“Seeing Is Not Enough”: World War I Battlefield Tourism

German Stahlhelm and postcard sent to
Louise and Bertha Trainer, 1921

After an unintentionally long hiatus, the Alice News blog is back with a story inspired by our recent exhibit of World War I artifacts at the Centennial Summer Fair. Most of the war relics in the Alice’s collection were obtained by servicemen who acquired them during their time overseas. However, one battered and rusty German helmet was given to Louise and Bertha Trainer by a friend of theirs who visited the battlefields of Belgium in 1921. Emma Kindl was one of thousands of tourists who made pilgrimages to sites in France and Belgium in the years after the Great War.

While we are accustomed to the idea of battlefield tourism today, we probably tend to associate it with the visiting of sites like Civil War battlefields—places where time has removed the most obvious evidence of their violent past. It may seem strange that people were interested in visiting trenches and ruined villages in the immediate aftermath of the war. But even before the armistice, commentators were predicting that there would be a boom in battlefield tourism. The war had been such a profound and life-altering event for so many people that it seemed inevitable that they would want to witness for themselves the places whose names had become part of their vocabulary: Ypres, Vimy, Passchendaele, Verdun.

Another factor encouraging travel was the decision not to return the bodies of the fallen to their home countries but to bury them on or near the battlefields. Bereaved family members had to travel in order to visit the graves of their loved ones. World War I also produced an extraordinarily large number of bodies that were never identified or otherwise remained unaccounted for. For the families of these missing men, a trip to a battlefield or war memorial was the closest they would come to visiting their final resting place. 

From the Michelin Guide
Ypres and the Battle of Ypres (1919)

Widows, parents, and children did not think of themselves as battlefield tourists but as pilgrims, visiting hallowed ground. Nevertheless, they frequently required guidance to locate the sites they wanted to visit, and a variety of charitable organizations were established in the post-war years to assist families and ex-servicemen. Travel agencies like Thomas Cook offered organized tours of sites associated with the war in France, Belgium, Italy, and the Middle East, and Michelin issued its first battlefield guidebooks in 1919. Volume I of this series, The First Battle of the Marne, stated quite explicitly, “The contemplated visit should be a pilgrimage; not merely a journey across the ravished land. Seeing is not enough, the visitor must understand; ruins are more impressive when coupled with a knowledge of their origin and destruction.”

From the Michelin Guide
Lille Before and During the War (1919)

The Michelin guides (31 titles in French and 15 in English) all followed a similar pattern. They began with an overview of the battles covered in the guide (“a clear comprehension of the action as a whole is absolutely necessary to a full understanding of the separate engagements”), after which itineraries were laid out. These itineraries were, in some ways, not all that different than those in ordinary guidebooks, including driving directions, histories of towns and villages, and information about churches and other landmarks. But they were also detailed accounts of battles, bombings, and wartime deprivation, often including first-hand accounts from those who had experienced them. The books were lavishly illustrated with photographs, many of them before-and-after views which highlighted the destruction wrought upon the landscape. Using the Michelin guides, the visitor could retrace the daily—almost hourly—progression of the war.

The idea that one could recreate the experiences of the past through visiting the battlefields seems to have been an important one both for families and for ex-servicemen. For the bereaved, retracing the steps of their loved ones helped them feel closer to those they had lost. The journey to the grave or battlefield was an essential part of the grieving process for many people, allowing them a venue to confront their emotions and emerge afterwards in a more hopeful and accepting frame of mind. Some ex-servicemen found revisiting battlefields therapeutic as well. By reliving their pasts and facing their memories, they could come to terms with the effects of the war.

Postcard of the battlefield at Kemmel. A note on the back states that
this field is where Mlle. Kindl picked up the helmet.

Of course, over time, the landscape of the battlefields changed, and it became harder to relive the past. In the early 1920s, the destruction of the war was still very clear. As one guidebook put it, “The ruined villages are as the shells and bombs left them. Everywhere are branchless trees and stumps, shell craters roughly filled in, trenches, barbed wire entanglements, and shelters for men and ammunition. Thousands of shells, shell casings, rifles, gun-limbers, and machine-guns lie scattered about.” Some battlefields and trenches were preserved in their wartime state, either by commercial operators or by Dominion governments (for example, the Canadian government was instrumental in preserving portions of Vimy Ridge), but for the most part, nature and agriculture reclaimed the fields. In this context, souvenirs took on great significance. Locating and bringing home a tangible reminder of the battlefield became even more important as time passed and the material effects of the war were less obvious.

Sources:

This post is primarily drawn from the David W. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia, and Canada, 1919-1939 (Berg, 1998). Other sources on battlefield tourism include Brian Murphy, “Dark Tourism and the Michelin World War I Battlefield Guides,” Journal of Franco-Irish Studies v. 4 (2015) and Caroline Winter, “Tourism, Social Memory, and the Great War,” Annals of Tourism Research v. 36 no. 4 (October 2009). An excellent source on monuments and the memory of World War I more broadly is Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Transforming the Debris of War: Trench Art of World War I

Soldiers resting on a pile of shell cases after the
Battle of Passchendaele, September 1917
Imperial War Museums © IWM (Q 2915)

The technological developments of the late 19th and early 20th century meant that World War I was a new kind of warfare. Machine guns, mortars, and other field artillery vastly increased the range of munitions fire, but also discouraged troop movements. Instead, opposing armies dug into protective trenches from which they could fire at each other, with occasional attempts to gain ground by going “over the top.” The constant noise of artillery, and the massive numbers of shell cases and other debris left behind by this type of warfare, had a profound effect on the men in the trenches. One of the ways in which they processed this experience was through the production and purchase of so-called “trench art.”

Matchbox cover decorated with insignia of the
Royal Canadian Artillery
Imperial War Museums  © IWM (EPH 4285)

Trench art encompasses a whole range of objects made from shells, shell cases, detonators, bullets, shrapnel, and other scrap metal both during and after World War I. During the war, many of these pieces were made by off-duty soldiers as a way to fill their time and make some extra money. They fashioned items like cigarette lighters, matchbox covers, letter openers, and pens from scrap metal, sometimes personalizing them or decorating them with the insignia of regiments stationed in the area. After the war, economic deprivation, combined with the widespread availability of war débris, produced a thriving civilian trench art industry in France and Belgium. Individuals continued to produce items for sale to war widows, pilgrims, and battlefield tourists until war broke out again in 1939. 

Battlefield souvenir crucifix 
Imperial War Museums © IWM (EPH 1915)

Nicholas Saunders, who has written extensively about trench art, notes that the large number of soldiers declared “missing,” along with the British decision not to repatriate the dead, meant that there was a continuous stream of visitors to the old Western Front between 1919 and 1939. Many of these visitors appear to have returned home with some sort of trench art souvenir. “Such objects,” Saunders writes, “were often the only material reminder of the dead.” Widows and family members purchased trench art for a variety of reasons: “as souvenirs of a visit, as acts of worship to the deceased’s memory, and of solidarity and empathy with local people for whom their loved ones had died and whose economic hardships were everywhere apparent.” There was an additional layer of irony here, too, as many of the women who later visited the battlefields had themselves worked in the factories that produced the weapons of war.

Trench art of unknown origin and purpose

The origin and purpose of this piece of trench art from the Alice’s collection is unknown. It is made of scrap brass and a bullet, and is decorated with a German Iron Cross medal and a flattened metal disc, possibly a coin or button. It may have been intended for use as an ashtray. The nature of the item suggests that it was made by a soldier during the war, rather than as a later souvenir. It is possible that this item, like the German helmet we featured last week on our Facebook page, was brought back by local soldier Ralph Worthley Wheeler. Wheeler went to France with the 26th Engineers, which was responsible for ensuring a steady supply of clean water for soldiers and animals at the front, as well as at hospitals and encampments. He returned to the United States in June 1919 and was hospitalized in New York. He was finally discharged in January 1920, but died just a few weeks later as a result of illness acquired during his service. It is likely that his parents, Ralph and Fannie Wheeler of Chazy, donated his war souvenirs to the Alice after his death.

The meaning of trench art is ambiguous. On the one hand, the fragmented nature of the objects can be seen as reflecting the literal fragmentation of objects, landscapes, and bodies during battle. On the other hand, trench art might be looked at as an attempt to exert some kind of control over the chaos of war, by turning its débris into something useful and even beautiful. For civilians, trench art provided a link to absent loved ones, and by bringing these objects into their homes, they in a sense “domesticated” the war, making shells, bullets, and grenades an everyday part of their environment. 

Sources:

Nicholas J. Saunders, “Bodies of Metal, Shells of Memory: ‘Trench Art’ and the Great War Re-cycled,” Journal of Material Culture 5, no. 1 (March 2000): 43-67. 

Fergus Read, “Trench Art,” Imperial War Museums