The First World War and the Unhoming of Europe

Abstract

Anyone familiar with writings on the First World War will be familiar with the tendency to describe the war in geographical terms, whether as fronts, campaigns, or battlefields. The names in this topographical war narrative — the Western Front, the War in the East, the Somme, Gallipoli — are redolent of European national investments in the war. Other key tropes, such as the home front, no-man’s land, the trench, the lines, behind the lines, HQ, among many such terms, combine with the list of place names to create a map of the war that naturalizes specific national meanings but also becomes the basis for a geography of differences — racial, sexual, and gendered. Such tropes, taken together, render invisible the implications of the war’s colonial stakes. They establish both the war’s significant spaces and the relationship of those spaces to a changing geopolitical order. For most of the twentieth century, war studies relied on the war period’s own topography. But that topography reproduced a nineteenth-century imperial geography and thus needs re-examination. The entwining of these spatial coordinates with the history of the European imperial nation state marks sites such as the Western Front as particularly potent objects of study. Paradoxically, the retelling of Britain’s own war stories needs to begin again with the Western Front, read not as a scene of national trauma, but as an imperial contact zone, with the all-important difference that it is within Europe.