Abstract
In the 1917 Michelin Guide to the Marne Battle-fields (1914), a photograph of a single grave is set opposite a painting from Senlis town hall on the facing page.1 The grave belongs to Monsieur Odent, Mayor of Senlis who was executed in August 1914 by the occupying German army along with six other hostages in reprisal for resistance by the retreating French army. The painting shows the execution of hostages in 1418 by the besieging Armagnacs: “Six centuries have elapsed, but it will be seen that, towards hostages, the Germans still retain the mental attitude of the Middle Ages.”2 The Guide converts the war, even as it is being fought, into a national history which can be accessed through the familiar vehicle of the European tour, by readers as much as travelers. The travel handbook with its reassuring itinerary of sights, monuments, paintings, châteaux, cathedrals, parks, and topographical features holds out the promise that this history is to be found in the territorial and cultural landscape of the nation, inherent in specific places and objects. Indeed, the Guide defines the significance of the war to the nation, precisely through the cultural richness of France, including places of interest “either from an archaeological or an artistic point of view … even though the war has passed it by, that the tourist may realize that it was to preserve this heritage of history and beauty intact, that so many of our heroes have fallen.”3
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Marne Battle-fields (1914) (Paris: Michelin et Cie, 1917), 50–1. See also Stephen L. Harp, Marketing Michelin: Advertising and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 89–125.
Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 23.
James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1993)
Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (Manchester University Press, 1999)
Eric J. Leed, The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism (New York: Basic Books, 1991)
James Buzard, “The Grand Tour and After (1660–1840),” in Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 37–52.
David W. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia, and Canada 1919–1939 (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998).
John Masefield, The Old Front Line or The Beginning of the Battle of the Somme (London: Heinemann, 1917) (all page references in text)
Buzard, “’The Country of the Plague’: Anticulture and Autoethnography in Dickens’s 1850s,” Victorian Literature and Culture 38.2 (2010): 415.
Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1929), in The Memoirs of George Sherston (New York: Doubleday, 1937) (all page references in text).
Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (1928) (London: Penguin, 2000) (all page references in text).
Enid Bagnold, The Happy Foreigner (London: Heinemann, 1920) (all page references in text).
Tricia Lootens, “Victorian Poetry and Patriotism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 255–79.
John Masefield, Gallipoli (London: Macmillan, 1916). See Noel Ross’s review, “Gallipoli,” Times Literary Supplement (London, England), Thursday, 14 September 1916: 435. Times Literary Supplement online archive.
See Allyson Booth, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space Between Modernism and the First World War (Oxford University Press, 1996), 88–93 for an excellent analysis of the conceptual challenge of the war’s battlefields.
Roberto Maria Dainotto, Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures and Communities (New York: Cornell University Press, 2000), 13
Anne F. Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
Findlay Muirhead, ed., Belgium and the Western Front (London: Macmillan, 1920), 131.
Edmund Blunden, “On Preservation,” in Blunden, Mind’s Eye (1934) (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1967), 179.
Edmund Blunden, Overtones of War: Poems of the First World War (London: Duckworth, 1996), 44; Blunden, Undertones, 195.
Kay Dian Kriz, The Idea of the English Landscape Painter: Genius as Alibi in the Early Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 62–8.
Lenemaja Friedman, Enid Bagnold (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 19.
See, for example, Ann Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000)
Stella Deen, “Enid Bagnold’s The Happy Foreigner: The Wider World Beyond Love,” English Literature in Transition (1880–1920) 44.2 (2001): 131–47.
Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (New York: Free Press, 1991), 35–6; Sally Dugan, “The Motoring Novels of C.N. and A.M. Williamson and the Characterization of the Car” (Presentation at the Annual Conference of the Society for the Study of the Space Between, Brown University, 16 June 2012).
Kimberly Chuppa-Cornell, “The U.S. Women’s Motor Corps in France, 1914–1921,” Historian 56.3 (Spring 1994), 465–76.
Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches, a Biography, vol. 2 (New York; Routledge, 2003), 110
John Stuart Roberts, Siegfried Sassoon (London: John Blake, 2000), 286.
For an alternative approach to the pastoral and same-sex desire see Stuart Christie, Worlding Forster (London: Routledge, 2005), 41–4.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Claire Buck
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Buck, C. (2015). Travel Writing on the Western Front: Masefield, Blunden, Sassoon, and Bagnold. In: Conceiving Strangeness in British First World War Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137471659_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137471659_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-50105-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-47165-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)