Trudi Tate

Literature and music of the First World War

The introduction provides historical and cultural context for the articles that follow. It explores some of the issues discussed by writers, composers, and music critics of the First World War. The volume as a whole analyses some of the many different ways in which the British experience of the First World War was remembered, mourned, and raged against – as well as celebrated – in music and literature during the war and in the decades that followed.

The First World War: British writing

Soldiers and civilians In May 1917, Virginia Woolf published a review in the Times Literary Supplement of The Old Huntsman , Siegfried Sassoons first collection of war poems. Sassoon was to become one of the most famous of the British First World War poets, and Woolf was among the first to recognize the importance of his work. No other poet, she writes, has managed to convey so strongly what is “sordid and horrible” about the war. Many others are writing about the conflict, but Sassoon produces “a new shock of surprise” in his readers. “Yes,” writes Woolf, we find ourselves saying, “this is going on; and we are sitting here watching it.” She describes the “loathing” and “hatred” at work in Sassoons poetry (a quality some readers at the time and since have criticized as too obvious) and speculates that it shocks readers into thinking about their role as spectators to the sufferings of war, producing “an uneasy desire to leave our place in the audience.” In this, Sassoons poetry is “realism of the right, of the poetic kind.” Woolfs modest article shrewdly notes two areas that are crucial to an understanding of British writings of the First World War (1914-18). Firstly, it was in literature that readers at the time could learn something of what was really happening (“this is going on”).

Sebastopol: On the Fall of a City

The siege of Sebastopol lasted for eleven months, causing immense hardship on all sides. After the heaviest bombardment in the history of the world, Sebastopol fell in September 1855 when the Russians evacuated overnight, leaving the city heavily mined. When the allies were eventually able to occupy Sebastopol, many were shocked and saddened by its state of ruin. Visitors were moved to make representations of the fallen city, in letters, newspaper articles, sketches, and photographs. This article explores some aspects of how representation helps to shape cultural perceptions of warfare, and the particular forms these took at the Crimea. It looks at a range of representations, including memoirs and letters of soldiers, army medics, and civilians, alongside some of the visual representations, most notably the haunting photographs of James Robertson and Felice Beato. The article meditates upon the meanings of representations of warfare, especially at the Crimea, regarded as the first modern war in this respect. I consider this question within a framework of historical rethinking suggested by historian Andrew Lambert, who argues that all the courage and suffering at the Crimea did not have much impact on the outcome of the war.