a war that has been ‘won’, since there is no affirming discourse of victory to silence the mourner. Whatever the reason, more than any other war memorial it has given the bereaved permission to maintain a communication with the dead. Since each name is engraved and within reach of visitors to touch and do a rubbing, it invites connection on an individual as well as a communal level. The practice of leaving gifts at the Wall began as a private mourning ritual but has since created a community of bereaved. Palmer’s Shrapnel in the Heart imposes a formal community on this practice in her publishing both private letters left at the Wall and the private accounts behind many of the letters. Kristin Anne Hass’s Carried to the Wall (1998) extends the concept of a ritual of grieving in examining the items brought to the wall and their stories. Thus, the phenomenon of what

The War at Home 101

may be seen as offerings to the dead is crucially important in examining the process of war grief and the relationship between the public and private. The three memoirs discussed here all provide detailed accounts of the first visit to the Wall. For each woman this visit marks a crucial stage in the negotiation of her bereavement. Unlike other war memorials, it arguably has become more important as a site of mourning than the actual gravesites of the Vietnam dead. Thirty years after the official end of American intervention in Vietnam, the Wall continues to attract the mourners of that war, 24 hours a day. In inviting participation it has resisted the static nature of earlier memorials, visited only during the public commemoration of certain dates. It remains a stark reminder, in its names and daily offerings, that the dominant legacy of American intervention in Vietnam, and by extension of all wars, is grief.

This page intentionally left blank

Part 2 War and Grief at the ‘Front’

This page intentionally left blank

4 Mourning and Combat: ‘No One Sings: Lully, Lully’

The First Field Dressing is futile as frantic seaman’s shift bunged to stoved bulwark, so soon the darking flood percolates and he dies in your arms. And get back to that digging can’t yer – this aint a bloody Wake for these dead, who will soon have their dead for burial clods heaped over. … No one sings: Lully, lully for the mate whose blood runs down. (Jones, 1982/1963, p. 174) It’s always hard to see a buddy get killed, but you don’t have time to think about it. You have to do your job. But it’s something you’ll never forget. (Winters in O’Donnell, 2002, p. 30) I started going down the roster, and it included most of the men I served with in the 1st Battalion. I was one of the few that survived. So I found a quiet place and cried. I still cry about it. (Moore in O’Donnell, 2002, p. 25) The gendered division of wartime behaviour excludes women’s voices from speaking war when it is defined as combat, and at the same time privileges grief and mourning as the province of women on the home front. This gendered division of labour similarly works to exclude male combatant grief from the war story: fighting and weeping cannot exist in the same space. The impossibility of expressing grief in combat represented by David Jones in In Parenthesis and the pain that remains years after the deaths of friends in the Second World War in the words of two American combatants interviewed in the 1990s point to the problematic 105

106 Grief in Wartime

nature of combatant grief and mourning that results from the immediate conditions of death and these gendered constructions of mourner and mourned. To further understand the complexity of combatant mourning and grief, we need to consider the paradox of the combat condition: by their own acknowledgement soldiers develop intimate and interdependent relationships with comrades or buddies that are closer than any other, but these relationships are constantly threatened and ended by death. Moreover, such deaths are also part of a larger traumatic experience defined by Hugh McManners in The Scars of War as ‘a vivid, terrifying nightmare of guilt, bereavement and black impending doom souring [combatant] lives thereafter’ (p. 8). Other than McManners’s investigation into the emotional experience of combat soldiers, few studies have directly addressed combatant mourning and the narratives through which combatants express or suppress grief and negotiate their own loss of life and that of others. In fact, the common assumption of investigators is that soldiers do not articulate their grief, even after war. Thus, Walter claims that ‘[f]orgetting is perhaps the most common response of the fighting man and of bombed and occupied civilians. When called upon to fight, or to provide moral support for those doing the fighting, they have to forget: wallowing in grief will undermine fighting performance. Even when there is more leisure … in the convalescent home or after the war, many choose to forget’ (p. 40). Walter’s language here itself alerts us to gendered perceptions of grieving: that it is a form of weakness, ‘wallowing in grief’, and that ‘men’ are able to ‘choose’ to forget. Certainly, in many instances, soldiers suspended mourning until after the war, but as Robert J. Lifton and Chaim Shatan both note, the impossibility of grieving friends killed in action and the subsequent suppression of grief could become an integral element in post-war stress. Reporting on PTSD treatment for Vietnam veterans, Dr. W. Peter Sax reinforces the central position of grief in post-war stress: ‘what is less obvious than anger and less readily available … is grief, usually profound and persistent. Most often it is related to lost comrades and lost beliefs about themselves and/or society’ (p. 237). Elder and Clipp also note that ‘it was the close, personal encounter with killing and the violent death of friends that was most traumatic for the combat soldier and the heart of post-traumatic disorders’ (p. 144). Drawing on the Vietnam War experience, the much more recent Iraq War Clinicians’ Guide recognises the relationship between combatant death and grief: Recent research results, although limited to one sample of Vietnam combat veterans in a residential rehabilitation unit for PTSD, have

Mourning and Combat 107

supported findings in the general bereavement literature that unresolved grief can be detected as a distress syndrome distinct from depression and anxiety. In this sample of combat veterans, grief symptoms were detected at very high levels of intensity, thirty years post-loss. The intensity of symptoms experienced after thirty years was similar to that reported in community samples of grieving spouses and parents at six months post-loss.1 Contrary to Walter’s claims, soldiers’ letters, diaries and post-war memoirs reveal far more remembering than forgetting where the grief and loss Sax notes is a constant. In fact, many soldiers’ writings are extended elegies for dead friends. During war soldiers articulate grief through letters and diaries; sharing this grief with their wives and lovers and the wives and lovers of men killed often becomes the means by which they play out their own grief and at the same time create a community of mourners. Thus, while the exigencies of combat precluded immediate expression of grief or later mourning other than a cursory burial if that was possible, combatants reveal a compulsion to narrate deaths of friends as well as to anticipate and negotiate their own deaths in the immediate instance and to use memoirs and oral history interviews as sites of post-war mourning. In doing so, combatants, like all individuals in wartime, were subject to public discourses that offered them ways of speaking death. While the larger public discourses differed in the three wars under discussion in this chapter, they also had common elements: the ideals of duty and sacrifice are a constant, and appear even in Vietnam narratives. In addition to these rhetorical conventions, however, brutal death in combat also came with its own euphemistic language. In Vietnam, for example, the dead were not ‘dead’ but ‘wasted’ – a term that both avoided speaking death and undercut any ideology that would impose meaning on war death. Tim O’Brien notes of his experience as an infantry soldier in Vietnam: ‘Death was taboo. The word for getting killed was “wasted”. When you hit a Bouncing Betty and it blows you to bits, you get wasted’ (1973/1969, p. 138). That said, diaries and letters tend towards a more private articulation of grief that avoids such euphemism; in these instances, letters in particular have more common elements across wars than differences. Further, while letters and diaries record the witnessing of deaths at close proximity or recount holding a dying friend, in many situations there was no body to become the focus of mourning. Soldiers disappeared, either because high explosives completely destroyed their bodies or acted as an impromptu burial or because they were lost at sea, burnt in planes or hidden in jungle undergrowth.

108 Grief in Wartime

In negotiating these deaths, combatant writing shows that men employed idealised discourses of public propaganda surrounding death in war as noted in the condolence letters in Chapter 1, as well as discourses prevalent in military parlance both during and after war, but most often their accounts express a deep sense of loss and sadness and post-war narratives indicate that for most men this grief remains for a lifetime. David Cole affirms that the important focus for the infantryman was the unit and the relationships within that unit: ‘The truth was that for an infantryman, his battalion, however harrowing its circumstances, was his home, indeed his world. There his friendships, his pride, his loyalty and his duty, his memories of war both happy and terrible and his own little place in history were all embodied’ (p. 190). The intimacy of combatant relationships sits uneasily with the collapsing of those ties as comrades are killed or injured in a brutal and mostly random fashion and removed from the war zone. As countless combatant memoirs from the two world wars and the Vietnam War reveal, relationships between combatants were necessary in preserving one’s sanity in nightmare conditions. Death, therefore, even if anticipated, precipitated a collapse of both the immediate security of intimate friendships and the larger assumptive reality that relies on the illusion of a universal order and purpose. Bereavement in this environment results in what Raphael calls ‘some death of the soul’, noting that ‘the costs of war lie not only in the body count of deaths, but in the impact of death on those soldiers who survive the combat’, and that ‘the extent of exposure to death in combat directly and linearly predicts some death of the soul for those so savagely exposed’ (p. 82). The closeness of combatant relationships is a trope of much war writing, but it is rarely discussed in relation to bereavement. To understand such intimacy it is useful to turn to Santanu Das’s analysis of the combatant environment in the First World War. In particular, he notes the extent to which shared physical intimacy was an expression of the emotional closeness that develops in an environment where individuals rely on each other entirely and are constantly under threat: In the trenches of World War One, the norms of tactile contact between men changed profoundly. Mutilation and mortality, loneliness and boredom, the strain of constant bombardment, the breakdown of language, and the sense of alienation from home led to a new level of intimacy and intensity under which the carefully constructed mores of civilian society broke down. (2002, p. 2)2

Mourning and Combat 109

Such intimacy must be understood to exist as a triumph over death; it must be seen as celebration of life, of young men huddled against long winter nights, rotting corpses, and falling shells. (p. 5) With a few variations such intimacy is representative of combatant relationships in the Second World War and the Vietnam War. It is also integral to survival in combat: ‘He and I stood back to back many a night. So how come? You cover me and I’ll cover you and we’ll all go home’ (Heinemann, 1977/1974, p. 329). Wilfred Owen, more famously, celebrates the love that is integral to the shared hell of war: I have made fellowships – Untold of happy lovers in old song. For love is not the binding of fair lips With the soft silk of eyes that look and long. By Joy, whose ribbon slips – But wound with war’s hard wire whose stakes are strong; Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips Knit in the webbing of the rifle-thong. (17–24, ‘Apologia Pro Poemate Meo’) While most combatant accounts refer to grief at the death of a comrade of the same rank, soldiers could also develop close, interdependent ties with another rank, particularly when these involved officer-servant relationships. Thus, nurse K. Luard recounts, ‘I found the boy who brought his officer in from between the German lines and ours, on Sunday night, crying this morning over the still figure under a brown blanket on a stretcher’ (1915, p. 284). Charles Carrington’s A Subaltern’s War finds him more directly affected by the death of his orderly Stanley than by any of his fellow officers: ‘I am dumbfounded with rage and horror. They have got Stanley, best of friends and loyallest of servants’ (p. 141). Forty pages later he returns to Stanley’s death, measuring what his loss means. Amidst the other deaths, It was Stanley that never left my mind. Although it seems a trivially selfish way to think of his death, it was the discomfort of his absence that made me think the more of his loss. He had been a part of my life for eighteen months and through these four days I had been helpless without him. Now that we had the opportunity to think clearly, I began to realise how much was lost to me. (p. 180)

110 Grief in Wartime

While Carrington initially defines his loss in terms of Stanley’s abilities as a soldier, ‘It was his advice that I had always valued most in battle’ (p. 181), he avoids offering any related platitudes such as honour, duty or sacrifice, instead stressing a much broader sense of loss that focuses on the personal nature of their officer–servant relationship: ‘I thought of his stolen ride to Amiens in my best breeches and his cutting off the heads and cooking the stalks of the asparagus I had gathered under shell-fire’ (p. 181). Moreover, Carrington chooses to end his narrative of Stanley’s death by using the voice of one of his men and placing Stanley amongst the other dead: ‘Ar! ’E was a good kid, was Stanley’, said Jones. ‘An’ so was young Greenwood, and Fred Smith an’ all. They was good lads, all on ‘em’ (p. 181). While the reproduction of the vernacular may seem awkward, even sentimental, and certainly reinforces the class difference between officers and men, it carries the poignancy of shared affection under shared hardship. In particular, through Jones, Carrington affirms ‘goodness’ rather than martial heroics as the important quality to be remembered. The trauma that attends the forming of such attachments and the inevitable repetition of bereavement is noted by Eric Leed in his analysis of the First World War experience on the Western Front: ‘The unit was an unstable entity, continually decimated by shellfire; old, familiar faces were continually replaced by strange, new ones. To identify with the battalion at war and with the narrow circle of one’s comrades was to open a large, vertiginous emotional drain, and to begin a seemingly endless process of mourning’ (p. 210). Quoting from Sassoon’s Memoirs of George Sherston, Leed illustrates the psychological toll: ‘But while exploring my way into the war I had discovered the impermanence of its humanities. One evening we could be all together in a cosy room in Corbie … a single machinegun or a few shells might wipe out the whole picture within a week’ (p. 211). While the Memoirs of George Sherston are a retrospective of the experience, Sassoon’s diaries capture much more immediately this ‘endless process of mourning’ that is central to the emotional experience of combat. Even while the soldier seeks meaning in comradeship, he is aware of a ‘decimation’ that is grotesquely literal as well as metaphoric: Sometimes when I see my companions lying asleep or resting, rolled in their blankets, their faces turned to earth or hidden by the folds, for a moment I wonder whether they are alive or dead. For at any hour I may come upon them, and find that long silence descended

Mourning and Combat 111

over them, their faces grey and disfigured, dark stains of blood soaking through their torn garments, all their hope and merriment snuffed out for ever, and their voices fading on the winds of thought, from memory to memory, from hour to hour, until they are no more to be recalled. (1983, p. 93) The single journal entry, 13 July 1916, of which this contemplation is a part, becomes a site of mourning that simultaneously contemplates, anticipates, describes and records death. The immediate recording celebrates individuals as alive and present, their company to be enjoyed, ‘Here with me are Dobell and Newton, fresh from Sandhurst, cheery, attractive and old Julian Dadd – the good soul’ (p. 92), but this is overshadowed by Sassoon’s prescience of their deaths quoted above and borne out in his retrospective notes that indicate ‘Dobell killed 1918. Newton killed Nov 1 at Ginchy’ (p. 92). A later entry records Dobell’s obituary: ‘After lunch today I glanced at The Times – killed in action Lt. C.N. Dobell, R.W.F. Little Colin who was with me at Mametz Wood’ (p. 267). In Some Desperate Glory Edwin Campion Vaughan focuses on this connection between loss and grief and the collapse of the soldier’s world: ‘One of the most pathetic features of the war is this continual forming of real friendships which last a week or two, or even months, and are suddenly shattered forever by death or division’ (p. 137). By the end of his diary Vaughan is beyond individual remembrance. His last entry, on 28 August 1917, records: ‘I returned to my tent to write out my casualty report, but instead I sat on the floor and drank whisky after whisky as I gazed into a black and empty future’ (p. 232). Beyond expressing grief here, he cannot bring himself to write the list of names that will force him to realise the dead; he can only take refuge in the oblivion offered by whisky. A particular and crucial aspect of this burden is the distinction between the way grief and loss is experienced by combatants and those outside combat. As we have seen in the first three chapters, for those on the home front loss of a soldier in action is primarily defined as absence, particularly the absence of the body and of a site of mourning. Yet, for the combatant, the death of a comrade is, conversely, a constant traumatic witnessing. The best-known image of such witness in the war literature is probably Wilfred Owen’s gas victim: ‘In all my dreams, before my helpless sight / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning’ (15–16, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’). David Connolly, a Vietnam veteran poet, spells out the discrepancy between grief at home and at the front as the

112 Grief in Wartime

distinction between what is present and absent, seen and not seen: ‘Two of my friends died in Vietnam’, this guy says to me, this virgin my age … in the slo-mo of my memory, I again see Ratshit try to collect himself … That dark pucker appears suddenly, next to his eye, and he begins to twirl, arms out, his body pulled by his head. And following that bullet which has skidded around his skull and out, his brains, his smile, all that he was, sprays the Weasel and I. … The Weasel, his fatigues full of bloody holes, propelled by the blast, rushes to embrace me, already dead on his feet. ‘Died in Vietnam’, the virgin said, as if he had any idea what that meant … But he doesn’t, he couldn’t know. You see, to him, ‘Died in Vietnam’ means he’ll never see them again. I’ll see them forever. (p. 61) For some combatants such repetition is represented through the writing and rewriting of death. Sassoon notes the deaths of friends as he narrates and annotates his wartime journal, but in only one instance does he employ an extended narrative of grief. Following the death of a close friend ‘Tommy’ (Lt. David Thomas), Sassoon enacts precisely the ritual Jones seeks as he records a private and intricate pastoral rite that allowed for his own outpouring of grief and an act of remembrance in addition to the public burial. So, after lunch, I escaped to the woods above Sailly-Laurette and grief had its way with me in the sultry thicket … Grief can be beautiful, when we find something worthy to be mourned. To-day I knew what it means to find the soul washed pure with tears, and the load of death was lifted from my heart. So I wrote his name in chalk on the beech-tree stem, and left a rough garland of ivy there, and a yellow primrose for his yellow hair and kind grey eyes, my dear, my dear. And to-night I saw his shrouded form laid in the earth … So Tommy left us, a gentle soldier, perfect and without stain. And so he will always remain in my heart, fresh and happy and brave. (1983, p. 45) Here Sassoon presents both his own private mourning ritual and the public military one. Yet, central to Sassoon’s private mourning is the

Mourning and Combat 113

public wartime rhetoric of chivalric knighthood through which he can idealise ‘Tommy’: the Christ-like knight ‘perfect and without stain’. Such idealisation, so close in tone to the rhetoric with which Vera Brittain surrounds Roland Leighton’s death, shows how, for combatant as well as civilian, grief looks for a language that can impose meaning on the death and appropriates and internalises discourses available in the larger public arena to express loss and at the same time to find consolation. Given Sassoon’s poetry and fiction of the war that seeks to strip away any idealisation of such death, this drive towards imposing meaning on the individual death is a noteworthy example of how intense grief and the attendant need for meaning finds Sassoon subject to those public discourses that rewrite death in war as heroic. At the same time, Sassoon’s diary also shows a more direct, and perhaps more conventionally masculine grief response in the anger that seeks revenge: ‘I used to say I couldn’t kill anyone in this war; but since they shot Tommy I would gladly stick a bayonet into a German by daylight’ (1983, p. 52). ‘I want to smash someone’s skull’ (p. 53). When Sassoon returns to this account of Thomas’s death in his postwar Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930),3 it is noteworthy that he excludes the chivalric rhetoric of the diary and downplays the murderous anger. Stripping the narrative bare of all except the essentials, the event is made to represent his initiation into death and the grief that attended it. ‘A sack was lowered into a hole in the ground. The sack was Dick. I knew death then’ (1930, p. 274). Remembering the death in the post-war climate of disillusionment calls for a rewriting of the event to sustain the message of Sassoon’s Memoirs where the dominant mood is one of unmitigated loss and ‘Dick’ is representative of every young man killed in the war. The post-war account needed to emphasise the pointlessness of the death rather than risk obscuring that message for his readers with the more complex and contradictory feelings that attended the event at the time. These narratives point both to the contradictory emotions attending grief and the way responses to the death become reformulated over time; in doing so they reveal the relationship between the narrative of mourning and the context of the event itself and its later retrieval and rewriting. On the most obvious physical level, as an officer Sassoon has the autonomy to remove himself from the group and find a place to grieve the death of a friend that would have been unavailable to a private soldier like David Jones for whom the physical subjection of the body to military discipline includes the subjection of emotional expression. Sassoon is also in a position to record the event such that writing

114 Grief in Wartime

becomes an act of mourning that allows him to define and shape his emotional response. In addition, as a combatant he can exploit his anger against the dead soldier’s killers for military ends, action unavailable to the civilian at home. That the response of the bereaved combatant is dictated by the context is further illustrated in Larry Heinemann’s Close Quarters where, in a few intense lines, he explores the relationship between combatant intimacy and the extremes of grief and rage experienced by the central character on hearing of his buddy Quinn’s death in Vietnam. No longer in combat and therefore unable to act on his anger, Heinemann’s character has a vehemently expressed desire to destroy. While Sassoon’s post-war expression of grief is concentrated into a profound sadness and disillusionment, the post-Vietnam context offers Heinemann permission to narrate a brutal and bitter anger. I didn’t read any further. Quinn was dead. Everything went flat calm. I could feel a rush of tears, tears I hadn’t felt since I was a kid – I mean, he and I stood back to back many a night. So how come? You cover me and I’ll cover you and we’ll all go home – At that moment I could have destroyed whole cities, whole civilizations, whole fucking races of people. If Quinn can’t make it back, none of us can. (p. 329) Both Sassoon, in his private mourning, and Carrington, more publicly in a post-war memoir, focus on the exclusive combatant relationship in their rituals of mourning. The split between home and front that sets combatant intimacy against civilian lack of comprehension has become a trope of war writing and is further emphasised by critics such as Fussell, Hynes and Mosse.4 Contrary to this version of the home/front binary, letters written by soldiers reveal a reliance on a shared narrative of sorrow with family and friends at home to express grief and negotiate losses at the front. Letters are, paradoxically, both a public and a private narrative of grief: the act of writing to an addressee is a public act, yet in each instance described below this public articulation of private feeling becomes a means of extending the private intimacy between writer and addressee. Moreover, in articulating his feelings, the writer often seems to be using the letter form as a vehicle for confronting his private trauma in a way that will allow him to negotiate it for himself. Since the keeping of personal diaries was forbidden for those on active service (although combatants frequently defied this rule), letters were often the only means by which combatants could order and control an essentially

Mourning and Combat 115

uncontrollable environment and event through language and form. As one soldier writing from Vietnam implies, the expression of the event in a letter could be cathartic or confessional, enabling the writer to leave the experience behind: ‘I am going to write you this letter and then I am going to try to forget it all’ (Stevens, ed., p. viii). It might be expected that the two following collections, Eric Appleby’s letters to Phyllis Kelly and Walter Robson’s letters to his wife, would draw on language specific to the larger and differing cultural discourses of the First and Second World War, respectively, as they communicate the loss of a friend to a woman at home. In fact, however, the similarities rather than the differences are striking here. This suggests that the experience of death in combat and its telling is influenced more by the immediate demands of the situation and its attendant grief and shock than by larger cultural differences in attitude to the war itself. In neither instance do we find the writer drawing on forms of public discourse as a means of consolation or on euphemistic combatant language that seeks to avoid confronting the reality of death. Nor do we find them employing any of the military language of condolence common to officers’ letters to next of kin cited in Chapter 1. Eric Appleby uses his letters to Phyllis Kelly to gain some control over his shock and grief at the death of his friend and immediate senior officer, Capt. Burrows. Over the course of several letters he describes the facts of Burrows’s death, his own proximity to the event when it happened and his subsequent difficulty in dealing with this loss. Throughout, the tone of his letters suggests that he expects Kelly to respond with understanding. She is a sympathetic addressee and, alongside Appleby, will be able to read their own narrative in the relationship between Burrows and his fiancée. There is no sense here that her role as a civilian excludes her from the experience; he writes her into his grief and subsequent loss of equilibrium. Rather than retreating from her, he relies on her more and more as he finds himself close to breakdown. On Sunday, 27 August [1916], Appleby writes: ‘I don’t quite know what I feel like today – we have just buried dear old Burrows. He died last night about 5.50 from a shrapnel wound in the back. We were both not more than a yard from him’ (Kelly, ed., p. 240). Appleby replays the scene of Burrows’s death and then notes his own reaction, moving from not knowing quite how he feels to articulating what he does feel: ‘Oh! Phyl, how very, very dreadfully sad it is. Somehow I hardly realise yet that he has gone. It somehow was all over so very terribly quickly and now there is a big, big blank, because he was a real good soul’ (p. 241).

116 Grief in Wartime

Unlike Sassoon’s desire to remove himself from society and ‘let grief have its way with him’, and engage in a private mourning ritual in his diary, Appleby’s outlet for his grieving and his memorial to Burrows is through his letters to Kelly. Having voiced his immediate personal response here, Appleby then extends his own emotional response to include sympathy for Burrows’s fiancée: ‘Oh! Phyl, it’s awful to think of his fiancée, an Irish girl from Dublin. They were to be married next month, or as soon as Burrows could get leave.’ Drawing on the image of the grieving fiancée, Appleby broadens the narrative of grief by relating it to Kelly and extending the grieving community beyond the combatant relationship at the front to a privileged griever at home. This sharing of the grief affirms his own intimacy with Burrows: ‘I had to write to her and tell her about his death, as he asked me once if I would do so, should anything happen to him.’ At the same time Appleby expresses his sense of his own shortcomings in fulfilling the obligation. ‘I just don’t know how I wrote the short note to her, and God knows I am a poor enough hand at that kind of thing at the best of times’ (p. 241). Appleby’s intense emotion in this communication conveys an unspoken awareness that this could equally have been Burrows writing the same letter to Phyllis Kelly. The correspondence over the next days and weeks creates a community of the bereaved that reflects the letter exchanges noted on Corporal Anderson’s death and in the Vera Brittain correspondence after Roland Leighton’s death discussed in Chapter 1, and similarly transcends the home/front binary. Collectively, these letters provide a poignant narrative of shared loss and anxiety, wherein young men and women struggle to confront the deaths of their contemporaries and the possibility of their own deaths. A later letter, Monday, 11 September, reinforces the presence of that community as well as the reciprocation of the shared generational experience. Appleby relates how Burrows’s death has affected his ability to function as a soldier: ‘Poor old Burrows’s death has knocked every atom of [bravery] out of me, and I simply dread the thought of going into action again’, a very different response from Sassoon’s bellicosity. He then immediately comments on Burrows’s fiancée, his projection of her grief almost an extension of his own. ‘That poor girl, the awful, terrible lonely feeling she must have in her heart now that her lover has gone.’ Noting the letter he has received from her he not only reinforces this proxy relationship, but also uses it to reinforce his relationship with Kelly. The train of thought that extends from ‘something very dear about you and I’ to ‘They were going to be married’ that he stresses twice, underscores this connection. ‘I got such a nice letter from her, thanking me for writing and telling her so soon after

Mourning and Combat 117

it had happened. I’m going to send it to you … because she said something very dear about you and I. They were going to be married as soon as he could get home; it’s terribly sad’ (p. 249). Appleby’s noting of apparently inconsequential details also make his letter a site of mourning. ‘All his kit was packed up and sent to his home. I told her every little detail I could think of about his death and his grave’ (p. 249). His sympathetic identification with Burrows’s fiancée makes him keenly aware of the necessity of providing details of the death. At the same time, whether consciously or not, he is informing Kelly of the process involved in a death at the front. If Burrows’s kit is sent to ‘his home’ then it is even more important that his fiancée, who will not have any tangible reminders of him, be given the details of his death and provided with at least an image of his grave as a focus for her mourning. It is clear from later correspondence that she responds to this, sending Appleby rosemary to put on Burrows’s grave (p. 256). Providing these details also allows Appleby to express his own grief and draws him closer to Kelly even while Burrows’s death has increased his longing for her. It further permits him to acknowledge the shared pain of those at home who wait and receive news of the death: ‘Wenley was saying he thought it must be awful for those we love at home’ (p. 248). This narrative shows that letter writing is essential to grieving and remembering, but at no point is this negotiation of loss attended by conventional platitudes surrounding death in war. As in Kelly’s final letter to Appleby on hearing of his wounding, death and grief here are narrated in terms of personal loss. We find a very similar narrative of grief shared between a combatant and a woman at home in the Second World War letters of Lance Corporal Walter Robson to his wife. In the following letter, Robson describes in detail the death of his close friend, Percy Ross, and then extends this specific example to the larger issues of loss in war. As in Appleby’s letter, Robson’s representation of death eschews any wartime platitudes that would impose meaning on the death, in spite of Percy’s Military Medal award and staff recognition of the particular action in which he is killed. In fact, Robson’s letter deliberately resists the discourse of military achievement and progress and replaces it with the losses that it has caused. The emphasis is on the human beings who are dead and those still alive who suffer from grief. 20.7.’44 This won’t be a very cheerful letter. Percy Ross was killed the other day. I’ve got his wallet here. It’s got two shrapnel holes in it, and they’ve gone through pictures of Percy as a boy in the school football

118 Grief in Wartime

team, Percy just starting work, and Percy as a soldier. Through pictures of his mother and Hilda [Percy’s wife], and through letters from Hilda. I’ve been trying to write to Hilda but can’t, poor kid, I keep thinking about her. Percy didn’t know much about it. There wasn’t a sound. A cloud of dust, a choking smell and a ringing in my ears. I expected to see them scramble clear, but there was young Percy, and young Tony Konstantinou, the Cypriot, and two others lying still on one side, two more dead on the other, and Tom Meadows and myself standing untouched in the middle. There were wounded, too, from the shell. We got the wounded into a house. I joined up with Percy, know his family, knocked about with him all this time, nearly always sharing the same tent. Donkin, the jeep ambulance driver, told me not to take it too hard. He took the wounded back, got ‘em off, returned to his jeep, and ‘whack!’ he got it too. He was another great guy. And Don, the Yank ambulance driver, went up on a mine … They were pleased way back because it was some advance, and the Brig. sent a Don-R up to tell us: ‘Well done, West Kents. You’re the most forward battalion in Italy.’ But the most forward battalion didn’t whoop, it was too desperate. And there’ll be more vacant chairs at the reunion dinner we have so often talked about … There’s terrific irony about the deaths of Percy and Tony. Two days before, we had been getting in the wounded. Percy went back with Tony on a second journey to a house where they had several bandaged up. Getting in, they found Jerry in occupation, smoking and talking to the casualties, who included German also. Percy and Tony smoked with them, got on famously. ‘They were smashing blokes,’ they said. Two helped them back with the wounded … I hear that Percy is being recommended for the M.M. [Military Medal]. He did many brave things. The award is not for one specific thing, but for what is more difficult to maintain – a high standard of behaviour all the way through. Let’s try to be brighter now. Oh dear! It’s always that now. Let’s try to be brighter. But we’ve got to do it for the same reason that we have concerts when we are out of the line. It keeps the memories and the ghosts outside the door. It’s a desperate sort of gaiety.5 When a chap is abstracted and broody over a drink you know why, and you know what he’s thinking about … I’m sorry about these letters. I’m sending mostly this sort lately. That’s because the life we lead is full of it. You can play football when you are out of the line, go to pictures, concerts, and it’s O.K. so long

Mourning and Combat 119

as you are running away from it, but when you sit down with a blank sheet of paper before you your thoughts come up, and though you don’t want to write them they are strong enough to condemn any levity. They’re like a conscience. It is necessary to develop into hard live-for-the-day fatalists. The fighting soldier must be that. Then he may exult at the advances of the army as a whole, and not brood over the losses that go with victory. But it seems to me that he gets nearer the animal then. I shall write to you tonight, something less depressing. (Robson, pp. 117–199)6 Having described Percy Ross’s death to his wife, Robson is very conscious of the degree to which the act of writing the letter reinforces the reality of the death he has witnessed. It is the opposite, he notes, of concerts, alcohol or football that are a ‘running away from it’(p. 119). Like Appleby, Robson uses the act of writing to a sympathetic female addressee here to confront and negotiate his friend’s death. In both instances the opening of the letter reflects the inescapable preoccupation with the immediate death and the consequent grief of the writer. As the specific details are narrated, the letter becomes a means of ordering and controlling an essentially uncontrollable event. After an abrupt introduction each letter opens directly with the event: ‘We buried poor old Burrows today’; ‘Percy Ross was killed the other day.’ Like Appleby, Robson goes on to claim a closeness to Percy that not only legitimises his sense of loss, but that also comes with responsibilities, particularly to the dead man’s wife or fiancée. Robson particularly stresses his ownership of Percy’s most intimate possession: ‘I’ve got his wallet here’. The wallet contains all that is left of Percy, ‘photographs of himself growing up, and of his mother and Hilda’ and ‘letters from Hilda’. In fact Robson uses the photographs and letters to narrate Percy’s brief life, ending with his relationship to his wife, Hilda. As in Appleby’s letter, the exercise of writing to the dead man’s lover is most painful. Robson confesses his need to write to Hilda, ‘but can’t’, suggesting that the act itself will be unbearable because in telling her and thus participating in her grief he must acknowledge the depth of his own grief and relive the circumstances of Percy’s death as he narrates them. Robson follows this memorialising with a factual description of Percy Ross’s death and his own role in the event. The same incredulity that we find in Appleby’s letter is present here. First he notes the shock that attends the sudden and random nature of the death as well as his own proximity to it; like Appleby, there is no sense here that the context of combat wherein soldiers

120 Grief in Wartime

expect death acts as a buffer against the shock of the event itself. ‘I expected to see them scramble clear, but there was young Percy … lying still on one side’ (p. 117). In this narrative of the actual moment of death, Robson claims the legitimacy of his loss by further asserting his close relationship with the dead man not just in the immediate context of the war, though this is foremost – a relationship that is confirmed by others: ‘Donkin, the jeep ambulance driver, told me not to take it too hard’ (p. 117). Importantly, in spite of noting Percy Ross’s Military Medal for consistent bravery, Robson makes no attempt to impose meaning on his death. Noting that ‘they were pleased way back because it was some advance’ (p. 118) in fact emphasises the remove between the immediate experience of the death of a comrade and his own near death and the staff perception of the operation ‘way back’. The seemingly abstract concept of ‘some advance’ clearly cannot compensate for the loss Robson is experiencing. ‘Well done, West Kents … but the most forward battalion didn’t whoop, it was too desperate’ (p. 118). Furthermore, the letter does not include any sense of the justness of the cause of war or sense of animosity towards the enemy German. On the contrary, it reinforces the shared humanity of the soldiers on both sides. The reference to the Military Medal, positioned immediately after the passage on the Germans is by implication ironic. He extends this irony to a heavily sarcastic ‘Let’s try to be brighter now’ clearly a comment on the possible platitudes he could write, and on the constant wartime admonition that letters should keep up the morale on both sides. Instead, however, Robson uses this ironic comment to move into a more abstract explanation of the combatant relationship with death: ‘It’s a desperate sort of gaiety. When a chap is abstracted and broody over a drink you know why, and you know what he is thinking about’ (p. 119). This image of private grief is juxtaposed with the ideal ‘fighting soldier [who can] develop into a hard live-for-the-day fatalist’ (p. 119) since it is only in leaving behind his humanity that the soldier can then ‘exult at the advances of the army as a whole, and not brood over the losses that go with victory’ (p. 119). Robson is confronting the central dilemma of combatant death: effective participation in combat demands that the soldier relinquish his humanity. To experience grief at the death of a comrade and to express that grief thus becomes an assertion of his humanity in the face of the dehumanising process necessary for military success. Reading this in the context of a later letter we can note how Robson’s rejection of the ‘animal’ to which he must be reduced to be an efficient fighting unit is directly connected to the repression of emotion

Mourning and Combat 121

demanded of bereaved civilians on the home front discussed in Chapter 2. Quoting from a letter from Percy’s wife Hilda, Robson uncovers the veneer of stoicism that is exchanged between home and front when both sides tacitly agree to obscure their real emotions on the death of a loved one, revealing at once the discrepancy between public representation and private feeling and the pressure on the individual to conform to the constructions of stoic endurance. In combat and at home, ‘being brave’ is synonymous with denying feeling and hence participates in the larger public demand for silence in the face of grief. Civilian and combatant are, thus, equally subjected to the militarised discipline of a country at war. 22.8.’44 I had a letter from Percy’s wife, Hilda, the other day. ‘I am being brave’, she writes. You wouldn’t guess my world was in ruins when I discuss the good war news with people. You would never think that as far as I am concerned it can go on for ever and ever now. (p. 130) In the situations above, the deaths are caused by enemy action. In the following letter from a marine in Vietnam to his family, the shock at the death of a friend is compounded by the fact that the death was from friendly fire, in fact from the letter writer’s own unit during a nighttime reconnaissance. The form of the letter here reveals the writer’s shaken state. It is much less coherent than the letters from Appleby or Robson. This is in part because, having announced the friend’s death, he must then explain his own implication in the death. A particular feature of the letter is the way the narrative of Lt. Smith’s death begins with the personal relationship, distances itself by moving into the language of a military report but gradually becomes confused, reflecting the confusion that happened at the time, and then again becomes more personal, reflecting grief at the death of a friend. The writer is also clearly trying to reconcile himself with his own actions: he paradoxically feels both responsible and not responsible for what had happened. On the night of April 17th while heading towards our assigned ambush site my good buddy Lt Smith was shot and killed while reconning the area out … He was not killed by a gook but by the man next to me … I was in charge of rear security … I was not informed that Lynn was up there nor was I informed that any friendlies was in that area to our right flank. I heard noises advancing on us and aimed in on it. I could then see the object coming towards us, I was going to pull

122 Grief in Wartime

the trigger but then thought of yelling out or what we call challenging. If I would of done this it could of meant two things, I would of caused the killing of all three of us or whatever it was would of responded. I was about to yell out when this new boot opened up … I then seen [Smith] fall and heard my squad leader Kwiatek yell out ‘Oh my God. No, please no.’ I then knew and ran up to where he was, he was still breathing when I got to him … I stood there for awhile crying and then finally pulled myself out of it. He finally stopped breathing after about fifteen minutes. Doc and I would take turns using mouth to mouth. He came around twice but after that it was no use. I honestly believe he is in heaven now. (Fields in Stevens, ed., p. 198) The abrupt insertion of this last claim points to the ambiguity of feeling expressed here. Is the writer using a conventional platitude out of his own need for consolation; is he affirming the goodness of his friend for his addressees and for himself; or is he confronting the finality of the death. Certainly the avowal of his intent to visit the dead man’s family that comes immediately after this statement follows a conventional pattern. He is carrying out a duty and responsibility, just as Appleby and Robson do in writing to the fiancée or wife of the dead friend. But here we also have the impression that this is even more necessary given the circumstances of the death. Jeff Fields, the writer, has not only witnessed his friend’s death, but he also feels himself directly implicated in it. At the same time, his desire to visit the family of his dead friend also serves to reinforce for his readers the strength of his friendship. Like Robson he affirms his right to grieve by focusing on the value of that friendship. Moreover, he also claims the importance of the letter as the only medium through which he can narrate the death and his family at home as the only audience for his grief: I never have met his family but I know a lot about them just as he knew of you in the same fashion. I first met Lynn when I reported into the FMF, 1st Mar. Division. We were friends ever since. I still can’t believe it’s happened. I should think I’d be use to this by now but watching him go really tore me up. You probably think that is too detailed a description to give about his death but who else can you tell things to? You can’t tell them to anyone around here because they themselves have the same worries, troubles, and problems. (p. 198) Multiple losses such as those considered above, combined with the combatant bonding necessary for psychological survival in the immediate

Mourning and Combat 123

term can result in a state of mourning resolved only by the survivor’s own death.7 To quote Leed again, the identification with the men of one’s unit … ensured that the death of every comrade would be a loss of self … Each departure could be compensated for only by an intensification of the bonds to those who remained, and this guaranteed that the next, inevitable loss would mean an even more severe, even less tolerable extinction of self. At the end of this process one’s own demise could be welcomed as a resolution to an insupportable, continuous mourning. (p. 211) As Siegfried Sassoon tells us ‘I had more or less made up my mind to die; the idea made things easier. In the circumstances there didn’t seem to be anything else to be done’ (1937/1980, p. 280). Anticipating, observing and then narrating the deaths of fellow combatants is the most obvious form of grieving in combatant writing: Sassoon’s diaries and Appleby’s, Robson’s and Field’s letters are sites of mourning for dead friends. But, as we see in Sassoon’s note of resignation above, letters may also be sites wherein soldiers confront their own deaths, impose meaning on their participation in war or offer condolence to family, friends or lovers. Thus, Geoffrey Thurlow writes a last letter to Vera Brittain on 20 April 1917 anticipating his death and drawing on Rupert Brooke’s ‘Safety’ for solace directed, it would seem, as much to him as to her: Everything seems very vague but none the less certain here & I only hope I don’t fail at the critical moment as truly I am a horrible coward: … ‘War knows no power safe shall be my going Safe tho’ all safety’s lost, safe where men fall And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.’ Rupert Brooke is great and his faith is also great. If Destiny is willing I will write later In haste G.R.Y.T. (1998, p. 338)8 Brookean abstraction is made more concrete in Pte. Rowbery’s 1941 letter to be delivered to his mother in the event of his death, but still upholds similar sentiments. He dismisses the larger abstractions of country ‘England’s a great little country – the best there is – but I cannot honestly and sincerely say “it is worth fighting for” ,’ and of freedom

124 Grief in Wartime

‘Nor can I fancy myself in the role of gallant crusader fighting for the liberation of Europe’ (Rowbery in Sanger, p. 182).9 In their place he asserts values that focus on the more immediate concrete domestic world of home and friends ‘my little world is centred around you … that is worth fighting for’ (p. 183). While Rowbery seems to suggest that his sentiments run counter to the larger official reasons for fighting promoted in wartime propaganda, in fact much of the official wartime discourse focused on the immediate world of family and place. Moreover, Rowbery wishes to offer consolation in presenting his death as a sacrifice for home, family and friends since they, and his mother in particular, are the intended recipients of the letter. In addition to echoing conventional sentiments about fighting for family, he also appears to have internalised gendered notions of mourning that focus on the grieving mother, or at least associates her with his own expression of emotion. ‘It is a letter I hoped you would never receive, as it is just a verification of that terse, black-edged card which you received some time ago, and which has caused you so much grief. It is because of this grief that I wrote this letter, and by the time you have finished reading it I hope it has done some good’ (p. 182). Rowbery’s letter is thus in essence a consolatory letter to a bereaved mother. While it was fairly common for soldiers to write such letters, Rowbery, in particular, writes as if from a third party perspective on his death. Adopting the tone of a condolence letter, he moves from the acknowledgement of grief and the fact of his death with reference to the will of God, through the affirmation of his death in a cause. The letter goes on to request no ‘flowers, no epitaph, no tears’ but proud remembrance, concluding with the consolatory assertion: ‘Remember that where I am I am quite OK’ (p. 183). Rowbery is, of course, mindful of his addressee. His concern is to mitigate his mother’s grief. At the same time, however, in writing a letter in the event of his death, he is forced to confront that fact. The letter, thus, also provides reassurance for its writer: ‘I would have liked that future to materialize but it is not what I will but what God wills, and if by sacrificing all this I leave the world slightly better than I found it I am perfectly willing to make that sacrifice’ (p. 183). Further, he claims, ‘Death is nothing final or lasting, it is just a stage in everyone’s life … and surely there is no better way of dying’ (p. 183). Nominally writing for his mother then, Rowbery’s act of writing is also an act defining the reality of his own death. While he does not explicitly claim a belief in an afterlife, the tone of the letter presupposes his own continuation – at no point does the letter acknowledge death as extinction: ‘providing

Mourning and Combat 125

I know that you are not grieving over me I shall be perfectly happy’ (p. 183). Thus, the acknowledgement of his death falls short of an acknowledgement of his own annihilation. Whether this is because he cannot acknowledge this to himself, or whether it is because he is writing to console his mother cannot be determined, but he brings together religion and wartime rhetoric of sacrifice to impose meaning on his own death in what is nominally a letter of condolence to his mother on his own death. Appleby, Robson and Rowbery use letters to communicate death in combat to an individual outside the combatant front. Doing so creates a community that shares mourning across boundaries defined as home and front. The artificiality of such binaries is further questioned when we note how the idea of the domestic or ‘home’ front is challenged when family members – fathers and sons, brothers and sisters – are together at the front. Thus, brothers often belonged to the same company or even platoon, nurses near the frontline constantly dreaded seeing a family member or lover brought into their hospital, and fathers could be close by when sons were wounded or killed, particularly in the case of career military families. Unlike Appleby and Robson who are narrating death within the first shocked hours after the event and employing the letters as a means of control, the wartime memoir of Canadian Chaplain Canon Scott, The Great War as I Saw It (1922), is written with a purpose beyond the fragmented recording of immediate events we find in letters and diaries. Intended to bring his experience of the First World War Western Front home to Canadian civilians, the memoir, justifying the war and the Canadian part in it and offering pastoral support for the bereaved, is consciously constructed to combine the Christian sacred with the concept of military purpose, duty and sacrifice. At the same time, more specifically, Scott’s account of his son’s death in action uses concrete detail and a sense of immediacy that offers his Canadian civilian readers the vicarious experience of finding a ‘missing’ son, participating in his burial and mourning at a graveside. While for both Appleby and Robson articulating their emotion is essential to negotiating their own grief as well as communicating it to a loved one at home, by his own acknowledgement, Scott prefers not to show private emotions, particularly as he records the difficult few days surrounding the news of his son’s death and the search for his grave. In contrast to the willingness to reveal emotion we find in the letters or in Carrington’s and Vaughan’s memoirs, Scott’s emotional reserve sets him apart from most personal accounts. He locates such stoicism in the immediate demands of the war, affirming soon after his son’s death: ‘We

126 Grief in Wartime

were out to fight the German, and on that one object we had to concentrate all our thoughts to the obliteration of private emotions’ (p. 105). Unlike Appleby or Robson, as a chaplain Scott positions himself as a model of the appropriate religious, patriotic and masculine response to death. At the same time, gaps appear in his narrative that do reveal his grief. While his memoir may succeed in obliterating any overt signs of sorrow, and his narrative of grief at his son’s death is written obliquely, at the same time the pain of his loss is evident throughout his account. Recounting the moment at which he receives news of his son’s death he avoids revealing his private feelings. Instead, his narrative displaces his own grief onto the visible emotion displayed by an ‘old mother’. On hearing the news of his son’s death the old man with whom he is billeted ‘shook my hand and said again “Have courage, my brother”. I went downstairs later on and found his old mother sitting in her chair with tears streaming down her cheeks. I shall never cease to be grateful to those kind, simple people at that time’ (p. 101; emphasis added). Scott does not relate his own feelings in the interval of being told of his son’s death and ‘later on’ when he goes downstairs. The version of militaristic masculinity he espouses throughout his memoir forces him to displace the visible manifestations of grief onto the old mother whose gender and role gives her permission to weep publicly. A short time later he takes up the narrative again and recounts his search for his son’s body. In contrast to the stoic tone of the earlier passage, looking over the waste of shell holes from the frontline trench, he writes, ‘I told the runner who was with me that, if I stayed there six months, I was not going to leave till I had found that grave’ (p. 108). The narrative of grief omitted by Scott and only hinted at in the terse ‘later on’ is here translated into the somewhat frantic searching for his son’s grave, digging to identify the body of his son and returning to the trenches under fire. Scott’s emotion is visible in his description of his actions rather than in any direct acknowledgement of feeling. On identifying his son by finding his ‘left hand, with his signet ring upon it’, Scott sends the runner who has helped him find the grave into a shell hole because ‘the Germans were sniping us’ and recounts ‘I read the burial service and then took off the ring’ (p. 108). Later, when his son’s body is removed to a cemetery, he notes being ‘thankful to have been able to have him buried in a place which is known and can be visited’, but at the same time he feels compelled to offer consolation to parents ‘whose sons lie in unknown graves’ using language that conflates the concept of military victory with the Christian concept of victory over death in the resurrection: ‘the grave seems to be a small and minor thing in view of

Mourning and Combat 127

the glorious victory and triumphant life which is all that really matters’ (p. 109). Although the narratives examined above reveal a conscious need to impose a mourning ritual on the death of a soldier through diary, letter or memoir, as noted at the beginning of the chapter, combatant grief is complicated by a necessary suspension of emotion in combat and the ensuing legacy of unresolved or, as Shatan defines it, ‘impacted’ grief (1978, p. 51). McManners explains: ‘In war friends are killed without warning, and in shocking and deeply upsetting ways. The danger and impetus of the battle makes the process of normal grieving impossible. Survivors may feel anger, but, in the tiredness, fear, danger and speed of combat, have no time to reflect on and come to terms with these deaths’ (p. 369). It is rare in combatant writing to find a conscious recognition and contemplation of this shutting down of affect that McManners describes, but in his memoir of the war in Italy from 1943 to 1944, David Cole notes his own experience and the way the emotions that attend grief are ‘suspended’ until one has ‘time to think’. Hearing news of his friend and cabinmate Graham Turnbull’s death, he writes, ‘I felt stunned … But then, as another mortar bomb dropped in the lane, I felt all sentiment draining away. In its place surged a sudden reconcentration on the immediately pressing matters of the work in hand and my own survival. Was this, I wondered afterwards, part of the armour that battle gave us? How else indeed could we go on?’ (p. 33). After another friend is killed, he notes: ‘He was a very nice sort [I said in a letter a few days later]. It is so hard to realise that all these friends are really finished. I don’t think we can appreciate the fact until we get time to think and remember. One grows horribly accustomed to death and the thought of death’ (p. 67). For many soldiers the ‘time to think and remember’ or to speak their stories would not come until long after the war, in some instances as much as 50 years later. In particular, the social climate after the Second World War, both in Britain and in the United States, was not conducive to revelations of trauma.10 In the aftermath of the war, the focus was on reconstruction. In Britain this meant reconstruction at the level of physical rebuilding as well as the demand for political change. In America the GI Bill and subsequent economic prosperity focused on recovery. There was little room for looking back and, unlike the First World War, victory included a strong moral justification for the war. Although films like Samuel Goldwyn’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) showed the need for civilian sensitivity to the problems of integration for returning combatants, it also promoted and reflected the dominant cultural idea

128 Grief in Wartime

that psychological recovery took place in the privacy of a serene domesticity facilitated by the love of a sympathetic woman. This left little room in public discourse for a combatant voice that could articulate the trauma and grief that attended the ‘good’ war. Moreover, unlike the First World War, British civilians had undergone their own trauma in the bombing of 1940–2, years of shortages, evacuation of children and further bombings in the later part of the war. Combatants could no longer claim to be part of an exclusive community based on shared trauma at the front. While this situation was not true of the United States, American veterans’ recent accounts of their return emphasise a need to put the war behind them and focus on jobs and families. Two recently published collections of oral histories from American troops serving in the Pacific and Europe in the Second World War are evidence that combatants carried their intense grief for lost comrades home and throughout the rest of their lives.11 The rise in oral histories and the recognition of their importance reveal how such interviews become sites of mourning that were unavailable to these men on their return from the war. Recalling, in the 1990s, his part in the assault landing on Gautu in the Pacific in 1942, Robert Moore’s grief for those killed is still raw: ‘It had never bothered me seeing dead people I hadn’t known, but when you see your buddies there with their heads blown open [chokes up] … it’s a different story’ (O’Donnell, 2002, p. 25). As in many veterans’ accounts, Moore focuses on a specific friend to represent the dead: ‘I remember Johnny Johns … a real nice fellow … shot in the head, brains all over the place. I’ll never forget this. How can you forget it?’ (p. 25). Moore goes on to recount his visit to Iwo in 1945 where he finds that the roster of dead ‘included most of the men I served with in the 1st Battalion. I was one of the very few that survived. So I found a quiet place and cried. I still cry about it’ (p. 25). It is clear here that the visit to Iwo cemetery, while it is a site of mourning for Moore and a place that allows expression of the grief that was necessarily suspended in combat, did not offer closure; rather, it reinforced his sense of loss to the extent that, more than 50 years later, he still ‘cr[ies] about it’. Thus, the interview itself becomes a site of mourning, a place where suspended and private grief can be publicly acknowledged. Another veteran of the Pacific War is even more specific as he recalls the death of his ‘close friend, Ike Arnold’. [choking up, Taber said, ‘I’d rather not go through this’, but then continued] He called me Tabe. He said very calmly ‘Tabe, I’ve been hit’. I turned to him. He was off to my side a little, and I said, ‘Where’

Mourning and Combat 129

He said ‘In the throat’. He said no more than that, and he was dead. He must have been hit in the jugular vein or artery. Blood just gushed out. I had my arm underneath him, across his back, and I lowered him down to the ground. [crying] There’s nothing you could do. He was a very good friend of mine. I looked around, and I was all by myself. (O’Donnell, 2002, p. 51) Narrating in detail the death and burial of a comrade during fighting on Leyte, James Holzem concludes, ‘That was very hard for me. This is the first time I ever told this story and why I don’t talk about Leyte. [crying]’ (O’Donnell, 2002, p. 158). In addition to the trauma and grief that attends witnessing the death of a friend, veterans such as Emmett Hays also acknowledge guilt and grief; Hays carries guilt and grief since he killed a wounded Japanese soldier. Central to his narration is his desire to reveal the war he experienced and in doing so to dispel the reworking of the war through popular post-war images: ‘I cut a guy’s throat with a knife. That hurts [chokes up] I’ve never really talked about this to anyone. The only reason that I am now is if someone doesn’t relate it the way it actually was instead of the Hollywood version, it’s going to be lost’ (O’Donnell, 2002, p. 137). John Lindgren’s desire to return to Corregidor 50 years after he had served there in the war and spend 3 weeks in remembrance for friends who had died illustrates both the lasting nature of the loss of comrades and the need to undertake a private mourning ritual that was impossible at the time: I went back to Corregidor on the fiftieth anniversary and stayed on the island for about three weeks. One thing that bothered me very much was how young these guys were. I was the oldest guy in the platoon by far. I was twenty-three. These guys were seventeen, eighteen – high school kids. That’s why I went back. I just wanted to try and really remember them. I wanted to have the experience as close to what we had that night as I could. I spent the night in that room alone. I relived that night and thought about the names of these guys. I just wanted to see if I could sit there and remember them – not so much what we did but the people that died there. (O’Donnell, 2002, pp. 205–6) As the ‘good’ war, the Second World War may have precluded narratives of grieving that included anger, ugliness and disillusionment, but, particularly after the revelations of the death camps in Europe and of the

130 Grief in Wartime

treatment of prisoners of war by the Japanese, it could offer meaning for allied combatant deaths. Because of the contradictory political climate within which the Vietnam War was fought, at least from late 1967 onwards, representations of private grief in letters, poetry and memoirs often take on a public and political dimension where the questioning of the value of the war itself, the United States’ part in the war, the combatants’ participation in the war and their presence and behaviour all come under scrutiny. Although young men may have gone to Vietnam influenced by their fathers’ participation in the Second World War, the breakdown in understanding between combatant and non-combatant and the anger against a generation that had sent its children into a hell not of their own making show Vietnam writers reaching back not to the second but to the First World War for a tradition within which they could express such dislocation, grief and anger. For combatants who perceived the war and their role in it to be invalid, death in war could not be accompanied by the high moral tone more legitimately employed in their fathers’ war. In effect then, death in war could be stripped of the language that worked to obscure its brutality and pain in the same way that lack of censorship in reporting allowed the camera lens to be pointed at death and injury in a way unprecedented in any earlier war. During and immediately after the First World War, combatant poetry demonstrated the extent to which the form could contain the ugliness, violence and absurdity of frontline conditions. Vietnam combatant poets found in this writing something approaching their own condition, yet they also took the questions surrounding ‘poetry and pity’ that Wilfred Owen had wrestled with further, interrogating the very act of creating poetry out of war. The medic and poet Basil Paquet deliberately invokes Wilfred Owen’s poetry to question poetry’s ability to articulate pointless dying. In ‘Morning – a Death’, his claim ‘I grow tired of kissing the dead’ evokes for his reader the futility of his job both as a medic and as a poet. As Ringnalda concludes, ‘Surely, part of Paquet’s point is that you can’t turn war and murder into spondees’ (p. 162). Each attempt at rescue, medical or poetic, is defeated at its inception: I’ve blown up your chest for thirty minutes And crushed it down an equal time And still you won’t warm to my kisses. (1–3) … I’ve scanned the rhythms of your living Forced half-rhymes in your silent pulse And the cesura’s called mid-line, half-time, Incomplete, but with a certain finality. (11–14)

Mourning and Combat 131

His poetic gestures are blown back at him like the breath he forces into dead lungs. Instead of the transfiguring power of ‘greater love’ we find in Owen, there is only the physical event: the chemical decay of the body, ‘you wash out pure chemical’. Likewise, Owen’s homoerotic imagery can mourn the death and injury of the male body at the same time celebrating it (‘Red lips are not so red / As the stained stones kissed by the English dead’, 1–2, ‘Greater love’), but for Paquet the intimations of the erotic only reinforce the futility and absurdity of his relationship with the dead: I’ve sucked and puffed on your Metal No. 8 throat for so long And twice you’ve moaned under my thrusts. (4–6) I have thumped and blown into your kind too often I grow tired of kissing the dead. (27–8) In admitting no resurrection of the dead, actual or ideological, the importance of Paquet’s poem lies in its rejection of the constructions of masculinity necessary for the perpetuation of war, particularly those constructions of ‘greater love’, which rewrites death in war as Christ-like sacrifice and can be fulfilled only in the exclusively male environment of combat. In this context, Paquet’s embracing of the feminine, what Chattarji calls ‘the life principle embodied in … women, a fulfilling eros’, is a radical gesture (p. 115). ‘I would sooner lift a straying hair from her wet mouth / Than a tear of elephant grass from your slack lips’ (51–2). Ultimately, Paquet’s mourning is to reject all forms of mourning that offer to transfigure the dead. Only when death in war is stripped of a transfiguring ideology and recognized as the annihilation of young men can we see it for what it is: ‘You are dead just as finally / As your mucosity dries on my lips’ (24–5).12 Confronting the reader with a code of masculinity that is perpetuated through the ‘shattered chests’ and ‘broken lips’ he has tried in vain to revive, Paquet’s achievement lies in his ability to move beyond the need to allay grief with constructions of meaning that find value in such death. The homoerotic reflexivity of ‘kissing the dead’ is revealed to be no more than that: an absurdly futile gesture. This approach allows him to reject war by collapsing the binaries of masculinity and femininity that perpetuate it. In place of the myth of ‘greater love’ that asks men to die for one another, he reaches for a life-giving erotic: ‘I’d rather be making babies / Than tucking so many in.’

5 ‘Can’t Face the Graves Today’: Nurses Mourn on the Western Front

I sat for a moment at the table with my head in my hands and wept for the pity of it all. (Smith, p. 299) When the time came to leave I went to the churchyard. Le B. went with me. He held my hand and did not say a word as we looked over the rows and rows of crosses. I was beyond feeling anything except the numbness of grief. (Millard, p. 111) These two accounts from volunteer nurses on the Western Front in the First World War, a Briton and an American, present a similar response to the news of the Armistice: not the joy and exhilaration of victory, or even relief at the end of the slaughter, but an overwhelming burden of grief at the loss that they had witnessed and which in that witnessing had become intrinsic to their experience. Women’s writing from the ‘front’, by professional and voluntary nurses, whether in the form of diaries or letters written during the war or memoirs composed later, reveals not only how grief marked their response to the official end of war, but also how it was intrinsic to the daily experience of nursing, and shows that the recording itself was an act of mourning. Thus, for example, the diary letters of nursing sister K. Luard, written at regular intervals throughout her time in France and Belgium and published in two consecutive volumes as Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front 1914–1915 (1915) and Unknown Warriors (1930), mourn overtly through the commemorative framework imposed on the published collections and indirectly in her immediate accounts of individual deaths.1 It becomes clear when reading nurses’ writing from the First World War that narrating their war experience, whether during the war in the form of letters or diaries or post-war as memoir or autobiography, is a form of elegy driven by the need to retrieve the multiple deaths from anonymity. 132

Nurses Mourn on the Western Front 133

Under the conditions of nursing near the frontlines in hospital, Casualty Clearing Station or ambulance train, there is little time to know the dying and dead and little or no time to grieve, but the writing comes out of an urgent need to remember and to record, whether at the very private level of a diary, or much more publicly for the general readership of a published memoir. Yet, as with combatant writing, the act of recording is restrained by the traumatic conditions as well as by censorship during the war. Nurses such as Mary Borden bringing together stories and fragments written during the war and retrospectively in The Forbidden Zone (1929) and Luard recording on an almost daily basis are as conscious of what cannot be told as they are of what they can write. Borden prefaces her work by acknowledging, ‘I have blurred the bare horror of facts and softened the reality in spite of myself, not because I wished to do so, but because I was incapable of a nearer approach to the truth.’ While ‘incapable’ can be read on many levels, it particularly suggests the limitations inherent in translating an experience she defines as ‘a great confusion’ into an ordered and linear form. Luard defines her limitations as arising out of the practicalities of the nursing environment, reminding us that frontline nursing is not compatible with writing: ‘I could tell you stories for hours … but they’ll be lost because this type of life allows only work and sleep’ (1930, p. 159). At the same time, however, her impetus to remember individual deaths and in those deaths to remind us of all that she cannot record results in hundreds of pages written in the interim of nursing and administration, including writing break-the-news-letters to next of kin. Nurses witnessing wounding and death on a massive scale have been almost entirely overlooked as mourners of the wartime dead. Paradoxically, as women, wartime culture expects them to take on the emotional labour of mourning, but as nurses they are required to remain emotionally distant from the dying around them. Yet, it is clear from their narratives, in letters, diaries, memoirs and poetry, that the legacy of their work is grief. Moreover, unlike women on the home front who grieve for individual losses of family and friends, nurses’ mourning is both individual and collective and, like combatants, bound up with the traumatic environment wherein they are both witnessing and participating in terrible suffering and death on a vast scale. At the same time, they themselves are not immune from close personal deaths of family and friends at the front or, in some cases, of fellow nurses and doctors. As noted earlier, the connection between such experience and the need to mourn has been explored in the late twentieth century by

134 Grief in Wartime

Chaim Shatan and Robert J. Lifton among others.2 Yet, long before late-twentieth-century definitions of post-traumatic stress disorder and before women were even considered to have legitimately participated in war, the diaries and memoirs of nurses writing in the First World War reveal this connection between grief and traumatic experience; mourning individual deaths and the larger loss of assumptive reality destroyed by the war is, for them, essential in bearing witness to the massive scale of injury and death. Erickson defines the response to trauma thus: The classical symptoms of trauma range from feelings of restlessness and agitation at one end of the emotional scale to feelings of numbness and bleakness at the other. Traumatized people often scan the surrounding world anxiously for signs of danger, breaking into explosive rages and reacting with a start to ordinary sights and sounds, but at the same time all that nervous activity takes place against a numbed gray background of depression, feelings of helplessness, and a general closing off of the spirit as the mind tries to insulate itself from further harm. Above all, trauma involves a continual reliving of some wounding experience in daydreams and nightmares, flashbacks and hallucinations. (Erikson, p. 228) Without access to the language of post-trauma stress, Lesley Smith’s memoir Four Years Out of Life articulates these characteristic responses when she revisits her psychic state of November 1918 more than 10 years later: I’m twenty-seven and I’m damned if I am ever going to feel anything again. I’ve seen what can happen to human bodies. I’ve see the ultimate horror of a fine spirit being degraded, and maddened by suffering to the level of a brute, and what is there left that should move me to tears? … I used to expect to find something lovely waiting round every turn … now I am afraid that, if I open the door, I shall find a maniac crawling along the floor; if I think, I shall remember a dying man fallen out of bed. Death and agony can come out of the sky … and I’ve lost confidence in a universe where these things happen … Life is too dangerous … I used to think that unreason and mania and crawling fear were outside of real life and had no relation to it. Now I see that the night is always there waiting at the end of the day; they are

Nurses Mourn on the Western Front 135

inextricably one and there is only a thin crust of make-believe between sanity and madness, between ease of mind and uncontrolled horror. (pp. 282–4) Although the last months of the war precipitate Smith’s confession here, the co-existing tension between breakdown and the necessary control demanded in the nursing environment is a recurring theme in nurses’ wartime writing. The writing itself, whether 10 years after the experience as in Smith’s memoir or the ongoing recording of events as they happen, is the means by which these women can both confront the experience and gain a measure of control over it, and in doing so, express the grief that was necessarily suppressed in the immediate situation. At times, as we will see in accounts by Borden, Smith and Millard, that included articulating their breaking down in the face of unbearable stress. Further, in their publishing of these accounts, the writers’ private experience becomes a public site of mourning and commemoration. As it does so, it also offers ways of resisting the dominant pro-war rhetoric that idealises death in war and that includes nurses as idealised figures in that narrative. At the level of daily experience, letters and diaries reveal how nurses struggle constantly with conflicting narratives that can define men impersonally through the medical language of wounds: ‘heads and knees and mangled testicles’ (p. 60) as Borden puts it, or as suffering and dying individuals who must be remembered and mourned, their individuality documented and catalogued as K. Luard does in her series of diary letters from the front: ‘You should see my Reggie, Walter, Joseph, Harry and Billy’ (1930, p. 77). Such documentation reveals the further contradictions inherent in the relationship between nursing and grieving: the nurse’s daily experience positions her as witness to and participant in men’s dying. Moreover, her work is itself paradoxical: she struggles against death while at times desiring it as she watches men in agony; her nursing makes her a conspirator in the perpetuation of injury when the care she gives causes excruciating pain in the immediate instance and ultimately results in the men being returned to the trenches. These contradictions are silenced in public representations of the nurse. As propaganda supported the war by narrating combat in the language of heroism and sacrifice which subsumed individual situations and responses under a single iconographic image of the soldier, so nurses, in their role as caregivers to the wounded, were represented as part of this picture. As already noted in the ‘Introduction’, Philip D’Alton reminds us that ‘the essentially nightmarish qualities of the

136 Grief in Wartime

experience [of warfare] must be transmuted into affirmations of socially positive values’, ‘turn[ing] a human experience into an idealized one [such that] [d]eath in war becomes iconic’ (p. 48). In public representations then, nurses and their relationship with their patients are idealised, drawing on the heightened wartime versions of masculinity and femininity. The nurse and wounded combatant thus become a tableau wherein the angel of mercy or Marian figure tends and mourns the allies’ gloriously dying son.3 Shirley Millard comments ironically on the ideal of war nursing she took with her on leaving the United States to sail to France: ‘I visualized myself … aiding and comforting the wounded, or kneeling beside dying men in shell-torn No Man’s Land … gliding silently among hospital cots … lifting bound heads to moisten pain-parched lips with water’ (p. 4). But, as with combat, such images veiled the real experience of terrible mutilation and general messiness that is the nurses’ world. Millard’s diary entry soon after her arrival in March 1918 records, ‘Terribly busy. It is all so different than I imagined. No time to write’ (p. 10). Her post-war commentary explains, There was no need to write. The memory remains indelible. Thirtyfive hundred cots filled with wounded men … hundreds of wounded men lay out there in the cold and rain, sometimes for three days and three nights, without blankets, before we could make room for them inside. From the black shadows under the trees came their moans, their cries and sobs. (pp. 10–11) Narratives of sacrifice stressed care and concern, but conveyed no sense of the real nature of the work described by nurses like Millard. Thus, even after the war, writing the preface to Luard’s Unknown Warriors, Field Marshall Viscount Allenby remembers the nurses’ work through gendered abstractions that uphold an ideal at odds with Luard’s own narrative of exhaustion, physical danger and witnessing of terrible injury and death: ‘I remember well those days and nights of bitter fighting, and how crushing was the burden which fell upon the gentle women who tended our wounded. I look back, still, with admiration on the amazing endurance and self-sacrificing devotion of those Nursing Sisters in their work of mercy’ (p. vii). Yet, women themselves wrote war through such heightened rhetoric, reflecting the public language that constructed war in these terms, particularly in the first year. In examining the nurse narratives from France and Belgium, and the language in which they write war and death and through which they construct themselves and the men they nurse, we

Nurses Mourn on the Western Front 137

need to consider the raised rhetoric that persisted in British and American civilian women’s and volunteer nurses’ letters and memoirs from France and Belgium early in the war. While women witnessed the effects of war in the shelling of towns and the deaths and displacement of civilians, many of them continued to describe the war in an elevated patriotic language that simplified the war narrative into one of heroism and courage set against danger, a combination that aroused a level of excitement that at times reached a kind of religious fervour. Thus, Louise Mack idealises the relationship between a young French woman and her husband: ‘those wild and passionate struggles for life and death between the Allies and Germans, which soon – God in his mercy forbid – may fling this smiling, fair headed boy out into the sad dark glory of death on the battlefield, leaving his little one fatherless’ (p. 265). ‘How superb will be the coming generation, begotten under such glorious circumstances, with nothing missing from their magnificent heritage. Love, Patriotism, Courage, Devotion, Sacrifice, Death, and Glory’ (p. 267). Even as late as 1917, the American Marian Baldwin’s letters elevate the French women under a collective image of feminine courage: ‘When their men are home on permission they put on a bold, cheerful front, and unless one looks at their eyes one would never know the crucifixion that is going on behind that calm, sweet exterior’ (p. 21). In spite of describing ‘the pathetic wrecks that limp back from those trenches’, she can still write of America’s entry into the war: ‘and yet our country and its honor never seems half so precious just now, or half so worth suffering and dying for. It is all so inspiring and so tiring’ (p. 21). Likewise, Esther Root writes to her father on seeing the grave of an American aviator: ‘I felt a warm pride to think of this corner of a foreign field (to paraphrase Rupert Brooke) that is forever America’ (Root and Crocker, p. 244). But it is not only women relatively remote from the witnessing of death and injury who construct war in such terms; several nurses writing letters home early in the war find themselves caught between the violence to the human body they are witnessing and the need to rewrite that violence in a way that confers dignity on the men’s suffering and on their own role as nurse. It is clear that in some instances the letters are written with the express purpose of eliciting support for the war effort, particularly in the very immediate way of requesting medical supplies. Such letters deliberately create an image of service and cheerful duty on the part of the nurse and stoic and courageous sacrifice on the part of the combatants who are her patients. Thus, the letters of ‘Mademoiselle Miss’ affirm her own ‘usefulness’ in spite of ‘the blood and anguish in which I move’ (p. 98). The overall tone of the collection

138 Grief in Wartime

emphasises the retrieval of meaning out of death and suffering, and specifically meaning for herself. In the acknowledged face of multiple deaths when ‘It is all like a weird dream, laughter (for they laugh well the soldiers) and blood and death and funny episodes, and sublime also, all under the autumn stars’ (p. 27). The one death she chooses to narrate is exemplary of the ‘good’ death: After Extreme Unction he pressed my hand, and suddenly a marvellous change passed over his face as if it had grown white and luminous.4 ‘Mama’, he murmured, ‘Louis’, then fainter and sweeter – ‘O mon bon Dieu’, and it was over, and nothing remained but a radiating smile. I went to lay him away among the heroes.’(pp. 62–3) While on several occasions ‘Mademoiselle Miss’ does approach a description of the injury and death she witnesses, she veers away and moves to retrieve value out of suffering to the extent that the suffering becomes an abstraction: it is, she says, a duty to be ‘joyous’. ‘Gauze, cotton, gloves, and needles all there! Thanks, thanks, and God bless you! It’s a new year of promise. I believe we ought to be joyous no matter if men do try to make it a vale of tears, and the more suffering I see, the more I think so’ (p. 57). Here the very concrete images of suffering, ‘needles, gloves, gauze’ (images Mary Borden makes into concrete instruments of torture5) are rewritten as emblems of promise – the writer moves away from the reminder of actual suffering they carry into abstraction that transmutes suffering into a positive force. In the same way that this nursing makes her useful and gives meaning to her existence, it also allows for exemplary death and makes meaning out of suffering. This same meaning making is equally the focus of Elizabeth Walker Black’s Hospital Heroes. Even while she is more direct about the exhausting conditions of her nursing during a push, ‘I was too tired to worry about the poor dying blessés or the danger. The feeling of it all being a dreadful nightmare from which we must awaken acted as a narcotic’ (p. 207), a few pages later the suffering she witnesses offers her life a purpose that it had previously lacked, turning the physical act of nursing into a quasi-religious ecstasy: I would stagger back at the end of my twenty-four hours to report, with an apron and often a face spattered with blood and mud, and yet a spirit radiant and unweary with service. A feeble whisper of thanks from the lips of a man suffering untellable agony or the unspoken gratitude in dying eyes made me realize that the girl who

Nurses Mourn on the Western Front 139

had started so humbly and ignorantly to be in a supply-room was making good in real work. (p. 219) While all the nurses’ accounts find them to some degree trapped between a need to impose meaning on suffering and offer dignity to the dying, and to bear witness to what British nurse K. Luard calls the ‘insanity’ of the larger situation that causes the suffering, some writers very consciously resist idealised language that might obscure the real suffering. Thus, the anonymous author of Letters from a French Hospital relates the real conditions of the wounded in a letter in order to make them known to a French public that does not seem to care: ‘I do not care if this letter is censored here or not, it is time someone told them the truth’ (Anon. p. 29). She rejects the self-indulgent tone of ‘Mademoiselle Miss’ and Black in the direct ‘You will realize how hardened I am getting when I tell you that I got through the day’s work without poisoning every wound with my tears’ (p. 29). She refuses to impose meaning on the deaths of two brothers who are family friends or engage in any language that offers consolation: ‘It is no use trying to cheer up, to remember only how happy they were. I can’t remember anything nice. My thoughts of little C. are always a gray sea and his floating face, and M. I see face downwards in the mud’ (p. 69). Healing men only to have them sent back to the trenches or hoping for the deaths of men who were dying slowly and in agony necessarily generated narratives of death that conflicted with the abstract platitudes. But if death cannot be couched in the discourse of patriotic sacrifice, nobility and courage, then how can dignity be conferred on suffering and dying. Moreover, how can the nurse affirm the meaning of her own role confronted with what Borden calls her complicity in the ‘conspiracy’ that heals the wounded only to send them back to the front.6 As the writer of Letters from a French Hospital tells us, ‘It is one of the trials of my present life that the sooner I get their suffering relieved, the nearer they are to là-bas’ [‘down there’, that is, in the trenches] (p. 38). The American author of 88 Bis and V.I.H: Letters from Two Hospitals more emphatically notes, ‘It’s so sickening, patching up people to go back to the horror of the front’ (p. 21).7 Elizabeth Walker Black is caught between her growing sense of futility and her desire to recognise the stoicism of the poilus. Passing lines of soldiers relieving returning troops she wonders ‘if anything was worth all this. It seemed so futile, all this struggling and misery in order that one army of frozen men could take some snowy uncomfortable holes in the ground away from another army, equally wretched’ (p. 124). Yet she ends her book with the image

140 Grief in Wartime

of the poilus ‘with souls not weakened but exalted by war’ (p. 222). And as she watches the stretcher bearers ‘carrying shattered pieces of these same poilus to be patched up and sent back to the trenches’, she is unable to sustain her previous resistance and employs the rhetoric of Lord Kitchener: ‘The best soldier is the healed wounded who returns to the front’ (p. 223). This application of official discourse to provide closure at the end of her narrative draws attention to the nurses’ dilemma in writing wartime death. To admit to the absurdity and insanity of two groups of men trying to take over each others’ holes in the ground is also to question her role in the process of their healing. Black’s recognition of the futility of the war is set beside her unwillingness to interrogate Kitchener’s language, alerting us to the contradictions in nurses’ writing that we have already noted in women’s writing outside the official war zone. In witnessing war and writing not only to recount their own experience but also to remember and grieve for the death and suffering that surrounded them, the impetus behind many of these women’s memoirs is to honour those who suffered and retrieve some meaning from that suffering. When the dominant language reflects the martial ideology of heroic endurance rather than an acknowledgement of the absurdity of their deaths, we are made aware of the dilemma of finding an appropriate language through which to remember and grieve. As nurses witnessed men reduced to what Lesley Smith calls ‘abortions’ by traumatic injury, emasculated both literally and figuratively, their knowledge of the multiple agonising ways men can die in war was no longer compatible with heroic versions of death on the battlefield. However, even while such knowledge destroys for women like Luard and Smith the notion that death in war can be narrated through abstractions like sacrifice and glory, they often employ conventional discourses of courage and endurance in an effort, it appears, to restore these men’s lost masculinity and dignity. When injury can be rewritten as a narrative of courage, it becomes difficult for the reasons behind that injury to be interrogated. K. Luard is one nurse who does manage to confer dignity on the dying and elegise the dead and at the same time convey the magnitude and absurdity of injury and death. She achieves this primarily through recording her nursing conditions and the deaths, day by day, of men she nurses. At the same time, however, while Luard eschews the heightened rhetoric of Black’s exemplary death, for example, her writing does show an internalising of the masculine, military code of courage and stoicism in the face of pain and death. The problem of employing an alternative

Nurses Mourn on the Western Front 141

narrative lies in the gendering of wartime roles, as Higonnet importantly notes of the dilemma for women writers: ‘If she [the writer] frankly decodes the lies for which lives are being senselessly sacrificed, she may be accused of betraying the dignity of the dead.’8 Although Luard does very plainly confront the ‘insanity’ of the war, when it comes to the site of mourning that is her diary, she is compelled to remember in terms of dignity and courage. Luard’s accounts in the form of a diary letters document her time nursing on ambulance trains, at Casualty Clearing Stations and in hospitals on the Western Front. While all the entries were written during the war, the 1930 publication of Unknown Warriors allows Luard to impose a formal memorial framework in an opening dedication to all those ‘which have no memorial’ quoting the official British post-war mourning text: “And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been … Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.’ Ecclesiasticus xliv. The earlier Diary of a Nursing Sister (1915) imposes a context of grieving and memorialising by framing the collection as a whole and individual sections with quotations from Brooke, Kipling and others. The title page includes lines from Brooke’s ‘The soldier’: Naught broken save this body, lost but breath Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there, But only agony, and that has ending; And the worst friend and enemy is but Death. Yet Luard achieves her memorial more through her narrative of the injuries and deaths of the individuals in her care than through the artifice of the framework. Her diaries document the daily occurrence of deaths, but they are not anonymous wounds or medical conditions; Luard peoples her pages with real individuals. Even while, for the sake of privacy, she may refer only to initials, ‘Capt. C’, or a name based on occupation, ‘the little Flying Boy’ or by nationality, ‘My Fritz’ or ‘Jock’, these individuals appear and reappear over several pages as she documents their individual injuries, personalities and sometimes the larger contexts of their lives in the form of friends and family members who visit or to whom she must write what she terms ‘the-break-the-news-letter’ telling next of kin of their deaths. A close look at Luard’s two collections allows us to examine the extended narrative of mourning that is woven into the daily documentation of her experience. Luard’s focus on the medical needs of her patients extends to a personal intimacy that

142 Grief in Wartime

provides us with the most sustained remembering of the war dead that we find in any of the nursing memoirs. It also results in a noteworthy negation of self that is intrinsic to the nursing ideal, but which, in comparison to the memoirs noted earlier, is completely lacking in self-congratulation. She comments matter of factly: ‘It is the second night running we haven’t had our clothes off – though we did lie down the night before. Last night we each had a four-hour shift to lie down, when all the worst were seen to’ (1915, p. 94). She immediately goes on to focus on the men: ‘One man died at 6 A.M. and another is dying: many as usual are delirious, and the haemorrhage was worse than ever; it is frightfully difficult to stop it with these bad wounds and compound fractures’ (1915, p. 94). The imperative behind her regular diary entries, made even during intense periods of work and the stress of being under shell fire, seems to be to record as many individuals as possible, particularly her dead. Within these narratives we read Luard’s own subtext of caring for and attempting to remember and grieve for the ongoing deaths. Although Luard is on one level writing to an addressee in Britain for the purpose of narrating her experiences, the act of recording is also a painful form of revisiting and re-creating the trauma. Of her work on an ambulance train, her diary entry for 25 October 1914 relates: ‘— Couldn’t write last night: the only thing was to try and forget it all. It has been an absolute hell of a journey – there is no other word for it’ (1915, p. 88). Yet, of course, she does write, affirming the necessity of narrating and confronting what she could not confront in the immediate aftermath. Her narrative details the contradictory impulses of remembering and forgetting by relating numbers: ‘We had 368; a good 200 were dangerously and seriously wounded, perhaps more’ (1915, p. 89), and then moves closer to her own immediate response to the pain she has witnessed: ‘They were bleeding faster than we could cope with it; and the agony of getting them off the stretchers on to the top bunks is a thing to forget’ (1915, p. 89). Thus, Luard both relates and avoids relating pain. The ‘agony’ is a ‘thing to forget’ and though she does not dwell on it further it is clear that she uses the concept of forgetting here as earlier to draw attention to what she cannot forget. Having paradoxically described and avoided describing the traumatic narrative she has witnessed and participated in, Luard temporarily replaces it with the attendant narrative of courage and stoicism that makes visible abstract qualities: ‘The outstanding shining thing that hit you in the eye all through was the universal silent pluck of the men; they stuck it all without a whine or complaint or even a comment’ (1915, p. 90). At this point, Luard casts off the medical detachment that has characterised her

Nurses Mourn on the Western Front 143

earlier entries. It is as if, in confronting her own trauma, speaking what she would prefer to forget, results in the collapsing of her self-protective distancing and allows her to see the ‘wounds’ as individuals. From this point onwards there appears to be a conscious attempt to write death and injury as individual suffering, a gesture that in turn allows Luard to create a sustained narrative of grieving. In the following account the grief is displaced, removed from her because of her professional role, yet the act of narrating it is a way of claiming it and representing it. Further, while she ‘can’t face the graves’, the official burial ceremony, she represents immediate personal sorrow in the individual image of the boy crying over his dead officer. She recounts how an officer is hit on Sunday morning and crawling about is hit twice more, lying out ‘all that day and that night, with one drink from another wounded’s water-bottle; everyone else was either dead or wounded round him. Next morning his servant found him and got stretcher-bearers, and he got here. I don’t know how they live through that’ (1915, p. 284). The daily entry ends here, on that note of bravery, loyalty and hope. Yet, a day later the narrative continues, interwoven with her own response to the deaths: ‘Can’t face the graves to-day; have had an awful night; three died during the night. I found the boy who brought his officer in from between the German lines and ours, on Sunday night, crying this morning over the still figure under a brown blanket on a stretcher’ (1915, p. 284) ([Fig. i] Luard’s accounts reveal the close ties that she develops with her patients in spite of the overwhelming amount of work. Moreover, the connections extend beyond the immediate care through communication with other nurses and with family outside the war zone and show how close relationships between nurses and their patients could be. Thus, she notes how a ‘boy whose arm was blown off’ that she had referred to earlier has died of haemorrhage after being sent by ambulance train to Le Havre. ‘The sister wrote and told me. He, of all people, one wanted to hear of being petted in his own home’ (1930, pp. 13–14). Interesting here is the close link between hospitals that acknowledges a relationship between individuals – the sister seems to have provided more than a formal report in this case – and Luard’s desire that this ‘boy’ be ‘petted in his own home’. To have come so close reinforces the terrible irony and helplessness of the situation: the boy dies in a limbo between her nurturing and the care he would have received at home. A further account reveals the extent to which the everyday experience of nursing involved intense emotion and a burden of loss. Thus, on Tuesday, 15 February, 10 p.m. Luard reports, ‘A dying boy in the medical

144 Grief in Wartime

is putting up a tremendous fight and Captain S. and Sister J and Craig the Orderly are slaving over him’ (1930, p. 31). On Friday, 18 February, she notes, ‘The fight for the boy’s life still rages against terrible odds’ (1930, p. 32). The following Tuesday (22 February) she notes, ‘The boy in the Medical is worse again, and poor Sister J is nearly in tears’ (1930, p. 35). The following day she reports his improvement, but the next day: ‘the poor boy in the Medical succeeded in dying this afternoon after a hideous illness of a fortnight’ (1930, p. 36). While Luard focuses primarily on her patients and would have been restricted in the comments she could make on the war itself, we do find her position presented clearly in Unknown Warriors, published after the war and hence not restricted by censorship: ‘men are lying out in the cold slush the better to kill each other. Isn’t it insane and immoral beyond description’ (1930, p. 44). The facing page of the text, her entry for three days later, records the decorating of officers and men of the Black Watch and the ‘very fine and stirring sermon’ that exhorted all of them to be ‘as gallant, self-sacrificing and devoted as the men just decorated’ (1930, p. 45). Luard makes no overt comment on the ironic juxtaposing of these two versions of war, but their presentation so close together provides its own irony. She lives perpetually with the results of such ‘gallantry and self-sacrifice’. A few weeks later she is more direct: ‘Wed May 24th It has been a bad day and a bad night. I wonder if next May will be the same. And the whole thing seems the same utter waste of life and suffering as it was last May – and the same story of wasted self-sacrifice’ (1930, p. 68). On another occasion a seemingly dead-pan remark can be interpreted as an indictment of war: ‘There seem to be an unusual number of charming boys, who have joined in tremendous keenness and are now filling the cemetery’ (1930, p. 73). Working at the Casualty Clearing Station nearest Vimy, Luard reports the endless convoys, but in spite of the stress of nursing and supervising she still finds time to include individual characteristics: ‘one who died to-day said yesterday he had “nothing to complain about”, and he was afraid he was a great trouble’ (1930, p. 65). She also includes the numbers of dead as if, in the absence of names, to count numbers is a gesture towards remembering that at the same time reinforces for her reader the enormity of the situation. ‘Just finished in the theatre at midnight – six have died and more will die – and they are still bringing them in. Two men died in the night and two more today’ (1930, p. 65). Later, ‘a whole line of our front trench has been buried with men in it’ (1930, p. 67). Luard often moves from the general to the particular to focus her own attention and her reader’s on the individuality of each dying man.

Nurses Mourn on the Western Front 145

In the following entry for Thursday, 25 May 1916, she begins with the professional listing of casualties by type: ‘The train cleared an enormous number of wounds and fractures, leaving the heads, chests, abdominals and amputations’ (1930, p. 70). Then she reclaims a dying boy from his wound and the collective wounded, to remind the reader of the individuality of each death: I must tell you about a boy who died to-day aged 17. ‘I fought I was too big to be walkin’ about the streets wivout joinin’, he explained. He was fatally wounded in the chest, brought in last evening, blue and gasping. ‘I fought a lot of things – when that – shell hit me. I fought about – … seein’ mother – and I fought about dyin’ …’ Later on, with great difficulty, he gave me her address, so I wrote to-night. He died at 5 o’clock. His gasping recital of his ‘foughts’ was the most upsetting thing that has happened of all the upsetting things. (1930, p. 71) While not relating the other ‘upsetting things’, but letting this episode stand for all of them, Luard draws the reader’s attention to the misery that must go unrecorded because she is unable to narrate it. In addition she reminds us that not only does she care for these men and watch them die, but she must also write the letters that inform their ‘mother[s]’. In doing so, she emphasises the weight of grief and loss that will fall on their families and shows her own ability to make that connection: ‘Capt. W. is dying tonight of gas gangrene. His younger brother was a posthumous V.C. and I think another brother has been killed, so it won’t make a pretty letter to write to his mother to-morrow. He is a particularly charming boy’ (1930, p. 76). Her last comment emphasises the loss; he is, temporarily, her ‘boy’ and lives long enough and is conscious enough to be ‘particularly charming’. The characteristic is less important than its ability to let us identify the individual along with a sense of her despair that he had to die. Luard emphasises the affective experience of watching men die with characteristic understatement: ‘we have a ward full of abdominals in all stages, recovering, hovering, going to die or dying. It is sometimes rather overwhelming to all our nerves’ (1930, p. 88–9). Especially noteworthy is Luard’s focus in many of her specific accounts on the tripartite exchange that connects nurse, dying patient and the family at home, usually represented by the mother. We find it repeated in Borden’s, Smith’s and Millard’s later accounts and in each case it creates a community of nurse, dying boy and mother (or wife) where the narrator positions herself as the mediator and mourner in this

146 Grief in Wartime

three-part relationship of death and grief. Luard’s senior position meant communicating with the mother or wife in a very concrete way, as writer of what she calls the break-the-news-letters. Her story thus includes the medical perspective on the condolence correspondence discussed in Chapter 1. She says sympathetically, ‘They almost invariably write and ask if he “said anything under the operation” or if he “left any message” when you’ve carefully told them he was unconscious from the time he was brought in … Some of them write most touching and heartbroken letters’ (1930, p. 93). In specific cases it is her job to send on the combatant’s final letter: ‘a man who died yesterday had a letter to his wife in his pay-book – to be sent to her in case of his death in action – left open for the Censor. I sent it to her with the news’ (1930, p. 149). This community of nurse, dying soldier and mother extends to her German patients where the exchange between women mourning transcends wartime oppositions of ally and enemy: ‘My Fritz is dying tonight … Sister L … who speaks German fluently is going to write to his mother for me’ (184). The endearments she uses towards her patients further suggests her creation of a mother–son narrative with the ‘boys’ she nurses: ‘My dear little resuscitated Suffolk boy got G.G. above the amputation and died this afternoon’ (1930, p. 170). Connections with home render deaths more poignant, as in the case of ‘Capt. C. D.C. and Bar [who] tries hard to live; he was going to be married’ (1930, p. 204). As witness to an enactment of grief, she directs the reader to share her own privileged gaze as a nurse: ‘One of the saddest things I’ve ever seen is happening tonight. An officer boy is dying with his father (a Colonel) sitting holding his hand’ (1930, p. 219). As sister in charge of a Casualty Clearing Station, Luard begins to note the impossibility of responding personally or even professionally to the massive intake of casualties during the Third Battle of Ypres. Yet, it is clear to her reader that her confession of her inability to feel in itself conveys the magnitude of the deaths. Writing at 12.30 midnight, after at least 36 hours without rest, she still takes time, paradoxically, to record her inability to record: I feel dazed with going round the rows of silent or groaning wrecks. Many die and their beds are filled instantly. One gets so used to their dying that it conveys no impression beyond a vague sense of medical failure. You forget that they were once civilians, that they were alive and well yesterday, that they have wives and mothers and fathers and children at home; all you realise is that they are dead soldiers and that there are thousands of others. It is all very like a battlefield. (1930, p. 221)

Nurses Mourn on the Western Front 147

In spite of the overwhelming numbers of dying, Luard works to maintain the community of grief through sending home details of each death in condolence letters, even though ‘[t]he letters to relatives of died-ofwounds are just reaching 400 in less than three weeks. Entering them in one’s book alone is more than one can make time for, but I do write about a dozen every day or night’ (1930, p. 223). The struggle to retrieve the individual from the anonymous masses of dying is central not only to Luard’s writing, but also to accounts by Mary Borden, Lesley Smith and Shirley Millard, volunteer nurses on the Western Front. In each instance these women represent the narrative of dying through the tripartite relationship between nurse, dying soldier and mother or wife that we have seen as central to Luard’s account. While such representation of death is for Luard a reflection of her everyday experience, a practical account of nursing the wounded and communicating the circumstances of death to the mother or wife at home, other writers consciously exploit this image as a way of interrogating idealised representations of war nursing in public discourse. Like Luard, in her story ‘Blind’ (The Forbidden Zone), Mary Borden makes a place for the representation of this tripartite structure of grieving in the midst of the seemingly endless procession of dead and injured that are placed on the floor of her frontline hospital ward on the Western Front. Moving her gaze from the large picture she focuses on her intimacy with death as ‘the little boy who had been crying for his mother died with his head on my breast. Perhaps he thought the arms holding him … belonged to … some woman waiting somewhere for news of him … How many women, I wondered, were waiting out there in the distance for news of these men who were lying on the floor?’ (p. 138). Borden’s consciously literary rewriting of the event, several removes from Luard’s hurried daily entries, allows her to comment on her role in this iconic tableau. Her iconic image fulfils the popular official nurse–patient narrative of war: the nurse as nurturing mother, which in turn links these men to the ‘women waiting somewhere for news’ (p. 138). But, as the narrator points out, the realisation that comes from remembering the connection between the dying boy and the waiting women creates a burden of intimacy that is unbearable: ‘I stopped thinking about this the minute the boy was dead. It didn’t do to think’ (p. 138). Throughout the central part of the narrative, Borden reinforces the dispassionate perspective by removing herself to the position of observer and making her self the object of her own gaze: ‘I think that woman, myself, must have been in a trance … she moves ceaselessly about with bright burning eyes and handles the dreadful wreckage of men as if in a dream. She

148 Grief in Wartime

does not seem to notice the wounds or the blood’ (p. 151). But being called back by ‘the real voice waking you from a dream’ eventually leads to her own breakdown at the end of the narrative. The recognition of shared humanity and shared suffering ‘breaks’ the professional detachment demanded of her as a nurse: ‘I was awake now, and I seemed to be breaking to pieces … I ran down the long, dreadful hut and hid behind my screen and cowered, sobbing, in a corner, hiding my face’ (p. 159). The idealised tableau that public representations of wartime nursing ask her to enact breaks down in the face of a human response to human suffering. This interrogation allows her to collapse those idealised images that would sentimentalise death in war and the nurse’s role in it. The nurse may be constructed through the iconography of the Pieta, a culturally accessible symbol of maternal grief and sacrifice, but it is in her literal breaking down of the symbolic that real grief is manifest and further is performed in private, behind a screen, away from the public gaze. That nurses employed the same narrative of death in the immediate instance and when rewriting the experience much later reveals a common construction of their wartime role as caregivers and grievers. But it also points to such an event as a frequent occurrence in the lived experience of wartime nursing. In Four Years Out of Life, Lesley Smith describes a very similar coming together of nurse, dying soldier and mother in an extended narrative of dying and death that allows her to undertake the mourning she had no time for during the event itself. Here, the tripartite community of intimacy forged between nurse, mother and dying boy we have noted in Luard’s and Borden’s writing is equally central to Smith’s memoir as a means of articulating her own grief and that of the mother, wife or girlfriend outside the war zone. In this particular instance, Smith leads us through the death of ‘one young corporal’, Railton, who ‘had a girl to go back to and fought for his life’ (p. 124). While his mother and Smith together watch his slow death, the reader’s gaze is positioned so that we watch with them and share in the collective image of care and grief. As with Borden and Luard, the manipulation of the reader’s gaze is a central element in creating this individual death as a collective site of mourning. But the necessary intimacy of his dying is constantly interrupted by the demands of other patients. ‘He grasped my wrist as though he wanted me to stay’ (p. 125), but at the same time ‘a chest wound had slipped off his air pillow and was in a bad position, and an amputation was being very sick … he lifted his eyes

Nurses Mourn on the Western Front 149

to my face and panted “sorry to keep you nurse – I won’t be long now – am going fast, ain’t I?” ’ (pp. 125–6). Later, meeting the dying boy’s demands for spiritual consolation, she takes the place of priest and mother while at the same time the presence of his mother, ‘unemotional and unresentful’, reinforces the enormity of this individual loss. In this instance, the narrative also reveals how, in the process of dying and death, the nurse plays a more immediately intimate physical, emotional and spiritual role than the mother who in this environment is deprived of agency. Yet, the nurse’s, mother’s and boy’s stories are cut off short in the exigencies of hospital demands. There is literally no further space for Railton and no time for Smith to grieve: ‘[I]n the morning there was another man in Railton’s bed. There had been a bad convoy in during the night’ (p. 127). This detailed recounting of Railton’s death long after the war thus offers her a space and a place within which to contemplate and mourn it. Although her mourning is not overt, the extended narrative of the death itself and her directing of the reader’s gaze, her attention to detail, use of dialogue, especially of the dying boy’s last few words, and her sense of constant rush or distraction from the main event that keeps looking away from and looking back to the death, creates a sense of unfinished business as well as a need to return dignity to the death – or to offer the time to this death that she was unable to offer during the original moment. Smith and the American nurse Shirley Millard (I Saw Them Die) return to this same structure of nurse, patient and waiting woman to reveal the connection between such grieving and their own breakdown at the end of the war. As in Luard’s multiple accounts and Borden’s story ‘Blind’, for Smith and Millard the individual death represents the unbearable burden of the many. At the moment the cease fire is declared, Smith’s grief at the death of one particular patient she has worked so hard to save is translated into a wider grief for all the deaths and injuries, the suffering she has witnessed and internalised: ‘I sat for a moment at the table with my head in my hands and wept for the pity of it all and for the misery of the early morning and for the thought of his young wife and the new baby’ (p. 299). Weeping, here and in Borden’s story, is employed as a visible representation of grief and of the nurse’s breakdown under the burden of witness. Shirley Millard employs a similar narrative to bring together the dying boy, his mother and her position as helpless observer of his death. Her diary records,

150 Grief in Wartime

November 10th Charley died this morning. I held his hand as he went and could not keep back the tears … Just after he went someone came into the ward and said: ‘Armistice! …’ … There is no armistice for Charley or for any of the others in that ward. … Well, it’s over. I have to keep telling myself, it’s over, it’s over, it’s over. But there is still that letter to write to Charley’s mother. … Can’t seem to pull myself together. (pp. 109–10) In her post-war commentary on this diary entry Millard makes Charley’s death representative of all the others from the war and asserts their deaths as an ‘enormous crime’ (p. 110). ‘All very well to celebrate, I thought, but what about Charley? All the Charlies? What about Donnelly, Goldfarb, Wendel, Auerbach? And Rene? And the hundreds, thousands, of others’ (p. 111). For Borden, Smith and Millard this representation of the nurse weeping over the soldier’s death draws on the iconic image of the mourning woman, but through it each writer can convey the unbearable nature of the experience to her audience and engender a collective mourning for ‘the pity of it all’ in which the reader is required to participate. Smith’s Four Years Out of Life bridges the immediacy of Luard’s diaries and the contemplative retrospective of better-known writers like Vera Brittain and Irene Rathbone. Moreover, unlike Brittain and Rathbone who continue their narratives through the later 1920s, Smith concentrates on the immediate experience of those ‘four years’. Although she only occasionally reports from the position of 1930 the book is a controlled medium within which she can record her experience, rewriting it in a way that allows her to exert control over her own traumatic witnessing of injury and loss. Likewise, her woodcut illustrations alongside the text represent a physical shaping of the experience into a concrete medium.9 Smith’s account of her nursing experience manages to capture the immediacy of a situation that only very occasionally permits reflection. At the same time, because she is returning to the war 10 years later, she can represent that experience in a way that allows for an ongoing commentary on war and her role in it. In her writing then, we find a

Nurses Mourn on the Western Front 151

collapsing of the meaning writers such as Black and ‘Mademoiselle Miss’ impose on their nursing. In fact, the idealised discourse of wartime nursing is revealed as an insidious coercion by pro-war propaganda. Work, she admits, is a type of cowardice, a refusal to examine her own complicity in the war. ‘Of course we’ll sign on again’, said Gratton acidly. ‘Are we not the complete embusquès?10 We do our job and it uses up every scrap of time and energy so we’ve forgotten there’s a war on’. ‘It wouldn’t do any good to worry’, said Ross in a puzzled voice. ‘I know it wouldn’t’, Gratton answered fiercely; ‘but I feel we’re shirking something horribly by just working hard and feeling useful’. (p. 67) In undermining the heightened rhetoric of service and sacrifice that we have seen in writing by Black and ‘Mademoiselle Miss’, and by recognising the false sense of satisfaction to be had in ‘working hard and feeling useful’, Smith challenges the idealised public images of the work itself. Where Borden confronts the absurdity inherent in war nursing in contemplating the ‘conspiracy’ of which she is a part, Smith’s memoir confronts the meaningless nature of an environment where death reigns and nursing itself is rendered ineffectual and therefore meaningless. In place of faith in their work, the nurses, like combatants in the trenches, resort to superstitious ritual to try and impose meaning in a world that is out of their control: The war had narrowed itself for us into a losing battle in a small marquee. Each death seemed to establish more firmly the reign of pain and destruction. Each death was a personal failure … our consciences became so inflamed that we made bargains with God or the devil with equal faith … [and we began] to perform all sorts of odd rites and incantations. (p. 255) Writing from within the daily routine and stress of nursing, Luard’s diaries, as I have mentioned, leave little room for conscious reflection on her own emotional state, but returning to the war more than 10 years later Smith and then Millard can weave an important commentary on that trauma into their narratives. Like the combatant experience, loss in nurses’ writing is not only a response to the loss of loved ones or of patients, but their continual witnessing of death and destruction results in a loss of faith in the world that can be defined as a loss or collapse of

152 Grief in Wartime

assumptive reality. The collapse of stability, of a belief in a world that offers meaning, removes all sense of security from the individual and is a common element in post-traumatic stress. In one of the few nursing memoirs to explore this psychic state, Smith examines it through dialogues between herself and her fellow VADs. Explaining her numbed state to Smith, a fellow nurse tells the story of finding her friend dead and faceless after a bombing raid on her hospital. I always used to think that everything fitted together somehow into a reasonable plan that made in the end for good. The laws of God and the laws of Nature must be accepted decorously and all that sort of thing. Well, Renton’s death was just the final kick. I can’t really have believed all that for ages, now it just seems bunkum. That suffering was not a law of God or of Nature: it was just the result of wanton ill will. (p. 217) Towards the end of the book, Smith allows her character to examine her own collapse of faith. As already noted, Smith brings together trauma, mourning and loss of assumptive reality as the only legacies left her by the war: ‘I used to expect to find something lovely waiting round every turn … now I am afraid that, if I open the door, I shall find a maniac … I’ve lost confidence in a universe where these things happen … there is only a thin crust of make-believe between … ease of mind and uncontrolled horror’ (pp. 282–4). In both instances the relationship between witnessing war and trauma is made clear: neither of these women can return to her pre-war belief in a benign universe. The knowledge that comes from witness has destroyed it and left only fear and numbness: ‘I’m damned if I am ever going to feel anything again.’ While on the one hand the author expresses the numbing or negation of emotion in her desire never to feel again, the writing of the memoir is a revisiting of those sites of extreme emotion. Moreover, the telling of trauma is both a personal revisiting and an act of witnessing that has a public and a political end. Mourning the dead and the 4 years lost out of life is a narrative of the physical and mental suffering borne by her generation during those 4 years: a re-enactment of what that suffering meant at the time and a confrontation with the legacy of the loss that is carried by survivors. Smith brings that legacy vividly to her readers by juxtaposing the immediate experience of the horror with the nurses’ own interrogation of their psychic states. We are thus made to understand the traumatic response Smith reveals at the end of the war because we share with her the memory of the events she narrates. While we must stand outside Smith’s trauma, she brings us to the point where we can

Nurses Mourn on the Western Front 153

understand it. The integration of trauma with the nursing experience and the disenfranchised mourning that accompanies it is directly related to the collapse into weeping Smith and Millard describe as their response to the news of the Armistice. Smith ends her memoir with the emptiness both of the legacy of the war experience and of the return home to an aimless existence; Shirley Millard, revisiting her original diary in 1936, sets her narrative between her own willing engagement with the false constructions of wartime nursing with which she opens her story and what she sees as the real story of war: a mother’s grief for her son. Having told us of her own grief at Charlie’s death and made it representative of the waste and suffering she has witnessed, Millard offers his mother’s letter as a plea against another war: ‘Perhaps you will have a son of your own some day. Then you will know how much they mean to us. I can only pray God there will never be another dreadful war like this has been’ (p. 114). Millard concludes with her own warning as a wartime nurse and a mother that makes public and political her private experience: ‘Now the world is once again beating the drums of war. To my son Coco, his friends and their mothers I offer this simple record of the dark caravan that winds endlessly through the memory of my youth’ (p. 115).

6 Vietnam: Bringing Home the Front

I dreamed that night about Vietnam … It was a new dream: Thousands of American mothers were walking in the streets of Saigon, carrying the bloody bodies of their dead sons. Above the wailing, screaming, and gnashing of teeth, one word was constantly repeated: Why? (Van Devanter, 1983, p. 316) Using her witness as a war nurse, Shirley Millard warns that war is the physical agony of the dying soldier and the emotional agony of a mother’s grief. The ‘bloody’ parade, recorded by Vietnam nurse veteran Lynda Van Devanter as her response to the end of that war, once again brings together grieving mothers and dead sons in an act of commemoration that challenges and subverts the way war is both remembered and forgotten. Post-war grief is here a continuation of war and its manifestation as a parade links it to the anti-war and civil rights protest movements. More specifically, the parade is a public enactment of the dual themes of trauma and grief with which her autobiography, Home Before Morning, is centrally concerned. In the image of the mother carrying the mutilated body of her son, Van Devanter, like the other nurses whose writing will be discussed here, brings together war stories that previous chapters have, for the most part, explored separately: the world of combat and the world of home; the physical trauma to the combatant body, and the psychological trauma of grief. Its context is a nurse’s story that itself parades injured bodies in an act of remembrance and demonstrates the intimate connection between the combatant and non-combatant experience of war. As we have seen in the previous chapter, nurses in the war zone position themselves as intermediaries between ‘home’ and ‘front’. In doing so they also position themselves politically, using their experience of death and injury to resist and 154

Bringing Home the Front 155

protest war and the cultural constructions of war that allow it to take place. The image of mothers literally ‘taking to the streets’ with ‘the bloody bodies of their dead sons’ makes public both the injury and the grief and collectively challenges the state’s appropriation of the bodies, asking the question ‘Why?’ Judith Herman defines this coming together of private pain with the public telling of the trauma story as testimony: ‘Testimony has both a private dimension, which is confessional and spiritual, and a public aspect, which is political and judicial’ (p. 181). Van Devanter’s dream suggests that she is handing back the broken bodies she nursed to their mothers, and at the same time her autobiography as a whole shows that she is unable to let them go: she must take on the burden of mourning, of carrying and revealing these bodies to public view that is the mother’s role. This image of the mothers, whose ‘wailing and gnashing of teeth’ is, to borrow from Michael Bibby, ‘the inchoate mourning and grief that defies words’ (pp. 154–5), conveys a wordless grief that allows Van Devanter to take us to a place of pain beyond the words she uses to describe it. Van Devanter tells her own story to reveal and to grieve for the injury and death she witnessed as a nurse in Vietnam. Like nurses in other wars, in doing so she collapses the narrow definition of war as combat. These mothers experience war in the deaths of their sons; the nurse veterans, as we have seen, experience war as an endless parade of mutilated bodies. The connection Van Devanter makes here between war and grief is politically important, since the connection between death in combat and grief at home allows the public manifestation of grief – mourning – to become the locus for political action. In spite of women’s testimony from earlier wars, the women who worked in Vietnam found themselves in a culture that once again questioned the legitimacy of their mourning and trauma. Such legitimacy was directly linked to their presence as women in a war zone as well as to representations of women in American culture in the 1960s and early 1970s. In the same way that we find First World War nurses both accepting and resisting idealisations of their role in wartime, so Vietnam nurses were forced to confront equally confining and unrealistic roles. Lynda Van Devanter notes the ideology of sacrifice that was a part of growing up female in a conservative middle-or lower-middle class Catholic culture, a background that many nurses took to Vietnam, where martyrdom was ‘the Catholic girl’s equivalent of growing up to be Babe Ruth’ (p. 19). Nursing reinforced this version of femininity, wherein the woman took on the burdens of others. In discussing nurses’ post-traumatic stress, Elizabeth Norman explores the relationship between

156 Grief in Wartime

this idealised version of femininity and the repression of emotions, particularly of grief, which played a role in post-war trauma: As a group, these nurses were altruistic … The motive that drove them forward … was a passion for protecting and conserving life. The concern for preserving life begins where self preservation ends. Dock and Stewart, in a classic history of the nursing profession, refer to this behavior as the ‘Mother nurse’ characteristic, where tenderness and devotion to the sick and helpless came before all personal needs. (p. 146) At the same time, it is precisely this version of femininity that many American nurses who served in Vietnam employ to legitimise their mourning for the dead and injured in the war zone. A recurring trope in oral and written accounts of this war, as we have seen in the First World War, the ‘mother nurse’ is set directly against the alternative cultural representation of femininity: the sexual woman embodied in visitors to the American troops such as Miss America and, in Winnie Smith’s American Daughter Gone to War, Nancy Sinatra: Nancy Sinatra is here in miniskirt, high-heeled knee-high boots, and heavy make-up to cheer up the troops. I hate her flaunting herself to sex-starved soldiers … she clacks down the ICU aisle, bending at each bedside to kiss a cheek, with her long hair tumbling down and her mini-skirt hiking up. … She’s starting down the third row when, eyes brimming, she turns and makes a hasty retreat through silver swinging doors … Now I’m really pissed. If she couldn’t handle it she shouldn’t have come … I want her to stay for a year, to climb six flights of steps everyday and sleep in one-hundred degree weather, to wash her hair in a trickle of water … to walk through puddles in those boots, wear that makeup while sweating it out on the ward. I want her to see wounded straight out of the field with pussy wounds or blood pouring, expectants behind the yellow-curtained screen, the body of a soldier you’ve tried hard to save ready for the graves. Then, if she still could, she might have cause to cry. (pp. 148–9) As we find repeatedly in combatant accounts, the right to grieve is given to those who are legitimate participants and thus legitimate witnesses to war. Since women in Vietnam as in earlier wars are officially excluded

Bringing Home the Front 157

from the combatant narrative or, as Cynthia Enloe notes in Does Khaki Become You?, silenced by being denigrated as ‘camp followers’, like nurses in earlier wars they must negotiate a legitimate femininity from which to speak and thus grieve (p. 109). In Winnie Smith’s Sinatra narrative, legitimacy is earned through living and working in conditions that destroy the sexualised female ideal of a Sinatra, but which in turn create an equally idealised femininity that is dependent upon maternal self-sacrifice. Yet, even while recognising that the maternal ideology is an idealisation, it arises out of the nurse’s lived experience of suffering, her own and that of those she cares for, as we have already seen in the discussion of First World War nurses. The representations of women that Smith negotiates above represent the contradictory constructions of themselves as mother or whore that nurses have struggled with since women took on the role in the nineteenth century. Magazine articles on nurses in Vietnam show that this war was no exception: the war nurse was idealised at the professional level – the nurses are caregivers who carry the burden of emotion that attends their work – and sexualised outside work. Thus, an article by journalist Linda Grant Martin, ‘Angels of Viet Nam’, in Today’s Health, August 1967, on the one hand admits that ‘the nurses are haunted by tragedies they are forced to witness’, on the other hand declares that ‘U.S. Military nurses care for the fallen and lighten the grimness of a dirty war’ (p. 17). A nurse is shown crying in despair over a ‘case’ and at the same time subjected to a description that positions her more as a contestant for the Miss America pageant than a professional nurse operating in difficult and dangerous working conditions: ‘Capt. Saralee Blum, an impish, 27-year old brunette from Atlantic City, New Jersey, one of 50 women surrounded by 15,000 men’ (p. 17). Similar contradictions appear in the photographs that accompany the piece; professionally smiling nurses are not only shown working with patients, but also ‘frolic[ing] with airmen in the surf of Cam Ranh Bay’ (p. 23). At the same time, set against this, is evidence of the emotional burden carried by a nurse in constant proximity to the dead and injured: ‘Clara is tortured by the screams of a dying boy she helped from litter to table. “It was inhuman”, she says bitterly. He was screaming, “God help me” ’ (p. 20). In rejecting Sinatra, Smith is erasing the sexual narrative of nursing along with the conflicting flirtatious/angel images of femininity noted above, but she retains the right to carry the emotional burden. Like Van Devanter and others, she takes on the burden of mourning not only the dead, but also all the mutilated and fragmented bodies that she encounters. As already discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, this display of the

158 Grief in Wartime

mutilated body is a trope of Vietnam writing that links civilian memoirs, combatant prose and poetry and nurses’ memoirs and poetry. Samuel Hynes notes: ‘bodies are dragged through the narratives – maimed, dismembered, violated, hideous, stinking bodies. And body parts’ (1997, p. 191). For both nurses and combatants, as in earlier wars, such a revelation is a political act asserting Elaine Scarry’s claim that ‘the main purpose and outcome of war is injuring’ (p. 63). For the American military in Vietnam, however, ‘bodies’ held meaning as numbers in a game that influenced strategy as well as the way the war was reported. In his discussion of GI Resistance Poetry, Bibby examines the link between the role of the body count in Vietnam, and the discourse of mutilation that marks the writing from that war: The emphasis placed on the bodycount in military reward and advancement encouraged soldiers not only to produce needless slaughter to legitimate their role in Vietnam to the military managers but also to manufacture imagined numbers … Troops were eventually trained, as the body count became more important and the war progressed, to read a complex semiotics of body parts in order to produce numbers satisfactory to military management … Severed limbs signified a whole for body counting purposes. While military managers sought to represent the war as a set of abstract numbers falling into debit and credit columns, ground troops were made either to produce these numbers directly … or to infer these numbers from the macabre bits of bone and tissue cast aside by the war’s destruction. Mutilation, in other words, was systemic in the discourse of the Vietnam experience for ground troops. (p. 163) The falsification of numbers also existed when counting American dead. American bodies only counted if they were killed directly by enemy action. Combatants who were evacuated to hospital and died en route or at hospital were labelled ‘died of post operative complications’. The whole system was thereby rendered meaningless and further, the official count presented on the nightly news reports in the United States erased the human story behind the numbers. Notably, responses that redress the erasure of human beings in the body count can, at the same time, imply a dehumanisation of the ‘other’ when they exclude Vietnamese deaths from those that are ‘lost’, as in the following comment: Then you come home, and they give the body count each night at dinnertime. They say ‘North Vietnam lost fifteen hundred and we

Bringing Home the Front 159

lost thirty. Isn’t that great!’ … people would be sitting there … saying ‘That’s not too bad, only thirty guys … They lost fifteen hundred. We are doing a good job over there.’ Nobody thought of thirty individuals … Those guys got lost in there, somehow. Fifty-eight thousand people got lost in that body count. (Walker, p. 301) For Bibby, the images of the trauma committed on the human body, whether American or Vietnamese, tell the combatant story of the Vietnam War. For the nurses caring for those bodies on a daily basis, mutilation was also systemic in the discourse of their experience. The bodies in their war zone, whether dead or alive, American or Vietnamese, are bodies excluded from the official count. The nurses recounting connects their story as nurses with the combatant story, and at the same time connects Vietnam with ‘the world’, linking the fragmented bodies of the men with the women, particularly mothers, at home and also, at times, presenting the dead and injured Vietnamese to the American home front. Although some nursing accounts move beyond mourning American dead to include the Vietnamese, the primary impetus behind Van Devanter’s account of her nursing experience in Vietnam, Home Before Morning, Winnie Smith’s autobiography (American) Daughter Gone to War and nurses’ poetry from the Vietnam war is the returning ‘home’ of American dead who have been denied a homecoming. The nurses’ intent here merges with that of the civilian bereaved we have discussed in Chapter 3, even in its bringing together the image of the dead son with the protest march. Their writing demonstrates the need Van Devanter’s mothers display in their march through the streets of Saigon: to retrieve their ‘sons’ from the anonymity of the body count, to reveal the purpose of war as injury and to put that injury on display while making a display of their own grief, to ask the question ‘why’, and to publicly mourn the deaths of the men whose lives (and deaths) are so intimately connected to their own.1 In particular, the image is a form of commemoration that refuses to allow the ‘disowning of injury’. To quote Scarry again, ‘The perpetuation of war would be impossible without the disowning of injuring’ (p. 64). Van Devanter’s image of the mothers and their bloody sons reminds us that even within the privileging of the American narrative of the war there are erasures and silences that demand we interrogate the processes of remembering and forgetting that take place both during and in the aftermath of war. Daniel Sherman reminds us that ‘commemoration privileges certain kinds of experience and excludes others, [and] deploys

160 Grief in Wartime

and organises not only memory but forgetting’ (p. 84). As we have seen, commemorating war, even the Vietnam War, means appropriating terms such as sacrifice, honour and service, wherein the state interposes the consolatory rhetoric of sacrifice between the body of the mother and the body of her dead and mutilated son, undermining or denying the pain and loss of war and disowning injury. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, a ‘lost’ war, state commemoration of the war was absent. Only silence could take the place of the language of abstract values. More recent rewritings of the war and ‘welcome home’ parades seem unable to or unwilling to engage in forms of remembrance that do not contain the raised rhetoric.2 Although mothers are traditionally privileged mourners in the context of war, and this is reflected in most accounts by war nurses, as we have seen in Chapter 3, their privilege excludes them from participation in the politics of war itself; both their mourning and their relationship with their combatant sons is strictly regulated by the military and the state. The privileged relationship between the mother and the dead son lies behind the concept of the ‘gold star’ mother that originated during the First World War in the United States. Fearing that overt displays of mourning would threaten the war effort, the women’s section of the Committee of National Defence convinced many women to wear a distinctive Gold Star emblem to express their sacrifice of a son to the nation, rather than conventional black mourning, an overt display of desolation. Thus, grief was purportedly allayed by the consolatory rhetoric of sacrifice, and the outer trappings of mourning, black clothing, transmuted into the pride of the gold star.3 Private grief was thus controlled and pressed into public service in the wearing of the gold star, and ultimately, as noted in Chapter 3, the government and the military maintained control over the body of the mother as well as the son. Thus, we find here a form of control that closely imitates military control over the combatant. Quoting Stouffer’s analysis of the American soldier’s situation in combat, Rose stresses that ‘What was crucial, for the maintenance of morale and efficiency, was the group’: The group in its informal character, with its close interpersonal ties, served two principal functions in combat motivation: it set and enforced group standards of behaviour, and it supported and sustained the individual in stresses he would otherwise not be able to withstand. (p. 44) The regulation of grief at the official and unofficial level, as we have seen in the discussion of the British home fronts in two earlier wars, likewise

Bringing Home the Front 161

uses group dependence to regulate not only the external or public behaviour but also the emotional responses of the private citizen. The gun salute and taps or last post of the military funeral create a context in which every sound and movement is exactly prescribed. Thus, commemoration of this particular death allows no room for individual grief, and certainly no overt display of ‘wailing and gnashing of teeth’. Grieving mothers (and others) as we have already seen, are thus prevented from enacting the overt spectacle of mourning, of putting their grief on public display as Van Devanter’s mothers do, and very importantly, distracted from the task of questioning the validity of death in war, of asking ‘Why’. These mothers, reflections of the nurse herself, subvert a ritual that is designed to silence their grief and to separate them from their sons’ mutilated bodies. Refusing to relinquish these bodies, the mothers have ‘undone’ the military funeral and burial, and exhumed their dead sons to reveal their mutilation. This public act of grieving, in which the mother is reunited with her dead son, and holds him physically, as she had done in infancy, challenges the military ownership of the son, and subverts the military attempts to offer platitudes in place of the dead son. Even while the military returns the body of the son to the mother in America, it, at the same time, seeks to ‘disown’ the presence of injury in the literal and metaphoric act of covering the body with the flag. Van Devanter’s mothers subvert the position they are relegated to by the military as passive receivers of their sons’ bodies engaging in private grief, to active rejecters of this position and revealers of the military conspiracy of ‘disowning’ injury, refusing the consolatory rhetoric and stripping away the flag. Confronting the war in its aftermath then, Van Devanter, like the anti-war protestors during the war itself, defies the ‘manufacturing of consent’ that was dependent upon silence and passivity. In doing so she confronts the state-subject power structure that we have seen as necessary for the conduct of war. Even though the war is technically over, like the civilian accounts in Chapter 3, her writing from this position emphasises the extent to which the ‘aftermath’ is a continuation of war for those who participated in it and for those who grieve its losses. It is also the position from which, like the post-First World War writers, women can interrogate the discourses that sent them to war and through which they constructed their experiences in the war itself. Connecting this public testimony with her private trauma, as well as connecting the war with its aftermath, is the fragmented body that becomes a synecdoche for all the mutilated bodies that pursue Van Devanter on her return home from the war: the terribly wounded young

162 Grief in Wartime

soldier, Gene. Van Devanter places Gene at the centre of her narrative, and his image links America and Vietnam both at the time she first encounters him and in his continuing presence in the intrusive posttrauma flashbacks she has after her return home. Moreover, the memory of one particular casualty becomes a means of retrieving the individual from the anonymity of the body count as well as her own means of working through years of disenfranchised grief. Entitled ‘Hump Day’, referring to the mid-point of her 12-month tour of duty, Van Devanter begins the story of Gene as an unwelcome intrusion into an exhausted sleep. The ‘young bleeder’, face partially shot away, begins as another faceless, nameless boy who pumps blood out as fast as she can pump it in. For three pages he remains literally and metaphorically faceless until Van Devanter accidentally kicks aside some of his clothing and A snapshot fell from the torn pocket of his fatigue shirt … The picture was of a young couple … on the back of the picture was writing, the ink partly blurred from sweat ‘Gene and Katie, May 1968’. I had to fight the tears as I looked from the picture to the helpless boy on the table. Gene and Katie, May 1968 … This wasn’t merely another casualty … He had been real. He was a person who could love and think and plan and dream. … I wouldn’t cry, I told myself. I had to be tough. (pp. 197–8) It is in the context of this event that Van Devanter loses her own sense of security and her belief in the middle-American values represented in the image of Gene and Katie at the prom. A day later she recounts: All I could see was Gene, Gene and Katie, May 1968. Then I began seeing all of them – the double and triple amputees, boys with brain injuries, belly wounds, and missing genitals … all the images came crashing back on me … I became a wild person, sobbing and shaking uncontrollably. ‘… I want to go home, Vietnam sucks, we don’t belong here. This is wrong …’ After I awoke I felt numb [she recounts], ‘I threw away the rhinestone flag I had previously worn on my uniform and found myself feeling nothing’. (p. 202) Gene becomes a person in the context of Katie, the woman he has brought to Vietnam in the photographic image. The image of the couple in the photograph, and the intimate connection between the two, is

Bringing Home the Front 163

destroyed not just for Gene, but for both of them, in Vietnam. At the same time, Van Devanter’s fragmentation of her own psyche and her assumptive reality takes place in the context of Gene’s fragmented body. Like the mothers who would appear in her dream several years later, her own wailing and gnashing of teeth becomes part of the endless parade of mutilated bodies that disrupt her sleep – dreams that always end in the question ‘Why?’ These begin the moment she arrives back ‘in the world’. Sleeping in the plane on her return home from Vietnam, Van Devanter is awakened by the nightmare image of Gene’s shot away face. His image, a metaphor for the futility of Vietnam, is also a metaphor for the Vietnam she carries back to America. Until Van Devanter published Home Before Morning in 1983, these nightmares remained part of her private traumatised isolation. The writing and publishing of the book allows her to reveal the bloody bodies she nursed and to bring them home to America in a public as well as a private sense. Winnie Smith in (American) Daughter Gone to War also links the mutilated bodies of the combatants she nurses with an image of the America that sent them to fight. As a nurse telling her war story she, too, sees her role as revealing the mutilated body: bringing it back to America and presenting it in the context of the middle-American values, in this case the American game of football, the rhetoric of which is often confused with the rhetoric of war. In the following passage Smith is concerned not just with revealing the injury that is war, but also in revealing it in the context of American ideals of masculine prowess and heroism on the football field: The soldier’s face is deeply tanned, not discoloured like so many in death. The dirt of battle gives him the air of an athlete at rest after a workout. Sweat streaks outline helmet straps along his jaw. He could be a high school football player after a scrimmage in the mud [she pauses] – except for the misshapen form under the sheet, flat where there should be arms and legs (p. 121; emphasis added). Smith begins with the image of the soldier as ‘warrior’, the description of helmet and straps lending the narrative a timeless quality, only to strip it ruthlessly away in the manner of a perverse conjuring trick, as she moves from the potentially consolatory image of the peaceful death to the nurses’ story: the fragmented body. The daily working environment of the Vietnam nurse called for grief as a primary emotional response, and at the same time nurses found it necessary to negate emotions in the interests of professionalism, often causing enormous psychological conflict. In one of the few discussions

164 Grief in Wartime

of military nurses’ experience in Vietnam, Jenny Schnaier defines three of the main stressors as seeing the mutilation of young bodies, having a continual stream of casualties and feeling the need to negate emotion (p. 107). As one nurse comments succinctly, ‘If we broke down, they died’ (Norman, pp. 34–5). Joan Furey extends this necessary repression of feeling to the post-war situation where women denied the legitimacy of their own traumatic experience in the context of what they perceived to be the much greater sacrifice of the combatant: ‘What we understood was that our patients had given the ultimate sacrifice. When you’ve been dunked in that fact, and believe it, you cannot own your own pain because it seems to diminish theirs’ (Anderson, p. 124). The necessary negation of emotion during their tour of duty ironically resulted in feelings of guilt in women who internalised an ideal version of their role as nurses and women, which told them that they should both care for the casualties as professionals and grieve for them as women or mother substitutes. The inability to fulfil such idealisation reinforced that guilt for some nurses, particularly when the trauma of their job resulted in psychic numbing. For others, as in this account from one nurse, the attempt to take on the burden could interfere with the individual’s ability to survive her tour of duty: She was working on what looked like a long tape of paper. Through her tears, she was scribbling the full names of every kid who had died in the last couple of days. The list was enormous. She had been doing it all along. I told her to stop. She had to let them go to survive herself. I remember she turned to me solemnly and said through her tears, ‘But someone has to. Someone has to remember their names’. (Powell, p. 41) The dates on the poems collected in the anthology Visions of War, Dreams of Peace edited by Lynda Van Devanter and Joan Furey show that most women could not confront the war experience and begin grieving until long after their tour of duty had ended. Moreover, many of the poems focus on the direct connection between the inability to grieve and the woman’s guilt at not undertaking this particularly female burden. It is not until 1990 that Penny Kettlewell, in ‘The Coffee Room Soldier’, can confront such negation of emotion and its legacy of guilt, and give a name to the anonymous broken body of 20 years earlier: I initially stepped casually over his shattered body laid out, unbagged, on the coffee room floor out of the way

Bringing Home the Front 165

thinking, where would I find them next on my bed? … Dispassionately I assessed his wounds and sipped from my cup. I then saw his face that of a child in terror and only hours ago alive as I or maybe I was as dead as he, because with another sip, a cigarette and a detached analysis I knew I could no longer even feel. I stepped out and grabbed a mop and pail so we would stop slipping in the blood on the R&E floor bagged the extra body pieces and the coffee room soldier re-stocked supplies, then went outside to watch the sunrise, alone and destitute of tears. (5–26; Van Devanter and Furey, 1991, p. 47) Such negation of emotion during the war was reinforced by a necessary silence about the war experience on the veteran’s return home. Both Van Devanter and Smith document their mothers’ responses to the war as an unwillingness to listen and an overt silencing when they tried to tell of their experiences and show photographs. Thus, Winnie Smith records her mother’s response to her description of the soldiers she nursed: ‘Nobody wants to hear that stuff … some things are better left unsaid’ (p. 251). Van Devanter likewise remembers a similar response to slides of her patients: ‘I don’t think you really want to show those slides … Maybe it would be wise to put them away’ (p. 259). Both women were further silenced by their mothers’ rejection of the language they now spoke that challenged the gendered boundaries of propriety by including swear words that, as Smith’s mother tells her, ‘women in our family do not use’. In the larger arena, a similar silence was imposed that refused to legitimate war narrated by a woman. As one publisher she approached asked Van Devanter: ‘what could a woman possibly have to say about war, especially the Vietnam War’ (1991, p. xxi). For the women veterans as well as the men, the grief that would not be heard thus became what Chaim Shatan terms ‘impacted’, the result of a concerted effort to forget on the part of the nation as a whole. Laurence Kirmayer reminds us that

166 Grief in Wartime

‘[a]s remembering is a social act, so too is forgetting. The contemporary landscape of memory is created through the modern ars memoria, which involve not so much feats of hypermnesia as of strategic forgetting’ (p. 191). For nurses, like combatants, social context often dictated their public memory: they recounted amusing anecdotes to their friends and family, while remaining silent about the disturbing, and thus less socially acceptable, memories. For the traumatised individual, controlling remembering and forgetting is a means of trying to control a potentially disruptive experience. In the larger social context, particularly as a response to a ‘lost’ war, controlling the cultural narrative of the war is equally a form of avoidance. Chaim Shatan’s comments on combatants are equally applicable to nurses in a war zone: The ‘post-Vietnam syndrome’ confronts us with the unconsummated grief of soldiers – ‘impacted grief’ in which an unending, encapsulated past robs the present of meaning. Their sorrow is unspent, the grief of their wounds is untold, their guilt is unexpiated. Much of what civilians view as cynical disillusionment is really the veteran’s numbed apathy from an excess of death and bereavement. (1978, p. 51) Van Devanter’s story is the story of grief; it reveals her need to mourn with the mothers of her dream, for whom participation in a collective public mourning was denied, and at the same time to mourn herself for all the men and women represented in the image of Gene and Katie. Likewise, although Winnie Smith’s autobiography was written after the establishing of a public site of mourning and memory, ‘the Wall’, her book continues the process of mourning that is both private and individual and public and collective. Her title itself indicates that loss is at the centre of the book – her pre-war private self, as well as the public self ‘the American daughter’ is ‘gone’, ‘lost to’ the war in Vietnam. The most private writing of women who nursed in the Vietnam War is their poetry, most of which remained unpublished until Van Devanter and Furey edited the anthology Visions of War, Dreams of Peace in 1992. The poetry, what the editors call ‘private writings hidden in the dresser drawer’ (p. xxii) was written between 1961 and 1991. The dominant narrative through which war is remembered in these poems is grief. While Van Devanter’s and Smith’s memoirs are held together by the chronological framework of pre-Vietnam, tour of duty and return home, the fragments that force the reader to participate in intrusive flashbacks or dream sequences are the most salient features of the story. The poetry of

Bringing Home the Front 167

nurse veterans often presents a further stage of fragmentation: a place where the external controls collapse and experience is expressed in incomplete, fragmented images and forms, as if the writers were unable to fit the parts into an organised whole. The dominant metaphor for such a breakdown in all these writings is the fragmented body. As Jane Marcus comments on First World War women’s writing, ‘the fragmented bodies of men are reproduced in the fragmented parts of women’s war texts … Writers of war produce pieces of texts, like parts of a body that will never be whole’ (p. 128). That many of the poems in the collection Visions of War, Dreams of Peace were written as long as 20 years after the nurse’s tour of duty, and most of them after the main site of mourning for the war, ‘the Wall’, provided a focus for grief, demonstrates the ongoing need to grieve for both the mutilated bodies they nursed and watched die and for the selves that were fragmented in the context of that experience. Intrinsic to the expression of this grief in many poems is an idealisation of the nurse/combatant relationship that sometimes borders on the sentimental and might initially appear to undermine the politically directed testimony of these poems. As noted earlier, having internalised the idealised image of the nursemother that was a part of their training, nurses tried to fulfil the idealisation. Yet, as the poetry shows even more than the autobiography, such idealisation co-exists in a very uneasy relationship with the images of the shattered bodies designed to subvert any notion of idealisation or consolation. Thus, on the one hand, the writing reveals the procession of injury that undermined the ideologies the nurses had brought to the war, as we have seen in Van Devanter’s narrative, on the other hand, it also reveals the necessity of psychological survival both during and after the experience, hence the clinging to an ideal, even when the failure to achieve the ideal engenders guilt. Van Devanter’s image of the grieving mothers carries a dual sense that she has handed the sons back to their mothers so that they can participate in her grief for their sons, but at the same time she is the mother carrying the dead son. The dream image of the mothers thus represents the nurses’ role as much as it does the real mother. The poetry carries the same burden of responsibility for the ‘bloody bodies’. In spite of the nurses’ struggle with the received values that idealised their nursing role, much of the poetry is also subversive in its challenging of state control over the memory of the war. As in Van Devanter’s image of mothers carrying the bloody bodies of their sons, on the publication of the poetry private grief becomes public protest.

168 Grief in Wartime

While much of the poetry nominally privileges the position of mothers in relation to the dying soldier, the physically intimate act of nursing, wherein the nurse plays an idealised maternal role, often subverts and supplants the image of the real mother. Thus, the nurse, in place of the mother, participates in the pathos of what Loraux calls the ‘body-memory’ of the mother for her son. As in Van Devanter’s Home Before Morning, essential to that body memory is the fragmentation of the body the mother-nurse holds. Thus, Marcus’s comment is as much an aspect of the lived experience of nursing as it is metaphoric. The nurses experience their own fragmentation in the context of the fragmented bodies they nurse. In her poem ‘Vigil’, Joan Furey experiences her own body parts as a physical disintegration that is both part of and leads to her psychological fragmentation: Legs ache, head throbs, Every muscle taut Every nerve on edge I want to scream but I can’t Day after day, week after week A parade. (1–6) Furey uses the term parade here in an ironic comment on the image of the military parade. In Vietnam terms it means an attack, or a series of attacks. In employing a term that will initially be misread by the uninitiated Furey can assert the legitimacy of her witness to injury while drawing attention to the gap between parade ground representations of masculinity and the disintegration of manhood that is her experience of war. Thus, the ‘parade’ leads to a parade not of men but of body parts: stumps where once there was a leg and arm. A face even adults will hide from … It could tear you to pieces giving them an identity of more than SOLDIER. (9–16; Van Devanter and Furey (eds), 1991, p. 35) For some nurses the constant contact with injury leads to a rejection of any possible sentimentalising of the nurse–patient relationship by replacing the nurse-mother intimacy with images of injury and fragmentation that are devoid of meaning. Thus, intimacy can be defined ironically as a relationship with body parts: ‘I knew you better than

Bringing Home the Front 169

most. / It was your arm, leg, lung, brain, heart / I knew most intimately (4–6;Ostergren Brunner, in Van Devanter and Furey (eds), 1991, p. 45). As noted in the relationship between the image of fragmented bodies and psychological fragmentation in Van Devanter’s ‘Gene and Katie’ episode, when physical fragmentation is made a metaphor for psychological fragmentation, it reveals Kirmayer’s hypothesis that the narrative of trauma breaks down because ‘narrative is an insufficient container or organiser for traumatic experience’ (p. 185). Caught between the impossibility of enacting the idealized mother role and Catholic sacrificial discourse, Kettlewell’s 1990 poem, ‘Sister Mary’, is an act of contrition for the sin of what she has not done, but at the same time reveals the burden of carrying such an impossibly idealised role, so that what once appeared to be firm belief collapses into fragmented questioning. Each new being she tenderly enfolds Within her nurturing eldest sister heart Caring without ceasing, praying for hope, Yearning for strength and yet with shadows of guilt regretting There’s just not enough for them and her too ‘Mea culpa?’ Oh, she would know then, and again and again and again That somehow she ‘should have done more’, but could she? Yes, she learned well that each soul was as the broken body of Sister Mary’s Jesus. But now could she see beyond the pain of all the unfulfilled dreams, theirs, hers and Sister Mary’s. ‘Mea maxima culpa?’ (7–19; Van Devanter and Furey (eds), 1991, p. 37) Again, Ostergren Brunner’s ‘To My Unknown Soldier Boy’, also written long after the war, enacts the grief that was necessarily suppressed at the time: I regret I didn’t take your dying, broken dirt covered body into my arms for her, for you, for me. Your name, your unknown name Keeps running through my mind. Your wounds,

170 Grief in Wartime

your crying for help, your pleading eyes, will haunt me until my own death. (11–22; Van Devanter and Furey (eds), 1991, p. 107) Both Brunner’s and Kettlewell’s poems reveal feelings of inadequacy in the context of the broken bodies: an inadequacy borne of their inability to enact an idealised role. Their act of contrition then, is to take on the burden of mourning to keep faith with the dead and commemorate them; revealing the broken bodies is necessary to that remembering. As already noted, on publication that private act becomes what Herman calls ‘testimony’, and takes on the political and judicial role of holding up the bodies to public view. Bibby sees ‘the tropes of mutilation in GI poetry as resistance to the ‘master narratives of the war’ (p. 172). The nurses’ prose and poetry likewise employs mutilation in the way Bibby describes, as resistance to and subversion of master narratives. Repeatedly, their resistance is demonstrated not only in the image of the mutilated body, but also in the connection between that male body and the body of a woman. They collapse entirely the idea that war is the combatant story; like Paquet, they return meaning to the fragmented male body by retrieving it from the master narrative and by positioning it in an intimate relationship with the female body. The public commemoration of the woman’s experience in Vietnam, Glenna Goodacre’s sculpture of three women and an injured, possibly dying, soldier in Washington, DC likewise places the nurse holding the injured combatant at the centre of its narrative. The sculpture, like the poetry and prose, thus remembers war not in terms of its dead, as ‘the Wall’ does, or as supporting a masculine ideology of combat, represented by Frederick Hart’s ‘Three fighting men’, but more broadly as an experience that can be defined, to use a Vietnam expression, as ‘a world of hurt’. Although the Vietnam Women’s Memorial is not an overt portrayal of the nurse as mother that dominates other American memorials to women in war, it does evoke the idealised image of the nurse-mother, particularly as it is represented in the Red Cross poster from the First World War, ‘The greatest mother in the world’, and the Christian Pieta, but at the same time it subverts the idealism represented by such images. In doing so the statue captures the ambivalence nurses had about their role, caught between the ideal version of the role they should play and the impossibility of enacting that role in a real situation. Moreover, the image at the centre – the nurse holding the wounded and dying

Bringing Home the Front 171

soldier – tells a very different story from that of the Red Cross mother, completely in control, effortlessly holding the securely bound wounded soldier. In Goodacre’s memorial, the nurse can barely support the weight of the soldier. The other women, calling out or praying, go on calling or praying, but none of them can bring an end to the suffering. The Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, ‘the Wall’, is an interactive site that acknowledges private grief by giving permission for a public expression of mourning; the women’s memorial provides a representational focus for grief in the image of the injured and dying body that is central to the woman’s experience of the war. The memorial also looks beyond the single symbol, however, by using two additional female figures to suggest a collective feminine memory of war that goes beyond mourning a symbolic ‘unknown soldier’ to remembering the state of war as trauma – a ‘world of hurt’. Yet, although the memorial is subversive in making public the injured body, it also draws our attention to what Winter and Sivan call ‘the dialectic between remembering and forgetting’ (p. 8), and returns us to Sherman’s reminder that remembering is also forgetting in its ‘privileg[ing of] certain kinds of experience and exclus[ion of] others’ (p. 84). In collapsing the binaries that have conventionally separated men’s and women’s experience of war in the public imagination, the intimate relationship between nurse and wounded combatant reinforces another set of binaries, those that privilege American injury and death over that of the ‘other’, in this case the Vietnamese. The importance of reading beyond the rhetoric of the memorial is stressed by Noakes, who recognises that an absent text always informs what is present: ‘when looking at the process of public remembering it is important to discover what has been forgotten, in order to better understand what has been remembered’ (p. 99). Very importantly for this discussion, Goodacre’s original prototype for the memorial had included a nurse holding an injured Vietnamese child. The Dallas Morning News, 25 August 1993, reports that [t]he Vietnamese baby has disappeared from the bronzed arms of the American Army nurse. No political statements are allowed at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall in Washington. ‘I had thought of the baby as part of the casualties of war’, says sculptor Glenna Goodacre, touching a tiny model of the infant that was eliminated from her original design for the Vietnam women’s statue. (http://www.members.aol.com/bear317b/sister12.htm) Yet, of course, the elimination of the child is itself a political statement that reveals the way cultural hegemony is not just an instrument of

172

Figure 6.1 Glenna Goodacre’s Vietnam Women’s Memorial, Washington, D.C.

Figure 6.2 Hart’s Three Fighting Men: Vietnam Memorial, Washington, D.C.

Bringing Home the Front 173

control during war, but a powerful tool in ‘restricting the discourse of memory’ (Sturken, p. 83). We can find this absent discourse in the women’s writing from the war however, much of which is concerned precisely with challenging this form of forgetting by holding up the injured Vietnamese, particularly the Vietnamese child, for public view. Ringnalda asks of the Wall: ‘Where is any recognition of the millions of dead and maimed Indochinese? Why isn’t it even possible to trace the Vietnamese people onto a piece of paper and take that home?’ (p. 240).4 As a civilian nurse in Vietnam with the U.S. Agency for International Development during the war, Patricia Walsh is concerned with precisely the issue of bringing back to America the Vietnamese dead and injured. In the following passage from the novel based on her experience, Forever Sad the Hearts, the wounded civilians caught in crossfire are carried to the hospital by the American soldiers who are responsible for their injuries: Navy corpsmen unloaded victims who had lain for hours in a rice paddy after being caught in a fire fight … One entire stretcher was piled with infants and small children; corpses mingled with the wounded, who whimpered painfully as we eased them from the tangled mess. Mothers clutched dead children to their breasts and wailed inconsolably … children screamed in terror as they tried to arouse dead parents. (p. 26) To stress the absurdity of the situation, Walsh has her protagonist inquire as to why American soldiers are called to pick up civilians. The answer, that ‘They’re are the other half of the firefight’, allows her to make the political statement erased from Goodacre’s statue: ‘American military were shooting people whom they’d later pick up and bring to an ill-equipped hospital staffed by American workers, to be cared for with supplies cumshawed from the military’ (p. 26). In her poem ‘How Do You Say I Love You in a War’, Bobbie Trotter employs the image of the grieving mother to collapse binaries of American and ‘other’. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. All the GIs kept telling me these people Aren’t like us. They don’t value life as we do. How then do you explain that woman when told her son was dead,

174 Grief in Wartime

how do you explain her beating her head against the pavement until her blood flowed and mingled with his? (1–8) In the poem the grieving mother, the ‘Little war baby’, the ‘young/ battered and broken lieutenant’ and the wounded North Vietnamese soldier share in an equality of death. Trotter takes on a burden of commemoration that demands she literally incorporate her grief for the dying Vietnamese baby into her own body, the womb that will one day bear her own child. In this image of ‘love’ she attempts to transcend war, but ultimately must carry the burden of grief as a pregnancy. The site of mourning for the dead baby becomes her own child. She can only mourn the Vietnamese child by allowing its image to interpose itself between her and her future unborn child: I clean your festered skin and that says I love you But nothing I can do is enough. I shall remember you all my life. I shall remember you most when I hold my own. If I love him, in remembrance of you, Perhaps that will be enough. (25–30; Van Devanter and Furey (eds), 1991, p. 18) While the absent text of the memorial is inscribed here, it remains at the level of the most private and particularly feminised place of commemoration: the womb. Trotter must carry the burden of this memory, it would seem, because, in the name of politics, it is excluded from public American sites of commemoration and mourning. Commemoration, for the mothers carrying their dead sons through the streets of Saigon, for the nurse mothers who try but cannot fulfil the obligations of the idealised Pieta, but who forever mourn the dying soldier or the dying child, is integral to mourning. Mourning as the manifestation of grief is enacted in the nurses’ autobiographies, poetry and the women’s memorial. But it is not a process that suggests closure. As Don Ringnalda points out of the Women’s Memorial, it ‘shows care and commitment, but it also shows pain and anguish without the conventional redemptory compensations’ (p. 235). Van Devanter’s mothers continually walk the streets of Saigon, wailing and gnashing teeth and asking ‘Why?’ Bobby Trotter carries forever the image of the dead Vietnamese baby. To quote Ringnalda again, ‘[the memorial] has no “finish”. At whatever point one decides to walk away from it, there is a

Bringing Home the Front 175

sense of having left things undone’ (p. 235). The image of the woman holding the fragmented body, whether in prose, poetry or sculpture, claims trauma, both physical and psychological, as the dominant motif of war: owning the injury that is ‘the main purpose and outcome of war’. While Van Devanter’s publication of her war experience and its traumatic aftermath gave many of the returned women veterans permission to speak publicly of their own experiences, the primary sanctioning of these war memories came with the placing of the women’s memorial in the context of the other sites of Vietnam commemoration, after years of lobbying by the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Fund. This public recognition of the women’s experience in Vietnam is important not just because it acknowledges that the women had a legitimate claim to a place in the larger site of remembering the war, but also because their war is remembered through trauma, injury and pain. Moreover, while the Wall remains the primary site of memory and mourning for the war in Vietnam, no form of commemoration can adequately respond to the grief narrated by these writers since, as one nurse articulates, a memorial like the Wall cannot convey the intimacy with mutilation and death that is the nurses’ lived experience: ‘It was almost too neat, almost too precise, almost too lined up. It somehow can’t reflect the horror of holding a young man while he dies. It just can’t. It’s not the same … it was terrible watching your children die. You have no idea what it looks like. If you did, you wouldn’t have another war’ (Elbring in Steinman, p. 153). Like Shirley Millard writing after the First World War, these women employ the legitimacy of their voices as nurse-mothers to collapse the binary opposition between home and front, demanding that the public gaze focus on the bloody bodies for whom they carry the burden of mourning and finally understand what war ‘looks like’.

7 Epilogue: ‘Mother to Mother’: The War in Iraq

Lynda Van Devanter’s politicising the private grief of the mother as a protest against war is employed again in a Vietnam nurse veteran’s response to the First Gulf War. In her poem ‘The Muslim Mother’, Bobbie Trotter takes the images of war beyond American mourning on the home front to include the mourning of ‘the other’. Trotter brings together the iconic Christian image of mother (the Pieta) with ‘the other’ Muslim mother as a way of uniting two opposing cultures in the single image of a mother’s plea against war: ‘The Muslim / mother went / to the grotto / clutching her son’s / picture to her aching breast’. The poem strips away the public and, by implication masculine, rhetoric that divides nations and sends them to war: ‘it wasn’t her faith in Allah / it wasn’t her faith in Jesus / that led her there’. This specific Muslim mother thus becomes the universal image of maternal grief, ‘before the statue / of the Virgin / Mary she fell / prostrate’, through whom Trotter can reject constructions of meaning that sustain the binaries essential to the perpetuation of war. For a mother war can be understood only in terms of personal loss and grief: ‘and begged / mother to / mother / please / end / this / war’ (Van Devanter and Furey (eds)., 1991, p. 180). In the Second Gulf War, the Iraq War, images of grief and more especially of the grieving mother have taken an unprecedented place in the discourse of the war and have come to dominate the anti-war movements in both Britain and the United States. While during the Vietnam War grieving families were silenced by the anti-war protest movement, in this war the faces of grieving mothers – from Michael Moore’s portrayal of Lila Lipscombe grieving for her son in Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) to Rose Gentle and Cindy Sheehan making public their private grief over the deaths of their sons in Iraq as a form of protest – have become central to the discourses surrounding the war and its conduct. In a very public 176

The War in Iraq 177

incident, the plea ‘mother to mother’ was used by Rose Gentle in the form of a letter and video to Cherie Blair, the British prime minister’s wife, documenting her grief through visual images of her son’s short life and funeral and asking Blair to influence her husband to end the war that killed Gentle’s son.1 As in Trotter’s poem, the plea ‘mother to mother please end this war’ asserts the legitimacy of the grieving mother to use her position as a form of protest and at the same time represents the gendered helplessness of the war-bereaved woman excluded from the male-dominated politics that refuse to legitimise her position, but demand the blood of her son in performing what the nation-state represents as his duty. As we examine online and print narratives of the Iraq War, we find that, in spite of women’s presence in public discourse particularly as part of the anti-war protest movement, gendered constructions of wartime binaries still hold. Arguably, the politicising of a woman’s grief that claims a public space at the same time reinforces the binaries wherein women portray themselves and are portrayed as the primary mourners and men position themselves and are positioned as fighters in ways that differ little from the narratives of the First World War. Likewise, in spite of an Internet system that allows soldiers to report their experiences through the immediacy of blogs, to contact families through e-mail and blogs and to speak to them by telephone and web cam, and provides a place for Iraqi civilians to voice their experiences, the chasm between definitions of ‘home’ and ‘front’, ‘self’ and other’ remains. Most particularly, in terms of the gendered binaries of wartime, women are positioned as waiting at home for their men to return from the front. Blogs and web sites from the American ‘home’ front are primarily written by women, whereas blogs from ‘the front’ are primarily male and combatant.2 Women’s blogs focus on the emotional experience of deployment, men’s on the concrete situations. Furthermore, narratives from the American and British perspectives on the war make little or no attempt to collapse the definitions of ‘home’ and ‘front’. In the many blogs, memorial sites and web sites that document the experiences of American families with a soldier in Iraq, there is none of the recognition of ‘the other’ that we find in Trotter’s poem. Certainly there is a notable absence of Nella Last’s ‘sons killing other mother’s sons’ perspective even though the war itself is arguably constructed on much less legitimate grounds than was the Second World War. In spite of attention to Iraqi blogs such as Salam Pax’s ‘Where is Raed’ that gained enormous popularity amongst Western readers in its immediate documenting of the war experience first hand and has since been published as Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi, there is very little sense of the

178 Grief in Wartime

common experience and, in spite of the emphasis on the grieving mother, little sense of that grief transcending wartime binaries.3 Further, while women such as Gentle and Sheehan have raised the issue of Iraqi suffering as part of their anti-war campaigns, it takes second place to their anger against the British and American governments for sending their sons to die in the war. At the same time, Sheehan and Gentle have disrupted the official version of the war by maintaining a public discourse of protest, competing in the public arena, especially in the United States, with the official stance on ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’. Yet, although the mother’s grief continues to play a visible role in the public protest, in narrating the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq and the bereavement that accompanies those deaths, mourners continue to draw on the conventional rhetoric of heroism and sacrifice to impose meaning on death in this war and to uphold the masculine and feminine binaries that support this rhetoric. The sustaining of such rhetoric in the face of American deaths, of public questioning of the reasons behind the war, and of returning soldiers speaking out against the war, attests to the power such discourses carry in offering meaning for death in war.4 As with official wartime discourse in earlier wars, this war once again demonstrates the importance of language in ‘transmut[ing] the horrific element of war into affirmations of socially positive values’ in order to persuade citizens to support the war effort (D’Alton, p.). In the particular instance of the Iraq War, George Lakoff thus draws attention to the use of metaphors in the transforming discourse of the dominant pro-war definition of ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’: One of the most central metaphors in our foreign policy is that A Nation Is A Person. It is used hundreds of times a day, every time the nation of Iraq is conceptualized in terms of a single person, Saddam Hussein. The war, we are told, is not being waged against the Iraqi people, but only against one person … What the metaphor hides, of course, is that the 3000 bombs to be dropped in the first two days will not be dropped on that one person. They will kill many thousands of people hidden by the metaphor. (p. 1)5 Lakoff goes on to note how that metaphor is reinforced by a further one, the ‘Rescue scenario’ in which Anglo-American forces rescue the Iraqi people and neighbouring countries from Saddam’s regime.6 The willingness of the American people to accept these metaphors even when confronted with opposing facts that don’t fit the metaphor, such as the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians in this ‘rescue’, results, Lakoff

The War in Iraq 179

explains, from the cognitive processing of information that reinforces the willingness of individuals to accept what Chomsky has called the ‘framework for thinkable thought’ discussed earlier. For Lakoff, the metaphors provide that framework: ‘One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors – conceptual structures like those we have been describing. The frames are in the synapses of our brain … When the facts don’t fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored’ (p. 2). When these meta-narratives of the war are established in public discourse then, they both obscure the thousands of Iraqi deaths and offer meaning for the deaths of more than two thousand Americans 3 years after the beginning of the war. While D’Alton explores the meaning making through which states persuade their citizens of the need to engage in war, Ashplant, Dawson and Roper remind us of the connections between the acceptance of such framing and the meaning making imposed by the state on its wars so that the rhetorical constructions operate not only as persuasive tools in the immediate instance, but also attempt to ensure that the war is understood and remembered in a very particular way even as it takes place: ‘[T]he commemorative rituals and patriotic rhetoric of the nation state are involved precisely in making particular meanings about death in war: the “noble sacrifice” of dying for your country’ (p. 9). Thus, at the end of his 2005 collection of memorial sites to soldiers in the form of family remembrances and soldier’s last letters, Their Last Words: A Tribute to Soldiers Who Lost Their Lives in Iraq, George Sheldon draws on such narratives and their attendant forgetting as he offers meaning for the war and for its American deaths: Over the next fifty or sixty years, Americans will sit down with their children and grandchildren to talk about that awful day in September and the war that followed it. They will remember the brave Americans who perished in the name of their country, so that we might all live with the blessings of American liberty. (p. 176) Such a narrative exemplifies what Dawson has defined as ‘composure’ in collective and individual ways of remembering war (p. 23). Sheldon’s choice of remembrance narrative exemplifies the need to ‘compose memories that help us feel relatively comfortable with our lives and identities’, a composure constructed from ‘public languages and meanings’ (Dawson, p. 8). Such a need results in a monolithic version of how the war should be written and remembered; the multiple narratives in his collection, including at least one letter from a soldier in Iraq that

180 Grief in Wartime

does not support the war, are thus subsumed under a single acceptable story that erases not just all other possible stories, but also the concept of such multiplicity itself. A direct challenge to the kind of composure Sheldon chooses comes from women like Sheehan and Gentle. For them, traumatic grief, in destroying what Rando and Neimeyer define as assumptive reality, at the same time destroys the framework that upholds ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’. Thus, Cindy Sheehan represents war death in Iraq in the immediate, concrete image of a mother’s pain that is outside all constructions of meaning. All she knows is that her child is dead: Somewhere in America there is a Mom … she won’t care if her child died for freedom and democracy or to make some people wealthier and more powerful. All she will see is the Grim Reaper in a uniform standing at her door before she collapses on the floor screaming for her child and pleading with the Grim Reaper to take her with him. (2005, p. 21) Cindy Sheehan has used her role as the bereaved mother of Casey Sheehan to stage a public protest outside President George Bush’s ranch in Texas in August 2005; central to her demand was that, as a bereaved mother, the president should meet her to justify to her the death of her son. Bush’s refusal to meet her resulted in a long drawn out ‘sit in’ at her campsite, Camp Casey, that drew anti-war protestors from across the United States, including Iraq veterans and families of soldiers fighting or killed in the war. Her grief for her son was made central to her protest and extended to the grief of others, represented by hundreds of white crosses set up by the campsite in remembrance of Americans killed in the war. Lynda Van Devanter’s experience in Vietnam compelled her to employ the image of the mother holding up the bloody body of the son to thrust the death and injury caused by war onto the gaze of a forgetful American public; in the Iraq War bereaved mothers have claimed their own space in the discourse of the war, refusing to grieve privately and putting the bodies of their sons on public display. Yet, before Gentle and Sheehan used their private experience to try and galvanise public protest against the war, an even more public image of the grieving mother had been constructed by Michael Moore in his film Fahrenheit 9/11 to reveal the connection between private pain and the public agenda. Moore positions the grieving mother at the centre of his film, made as a protest against the war while it was happening. The son is an absence, but ever-present in the grief of his

The War in Iraq 181

mother who narrates their shared story. Moore films Lila Lipscombe both at her home in Flint Michigan and near the White House in Washington, allowing him to represent the private family grief in its domestic space and then to take that grief and set it in the context of the public site of political power. Further, juxtaposing places private pain in the context of the politics of poverty that in turn provides soldiers for the service of the state. Moore uses Lipscombe to narrate the process by which American society merges patriotism, military service and the practical economics of that service. Early in the film, her pride in the American flag and in the American military set alongside the economic deprivation of Flint, Lipscombe says, ‘I, as a mother, started teaching my children … the military is an excellent option for people in Flint.’ The relationship between patriotic rhetoric and practical economics becomes blurred, Moore’s film implies, and at the same time the possible long-term consequences of military service – death in war – are obscured. But Moore’s objective here, among others, is to equate war with injury, death and loss, at the same time revealing the connection between economic disenfranchisement, public policy and private agony. He has Lipscombe tell her grief to the camera. As the military ‘regretfully inform’ her of her son’s death, she records, ‘the grief grabbed me so hard I fell on the floor’, an image echoed in Sheehan’s representation of maternal grief. The mother’s grief displayed to the camera, in Lipscombe’s visible distress as she weeps and speaks brokenly of her son, is essential to Moore’s protest. Recently he has approached Rose Gentle to tell her story in the sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11.7 In a November 2005 article, ‘The betrayed mothers of America’, Robert Fisk similarly positions grieving mothers against the American foreign policy that sent their sons to die in Iraq. While Moore deliberately exploits the emotional response to jar his audience into examining American politics in the Middle East and the poverty at home that sends young men and women into the military, Fisk is concerned with a too easily evoked sentimentality that might obscure the political importance of anti-war protest. Waiting to interview two bereaved mothers who have been part of an anti-war group in the Veteran’s Day march in November 2005, Sue Niederer and Celeste Zappala, he notes he is ‘uncertain how to approach [them], afraid that their stories can be too easily turned into tears, their message lost after the Veterans’ Day march’. At the same time, he draws on the painful image that returns us to Loraux’s discussion of the war-bereaved mothers of ancient Greece and Rome: mothers cannot be separated from the bloody bodies of their sons. ‘Later

182 Grief in Wartime

I sit between the two women and remember the blood splashed across the road at Khan Dari and the 82nd Airborne washing away the brains from the highway in central Fallujah and the body lying beneath a tarp in north Baghdad. I’ve seen the American corpses. Now here are the American mothers’ (Fisk, 2005a, p. 1).8 As these mothers tell the stories of their sons’ deaths, the narrative recalls Moore’s film: patriotism, college loans, the National Guard, death by a roadside improvised explosive device (IED), anger, questioning and, additionally, a coming together with anti-war veterans that has not been part of earlier war narratives. In closing, Fisk notes the disenfranchisement of ‘this little group of brave American men and women – the exsoldiers have no jobs, no future save their enthusiasm for their own campaign against the Iraq War’ (p. 2). Against this image of a small private group galvanised by their grief and their involvement in the war to reject it, Fisk leaves his readers with the massive public image of Vice-President Cheney on a giant television screen in Times Square ‘Solemnly bowing his head in Arlington Cemetery. Ah, yes, he is honouring the fallen’ (2005a, p. 2). Fisk is deliberately placing private lived experience of war death against what he implies is Cheney’s public posturing. Cindy Sheehan, demanding answers for her son’s death, confronts the senior government officials who construct the public discourses in support of the war with the visible evidence of her private grief: ‘I wanted [Rumsfeld] to look me in the face and see my red swollen eyes and to see all the lines that grief has etched … I wanted him to see the unbearable pain’ (2005, p. 11). Yet more than any earlier war, the discourses surrounding the war in Iraq suggest a growing breakdown between definitions of the public and the private and the legitimacy of official and unofficial voices, although at the same time very conventional narratives of war persist. It is arguable that the media attention paid to the private experiences of women like Gentle and Sheehan, as well as the growing accessibility of the Internet that offers private individuals a public forum to express their thoughts, may be contributing to this merging of public and private, official and unofficial. Certainly the Internet provides a previously unavailable site for women’s expression of their war experience either as soldier blogs or from women at home, usually soldiers’ mothers. Formerly, letters to the newspapers were one of the few ways private citizens could participate in the public media. A mother’s grief is again set against the impersonality of public politics in a letter from Celeste Zappala to the New York Times of 23 May 2004 as she asks her readers to consider the political discussions over the legitimacy of a war in the context of the private grief of a family. For her, any ‘troubling thoughts’ on

The War in Iraq 183

the part of senior officials are a luxury that will not return her son: ‘I am the mother of Sgt. Sherwood Baker of the Pennsylvania National Guard, soldier 720. That number is seared on my soul now, along with the screams and despair of my family and the wind carrying the sound of taps above the weeping crowd at the grave site of my son.’ By May 2004, however, such representations of the private in the public sphere had become almost anachronistic. In place of letters screened by an editor, or private diaries and letters available only to immediate family and friends and given public access long after they were written, the private experience of war made public through blogs and Internet sites, including remembrances and obituaries posted on memorial sites, has become a primary means through which the war is told and the means by which multiple voices can participate in online conversation. These multiple sites compete with more conventional forms of discourse such as newsbroadcasts and newspapers, allowing individuals to move beyond a few public sources of information on the war and to respond through multiple narratives and ensuing comments. While the conventional forms still exist, the reporter now competes with the soldier’s blog and the newspaper obituary with the multi-voiced site of mourning that allows any individual logging on to the site to post a comment and engage in dialogue with others, including the immediate family of the dead. Conventional public sources, such as television, newspapers and associated online news sites, are thus continually supplemented and at times challenged by multiple private narratives that can exist in a public domain. Quoting Dean Wright, editor-in-chief of MSNBC.com, Stuart Allan posits that ‘this may well become known as the Internet war, in the same way that World War II was a radio war and Vietnam was a television war’ (p. 348). While censorship of soldiers’ blogs is to some extent present, and while the technology that allows multiple private voices to speak and interact still favours those who can have access to it, blogs and message boards offer an arena through which private experience can be represented publicly with unprecedented immediacy and availability. Although the Internet can never bridge the gulf between the individual who has experienced war first hand and one who has not, it does offer a site wherein concepts of public and private, home and front, are seen to break down and thus need to be examined, particularly as we consider the role of gender in the mourning narrative of the war.9 Blogs and web sites by soldiers and their families, whether they support the war or are against it, or attempt to avoid political debate, collapse the more obvious distinctions of previous wars between

184 Grief in Wartime

public and private and between those who experience war and those who do not at the same time as they problematise this collapse. Thus, ‘real-time’ soldier blogs from Iraq, known as ‘milblogs’, even when they have the primarily private intention of communicating their experience to immediate family and friends, may share the potential deception of older forms of reporting in appearing to offer an accurate and direct representation of experience that persuades readers or viewers that they share that experience. From Edward R. Murrow recording the London Blitz for American news listeners to television coverage of the Vietnam War, the media has tried to convince its audience that it is taking them to the scene and that the credibility of the news derives from the first-hand account from one who is ‘there’. Warning of the limitations of Internet reporting from Iraq, Allan quotes Raymond Williams to draw attention to ‘the culture of distance’ that works against the audience’s comprehension of what is read, viewed or heard: Of utmost importance [Williams] believed, was the need to understand the way in which television news shaped the ‘representation of spectacular destruction’ while, at the same time, serving to ‘insulate us from reality’ as we watch our television screens in our respective households. Hence the urgency of his call for new investigations to be made into this culture of distance, this ‘latent culture of alienation, within which men and women are reduced to models, figures and the quick cry in the throat’. (1982, p. 21; see also Williams, 1958, p. 348) As watching television in a living room ‘insulates’ the viewer from the experience being watched, so the reader of a war blog or web site on a computer screen is insulated from the experience the blog describes. Thus, the equation between ‘knowing and seeing’ that Roland Leighton defined writing to Vera Brittain during the First World War has changed only in the sense that viewers are more likely to be convinced (with the collusion of the medium) that what they see on television or read on a blog equates with knowing, when the chasm between those experiencing the war, as a soldier in combat or a waiting or bereaved family member or friend, and those outside it is as large at it ever was. Yet, at the same time blogs and interactive web sites also challenge the ‘culture of distance’ in offering an unprecedented opportunity for collapsing some of that distance through interaction unavailable to conventional forms of recording experience, as readers engage with the

The War in Iraq 185

blogger and other commentators online. Alongside texts, photographs and even videos draw the reader/viewer into a broad-ranging interaction with the material. Thus, for example, the web site in memory of Gordon Gentle includes the video of his childhood, youth and funeral service that Rose Gentle sent to Cherie Blair.10 In the online version of the article ‘Final Salute’, a story on the experience of war-bereaved families in the United States, in addition to the text, photographs contribute an additional narrative and video clips allow viewers to hear and see the events through the voices and images of Marine Major Beck and bereaved wife Katherine Cathey.11A further important feature of web logs and other interactive sites is thus their ability to forge a community, usually of like-minded individuals, through online response and through web log navigation bars that direct readers to multiple other sites and blogs.12 It is this interactivity that sets blogs and interactive sites apart from conventional public reporting on television and radio and in newspapers and from the private forms in diaries, letters and even e-mails. The solitary activity of writing a diary or a letter to a single individual is exchanged for immediate online interaction and additionally directs the reader beyond the immediate blog to other blogs and sites. Adam Reed notes, No longer an isolated text on the Internet for online strangers and offline acquaintances to visit, the weblog thus becomes part of a body or society of blogs. This move is instantiated by the establishment of directories, mailing lists and webrings, but also by what is an increasingly common feature on weblog navigation bars, the ‘blog roll’ – a permanent list of hyperlinks to the individual’s favourite weblogs. (pp. 234–5) One result of such interaction however, is that rather than generating dialogue, blogs tend to reinforce certain view points and exclude others. Of the blogs and web sites that are specific to the American ‘home front’ side of the Iraq war, included are sites of mourning where an individual account of death and grief receives multiple responses that create a communal site of mourning. Moreover, we find in these mourning sites that women’s voices predominate, whether in writing obituaries or in detailing the experience of a soldier’s mother. While the medium is new then, the gendered division of wartime mourning persists: women continue to take on ‘the labour of loss’, a role reinforced by the media attention paid to bereaved mothers and wives. In addition, in spite of the multiple interaction of voices, the language and the responses to war

186 Grief in Wartime

death in these sites tend to reinforce each other’s positions rather than offer a dialogue of differing perspectives. One blog that takes very seriously its purpose of representing the experience of a soldier’s mother in wartime, ‘Some soldier’s mom: Thoughts of a soldier’s mom in a time of war’, offers its readers the story of her son’s deployment to Iraq, wounding, slow recovery and news of his unit.13 In particular, it includes an extended description of the funeral of her son’s close friend, Spec Tommy Byrd, which illustrates the breaking down of the binaries of public and private that is a feature of blogs. At the end of the blog, messages to the blogger and to Byrd and his family extend the blog’s narrative of grief and contribute to the discourses of meaning constructed around the soldier’s death. The blog does not include overt support for the war, nor does it question the American involvement in Iraq. Understandably given its writer, it offers a very sympathetic narrative of the hourly anxiety endured by the family of a deployed soldier, the experience of his wounding and recovery, the death of the son’s friend and, in January 2005, the homecoming of his unit. Yet, although the blogger avoids any overt discussion of wartime politics and the tone of the blog offers unquestioning support of the military, the narrative of grief that tells the story of Byrd’s funeral is arguably subversive in its intense focus on the desolation of his family, in spite of the silencing of a ‘he died for nothing’ response in the comments section. One soldier’s mom responds, ‘This is not the time, the place or forum for your empty musings’ and another post beneath has been removed, a clear message that to use the site for political ends is inappropriate, in the same way, it suggests, that it would be inappropriate to offer such a comment in person at the end of the funeral. In including comments and messages of condolence to Byrd’s family, the blog serves both public and private needs. It offers a form of participation for those who could not come to the funeral in its moving account of the emotions that attend the death of someone so young, and exposes very private grief to a public audience. While a funeral, and especially a full military funeral, is a public expression of mourning, the Internet account from an individual immediately involved in the mourning makes it both a specific, private, intimate representation of a family’s grief and a general public account of a soldier’s funeral, available to anyone with access to the Internet and strategically positioned close to 11 November. The account of the funeral also draws our attention to the tension between the revolutionary form and the use of that form to sustain, at least on the surface, conservative discourses of gender, war and grief.

The War in Iraq 187

Such discourses are manifest particularly in the representations of men’s and women’s wartime mourning: protective stalwart men stand beside weeping wife and mother. The dead soldier is honoured as hero and protector of family and country, differing little in rhetoric and gendered perception of grief from that surrounding a soldier’s death in the First World War: Noah, handsome as they come in his class A uniform brimming with medals and braids. He is standing against one wall with a waif of a young woman, her eyes rimmed red and dressed in a turquoise colored top and dark trousers. Besides being very young, she is diminutive … People are greeting her and hugging her and she is dwarfed … smothered by these mourners. I know immediately that this is Mykel, Tommy’s wife … Mykel and I clutch each other in a tight embrace … Her mother and I also tightly embrace and cry on each other’s shoulders … wordlessly conveying our pain for our children’s loss. (p. 2) Introducing herself to the Byrds ‘while the fathers shake hands, we mothers embrace and cry’. Later during the funeral ceremony, ‘[t]he wracking sobs of his mother echoing through the church are all it takes for the rest of the mourners and me to join her. I see Mykel’s shoulders heave as she cries’ (p. 4). Alongside these images of extreme grief is the note of pride and patriotism that attends the military funeral: ‘Two American flags are removed from the casket … each fold gathers and holds more than a hundred years of tradition together with the gratitude of a grateful Nation. It is all Mykel and Julie can do not to collapse from their chairs as the folded flags are presented to them’ (p. 6). Most poignantly, as the coffin is about to be lowered, ‘Mykel sobs out her husband’s name one last time … and reaches to plant a kiss on the coffin lid’ (p. 7). The blog includes a photograph of Mykel bent over the coffin as she says goodbye to her husband, an iconic image of the grieving young war widow. Set against this feminine representation of a woman’s grief is the masculine grief of the combat buddy: ‘Noah pulls his prized Combat Infantry Badge from his uniform chest and places it gently on his friend’s casket and recites softly the four lines of the St Crispin’s Day speech from “Henry V” that names them forever members of the Band of Brothers’ (p. 7). Although the military ideologies of patriotism and pride uphold conservative constructions of wartime death, particularly in the image of the flags and the recital of the St Crispin’s Day speech, and are supported by the conventional representations of masculine and feminine behaviour,

188 Grief in Wartime

in each instance the abstract ideal of patriotism is arguably overwhelmed by the dominant narrative of inconsolable loss to reveal a perhaps unwittingly subversive subtext. Thus, mother and wife almost collapse when handed the flags from the coffin: the patriotic ideal, ‘a grateful Nation’, cannot offer consolation in the face of the unbearable burden of grief they must now carry. Similarly, the image of Noah reciting the St Crispin’s Day speech competes with the photograph of the dead soldier’s wife laying a kiss on his coffin that draws the reader’s/viewer’s gaze away from all other narratives. Further, the blog concludes with a note of sadness and waiting. ‘DH remarked how long this year has been. I can only reply that I hope it gets no longer’ (p. 7). Many of the ensuing readers’ comments, however, uphold abstract notions of freedom, sacrifice and patriotism as part of the condolence they offer to Byrd’s family. As we have seen in earlier wars, condolence tends to rely on patriotic language as it attempts to impose meaning on the death. Thus, one response to the post comments: [M]y mind reels while it tries to grasp the awful price for Freedom that has been paid here! Words are pitifully inadequate expressions of sorrow and condolence ring hollow. I can only say THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU … I owe a dept I can never repay. My 18 month old son is the lucky reciepient [sic] of this terrible sacrifice. I will raise him up to know about and emulate men like Tommy. God’s blessing on this family, our warriors and their families and our Nation. (pp. 12–13) Support to sustain bereaved families thus becomes support for ‘the warrior’ and, in turn, the war. Death becomes ‘a terrible sacrifice’ for ‘Freedom’, so that the person of Tommy Byrd is obscured by the abstractions that accompany his death. They exist as part of the metaphoric framework Lakoff identifies, thus erasing possible alternative narratives that would question the meaning of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘Freedom’ and as each commentator employs this rhetoric it becomes more firmly established as the appropriate language of remembrance. While the grief of women like Sheehan and Lipscombe becomes central to questioning the validity of the war, in the Tommy Byrd story and later in ‘Final Salute’, grief can stand in the way of such questioning, even while the funeral narrative allows for a subversive subtext that implicitly raises the questions that cannot be spoken. Paradoxically then, the image of a 19-year-old bereaved wife laying her fingers against her 21-year-old husband’s coffin erases questions concerning the value of his death and his role as an

The War in Iraq 189

American soldier in Iraq, at the same time drawing our attention to such questions. In the Tommy Byrd story, the narrative is entirely controlled by the blogger; the bereaved wife and mother are not given a voice in the story. They are defined by the roles they play in the funeral and in the context of Byrd’s death and by the roles offered them in the condolence comments. When the bereaved do speak, however, they do not always accept the roles offered them by such abstract rhetoric or the meaning it imposes on their son’s death. Paul E. Schroeder, father of Lance Corporal Edward ‘Augie’ Schroeder II, killed August 2005, in his article ‘A life wasted: Let’s stop this war before more heroes are killed’, in the Washington Post in January 2006, challenges the consolatory abstractions offered in place of his son: ‘When heard repeatedly, the phrases “he died a hero” or “he died a patriot” or “he died for his country” rub raw … People think that if they say that, somehow it makes it okay that he died”, our daughter Amanda, has said’ (p. 1). Schroeder asserts, ‘The words “hero” and “patriot” focus on the death, not on the life. They are a flag-draped mask covering the truth’ (p. 1). Using his legitimacy as the bereaved parent of a soldier, Schroeder voices what the ‘Some soldier’s mom’ blog avoids speaking: ‘Though it hurts, I believe that his death … and that of other Americans who have died in Iraq – was a waste … But their deaths will not be in vain if Americans stop hiding behind flag-draped hero masks and stop whispering their opposition to this war … This is very painful to acknowledge, but I have to live with it. So does President Bush’ (p. 2). While pro- and anti-war discourses have been set against each other in the public arena, private discourse surrounding bereavement in the Iraq War seems more willing to reject than accept Schroeder’s demands that Americans stop hiding behind ‘flag-draped masks’ since, as Schroeder acknowledges, to represent the death as meaningless is to place it outside the reach of that consolatory rhetoric through which states and individuals impose meaning on death in war. Sites such as ‘Fallen Heroes of Operation Iraqi Freedom: Remembering the soldiers who died in the service of their country’ demonstrate the power such rhetoric holds in imposing meaning on these war deaths as it has in earlier wars. Messages left in memory of Army Pfc. Eric P. Woods exemplify this coming together of condolence and the rhetoric that at once offers meaning for death in war and maintains the discourse of ‘home’ and ‘front’ that sustains war as a legitimate activity. ‘Please take some comfort in knowing he is an American Hero and we will never forget his sacrifice to keep us safe at home’ and ‘America will honor your Hero. The Courage, Honor, and Valor that your Hero showed will always be remembered.’14

190 Grief in Wartime

Whether wartime mourning is enacted through constructions of meaning that support or protest the war, in this war legitimacy has been accorded the bereaved to a far greater extent than in the other wars discussed here. While the public statements from Rose Gentle and Cindy Sheehan that reveal their very private experience have garnered a great deal of media attention, stories of the bereaved that in past wars would have been considered too private to publish have also been made public. On the one hand, this is unprecedented in revealing the pain caused by war, but on the other hand, these stories are highly conventional in according the burden of loss to women, ultimately reinforcing the gendered narrative of ‘home’ and ‘front’ where men fight and women wait and weep in ways that have changed little since the First World War in spite of a much greater number of women in the military. As Lakoff has pointed out, even though the facts change, the framework remains the same. In a story that has appeared in both Britain and the United States, reporter Jim Sheeler and photographer Todd Heisler spent a year following and photographing as Marine Major Steve Beck, a Casualty Notification Officer, delivered the message of death to the families of marines killed in Iraq.15 At the centre of the larger story, published as ‘Final Salute’ in the United States in the Rocky Mountain News, and later as ‘The Last Post’ in the Sunday Times, is the representation of a grief usually hidden from view: the experience of receiving news of the death, the reception of the dead soldier’s body and the intensely private acts of mourning that each individual must perform. The framing of Katherine Cathey’s story of bereavement and grief at the death of her husband is noteworthy in emphasising her image as ‘pregnant mother’ as much as ‘wife’ or widow. She becomes iconic at two levels. The story begins not by telling us that she is waiting for her husband’s body, but that she is pregnant: ‘Inside a limousine parked on the airport tarmac, Katherine Cathey looked out at the clear night sky and felt a kick. “He’s moving”, she said. “Come feel him. He’s moving” ’. Having established the image of the pregnant widow the subsequent narrative increases in poignancy: ‘At the sight of the flag-draped casket, Katherine let loose a shrill, full-body wail that gave way to moans of distilled, contagious grief … She screamed as the casket moved slowly down the conveyor belt. She screamed until she nearly collapsed.’ Later, alongside photographs that show her obvious pregnancy, the narrative reinforces this image of motherhood: ‘Katherine draped her body over the smooth wood, pressing her pregnant belly to the casket, as close to a hug as she could get.’ As she lays markers of their life together in Jim Cathey’s coffin, the last gift is the ultrasound of the baby, taken 2 days after

The War in Iraq 191

Cathey’s death, offered in a long drawn out ritual, the last before the coffin is closed: ‘She stood cradling the ultrasound, then moved forward and placed it on the pillow at the head of the casket. She stood there, watching for several minutes, then removed it. She walked the length of the casket, then stepped back, still holding the only image of James J. Cathey Jr. She leaned in and placed it over her husband’s heart.’ The attendant photographs, particularly those showing Katherine Cathey clutching or draped over her dead husband’s flag-draped coffin, make it difficult if not impossible for the viewer to step outside the framework of thinkable thought offered by the marine honour guard and the ritual of a soldier’s burial that impose meaning on his death. The final section of the story, entitled ‘In death, a hero’ gives the reader, as it gives the bereaved, a construction of the death designed to mitigate grief. However, as in the narrative of Tommy Bryd’s death, we again find the paradoxical asking and erasing of the questions surrounding the death. In the ‘Final Salute’, the photographic images of intense grief hold their own questions. These are raised at one point in the article when a bereaved mother asks, ‘ “But is it worth it?” … “Was it worth his life?” … “Betty, with all you’ve been through, that’s not something I can answer for you”, Beck said, “That’s something for you to decide” ’. Yet the question had already received an implied answer in being set against a ceremony called ‘Remembering the brave’ that offers the bereaved families a source of consolation. Ultimately, however, while ‘Final Salute’ bridges the gap between public grieving in the funeral ceremony and the private pain that usually happens out of public view, to the point of depicting Katherine Cathey bedding down in the chapel to sleep one final night beside her husband and breathing in his smell from an unwashed t-shirt, the intensity of her pain and the story that surrounds it to a large degree obscure the questions behind her suffering. As an audience presented with such pain we want to accept what Asquith called ‘the high falutin’ platitudes’ on Cathey’s and our own behalf since they offer the only site of meaning in the face of her grief. While questions may be obscured or asked but offered consolation in ‘Final Salute’, and suggested but not asked directly in the story of Tommy Byrd’s funeral, the funeral of Gordon Gentle in Scotland in 2004 became a site of mourning that represented Gentle’s death in war precisely by pulling off the ‘flag-draped hero masks’ and moving beyond the rhetoric of consolation that upholds military ideology. Two narratives that relate the life and death of Gordon Gentle and the grief of his mother and friends offer none of the conventional consolation that attend the responses to Tommy Byrd’s funeral or the attentive marine brotherhood

192 Grief in Wartime

of ‘Final Salute’. Although the dominant tone of Some soldier’s mom’s blog on Byrd’s funeral is sorrow and loss, it exempts itself from a position on the war. While silencing any suggestion that Byrd died for nothing, as in ‘Final Salute’ voices offering abstract ideals of freedom and heroism are included in the construction of his dying. In defiance of such rhetoric, the funeral eulogy and the death of Gordon Gentle offer a public forum for speaking out against the war that continues past the funeral service itself through online sites. Moreover, in direct contrast to the role of the church as a patriarchal authority supporting the state that we have seen played out in the two world wars, here the Rev. John Mann begins his eulogy by expressing the emotions aroused by Gentle’s death, not pride in service to his country, but ‘Shock – denial – sorrow – anger’. Unlike the pre-eminence given to sorrow in the Byrd funeral account, the primary emotion Mann chooses to focus on is culturally less acceptable: anger. I am angry at the political leaders who created this war. I am angry at the politicians who themselves have never personally experienced the horror of war, yet who so easily have sent others into that horror. I am angry at the political leaders who in the pursuit of empire have sacrificed the lives of honourable people: and who see that sacrifice as an acceptable loss. I am angry at the political pretext for this war. (p. 1, http://www.justice4gordongentle.org/) Loss here is measured not in terms of service, or even in relation to grieving parents and friends, but as the loss of Gentle’s own life. ‘Usually when at a funeral we offer a tribute to a person’s life, the first 19 years are described in a sentence or two. When a young man is killed at the age of 19, no amount of words seems enough to contain his life.’ What is striking in this eulogy is the degree to which the status quo and tradition of honouring the soldier as soldier so visible in ‘Final Salute’ with its focus on the marine brotherhood is rejected. Mann’s language takes the soldier back from the ownership of the military and the accompanying narrative that honours death in war, and returns him to his family who hold him up in a demand for peace. Thus, in place of the abstract rhetoric of sacrifice, honour and duty to country that we have seen attending the deaths of Tommy Byrd and Eric Woods for example, Mann offers only one way of honouring Gordon Gentle: ‘The only way that his sacrifice will not be in vain, is if we the living, live with hope … [t]hat we might hear just an echo of the sound of the implements of war being turned into the instruments of peace’ (pp. 2–3).

The War in Iraq 193

A post on ‘A mischief of magpies’ blog for Remembrance Sunday, 13 November 2005, reprints Mann’s eulogy from the previous July, using it to rage against the absurdity that is war: I realise everyone is sick to death of the Iraq war, but I can’t think of a better time to get angry again than Remembrance Sunday. I would have hoped by this stage in history we’d all spend this Sunday laughing like drains at the very idea that anyone would be foolish enough to go to war to settle their differences. Sadly we haven’t progressed much. I only hope that when Prime Minister Tony is standing at the Cenotaph tomorrow, he fully realises what he’s done.16 A response to this blog takes the absurdity further by setting it in a historical context as it links it directly with the ‘pointless’ deaths of the First World War: ‘Something approaching the wave of gut wrenching emotion that overtook me a year ago in a small war cemetery on the outskirts of Ypres hit me when I read your post … It’s when you boil it all down to individuals, human beings with lives … rather than simple cannon fodder.’ The comment continues, ‘Gordon Gentle died for nothing. He didn’t die to make our lives better or safer … He died to sate the hunger of corporations and further the vainglorious posturings of ludicrous men’. It ends by uniting the two wars through a common meaninglessness: ‘So here’s to Gordon Gentle. Here’s to every lost life in the quagmire that is Iraq. Here’s to the lost souls of Flanders Fields. Lives lost needlessly, like all lives lost in pointless, petty wars’ (p. 3). Michel Tierney’s piece on Gordon Gentle in the Herald, with its title ‘The lost boy’, tells the story of loss and grief in the Iraq War with deliberate echoes of the First World War in its references to Peter Pan and ‘the lost boys’ and their audience of Edwardian boys who never grew up, being lost to the First World War. Like Peter Pan, Gordon Gentle retained all his baby teeth and never grew up.17 Tierney’s account and the linking of Gentle with the absurd losses of the First World War in the previously quoted blog show the legacy of that war persisting in British cultural memory and reinforcing resistance to military discourse through the language of absurdity and waste in a way that is nowhere evident in American writing on the Iraq War.18 Presenting us not only with the grief of Gentle’s mother Rose, father and sisters, but also that of his friends, Tierney sets out to show the damage an individual death inflicts on those closest to that person, damage not acknowledged even in the depictions of acute sorrow that we have seen in ‘Final Salute’ and Tommy Bryd’s

194 Grief in Wartime

funeral. Moreover, unlike the Byrd and Cathey stories, Tierney’s article allows Rose Gentle and Gordon Gentle’s friends a voice in the narrative through which they articulate their own grief. ‘The shed’, a hut Gentle and his friends built several years before when they were young teenagers, draws our attention to their youth; it has also become a kind of memorial to Gentle: ‘They keep photographs of Gordon inside and a few posters rallying against the war in Iraq. They’ve engraved his name on a bench’ (p. 1). Tierney avoids the public trappings of wartime burial, the flag and honour guard and, like Michael Moore, instead focuses entirely on private grieving. Intrinsic to this representation is a collapsing of the front/home, masculine/feminine binaries through which the Tommy Byrd and ‘Final Salute’ stories write bereavement. As Gentle himself is represented through the ‘feminine’ rather than the ‘masculine’, ‘[h]e was known as Gentle, Gento Giant, Big Man and Soft’, so Gentle’s friends do not represent the stoic masculinity of Some soldier’s mom’s blog, but acknowledge a persistent and overwhelming grief. One might conclude that Tierney has deliberately ‘feminised’ their representation here as he lets the boys speak. One of Gentle’s friends, Jim-Bob, acknowledges a very private expression of his grief that in earlier wars we have seen associated with ‘feminine’ grief: ‘The last couple of weeks I’ve been greetin’ up in my bedroom’ (p. 2). Gentle’s close friend Gary, who keeps Gentle’s last message on his mobile phone, admits, ‘You get your nights, you know what I mean. Some nights are bad … See without him … I’m just lost now. I drink every night. I cannae get him out of my head’ (p. 3). As in Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, the politics of grief is represented by Tierney in terms of the combination of the unemployment and army recruiting that led to Gentle’s joining up in the first instance, and in terms of Rose Gentle’s anti-war campaign that is her response to her grief: ‘Critics – a number of whom have written to her – say she should be grieving instead of campaigning. “I am grieving”, she insists “This is my grief, turned into anger. Six months ago I started crying and I haven’t stopped since. I want mums and dads to wonder why their sons are there” ’ (p. 3). Like Cindy Sheehan’s protest, Rose Gentle’s campaign is an active and public manifestation of her grief. But Tierney brings us behind the public face and uncovers the private representations of sorrow. In doing so, as a reminder to the reader of what the loss of a son means to a mother in physical terms, Tierney notes how Gentle’s bedroom ‘has become an ersatz shrine’ from which his mother runs her campaign. Here, most poignantly, Gordon Gentle is both present and absent: ‘In Gordon’s bedroom, Rose shows me the suitcase returned by the army with his training shoes, T-shirts, underwear and socks.’ Like

The War in Iraq 195

Katherine Cathey she yearns for physical evidence in the face of a terrible absence: ‘She puts a shirt to her face … But her most treasured possession is his bottle of Joop! aftershave … Rose sprays it on the carpet, in the fabric of his clothes … Everything was laundered and his smell had gone from them”, she says, “I was angry” ’. At the end of ‘The lost boy’, Tierney returns to the private space that is Gordon Gentle’s bedroom, as if doing so will bring his readers into the private space of Rose Gentle’s grief. Tierney’s representation of the mother’s physical relationship with her son and its loss recalls Loraux’s discussion of a mother’s grief: ‘[T]he grief and the intimacy of these bodies produce excessive pain for the body-memory of mothers’ (p. 37). She loves it in here, full of his things. She stayed with him the night before he was buried … “ I remember grabbing him and shaking him, saying, ‘Wake up, wake up.’ She looks and sounds bereft. Every day and every month that passes, her emotional breakdown intensifies … ‘It’s going to be really hard when it finally sinks in … and I don’t think I’m ready … I don’t think I’ll ever be’. Her beautiful soldier boy is dead. Like Sheeler and Heisler in ‘Final Salute’, Tierney collapses private and public sites of mourning: allowing us to enter Gentle’s son’s bedroom we participate in her grief. While we cannot experience it, we are brought closer to an understanding of what it means. Where Tierney’s narrative differs from ‘Final Salute’, however, is in the absence of any construction of the death that imposes meaning on it. His representations of private pain, unobscured by the rhetoric of consolation, become the means by which the war is questioned. Both Rose Gentle and Cindy Sheehan use their position as bereaved mothers to hold up their dead sons in public protest against the war. Both women have come under attack for their actions, though Sheehan more so than Gentle, probably representing the greater support for the war in the United States. In each instance, however, the reactions against them have included reactions against their taking their grief to the street. In Sheehan’s case this has also included attacks on her fitness as a mother. Although, as already mentioned, their representation of themselves as ‘mourning mothers’ is highly conventional, the more subversive nature of their protest becomes visible when set against the conservative construction of motherhood exemplified by the ‘Marine corps moms’ web site.19 In direct contrast to the idea of mother as a site that collapses binary oppositions necessary to the conduct of war in Trotter’s poem ‘Mother

196 Grief in Wartime

to mother’, the introduction on the ‘Marine corps moms’ home page reveals a motherhood that upholds the home/front, feminine/masculine binaries that sends their sons to war: ‘We had been on the sidelines of soccer, baseball, and football games, cheering madly as our sons contributed to their team successes. Now, our sons were half a world away protecting us and millions of other Americans. And there is no place for mothers on the sidelines of a battlezone’ (p. 1). The extreme lack of a focus outside their own world means that these mothers interpret their motherhood and its relationship with the war exclusively from an American perspective. As with Sheldon, their desire to offer support to their sons traps them within a ‘framework of thinkable thought’ that erases alternative narratives of war and motherhood. Their privileged position allows them to ignore those Iraqi mothers who have no choice but to live in the battlezone created by the marine sons. Further exclusion involves failing to recognise that some of the American soldiers deployed to Iraq are mothers. While the deaths of their sons for Sheehan and Gentle initiated them into the knowledge that war means killing and dying, the ‘Marine corps moms’ site defines war as an extension of football and childhood games, though it is also a gendered playground from which mothers are excluded. Moreover, employing a metaphoric framework that erases the concrete damage of war, the site tells the story of the death of a marine, Lieutenant Corporal Tyler Troyer, noting how as children he and Shane Conrad (one of the marine moms’ sons) broke a table and then fixed it. Likewise, it tells us ‘Although they broke things in Iraq, they worked on fixing them too’ (p. 2). Since, unlike the Iraqi mothers, or indeed the forgotten mothers who are also serving soldiers, these mothers ‘do not belong on the sidelines of a war’, they have not witnessed their sons’ breakages in Iraq. Robert Fisk, in one of the first considered accounts of the war in the context of Anglo-American Middle East politics, did witness the breakages caused by Anglo-American weapons: A middle-aged man is carried into the hospital in pyjamas, soaked head to foot in blood. A girl of perhaps four … is staring at a heap of her own intestines protruding from the left side of her stomach … A woman in black with what appears to be a stomach wound [p. 1168] … the partially decapitated body of a little girl … another girl lies on a stretcher with her brain and left ear missing. Another dead child has its feet blown away. (2005b, p. 1169)20 Fisk’s description alerts his readers to the erasure of ‘the other’ demonstrated in the ‘Marine corps moms’ web site; at the same time, in focusing

The War in Iraq 197

on the injured Iraqi bodies, he also reminds us of the potential for the Anglo-American protest movements to enact the same erasure. Even while both Gentle and Sheehan have included the suffering of the Iraqis in their calls for Anglo-American troop withdrawal, the bloody bodies held up to public view in protest against the war are American and British; their dominance obscures the bodies of ‘the other’. Representations of grief can be subversive then, in revealing the damage war causes and potentially destabilising the state; conversely grief can also be ‘governed’ by the consolatory rhetoric that imposes meaning on death in war. These narratives from the war in Iraq set up a tension between their potential to reveal what lies under the flag-draped coffin and the manufacture of consent inherent in the giving and receiving of the rhetoric of consolation that offers meaning for these deaths. In both situations, however, the focus on ‘our’ grief to the exclusion of the grief of the ‘other’, in the narratives discussed here, limits the extent to which the protest narratives actually do interrogate the binaries that make war possible. This exclusion relates directly to a further silencing that needs to be addressed. The impossibility of intruding on the intense grief represented by bereavement narratives such as ‘Final Salute’, ‘One soldier’s mom’ and even in Tierney’s story on Gordon Gentle’s death stands in the way of questions surrounding the dead soldier’s part in the war. These questions become even more difficult to pose when the language accompanying a soldier’s death unequivocally upholds abstractions of honour, duty, sacrifice and freedom that not only erase the terrible nature of his death, but also erase the death and injury he has inflicted. Commemorating a soldier’s death in the Iraq War, then, reveals that mourning women and by extension the society to which they belong, can still remain trapped in the problem Kazantzis finds in the First World War: ‘To question those values is to question the Sacrifice itself – impossible. For then his death must become not only horrible but also meaningless’ (Kazantzis in Reilly, ed., p. xix). While the value of First World War ‘sacrifice’ has been questioned many times since 1918, the problem returns with each new war and the official discourses that initiate and sustain it. Grief at the death of an American or British soldier in Iraq and the subsequent construction of that soldier as ‘Hero’ make wartime debate difficult because such debate would threaten the forms of meaning through which the bereaved mourn. At the same time, of course, the consolatory rhetoric is the language that constructs war as a legitimate activity and upholds its value in society in large part through the erasure of the image of the soldier as killer and the damage he causes to ‘the other’.

198 Grief in Wartime

Ninety years before Robert Fisk would bring together the First World War and the Iraq War and remind us in The Great War for Civilisation that ‘war is primarily … about death and the infliction of death’ (2005b, p. xxi), a 20-year-old soldier, uncovering the bodies of his dead ‘enemy’ in 1915, angrily rejects rhetorical abstractions that would obscure the humanity of ‘the other’ and the brute facts of death in war: ‘Let him who invok[es] Honour and Praise and Valour and Love of Country … realise how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of hideous putrescence’ (Leighton, quoted in Brittain, 1982, p. 133). This literal exhuming strips away the rhetoric that would transform the dead, demanding that those who construct such rhetoric see ‘the corpse that used to be a son’. To ‘see’ is to participate in the knowledge of death without consolation. Such knowledge results in the question that is repeatedly asked by the bereaved of almost a hundred years of war, but must be repeatedly silenced by the state at war: ‘Who is there who has known and seen who can say that Victory is worth the death of even one of these?’ (Leighton, quoted in Brittain, 1982, p. 133).

Notes Introduction 1. Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia; Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Damousi’s Labour of Loss and her more recent Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-War Australia and Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning inform my study throughout. They have been crucial in legitimising the study of wartime bereavement and in offering ways of approaching the subject. However, both writers focus primarily on post-war grieving and its cultural construction. This book looks primarily, though not entirely, on the experience of grief during war and the bereaved individual’s interaction with wartime discourses of loss. 2. Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War. Summerfield’s work has been important to my approach in offering a useful theoretical perspective from which to consider the relationship between the private individual and public discourse in wartime. 3. On the First World War, see Braybon, Women Workers in the First World War; Melman, ed., Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930; Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War; Smith, The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War; Cohen, Remapping the Home Front: Locating Citizenship in British Women’s Great War Fiction; Gullace, ‘The Blood of Our Sons’: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War; Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain; Potter, Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great War 1914–1918. On the Second World War, in addition to Summerfield, see Campbell, Women at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era and Lassner, British Women Writers of World War Two: Battlegrounds of Their Own. For a broader ranging discussion, see Noakes, War and the British: Gender, Memory and National Identity. Two important works on war and masculinity are Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities and Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return. 4. Dana Millbank, ‘Curtains Ordered for Media Coverage of Returning Coffins’, the Washington Post (Tuesday, 21 October, 2003) A23. 5. Cannadine, ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain’, in Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death; Lyn MacDonald, 1914–1918: Voices and Images of the Great War. For a specific discussion of the negotiation between public and private commemoration post-war, see Moriarty, ‘Christian Iconography and First World War Memorials’, Imperial War Museum Review 6 (1991): 63–75. 6. Higonnet et al., ‘Introduction’, in Higonnet et al. (eds), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 199

200 Notes

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

1987) p. 4. See also Higonnet and Higonnet, ‘The Double Helix’ in the same collection. One limitation of using diaries is the inherent bias towards a middle-class perspective. Since most diaries were and continue to be written by middleand upper class women it is their legacy that we tend to draw on. This study does not wish to privilege these already privileged voices, but must at the same time rely on the material available. As far as possible it also draws on working-class women’s writing. Internet technology may continue this bias, given that the creation of message boards and blogs requires ownership or availability of a computer and some working knowledge of the technology. Further collapse of the concept of home and front happens in the event of a combatant receiving news of the death of his family in the Blitz in the Second World War. See Litoff and Smith, ‘ “Will He Get My Letter?” Popular Portrayals of Mail and Morale during World War II’ Journal of Popular Culture 3 (1989/90): 21–43. For further discussion of gender and letters during the Second World War, see Jolly ‘Love Letters versus Letters Carved in Stone: Gender, Memory and the “Forces Sweethearts” Exhibition’, in Evans and Lun (eds), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century. For discussions of gender and wartime binaries, see Elshtain, Women and War; Higonnet et al. (eds), Behind the Lines: Gender and Two World Wars; Cooper et al. (eds), Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation; Cooke and Woollacott (eds), Gendering War Talk. On women’s and men’s wartime bodies, see Jane Marcus, ‘Corpus/Corps/Corpse: Writing the Body in/at War’, in Cooper et al. (eds), Arms and the Woman. Useful examinations of gender and grief are collected in Field, Hockey and Small (eds), Death, Gender and Ethnicity.

Chapter 1

For Women Must Weep

1. Phyllis Kelly, an Irish girl from Athlone, was engaged to Eric Appleby who was serving in the Royal Field Artillery in France. Having met Appleby while he was in training in Ireland, the term of endearment that they exchange, Englishman, is part of a private joke on their English/Irish difference. Appleby signs his letters to her ‘Your Englishman’. This letter, the only letter by Phyllis in the collection, is taken from Jean Kelly (ed.), Love Letters from the Front (Dublin: Marino Books, 2000) p. 284. Quotations from this collection are reprinted by kind permission of Mercier Press Ltd., Cork. 2. The Girl’s Friend (London: Amalgamated Press, 1914). Magazines used in this chapter are housed in the Doris Lewis Rare Book Room, Dana Porter library, University of Waterloo. 3. Although these extracts are taken from magazines published at the beginning of the war when, it could be argued, the war was seen as an adventure and heroic ideals were still uppermost in the minds of the general population, stories and columns from 1917 and 1918 show little change in attitude. The major difference is that heroines of later stories are taking a more active

Notes 201

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

part in the war; however, romantic links to a sweetheart at the front are still of paramount importance in defining the woman’s position in relation to the war. For an important discussion of popular wartime writing and propaganda, see Potter’s Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print, especially chapter 2, ‘ “Is your best boy wearing khaki?”: Publishing and propaganda’, and chapter 3, ‘ “Putting things in their right places”: The War in Romance Novels’. I define ‘official’ discourse as that implemented by the state or in the service of the state for specific propaganda purposes, such as recruiting posters, pamphlets and so on. I define as ‘unofficial’ other discourse that was public and supported the war effort directly or indirectly, but did not come directly from state intervention, such as advertising, public forms of behaviour, such as the wearing of the badge of sacrifice, sermons and magazine columns. This discussion refers to the British situation. The scale of deaths was, of course, repeated in all the belligerent countries and was necessarily most severe in France and Belgium. See McDonald, 1914–1918: Voices and Images of the Great War, p. 165; Connelly, The Great War, Memory and Ritual: Commemoration in the City and East London 1916–1939; Imperial War Museum Misc. 91, Item 1358: Collection of Mourning Cards. Letters from a Lost Generation: First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends, ed. Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge (London: Little, Brown, 1998) p. 398. The manuscript letters and diaries in the Vera Brittain Archives, William Ready Collection, McMaster University, were also consulted as part of my research. Quotations from the published edition of the letters are referenced by date of publication (1998); unpublished quotations are referenced as manuscript, abbreviated to ms. Quotations from Vera Brittain material are reproduced by permission of Mark Bostridge and Rebecca Williams, her literary executors. It is important to note that anticipatory ‘mourning’ also appears to be part of the combatant narrative. On leaving for the front in March 1915, Leighton sent Brittain an amethyst brooch, traditionally a mourning stone, accompanied with a card engraved ‘In Memoriam’. Roland Leighton to Vera Brittain, 11 September 1915: Letters (1998) p. 165; Chronicle (1982) p. 344; 14 September 1915. For an interesting commentary on Brittain’s description here, see Das, ‘ “The impotence of sympathy”: Touch and trauma in the memoirs of the First World War nurses’, Textual Practice 19.2 (2005): 239–62. Transcribed by Brittain and enclosed in a letter to Edward Brittain, ms: 7 January 1916. Transcribed by Brittain and enclosed in a letter to Edward Brittain, ms: 6 January 1916. Damousi disputes this (1999, p. 11), but the example she gives contains the formulaic phrases that are repeated again and again in condolence letters from the front in the Imperial War Museum collections and elsewhere. Higginson collection, Imperial War Museum 95/1/1: Material taken from collections in the Imperial War Museum’s department of documents will henceforth be referenced in the text as IWM and collection number.

202 Notes 16. Material in the Anderson collection shows that Anderson was a skilled stained glass designer and artist who sent sketches as well as letters and cards home to his wife. His letters suggest that he had a much higher level of formal education than his wife. 17. A search of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission yields no record of a site for Crees, so we must presume, thankfully, that Dorothy Cartwright was spared the message she so dreads in her letter. 18. Vera Brittain’s post-war writing, especially Testament of Youth and Honourable Estate, suggests a need to claim ownership of Leighton because she was denied it at his death. Socially and legally there was a painful gap between her status as fiancée and her status as wife. Brittain’s grief was certainly exacerbated by the fact that she was not married to him at the time of his death: that, in fact, his death at that particular moment prevented the marriage she had anticipated. Marriage would, of course, have placed Brittain, rather than Leighton’s mother, as the recipient of his possessions, including his poetry. 19. Asquith’s comment is rendered even more pertinent when set against John Buchan’s tribute to Raymond Asquith: ‘Debonair and brilliant and brave, he is now part of that immortal England which knows not age or weariness or defeat.’ Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914 and After, p. 97. 20. See Cannadine’s essay, ‘War and death, grief and mourning in modern Britain’, in Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death. 21. For a discussion of the reception of Journey’s End during the early days of its production, see R.C. Sherriff’s autobiography No Leading Lady (London: Gollancz, 1968). The 75th anniversary production of the play in London (2004) shows that the First World War dead are not forgotten. The play, which extended its run, ended with a poignant memorial to the war dead in place of the traditional curtain call.

Chapter 2

Grieving the ‘Good’ War

1. Dana Gioia, ‘The most unfashionable poet alive: Charles Causley’ (http//www.danagioia.net/essays/ecausley.htm), p. 2. accessed 12 July 2005. 2. Brittain, ‘They that mourn’, in Brittain (ed.), One Voice: Pacifist Writings from the Second World War. I would like to thank Dr. Michael W. Higgins for bringing to my attention this new edition of Brittain’s Second World War essays. 3. Hartley’s anthology and her analysis of the texts and their context in her introduction are important resources in the study of women and the Second World War; it remains an area that demands more scholarly attention, particularly at the level of primary texts. 4. Phyllis Warner, ‘England in 1940: The human front – Measuring the moods of Britain’, published in the Washington Post, 21 April 1940 (IWM 95/14/1). Warner was a journalist for the Washington Post, living in London. The archives include Warner’s own journal, ‘Journal under terror’ and extracts from that journal and other articles published in the Washington Post. This piece comments on the use of Mass Observation in revealing the moods of the people of Britain. For a very specific analysis of the relationship between

Notes 203

5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

the individual, the community and wartime ideology, see Freedman, Whistling in the Dark: Memory and Culture in Wartime London (Louisville, KT: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999). For further discussions of film and other media during the war, see, among others, Aldgate and Richards, Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War; Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema; Hayes and Hill (eds), ‘Millions Like Us?’: British Culture in the Second World War; Murphy, British Cinema and the Second World War. Jesse and Harwood, London Front: Letters Written to America (August 1939-July 1940); Hodgson, Few Eggs and No Oranges: A Diary Showing How Unimportant People in London and Birmingham Lived through the War Years 1940–1945 Written in the Notting Hill Area of London; Byerly and Byerly (eds), Dearest Phylaby: Letters from Wartime England by Edith Base; Webley (ed.), Betty’s Wartime Diary 1939–1945. Naomi Mitchison, Among You Taking Notes … The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison 1939–1945, ed. Dorothy Sheridan (London: Victor Gollancz, 1985). Joan Kirby was in the ‘WRENS’. Her letters are written from the various places around Britain where she was stationed, including her time as a signaller on the coast of Scotland. Litoff and Smith, ‘ “Will he get my letter?”: Popular portrayals of mail and morale during World War II’. A reading of British Second World War private writing suggests that God was rarely mentioned. Two noteworthy collections of oral accounts are Wicks, No Time to Wave Goodbye and The Day They Took the Children. Further discussion of wartime evacuation can be found in Inglis, The Children’s War: Evacuation 1939–1945 and Jackson Who Will Take Our Children: The Story of the Evacuation in Britain 1939–45. Jackson is one of the few writers to examine the psychological effects of the evacuation on parents and children. Mabel Lucie Attwell, ‘August 1939 – The evacuation of school children was carried out with complete success’, in The Queen’s Book of the Red Cross, p. 192. The idea of the photograph as a means of transcending ‘home’ and ‘front’ is exemplified in a Kodak advertisement in Chatelaine magazine, July 1944, which shows a soldier outside a Salvation Army hut studying a photograph that has come with his mail: ‘Home … it’s what they all talk about, think about. It stands for everything that’s dear to them – everything they’re fighting for … Nothing else brings home so close as letters and snapshots. Over and over again they ask for “more snapshots”. Let’s see that they get them’.

Chapter 3

Vietnam: The War at Home

1. Baskir and Strauss, ‘The Vietnam Generation’, in Horne (ed.), The Wounded Generation. This essay also provides statistics on the particular groups that were sent to Vietnam and those that avoided it, particularly in relation to class and educational privilege. 2. In ‘Chicken or hawk? Heroism, masculinity and violence in Vietnam War narratives’, Angela Smith quotes Berg and Rowe to emphasise this connection between potential draftees and their communities: ‘ “[C]itizens served

204 Notes

3. 4. 5.

6.

on local draft boards and their review panels, forced to decide which neighbors’ children would go to war”. This … ensured that the rhetoric of patriotism infiltrated the whole community’, in Smith (ed.), Gender and Warfare in the Twentieth Century: Textual Representations, p. 187. For further discussion of this, see Piehler, Remembering War the American Way. Women were also killed in Vietnam, but their families were usually unaware that they were in danger. Describing the deaths of airmen she witnesses in the Second World War, J. Westren writes of a particular body, ‘I stood there with him, aching for his family – a wife, a girl, a mother? – who were still knowing him alive, yet I knew he was dead; they did not, yet – perhaps wouldn’t know for hours, they would be on a sort of borrowed time of knowing him still alive’ (IWM, 91/4/1, p. 153). Mullen’s memoir was, in large part, written as a response to the Mullens’s story as told by Bryan in Friendly Fire.

Chapter 4 Mourning and Combat: ‘No One Sings: Lully, Lully’ 1. On combatant grief and PTSD see Lifton, Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims nor Executioners and ‘Understanding the traumatized self: imagery, symbolization, and transformation’, in Wilson, Harel and Kahana (eds), Human Adaptation to Extreme Stress: From the Holocaust to Vietnam; Shatan, ‘Stress disorders among Vietnam veterans: The emotional content of combat continues’, in Figley (ed.), Trauma and Its Wake, vol. II and ‘Have you hugged a Vietnam veteran today? The basic wound of catastrophic stress’, in M.D. Kelly (ed.), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the War Veteran Patient. See also the findings of Pivar and Field in ‘Unresolved grief in combat veterans with PTSD’, Journal of Anxiety Disorders 18.6 (2004): 745–55: ‘[G]rief severity was uniquely associated with losses of comrades during combat whereas no such relationship was shown for trauma or depressive symptoms. The latter finding suggested that in fact higher levels of grief stemmed from interpersonal losses during the war and was not simply an artefact of current general distress level’ (p. 745). The Iraq War Clinician’s Guide, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (http:// www. ncptsd.va.gov/war/guide/ index.html). 2. Das offers an important analysis of physical intimacy amongst combatants in Das, ‘ “Kiss me, Hardy”: Intimacy, gender, and gesture in World War I trench literature’, in Modernism/Modernity 9.1 (2002): 51–74 and in Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 3. Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer in The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (London: Faber & Faber, 1980/1937). Memoirs of an Infantry Officer was first published in 1930 and subsequently as the first part of The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. The quotations here are taken from The Complete Memoirs. 4. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory; Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars; Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture and The Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War.

Notes 205 5. See J. Westren’s comments on such ‘desperate gaiety’ in Chapter 2. 6. Walter Robson, Letters from a Soldier (London: Faber & Faber, 1960). Quotations from this collection are reprinted by kind permission of Faber & Faber. 7. It is important to note that this state of mind is also present in home front bereaved, as we have seen in Chapters 1 and 2. 8. Geoffrey Thurlow to Vera Brittain, France, 20 April 1917: Thurlow, a close friend of Brittain’s brother Edward, was killed on 23 April. His letters to Vera and Edward Brittain are included in Letters from a Lost Generation: First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends. 9. Private Ivor Rowbery to ‘the best Mother in the world’ in Sanger Letters from Two World Wars: A Social History of English Attitudes to War 1914–45. 10. For an important discussion of British survivors’ silence after the Second World War, see McManners, pp. 12–14. Also see Ben Shepherd’s chapter ‘A good war’ in his discussion of war and psychiatry, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Although Shepherd notes that returning combatants were made very aware of potential psychiatric problems, individual accounts suggest that many veterans preferred to deal with their war experience outside of professional help. 11. O’Donnell, Beyond Valor: World War II’s Ranger and Airborne Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat and Into the Rising Sun: In Their Own Words, World War II’s Pacific Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat. 12. In The Poetry of Mourning, Ramazani finds this rejection of a transformative ideology also represented in ‘the Wall’: ‘The Memorial skeptically signifies its inability to recuperate the dead, to redeem death as life’ (p. 362).

Chapter 5 ‘Can’t Face the Graves Today’: Nurses Mourn on the Western Front 1. K.E. Luard’s first collection, Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front 1914–1915, was published anonymously in 1915; the diary/letters she wrote after that point, from October 1915 to August 1918, and collected in Unknown Warriors were not published until 1930. 2. See Chapter 4, note 1. 3. For an important discussion and illustrations of such representations, see Hutchinson’s ‘Pictorial essay’, in Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross. 4. The man is North African – this change to ‘whiteness’ suggests that part of the value of his dying is his becoming ‘white’. 5. Contrast Borden’s ‘Paraphernalia’, in The Forbidden Zone: ‘And here are all your things, your blankets and your bottles and your basins. The blankets weigh down upon his body. Your syringes and your needles and your uncorked bottles are all about in confusion … What have you and all your things to do with the dying of this man? Nothing. Take them away’ (pp. 125–6). 6. See Borden’s fragment ‘Conspiracy’, in The Forbidden Zone for an extended exploration of this concept. 7. An American V.A.D. [Katherine Foote, daughter of Arthur Foote], 88 Bis and V.I.H.: Letters from Two Hospitals.

206 Notes 8. Higonnet, ‘Not so quiet in no-woman’s-land’, in Cooke and Woollacott (eds), Gendering War Talk, p. 210. One writer who does ‘decode’ the lies is Ellen La Motte in The Backwash of War (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1934), published in 1916, but, La Motte writes in her introduction to the 1934 edition, suppressed in the summer of 1918 because it was seen as ‘damaging to the morale’. 9. For further discussion of women’s war writing as witness, see Potter, Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print, chapter 4, ‘ “I alone am left to tell the tale’: Memoirs by Women on Active Service’. 10. The French term for coward or shirker.

Chapter 6

Vietnam: Bringing Home the Front

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver (eds), The Memory of Catastrophe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). I am grateful to Manchester University Press for allowing me to reprint it here. 1. I use nurses’ war poetry in this chapter because I see it as a form of life writing. Including the poetry adds a further dimension to the understanding of the nursing experience and of the connection between the private and political that is important in the women’s writing in general. All of the poems are taken from the anthology, Visions of War, Dreams of Peace, ed. Lynda Van Devanter and Joan Furey. 2. For an important discussion of the Vietnam War and remembrance, see Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. 3. See again Piehler, Remembering War the American Way. 4. For a further discussion of this issue in relation to the ‘Wall’, see Sturken, pp. 44–84 and Ringnalda, pp. 240–3.

Chapter 7

Epilogue: ‘Mother to Mother’: The War in Iraq

1. Lorna Martin, ‘ “Mother to mother’ plea to Cherie over Scottish soldier killed in Iraq’, Observer (Sunday, 19 December, 2004) http: //politics. guardian.co.uk/ print/0,3858,509143–111256,000.html accessed 24 November 2005. 2. There are notable exceptions to this, of course. Women soldier’s blogs from Iraq include ‘Life in this girl’s army (http://sgtlizzie.blogspot.com/); ‘A view from a broad’ (http://www.livejournal.com/users/ginmar/) and ‘Desertdiet’ (http://desertdiet.blogspot.com/). In addition, one of the better soldier accounts to come out of the Iraq War is Kayla Williams’s Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2005). The experience of the ‘waiting father’ is powerfully articulated in Frederick Busch’s essay ‘ “Don’t watch the news”: A marine’s family lives from phone call to phone call’, Harper’s Magazine (November 2005): 33–41.

Notes 207 3. Salam Pax, Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi. One reason for the appeal of this blog may have been its overall ‘Western’ tone. 4. Many returning soldiers have spoken against the war; others have refused to serve in Iraq. For an overview of such dissension and the Iraq veterans against the war movement, see David Goodman’s October 2004 article ‘Breaking ranks’ (http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature /2004/11/ 10_400.html), accessed 28 January 2006. 5. George Lakoff, ‘Metaphor and war, again’ (http: //www.alternet.org/ story/15414/), p. 1, accessed 18 January 2006. 6. This chapter focuses on British and American representations of the war, but recognises that the Americans are the dominant players supported by the British troops and, to a lesser extent, by other coalition forces. 7. Murdo Macleod and Ben McConville, ‘Michael Moore wants mother of dead soldier in next movie’ (Sunday, 12 December 2004) (http://scotlandonsunday. scotsman.com), accessed 24 November 2005. 8. Robert Fisk, ‘The betrayed mothers of America’ (19 November 2005) (http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles547.htm), p. 1, accessed 1 December 2005. 9. For further discussion of the role of blogs in the Iraq War, see the following: Hockenberry, ‘The blogs of war’, Wired Magazine (http://www.wired. com/wired/archive/13.08/milblogs_pr.html), accessed 18 November 2005; Piper and Ramos, ‘Blogs of war: A review of alternative sources for Iraq War information’, Searcher: The Magazine for Database Professionals (February 2005, pp. 15–21); Wall, ‘Blogs of war: Weblogs as news’, Journalism 6.2: 153–72. 10. ‘Justice for Gordon Gentle’ (http://www.justice4gordongentle.org/). 11. ‘Final Salute’, see note 16. 12. For statistics on wartime bloggers and their readers, see Kaye and Johnson, ‘Weblogs as a source of information about the 2003 Iraq War’, in Berenger (ed.), Global Media Go to War: Role of News and Entertainment Media during the 2003 Iraq War, pp. 291–301. 13. ‘Some soldier’s mom: Thoughts of a soldier’s mom in a time of war’ (http://somesoldiersmom.blogspot.com/2005/11/funeral-of-spc-tommybyrd.html), accessed 5 December 2005. 14. ‘Fallen Heroes of Operation Iraqi Freedom: Remembering the soldiers who died in the service of their country’ (http: //www.fallenheroesmemorial. com/oif/profiles/woodsericp.html), accessed 5 December 2005. 15. Sheeler and Heisler, ‘Final Salute’ (http: //denver.rockymountainnews.com/ news/finalSalute/), accessed 30 January 2006. Quotations are taken from the text at this site. A shorter version of this story, ‘The last post,’ detailing the return of James Cathey’s body to Reno, Nevada, was published in the Sunday Times Magazine on 8 January 2006. I am indebted to Dr. Jane Potter for bringing this piece to my attention and supplying me with the Times hardcopy. 16. A mischief of magpies: Sunday, November, 13, 2005, ‘One for remembrance Sunday’ (http://amischiefofmagpies.blogspot.com), accessed 24 November 2005. 17. Tierney, ‘The lost boy’ (http://www.justice4gordongentle.org/news-stories/ 2004/12/11/the-lost-boy.html), accessed 24 November 2005.

208 Notes 18. This relationship between the First World War and the Iraq War in British consciousness is further evidenced in Andrew Steggall’s production of The Soldier’s Tale at the Old Vic, February 2006. 19. Marine corps moms, (http://www.marinecorpsmoms.com), accessed 28 November 2005. 20. See also Anderson, ‘War wounds: Bombs fall and the Lights go out’, The New Yorker (14 April, 2003): 46–51.

Bibliography Private papers Vera Brittain Archives, William Ready Collection, McMaster University Imperial War Museum Department of Documents Anderson, Lance Cpl. William (96/24/1) Ball, Mrs. V.R. (99/66/1) Biggington, Mrs K.M. (99/41/1) Higginson, Pte A. (95/1/1) Hopkinson, Diana (86/3/1) Kirby, Joan (Con Shelf) Letter to Miss Ann O’Neill (Misc. 100 item 1556) Warner, Phyllis (95/14/1) Westren, J. (91/4/1) Collection of Mourning Cards (Misc. 91 Item 1358)

Periodicals and newspapers Chatelaine Daily Mail The Family Journal: A Weekly Paper for the Household The Girl’s Friend Life Times of London Woman’s World

Books, articles and internet sources Adler, Bill (ed.). Letters from Vietnam (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003). Aldgate, Anthony and Jeffrey Richards. Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Allan, Stuart. ‘The Culture of Distance’, in Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer (eds), Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). Allan, Stuart and Barbie Zelizer (eds). Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). Allingham, Margery. The Oaken Heart (London: Michel Joseph, 1941). A Mischief of Magpies: Sunday, November, 13, 2005, ‘One for Remembrance Sunday’ (http://amischiefofmagpies.blogspot.com), accessed 24 November 2005. An American V.A.D. [Katherine Foote, daughter of Arthur Foote] 88 Bis and V.I.H.: Letters from Two Hospitals (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1919). Anderson, Donald. ‘Visions of War, Dreams of Peace: A Conversation with Joan A. Furey’, War, Literature, and the Arts 11.2 (Fall–Winter 1999): 118–33. 209

210

Bibliography

Anderson, Jon Lee. ‘War Wounds: Bombs Fall and the Lights Go Out’, The New Yorker (14 April 2003): 46–51. Anderson, Linda. Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century: Remembered Futures (London and New York: Prentice Hall/ Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997). Anderson, Verily. Spam Tomorrow (Bath: Chivers, 1995). Anon. Letters from a French Hospital (London: Constable, 1917). Antze, Paul and Michael Lambek (eds). Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York and London: Routledge, 1996). Archer, John. The Nature of Grief: The Evolution and Psychology of Reactions to Loss (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). Ashplant, T.G., Graham Dawson and Michael Roper. ‘The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration: Contexts, Structures and Dynamics’, in T.G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper (eds), The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Asquith, Cynthia. Haply I May Remember (London: James Barrie, 1950). ——. Diaries 1915–1918 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968). Baldwin, Marian. Canteening Overseas: 1917–1919 (New York: Macmillan, 1920). Baskir, L.M. and W.A. Strauss. ‘The Vietnam Generation’ in A.D. Horne (ed.), The Wounded Generation (Princeton, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981). Bawden, Nina. Carrie’s War (Philadelphia and New York: J.P. Lippincott, 1973). Beder, Joan. ‘Mourning the Unfound’, Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Human Services 83 (2002): 400–3. Benson, Theodora. Sweethearts and Wives: Their Part in War (London: Faber & Faber, 1942). Benstock, Shari (ed.). The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). Bibby, Michael. Hearts and Minds: Bodies, Poetry and Resistance in the Vietnam Era (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995). Black, Elizabeth Walker. Hospital Heroes (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919). Borden, Mary. The Forbidden Zone (London: William Heinemann, 1929). Brandon, Heather. Casualties: Death in Vietnam; Anguish and Survival in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984). Braudy, Leo, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Nature of Masculinity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). Braybon, Gail. Women Workers in the First World War (London and New York: Routledge, 1989/1981). Brittain, Vera. Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925 (London: Virago, 1978; Gollanez, 1933). ——. Chronicle of Youth: Vera Brittain’s War Diary, 1913–17, ed. Alan Bishop and Terry Smart (London: Fontana/Collins, 1982). ——. Testament of Friendship: Diary of the Thirties 1932–1939, ed. Alan Bishop (London: Victor Gollancz, 1986). ——. Letters from a Lost Generation: First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends, ed. Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge (London: Little, Brown, 1998). ——. ‘They That Mourn’ in Vera Brittain. One Voice: Pacifist Writings from the Second World War (London and New York: Continuum, 2005). Bryan, C.D.B. Friendly Fire (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976). Buitenhuis, Peter. The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914 and After (London and Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1989).

Bibliography 211 Busch, Frederick. ‘ “Don’t Watch the News”: A Marine’s Family Lives from Phone Call to Phone Call’, Harper’s Magazine (November 2005): 33–41. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: University of California Press, 1997). Byerly, Benjamin F. and Catherine Ridder Byerly (eds). Dearest Phylaby: Letters from Wartime England by Edith Base (Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 1996). Calder, Angus. The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991). Calder, Angus and Dorothy Sheridan (eds). Speak for Yourself: A Mass-Observation Anthology 1937–49 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984). Campbell, D’Ann. Women at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Cannadine, David. ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain’, in Joachim Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa, 1981). Carrington, Charles. A Subaltern’s War (New York: Arno Press, 1972). Charmaz, Kathy, Glennys Howarth and Allan Kelleher (eds). The Unknown Country: Death in Australia, Britain and the USA (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997). Chattarji, Subarno. Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic Responses to the Vietnam War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Chomsky, Noam. ‘The Manufacture of Consent’, in James Peck (ed.), The Chomsky Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987). Coetzee, Frans and Marilyn Shevin Coetzee. Authority, Identity, and the Social History of the Great War (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1995). Cohen, Debra Rae. Remapping the Home Front: Locating Citizenship in British Women’s Great War Fiction (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002). Cole, Sir David. Rough Road to Rome: A Foot Soldier in Sicily and Italy 1943–44 (London: William Kimber, 1983). Connelly, Mark. The Great War, Memory and Ritual: Commemoration in the City and East London 1916–1939 (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 2002). Connolly, David. ‘Died in Vietnam’, in David Connolly, Lost in America (Woodbridge, CT: Vietnam Generation & Burning Cities Press, 1994). Cooke, Miriam and Angela Woollacott (eds). Gendering War Talk (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Cooper, Helen M. et al. (eds). Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). Crawford, John. The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005). D’Alton, Philip. ‘Prayers to Broken Stones’, in Kathy Charmaz, Glennys Howarth and Allan Kelleher (eds), The Unknown Country: Death in Australia, Britain and the USA (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). Damousi, Joy. The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). ——. Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-War Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Damousi, Joy and Marilyn Lake (eds). Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Das, Santanu. ‘ “Kiss me, Hardy”: Intimacy, Gender, and Gesture in World War I Trench Literature’, Modernism/Modernity 9.1 (2002): 51–74.

212 Bibliography Das, Santanu. ‘ “The Impotence of Sympathy”: Touch and Trauma in the Memoirs of the First World War Nurses’, Textual Practice 19.2 (2005): 239–62. ——. Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Dawson, Graham. Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). Durglinger, Serge. ‘ “I Regret to Inform You . . .” Next-of-Kin Notification and Official Condolences—The Case of Flight Lieutenant George J. Chequer, RCAF’, Canadian Military History 9.4 (Autumn 2000): 44–55. Elder, Glen H., Jr. and Elizabeth C. Clipp. ‘Combat Experience, Comradeship, and Psychological Health’, in John P. Wilson, Zev Harel and Boaz Kahana (eds), Human Adaptation to Extreme Stress: From the Holocaust to Vietnam (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1988). Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Women and War (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995/1987). Emerson, Gloria. Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses, and Ruins from the Vietnam War (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976). Enloe, Cynthia, Does Khaki Become You?: The Militarization of Women’s Lives (London: Pandora Press, 1988). Erikson, Kai. A New Species of Trouble: Explorations in Disaster, Trauma, and Community (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1994). Evans, Martin and Ken Lun (eds). War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997). ‘Fallen Heroes of Operation Iraqi Freedom: Remembering the Soldiers Who Died in the Service of Their Country’ (http://www.fallenheroesmemorial.com/oif/ profiles/woodsericp.html), accessed 5 December 2005. Fallows, James. ‘What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?’, in A.D. Horne (ed.), The Wounded Generation (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981). Faviell, Frances. Chelsea Concerto (London: Cassell, 1959). Field, David, Jenny Hockey and Neil Small (eds). Death, Gender and Ethnicity (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). Fields, Jeff. ‘Letter to His Family’, in Michael E. Stevens (ed.), Voices from Vietnam (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1996). Fierke, K.M. ‘Whereof We Can Speak, Thereof We Must Not Be Silent: Trauma, Political Solipsism and War’, Review of International Studies 30 (2004): 471–91. Fisk, Robert. ‘The Betrayed Mothers of America’ (19 November 2005a) (http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles547.htm), accessed 1 December 2005. ——. The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (London: Fourth Estate, 2005b). Florian, Victor. ‘Meaning and Purpose in Life of Bereaved Parents Whose Son Fell During Active Service’, Omega 20.2 (1989–90): 91–102. Forbes-Robertson, Diana and Roger W. Straus, Jr. (eds). War Letters from Britain, with a foreword by Vincent Sheean (New York: Putnam & Sons, 1941). Freedman, Jean R. Whistling in the Dark: Memory and Culture in Wartime London (Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999). Fulton, Robert and Robert Bendiksen (eds). Death and Identity (Philadelphia: The Charles Press, 1994). Furey, Joan. ‘Vigil’, in Lynda Van Devanter and Joan Furey (eds), Visions of War Dreams of Peace: Writings of Women in the Vietnam War (New York: Warner Books, 1991).

Bibliography 213 Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979/1977). ——. Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Garton, Stephen. The Cost of War: Australians Return (Oxford and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996). Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001). Gioia, Dana. ‘The Most Unfashionable Poet Alive: Charles Causley’ (http// www.danagioia.net/essays/ecausley.htm), accessed 12 July 2005. Goldensohn, Lorrie. Dismantling Glory: Twentieth-Century Soldier Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Gorham, Deborah. Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Grayzel, Susan R. Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). Gruhzit-Hoyt, Olga. A Time Remembered: American Women in the Vietnam War (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1999). Gullace, Nicoletta F. ‘The Blood of Our Sons’: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Haney, Richard Carlton. ‘When Is Daddy Coming Home?’: An American Family during World War Two (Madison, WI: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2005). Hanna, Martha. ‘A Republic of Letters: The Epistolary Tradition in France during World War I’, The American Historical Review 108.5 (2003). (http://www. historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/108.5/hanna.html). Hartley, Jenny (ed.). Hearts Undefeated: Women’s Writing of the Second World War (London: Virago, 1994). Hass, Kristin Ann. Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Hayes, Nick and Jeff Hill (eds). ‘Millions Like Us?’: British Culture in the Second World War (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999). Heinemann, Larry. Close Quarters (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977/1974). Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992). Herr, Michael. Dispatches (London: Picador, 1979/1968). Higonnet, Margaret. ‘Not so Quiet in No-Woman’s-Land’, in Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (eds), Gendering War Talk (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Higonnet, Margaret et al. (eds). Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987). Hockenberry, John. ‘The Blogs of War’, Wired Magazine (http://www.wired.com/ wired/archive/13.08/milblogs_pr.html), accessed 18 November 2005. Hodgson, Vere. Few Eggs and No Oranges: A Diary Showing How Unimportant People in London and Birmingham Lived through the War Years 1940–1945 Written in the Notting Hill Area of London (London: Dennis Dobson, 1976). Horne, A.D. (ed.). The Wounded Generation (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981). Housman, Laurence (ed.). War Letters of Fallen Englishmen (London: Victor Gollancz, 1930). Hutchinson, John F. Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross (Boulder, CO, and Oxford: HarperCollins, 1996).

214 Bibliography Hynes, Samuel. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: The Bodley Head, 1990). ——. The Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1997). Inglis, Ruth. The Children’s War: Evacuation 1939–1945 (London: Collins, 1989). Iraq War Clinician’s Guide, U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs http://www.ncptsd. va.gov/war/guide/index.html. Jackson, Carlton. Who Will Take Our Children: The Story of the Evacuation in Britain 1939–45 (London: Methuen, 1985). Jameson, Storm. Love in Winter (London: Cassell, 1935). ——. The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell (London: Macmillan, 1961/1945). ——. Journey from the North: Autobiography of Storm Jameson, vol. II (London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1970). Jarvis, Christina S. The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World War II (De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004). Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989). Jesse, F. Tennyson and H.M. Harwood. London Front: Letters Written to America (August 1939-July 1940) (London: Constable, 1940). Jolly, Margaretta. ‘Love Letters versus Letters Carved in Stone: Gender, Memory and the “Forces Sweethearts” Exhibition’, in Martin Evans and Ken Lun (eds), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997). Jones, David. In Parenthesis (London: Faber & Faber, 1982/1963). Jupp, Peter and Glennys Howarth (eds). The Changing Face of Death: Historical Accounts of Death and Disposal (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). Kaye, Barbara K. and Thomas J. Johnson. ‘Weblogs as a Source of Information about the 2003 Iraq War’, in Ralph D. Berenger (ed.), Global Media Go to War: Role of News and Entertainment Media during the 2003 Iraq War (Spokane, Washington: Marquette Books, 2004). Kazantzis, Judith. Preface in Catherine W. Reilly (ed.), Scars Upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War (London: Virago, 1981). Kelly, Jean (ed.). Love Letters from the Front (Dublin: Marino Books, 2000). Kettlewell, Penny. ‘The Coffee Room Soldier’ and ‘Sister Mary’, in Lynda Van Devanter and Joan Furey (eds), Visions of War Dreams of Peace: Writings of Women in the Vietnam War (New York: Warner Books, 1991). Kirmeyer, Laurence. ‘Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative and Dissociation’, in Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York and London: Routledge, 1996). Kitzmann, Andreas. ‘That Different Place: Documenting the Self Within Online Environments’, Biography 26.1 (Winter 2003): 48–65. Klein, Yvonne M. (ed.). Beyond the Home Front: Women’s Autobiographical Writing of the Two World Wars (New York: New York University Press, 1997). Lakoff, George. ‘Metaphor and War, Again’ (http://www.alternet.org/story/15414/), accessed 18 January 2006. La Motte, Ellen. The Backwash of War (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1934). Lant, Antonia. Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).

Bibliography 215 La Sale, M.A. ‘Vietnam Nursing: The Experience Lives On’, Military Medicine 165.9 (September 2000): 641–6. Lassner, Phyllis. British Women Writers of World War Two: Battlegrounds of Their Own (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). Last, Nella. Nella Last’s War: A Mother’s Diary 1939–45, eds Richard Broad and Suzie Fleming (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1981). Laurent, Pauline. Grief Denied: A Vietnam Widow’s Story (Santa Rosa, CA: Catalyst for Change, 1999). Leed, Eric. No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War One (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Lewis, C.S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1950). Lifton, Robert J. Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims nor Executioners (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973). ——.’Understanding the Traumatized Self: Imagery, Symbolization, and Transformation’, in John P. Wilson, Zev Harel and Boaz Kahana (eds), Human Adaptation to Extreme Stress: From the Holocaust to Vietnam (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1988). Litoff, Judy Barrett and David C. Smith. ‘ “Will He Get My Letter?” Popular Portrayals of Mail and Morale during World War II’, Journal of Popular Culture 3 (1989/90). Litoff, Judy Barrett and David C. Smith (eds). Since You Went Away: World War II Letters from American Women on the Home Front (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Long, Judy. Telling Women’s Lives (New York: New York University Press, 1999). Loraux, Nicole. Mothers in Mourning, trans. Corinne Pache (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998). Luard, K.E. [published anonymously] Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front 1914–1915 (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1915). ——. Unknown Warriors (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930). MacDonald, Lyn. 1914–1918: Voices and Images of the Great War (London: Penguin Books, 1988). Mack, Louise. A Woman’s Experiences in the Great War (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1918/1915). Mackay, Robert. Half the Battle: Civilian Morale in Britain during the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). Macleod, Murdo and Ben McConville. ‘Michael Moore Wants Mother of Dead Soldier in Next Movie’ (Sunday, 12 December 2004) (http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com), accessed 24 November 2005. Mademoiselle Miss. ‘Mademoiselle Miss’: Letters from an American Girl Serving with the Rank of Lieutenant in a French Army Hospital at the Front (Boston: W. A. Butterfield, 1916). Marcus, Jane. ‘Corpus/Corps/Corpse: Writing the Body in/at War’, in Helen Cooper et al. (eds), Arms and the Woman: War, Gender and Literary Representation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). Marine Corps Moms. (http://www.marinecorpsmoms.com), accessed 28 November 2005. Martin, Linda Grant. ‘Angels of Viet Nam’, Today’s Health (August 1967).

216 Bibliography Martin, Lorna. ‘ “Mother to Mother” Plea to Cherie over Scottish Soldier Killed in Iraq’, Observer (Sunday, 19 December 2004) (http://politics. guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,509143-111256,000.html), accessed 24 November 2005. Mayhew, Patrick (ed.). One Family’s War with an introduction by Christopher Mayhew (London: Hutchinson, 1985). McManners, Hugh. The Scars of War (London: HarperCollins, 1994). Melman, Billie (ed.). Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930 (New York and London: Routledge, 1998). Micale, Mark S. and Paul Lerner (eds). Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Middlebrook, Diane. Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath a Marriage (London: Penguin Books, 2004). Millard, Shirley. I Saw Them Die: Diary and Recollections of Shirley Millard, ed. Adele Comandini (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936). Millbank, Dana. ‘Curtains Ordered for Media Coverage of Returning Coffins’, Washington Post (Tuesday, 21 October 2003). Mitchison, Naomi. Among You Taking Notes ... The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison 1939–1945, ed. Dorothy Sheridan (London: Victor Gollancz, 1985). Mithers, Carol Ann. ‘Missing in Action: Women Warriors in Vietnam’, in John Carlos Rowe and Nick Berg (eds), The Vietnam War and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Moore, Robert. Interview in Patrick K. O’Donnell, Into the Rising Sun: In Their Own Words, World War II’s Pacific Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat (New York and London: The Free Press, 2002). Moorjani, Angela. ‘Kathe Kollwitz on Sacrifice, Mourning, and Reparation: An Essay in Psychoaesthetics’, Modern Language Notes 101.5 (December 1986): 1110–34. Moriarty, Catherine. ‘Christian Iconography and First World War Memorials’, Imperial War Museum Review 6 (1991): 63–75. Mosse, George L. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991/1990). Mullen, Peg. Unfriendly Fire: A Mother’s Memoir (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995). Murphy, Robert. British Cinema and the Second World War (New York and London: Continuum, 2000). Neimeyer, Robert A., ‘Searching for the Meaning of Meaning: Grief Therapy and the Process of Reconstruction’, Death Studies 24 (2000a): 541–58. ——. ‘Narrative Disruptions in the Construction of the Self’, in R.A. Neimeyer and J. Raskins (eds), Constructions of Disorder (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2000b). ——. ‘The Language of Loss: Grief Therapy as a Process of Meaning Reconstruction’, in Robert A. Neimeyer (ed.), Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001). Nemerov, Alexander. Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures (Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2005). Nicholas, Sian. ‘The People’s Radio: The BBC and Its Audience 1939–1945’, in Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill (eds), ‘Millions Like Us?’: British Culture in the Second World War (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999).

Bibliography 217 Noakes, Lucy. War and the British: Gender, Memory and National Identity (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1998). Norman, Elizabeth. Women at War: The Story of Fifty Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). O’Brien, Kenneth Paul and Lynn Hudson Parsons (eds). The Home-Front War: World War II and American Society (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood, 1995). O’Brien, Tim. If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (New York: Delta/Seymour Lawrence, 1973/1969). O’Donnell, Patrick K. Beyond Valor: World War II’s Ranger and Airborne Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat (New York: The Free Press, 2001). ——. Into the Rising Sun: In Their Own Words, World War II’s Pacific Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat (New York and London: The Free Press, 2002). Ostergren Brunner, Mary Lu. ‘Cheated’ and ‘To My Unknown Soldier Boy’, in Lynda Van Devanter and Joan Furey (eds), Visions of War Dreams of Peace: Writings of Women in the Vietnam War (New York: Warner Books, 1991). Owen, Wilfred. The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: The Hogarth Press, 1985). Palmer, Laura. Shrapnel in the Heart: Letters and Remembrances from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (New York: Random House, 1987). Palmer, Svetlana and Sarah Wallis (eds). Intimate Voices from the First World War (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2003). Paquet, Basil T. ‘Morning—A Death’, in Larry Rottmann, Jan Barry, and Basil T. Paquet (eds), Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972). Partridge, Frances. A Pacifist’s War (New York: Universe, 1978). Pauwels, Jacques R. The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War (Toronto: James Lorimer, 2002). Pearson, Kit. The Sky Is Falling (Toronto: Puffin, 1991/1989). Piehler, Kurt. Remembering War the American Way (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1995). Piper, Paul S. and Miguel Ramos. ‘Blogs of War: A Review of Alternative Sources for Iraq War Information’, Searcher: The Magazine for Database Professionals (February 2005): 15–21. Pivar, Ilona L and Nigel P. Field. ‘Unresolved Grief in Combat Veterans with PTSD’, Journal of Anxiety Disorders 18.6 (2004): 745–55. Potter, Jane. Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great War 1914–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Powell, Mary Reynolds. A World of Hurt: Between Innocence and Arrogance in Vietnam (Cleveland, OH: Greenleaf, 2000). Queen’s Book of the Red Cross, The (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1939). Ramazani, Jahan, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Rando, Therese A. Treatment of Complicated Mourning (Champaign, IL: Research Press, 1992). Raphael, Beverley. ‘Death and the Great Australian Disaster’, in Kathy Charmaz, Glennys Howarth and Allan Kelleher (eds), The Unknown Country: Death in Australia, Britain and the USA (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997). Rathbone, Irene. We That Were Young (London: Virago, 1988; Chatto & Windus, 1932).

218 Bibliography Reed, Adam. ‘My Blog Is Me: Texts and Persons in UK Online Journal Culture (and Anthropology)’, Ethnos 7.2 ( June 2005): 220–42. Reilly, Catherine W. (ed.). Scars Upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War (London: Virago, 1981). Ringnalda, Don. Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994). Robson, Walter. Letters from a Soldier (London: Faber & Faber, 1960). Root, Esther Sayles and Marjorie Crocker. Over Periscope Pond: Letters from Two American Girls in Paris October 1916–January 1918 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Cambridge University Press, 1918). Rose, Nikolas. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London and New York: Free Association Press, 1999/1989). Rosenblatt, Paul C. Bitter, Bitter Tears: Nineteenth-Century Diarists and TwentiethCentury Grief Theories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Rowbery, Private Ivor. ‘To the Best Mother in the World’, in Ernest Sanger (ed.), Letters from Two World Wars: A Social History of English Attitudes to War 1914–45 (Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton, 1993). Rowe, John Carlos and Nick Berg (eds). The Vietnam War and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Salam Pax. Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi (New York: Grove Press, 2003). Sanger, Ernest. Letters from Two World Wars: A Social History of English Attitudes to War 1914–45 (Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton, 1993). Sassoon, Siegfried. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, in The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (London: Faber & Faber, 1980/1937). ——. Diaries 1915–1919, ed. and intro. Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Faber & Faber, 1983). Sax, W. Peter. ‘Establishing a Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Inpatient Program’, in William E. Kelly, M.D. (ed.), Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the War Veteran Patient (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1985). Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Schnaier, Jenny. ‘A Study of Women Vietnam Veterans and Their Mental Health Adjustment’, in Charles Figley (ed.), Trauma and Its Wake Vol. II (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1985). Schroeder, Paul E. ‘A Life, Wasted: Let’s Stop This War Before More Heroes Are Killed’, Washington Post (Tuesday, 3 January 2006) (http://www.washingtonpost. com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/02/AR2006010200974.html) Scott, Canon Frederick G. The Great War As I Saw It (Ottawa: CEF Books, 1999). Shatan, Chaim F. ‘Stress Disorders Among Vietnam Veterans: The Emotional Content of Combat Continues’, in Charles Figley (ed.), Trauma and Its Wake Vol. II (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1978). ——. ‘Have You Hugged a Vietnam Veteran Today? The Basic Wound of Catastrophic Stress’, in William E. Kelly, M.D. (ed.), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the War Veteran Patient (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1985). Sheehan, Cindy. Not One More Mother’s Child (Kihel, Hawai’i and Santa Fe, New Mexico: Koa Books, 2005).

Bibliography 219 Sheeler, Jim and Todd Heisler. ‘Final Salute’ (http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/news/finalSalute/), accessed 30 January 2006. Sheldon, George G. Their Last Words: A Tribute to Soldiers Who Lost Their Lives in Iraq (New York: Berkley Caliber Books, 2005). Sheldon, Sayre P. (ed.). Her War Story: Twentieth-Century Women Write about War (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). Shepherd, Ben. A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Sheridan, Dorothy, (ed.). Wartime Women: A Mass-Observation Anthology (London: Phoenix Press, 2000). Sherman, Daniel. ‘Monuments, Mourning and Masculinity in France after World War One’, Gender and History 8.1 (April 1996): 82–107. Sherriff, R.C. Journey’s End: A Play in Three Acts (New York: Brentano’s, 1929). ——. No Leading Lady (London: Gollancz, 1968). Smith, Angela K. The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). ——. ‘Chicken or Hawk? Heroism, Masculinity and Violence in Vietnam War Narratives’, in Angela Smith (ed.), Gender and Warfare in the Twentieth Century: Textual Representations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). Smith, Lesley. Four Years Out of Life (Glasgow: Philip Allan, 1931). Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993). Smith, Winnie. (American) Daughter Gone to War: The True Story of a Young Nurse in Vietnam (New York: Warner Books, 1992). Some soldier’s mom: Thoughts of a soldier’s mom in a time of war (http://somesoldiersmom.blogspot.com/2005/11/funeral-of-spc-tommybyrd.html), accessed 5 December 2005. Spears Zacharias, Karen. Hero Mama: A Daughter Remembers the Father She Lost in Vietnam—and the Mother Who Held Her Family Together (New York: William Morrow, 2005). Spiller, Harry. Death Angel: A Vietnam Memoir of a Bearer of Death Messages to Families (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 1992). Steinman, Ron. Women in Vietnam: The Oral History (New York: TV Books, 2000). Stephenson, John S. Death, Grief, and Mourning: Individual and Social Realities (London: Collier Macmillan, 1985). Stevens, Michael E. (ed.). Voices from Vietnam (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1996). Stewart, Victoria. Women’s Autobiography: War and Trauma (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Stout, Janis. Coming Out of War: Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the World Wars (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005). Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Summerfield, Penny. Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998).

220 Bibliography Swindells, Julia (ed.). The Uses of Autobiography (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995). Tal, Kali. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Tate, Trudi. Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). Thomson, Alastair. Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Melbourne and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Tierney, Michael. ‘The Lost Boy’ (http://www.justice4gordongentle.org/ news-stories/2004/12/11/the-lost-boy.html), accessed 24 November 2005. Townsend, Colin and Eileen. War Wives: A Second World War Anthology (London: Grafton Books, 1989). Trotter, Bobbie. ‘How Do You Say I Love You in a War’ and ‘The Muslim Mother’, in Lynda Van Devanter and Joan Furey (eds), Visions of War, Dreams of Peace (New York: Warner Books, 1991). Tylee, Claire. The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women’s Writings, 1914–64 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990). Tynan, Katherine. Flower of Youth: Poems in War Time (London: Sidgewick & Jackson, 1915). Usandizaga, Aranzazu and Andrew Monnickendam (eds). Dressing Up for War: Transformations of Gender and Genre in the Discourse and Literature of War (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001). Van Devanter, Lynda (with Christopher Morgan). Home Before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam (New York: Warner Books, 1983). Van Devanter, Lynda and Joan Furey (eds). Visions of War Dreams of Peace: Writings of Women in the Vietnam War (New York: Warner Books, 1991). Vaughan, Edwin Campion. Some Desperate Glory: The Diary of a Young Officer, 1917 (London: Macmillan, 1981). Vernon, Alex (ed.). Arms and the Self: War, the Military, and Autobiographical Writing (Kent, OH and London: The Kent State University Press, 2005). Walker, Keith. A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of Twenty-six American Women Who Served in Vietnam (New York: Balantine Books, 1985). Wall, Melissa. ‘Blogs of War: Weblogs as News’, Journalism 6.2 (2005): 153–72. Walsh, Patricia. Forever Sad the Hearts (New York: Avon, 1982). Walter, Tony. On Bereavement: The Culture of Grief (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999). Watson, Janet S.K. Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Weatherford, Doris. American Women and World War II (New York and Oxford: Facts on File, 1990). Webley, Nicholas (ed.). Betty’s Wartime Diary 1939–1945 (London: Thorogood, 2002). Weinberg, S. Kirson, ‘The Combat Neuroses’, The American Journal of Sociology 51.5 Human Behavior in Military Society (March 1946): 465–78. Whaley, Joachim (ed.). Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa, 1981). Wicks, Ben. No Time to Wave Goodbye (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988). ——. The Day They Took the Children (Toronto: Stoddart, 1989).

Bibliography 221 Widdison, Harold A. and Howard G. Salisbury. ‘Delayed Stress Syndrome: A Pathological Grief Reaction?’ Omega 20.4 (1989–90): 293–306. Wilkinson, Alan. ‘Changing English Attitudes to Death in the Two World Wars’, in Peter Jupp and Glennys Howarth (eds), The Changing Face of Death: Historical Accounts of Death and Disposal (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). Williams, Kayla. Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2005). Winter, Jay. The Great War and the British People (London: Macmillan, 1986). ——. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Winter, Jay and Emmanuel Sivan. ‘Setting the Framework’, in Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (eds), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Winter, Jay and Emmanuel Sivan (eds). War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Winters, Dean. Interview in Patrick K. O’Donnell, Into the Rising Sun: In Their Own Words, World War II’s Pacific Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat (New York and London: The Free Press, 2002).

Index advertising (as propaganda), 21, 53–5, 67 Allingham, Margery, 48–9 Anderson, (papers of Cpl William), 33–7, 202 n. 16 anger, 26–7, 43–4, 59–60, 63, 114, 192 anticipatory mourning, 28, 49, 201 n. 9 anti–war protests Iraq War, 176–8 Vietnam War, 99–100 see also protest anxiety, 28, 36–7, 48 Appleby, Eric, 10, 17–18, 37, 115–17, 200 n. 1 Asquith, Cynthia, 28, 39–41, 56 Ball, V.R., 75–6 Biggington, K.M., 76 Black, Elizabeth Walker, 139–40 Blitz, the, 58–60 bodies, dead, 28, 59, 86–92, 96, 110–11, 126, 158–9, 164–5, 167, 196, 198 body count, 82, 96, 158–9 Borden, Mary, 133, 147–8, 205 n. 5, 6 Brandon, Heather (Casualties), 81 Brittain, Vera, 8, 12, 23, 25–32, 38, 46, 201 n. 8, 202 n. 18 nursing, 24 ‘They That Mourn’, 50 Brooke, Rupert, 25, 28–9, 123, 137 Butler, Judith (and subjection), 4, 22 Carrington, Charles, 109–10 cemeteries (also graveyards), 44–5, 143 censorship, 9, 26, 144 see also silencing children (and evacuation), 13–14, 74–6, 78–9, 203 n. 11 Chomsky, Noam (and manufacture of consent), 1, 2, 4, 20

civilian deaths, 59–60, 66, 173–4, 196 class, 35, 39, 59–60, 82–3, 181 communities (of bereaved), 10, 13, 35–7, 39–40, 81, 99, 116–22, 94, 145–6 Connolly, David, 111–12 consolation, 30–3, 36–7 correspondence, see letters D’Alton, Philip, 3, 135–6 Damousi, Joy, 1, 13, 18, 31, 199 n. 1, 201 n. 14 Das, Santanu, 108–9, 201 n. 11, 204 n. 2 diaries, 7–9, 200 n. 7 fathers, 77–8, 88, 90–1, 97, 125–7, 146, 189, 206 n. 2 Faviell, Frances, 59–60 film, 52, 83, 127–8, 203 n. 5 Fahrenheit 9/11, 176, 180–1 Millions Like Us, 52–3 Fisk, Robert, 181–2, 196–8 funeral, 86–7, 113, 143, 161, 186–9, 190–1, 192 Furey, Joan, 168–9 Fussell, Paul, 52, 72, 83 futility (of war), 26–7, 28–9, 68, 139, 144, 151, 192–3, 198 Gaunt, Margery, 72–4 Gentle, Gordon and Rose, 176–7, 191–5 Haney, Richard Carlton, 77–8 Hanna, Martha, 9–10 Hartley, Jenny, 6, 50–1, 202 n. 3 Heinemann, Larry, 114 Higonnet, Margaret, 7, 199 n. 6, 206 n. 8 Hopkinson, Diana (‘Love in War’), 71–2 husbands, 71–4, 89–90, 97–9, 190–1 222

Index 223 injury, 11, 59, 90, 112, 118, 135, 142, 146–7, 154, 159–60, 162, 163 intimacy between combatants, 108–11, 114, 130–1, 143 between nurses and combatants, 143–4, 141–2, 149–50, 168–9, 170–1, 175 Iraq War Clinicians’ Guide, 106–7 Jameson, Storm, 42, 48, 78–9 Kelly, Phyllis, 17–18, 37, 115–17, 200 n. 1 Kettlewell, Penny, 164–5, 169–70 Kirby, Joan, 61–2 Kirmeyer, Laurence, 165–6, 169 Lakoff, George, 178–9 Last, Nella, 8, 63–8 Laurent, Pauline, 90, 95–101 Leed, Eric, 110, 123 Leighton, Roland, 9, 2, 23, 28–32, 198 letters, 9–10, 71–4 from combatants, 32–5, 37, 115–25 to combatants, 17–18, 71–4, 121 of condolence, 31–7, 84 to family, 57–8, 61–2, 121 Lifton, Robert, J., 106 Loraux, Nicole, 2–3 Luard, K., 11–12, 29, 109, 132–3, 135–6, 140–7 Mackay, Robert, 58, 69 ‘Mademoiselle Miss’, 137–8 magazines (women’s), 18–20, 22, 53–5, 69 Marcus, Jane, 14, 167, 200 n. 12 Mass Observation, 64, 57, 63 Mayhew (One Family’s War), 57–8 McManners, John, 106, 127 memorials, private, 23, 44–6, 112, 195 memorials, public, 44–5, 85, 141, 179 Vietnam War Memorial (the Wall), 100–1, 171, 175 Vietnam Women’s Memorial, 170–3, 175 Millard, Shirley, 132, 136, 149–53, 154 missing in action, 68, 72–4

Moore, Michael (Fahrenheit 9/11), 176, 180–1 Moorjani, Angela (on Kathe Kollwitz), 20 mothers, 2–3, 76, 165 Gold Star, 86, 160 as Pieta, 3, 147, 176 as privileged mourners, 31, 86, 126, 160, 176–7, 185, 190 and sons, 2–3, 39, 64–8, 94, 96–7, 124, 153, 154–5, 159–60, 167, 176–7, 180–3, 195–6 Mullen, Peg and Michael, 84–8, 90, 95–101 Neimeyer, Robert, 2, 5, 12, 28, 30, 47–9 nurses idealisation of, 24, 136, 138–9, 147–8, 167 nurse–mother, 136, 147–9, 156, 161, 164, 167–70, 170, 174 sexualisation of, 157 online writing, 6, 11, 183, 190–3 blogs, 185, 206 n. 2, 207 n. 9, 12 some soldier’s mom, 186–9 obituary sites, 189 Ostergren Brunner, Mary Lu, 169 ‘other’, the, 13, 28–9, 146, 176, 196–8 Owen, Wilfred, 109, 131 Palmer, Laura (Shrapnel in the Heart), 82 Paquet, Basil, 130–1 Partridge, Frances, 42, 68 propaganda, see advertising protest, 12, 85, 98–100, 130, 154–5, 167 Rando, Therese, 2, 12, 91 Rathbone, Irene, 42–4 religion, 24–5, 60, 155, 169–70, 176 Robson, Walter, 117–21 Rose, Nikolas (Governing the Soul), 4 Rosenblatt, Paul, 2, 8–9

224 Index sacrifice, 12 Badge of, 20, 22 as Christian value, 24–5, 30 of combatants, 27, 144, 179, 197 of nurses, 136, 155–6 women and, 18–24, 27, 51 Sassoon, Siegfried, 8, 110–14, 204 n. 3 Scarry, Elaine (The Body in Pain), 2, 159 Scott (Canon), 125–7 shame, 97, 99 Shatan, Chaim, 106, 166 Sheehan, Cindy, 176, 180, 182 Sherriff, R.C. (Journey’s End), 41, 59, 202 n. 21 silencing, 13–14, 50, 81, 85, 95–6 Smith, Lesley, 132, 148–53 Smith, Winnie, 156–7, 163, 165 Spears Zacharias, Karen, 90–1, 95–101 stoicism, 22, 53–6, 98, 121, 125–6, 140, 142 Summerfield, Penny, 1, 5, 51, 199, n. 2

Thurlow, Geoffrey, 123, 205 n. 8 trauma, physical, see injury trauma, psychological, 11–12, 69, 88–9, 106, 134–5, 151–3, 164, 166, 169, 204 n. 1, 205 n. 10 PTSD, 106 Trotter, Bobbie, 174, 176 Van Devanter, Lynda, 154–5, 161–3, 165, 167 Vaughan, Edwin Campion, 111 Visions of War, Dreams of Peace, 166–7 waiting, 24, 28, 36 Walsh, Patricia, 173 Walter, Tony, 5–6, 106 Warner, Phyllis, 52, 60–1, 202 n. 4 Westren, J., 49, 56, 60–3, 204 n. 5 Wilkinson, Alan, 1, 25 Winter, Jay, 1, 13, 27, 39 witness (testimony), 59–60, 130, 133, 140, 149, 155, 157, 164 wounds, wounding, see injury