Abstract
This article explores the role of postcards in the maintenance of relationships between combatants and civilians during the First World War. By drawing on untapped archival material found during wider research into the morale of English infantrymen, it concentrates on the multiple uses of this medium in correspondence between the Western and Home Fronts. Following the ‘cultural turn’ in military history it has become increasingly apparent that the gulf between those fighting and those left at home was much narrower than previously assumed. This analysis charts the variety of ways in which postcards helped to bridge this divide.
‘The donning of a uniform is assumed to initiate men into a gnostic society, from which women and children are resolutely excised.’ Yet, as Joanna Bourke has argued, ‘that is not what happens’. 1 During the First World War relationships between soldiers and those they left behind retained huge significance to all involved. This article sheds light on the communication networks that existed between those fighting in the Great War and those left at home – focusing on the use of postcards and on English soldiers on the Western Front. Its central aims are: first, to emphasize the importance of postcards in the Anglophone cultural history of the Great War; 2 second, to investigate the role of postcards in the maintenance of long-distance relationships between civilians and combatants. It will highlight the ways in which postcards contributed to a shared imaginary space that existed between the fighting men and the Home Front. The postcard is an important and often overlooked source through which the personal experience of war can be understood with greater nuance.
Since the ‘cultural turn’ in military history, it has become increasingly clear that the connection between soldiers and civilians remained very important despite their separation during the war. 3 In the past, censorship had been regarded as an indication of the disconnect that existed between the soldier and the civilian. Yet such a conclusion has now been thoroughly debunked. 4 The letters that were penned by combatant and non-combatant alike have provided historians with considerable source material and informed much of their analysis. This has led scholars such as Jessica Meyer and Michael Roper to emphasize how the links between the home and military fronts became a central ingredient in soldiers’ military resilience. 5 Almost as soon as the war began the communication routes used by the various armies began to creak under the pressure of soldiers’ and civilians’ correspondence. By 1917 the British Army employed over 4,000 non-combatant postal staff. They handled the 8,926,831 letters and postcards sent home per week and the 2,087 bags of mail received in return. 6 However, on a day-to-day basis, letter writing only occupied a few precious moments for men, its importance as an outlet notwithstanding. For the most part, their war-experience was one shared with their comrades and was difficult to convey with much coherence to those at home. This was particularly true for the large swathe of the population whose literacy levels prohibited well-worded narratives and for others to whom the overt display of emotions was anathema. What is more, the censor’s shadow, while less oppressive than previously assumed, still lurked over men while they scribed their letters in Belgium and France.
The postcard can help the historian to understand how, despite these obstacles, the civilian and the soldier remained emotionally intertwined. Michael Roper has analysed the intimate relationships maintained between soldiers and their families (in particular their mothers) at home. 7 Home, Roper has argued, has been studied as ‘primarily a political entity and not, as most veterans probably imagined it, a short-hand for loved ones, bricks and mortar, a garden or a neighbourhood, perhaps a local landscape’. 8 The letters that Roper has studied demonstrate how home remained vivid in the mind’s eye of combatants, and how the extensive networks of communication between Home Front and war zone nurtured these images. The war’s reality was, to varying degrees, understood by civilians, and relationships between soldiers, their families, and their friends remained strong and sustaining.
The postcard played an important role in this process. As opposed to letters, however, it has tended to be ignored in Anglophone historiography. Roper himself has acknowledged that the increased weight of mail before the Great War was produced mainly by the popularity of ‘cards and especially picture postcards, which required only rudimentary writing skills’. 9 French historians have more readily utilized these as an important source. 10 Postcards offered historical actors the opportunity to supplement their correspondence and allowed for short, uncomplicated messages to be sent alongside an image. The postcard was a vibrant and expansive form of late Victorian and Edwardian mass media. Such insights provide further evidence that, far from having ‘little idea of time, place or importance’, early twentieth-century communication networks, namely the postcard, meant that First World War combatants were both aware of and in many ways still integrated within the civilian world. 11 This article explores the variety of ways in which actors used the postcard during the First World War and demonstrates that they were not simply the touristic snap-shots that they have become today.
In France, before the war, 800 million cards were produced annually. In Germany, production had increased to over a billion per annum. In the United Kingdom, the halfpenny cards were half the cost of normal postage. Nicholas Beaupré has suggested that the extent of the industry is incalculable. 12 The postcard achieved an astounding ‘multi-functionality’. 13 There were clubs, exhibitions, special wallets, importers, and collectors. They became ‘status symbols’ recording travel and were ‘windows acting on an exciting world outside the knowledge of most ordinary people’. 14 They were ‘cheap and collectable’ and their use ‘cross[ed] all social boundaries’. 15 Production firms specialized: either choosing to focus on ‘views’ (black-and-white scenes of places or people), ‘messages’ (fantasy or patriotic scenes photographed in studios), or ‘satire’. 16 Furthermore, new technology meant that photographers’ images, now held as a negative, could be cheaply turned into any number of postcard photographs.
During the Great War the postcard became ‘ubiquitous’. 17 Many of the themes of the pre-war postcards continued to prove popular. Yet, British (and international) firms (as well as newspapers, such as The Daily Mail) immediately began publishing war-related images. Early cards were quick to embrace the multinational nature of the Allied war effort. While this article will focus on cards found in British archives, the frequency with which these postcards were French or multilingual is revealing of a product that embraced the pan-European and, indeed, global nature of the war. 18 Many cards depicted the strength of the Allied nations and exhibited an exalted and idealistic sense of patriotism. One of the most prevalent forms was ‘flag cards’. 19 Other designs portrayed the belligerents’ military might. In Britain, images of the Grand Fleet and its Dreadnoughts were particularly sought after, as were images of ‘great figures’ such as Lord Kitchener. The British penchant for satire, which was directed wholeheartedly at Germany, was also evident and ‘the Germans [were depicted] as brutish, stupid and lumpish characters’. 20 Postcards were also embraced by the recruitment campaigns. 21 Regimental cards were produced en masse, while other postcards documented the war’s progress. Some portrayed the trials of military life. Soldiers continued to use photographers around camps to produce postcards of them, their friends, and their unit. It is unclear what censorship deemed inappropriate, though it is evident that anything that could have been perceived as defeatist was avoided in, or omitted from, card designs.
The postcards sent to and from Belgium and France fell into four broad categories. First, the most expensive, and therefore least frequently sent, were those that were produced for soldiers or family members as unique items by photographers in towns or camps. The second, third, and fourth categories were cheaper commercially produced series. They depicted scenes of soldiers’ life in and out of the trenches; were sweetheart or ‘forget me not’ cards; or showed towns, landscapes, and local features. These appear more frequently in the archives and used official photographs; scenes photographed in studios; or cartoons, drawings, and paintings.
The usefulness of postcards as a source rests on a number of the industry’s unique characteristics. First, postcards were a form of correspondence that transcended class boundaries. Second, they can be considered both a literary source and an example of material culture. They were designed but also offered the opportunity for the cost-effective printing of personal photographs. By including an image with varied designs these cards offered the opportunity to transmit and reflect an emotion, idea, or place. 22 As such, they contained ‘many layers of meaning’. 23 Third, postcards played an important role in allowing illiterate or semi-literate soldiers to convey emotion and ideas. Lastly, outside of reproductions of official photographs, there seems to have been little censorship of postcards. By purchasing postcards of a certain location, men were able to show their families where they were and what they were seeing. When attempts were made to redact the location shown on the card, it was often still possible to make out the name beneath the scribbled lines or to discern a location from the image used. Furthermore, the embarrassment or fear of sentimentality – since their letters were liable to be read by their officer – was diminished by the commercial origin of the postcard’s printed message. While self-censorship remained an issue, it seems that ideas were more easily conveyed than in letters.
There is an extensive literature on how one can consider and study ‘objects’ such as letters or parcels. Postcards were an alternative to letters, but shared some common attributes and similar issues arise when analysing them. There is a question as to how much soldiers could say openly in correspondence and some scholars have questioned whether letters can tell us all that much. Illana Bet-El, for example, has suggested that conscripts were unable to convey their military experience in their writing. 24 Others, however, argue that men were able to describe their lives in surprising detail. 25 ‘As epistolary historians have established, ‘letters are revealing of social codes and are ways that correspondents variously “fashioned” themselves, created “fictions” and maintained versions of the self.’ 26 While ‘proximity to events does not mean the sentiments expressed in letters or diaries were transparent’, there is much to be learnt. 27 As Michael Roper has argued, ‘The real value of letters as psychological sources becomes fully evident once we accept that emotional states are not wholly conscious, and take into account what is hinted at, unspoken, or unspeakable.’ 28 The same things can be said of the postcard. Indeed, the use of the postcard goes some way to negating the problem of drawing exclusively from a source that ‘draws disproportionately on accounts from the better-off’. 29 In fact, they may be one of the few sources available to historians of this period that were used more regularly by the working classes. Unlike letters, postcards offered the opportunity not only to employ codes of writing but also to personalize the images used. Importantly, these images played on themes that only existed because they were commercially popular. While there may sometimes have been a limited choice of cards, there was always the opportunity to use the images and illustrations for the sender’s own purpose. It is possible that interpreting postcards is an even more complicated affair than the analysis of letters, since they frequently offered little or no context. The limited space and prepared messages and images did, though, provide a canvas for ideas, feelings, and thoughts. Postcards rarely had one meaning and their popularity was likely, in part, a product of their multi-dimensionality. These cards allowed the sender to layer the item with various ideas and the recipient to draw something else entirely from the image or message. While one should not simply take these cards at face value, neither should one ignore the immediate and clearest messages they convey, as these remained important to both the sender and recipient. As Peter Gilderdale has argued, if one accepts that there were many meanings and messages included in postcards then they can provide important insights. 30
What follows draws on the postcards found in a number of archives around the United Kingdom as well as in the digitized Great War Archive. Family members kept and treasured these objects as the most tangible link they had to their absent sons, husbands, loved ones, or friends. The postcards used were found during wider research into English infantrymen’s morale in 1914–18. 31 This research included some 270 soldiers’ collections, of which approximately 55 have been used here. The postcards discussed were discovered in situ and lay within wider collections. While the cross-section of source material collected here is limited, such an approach can, by focusing on an event, place, or group of people, throw light on wider patterns in history. 32 Andrew Popp used a single postcard sent in 1904 to discuss Liverpool’s cotton industry. 33 Stéphane Audoin Rouzeau demonstrated the merits of such a method in his investigation of patterns of mourning, in which he focused on only five case studies. 34 Anthony Fletcher has shown how much can be learnt by only focusing on 17 ‘main characters’. 35 Naturally such analyses only provide ‘snap shots’, but these help to open a larger window and stimulate further discussion. 36 Of course, they tended to be part of wider written networks and to supplement letters and parcels. Sometimes they offered senders the opportunity to write a quick note to remind the recipient of their existence. More frequently they allowed them to convey an idea with great vibrancy through the images, prepared message, and their personalized notes. They are used here to reveal the multiple applications of the medium in the maintenance of relationships throughout the conflict. The story of the postcard is more than the tale of the object itself.
This article argues that the postcard allowed for wartime experiences to be shared and offered a vehicle through which relationships were maintained and even nurtured. Their use can shed light not only on the nature of wartime relationships but also offer a broader perspective on popular culture and on the working-class experience of the First World War, which is under-researched. 37 What follows will briefly explicate the role of postcards in long-distance relationships between combatants and civilians. It moves on to consider the ways in which postcards helped to maintain a strong connection between the men at the front and those at home. It does so by focusing on the variety of ways in which postcards were used to convey ideas and emotions, drawing on themes that have been found in epistolary histories. In particular, it looks at the mechanisms for maintaining closeness, asserting domesticity, nurturing sexual attraction, legitimizing the war, and maintaining a shared imaginary space. 38
Postcards: Imagination and ‘Long-Distance Relationships’
When time or literacy have allowed, soldiers have always written home. Yet in today’s digital age it is hard to imagine how people even one hundred years ago could have maintained the strength of their peacetime relationships over long periods of war-induced separation. 39 Here relationships are taken to mean those that were parental, romantic, and friendship. Research has highlighted the importance of modern networks of communication in positive ‘relational maintenance’, but has also underlined the continued importance of written networks. 40 This was doubly important given some of the central strains of distance: ‘difficulty in assessing the degree and state of the relationship from a distance’ and the ‘more extreme range of emotions experienced by partners’. 41 However, parties in these relationships tend to develop any number of strategies to overcome the issues of separation. New forms of communication are developed, which focus on honesty and trust. 42 In the context of the Great War the postcard played a pivotal role in this process.
Postcards helped to combat the stresses of homesickness and anxiety. French historians Brouland and Doizy have shown that by facilitating the easy transmission of complex emotions they also offered the opportunity for people to share an imaginary universe. 43 This article extends their analysis to the British case and will provide novel insights into the role these cards played in the networks of communication between Britain and the Western Front. Imagination is both an ‘image-based schematic’ through which we order and make sense of experiences and ‘a faculty for fantasy and creativity’. 44 Psychologists have found that there are common patterns in how humans use imagination to change unusual events to make them more normal. 45 It is, therefore, unsurprising that dreaming and internalized images were an important psychological tool for men on the Western Front (and those left at home) through which they were able to briefly escape their present reality and broaden their horizons. The lived experience of the war played out in the minds of its participants: its course and fall-out were internalized, worked, and then reworked in the imaginations of historical actors. 46 While these might not actually reflect the objective truth of events, they were a subjective truth, projected and crafted by those involved, and one that facilitated continued emotional connection. Postcards, particularly the images depicted on them, allowed people to share and recreate similar ideas and events in their mind’s eye. As was the case with letters, postcards allowed the sender to project ‘multiple’ selves. They reveal ‘aspirations, their future versions of themselves and their relationships’, and, fundamentally, a desire ‘to maintain emotional proximity’. 47
Photographic Postcards: Encapsulating the Self and Others
In the absence of cameras on the front lines, photographic postcards, produced by photographers in and around areas in which soldiers were billeted, were the men’s best tool for providing their families with an image that captured both their portrait and their new reality. 48 Photographic postcards were capable of engaging the subconscious. They could become ‘analogous to diverse kinds of memories, fantasies, or dreams’. 49 They offered soldiers the chance to immortalize themselves. These postcards were an opportunity for vanity and solace: they could show off and if the worst were to occur their families would have something to remember them by. What is more, in the midst of a homogenous military institution that asserted uniformity, it allowed for the reassertion of uniqueness and selfhood. These photographic postcards ranged from portraits to group photographs. Such postcards became the popular equivalent of a portrait. The photographs were entirely about the men themselves: the war was removed from the image. There was little celebration of the conflict and men’s portraits were frequently close-ups that brought out their features with great clarity. 50 While in France, Private William Harrop had his picture taken against a scenic background – surely a conscious attempt to provide a contrast with the destruction across the front lines. 51 D.G. May sat for another showing a minor wound on his left arm. His injured limb, held in a sling, provided physical evidence of duty-done for those at home. 52 The photographic postcards were also used to nurture relationships. Private W.M. McMillan, for example, used a photographic postcard showing himself in uniform to express his fondness and love for his wife: the object was a gift, a memento of her husband, while the written message was a well-worded love note from a distant partner. 53 A soldier might have decided to take a photograph for any number of reasons, but in all circumstances it was ultimately so that he could share an image of himself with home.
Author’s Own Collection: An example of an individual portrait postcard – unknown British soldier, undated.
Postcards also became the medium through which many of the soldiers collected and shared images of (and stories about) their comrades and new friends. 54 One officer, W.S. Ferrie, sent his family a number of picture postcards of his unit from France. He used them to introduce his companions to those at home. These were characters that he referenced regularly in his letters. Photographic postcards added detail to his stories from the war zone. One card showed his company’s officers and sergeants. While his captain was simply referred to as ‘good’, the biographies of the others went into much more detail. For example, indicating the man behind the Sergeant Major, he recorded that he ‘is a Cambridge Mathematical Scholar and is a very poor sergeant’. In another, he confided that 2nd Lieutenant Shearer ‘has held a commission longer than any of us but has not had the fortune to be promoted yet’. 55 Cards such as these were sometimes for personal consumption: a memorial of the community of soldiers. While these were often sent home, the absence of message and inclusion of many names suggests it was for safekeeping. Nonetheless these would have given civilians greater detail about the soldiers’ world. J.L. Hampson posted a large number of portrait postcards of himself and close companions, often having them sign the backs. A close friend, Joe Diamond, appeared in many of the images. Indeed, one of these was sent to Hampson by Diamond himself and was addressed to ‘his dearest friend’. Other figures, including Belgian and French civilians, recurred in the photographs. 56 There is also a photo-postcard of ‘Mlle Elisa Audenaert’ of 9 rue de Cassell, Bailleul, with whom he was billeted on one occasion. 57 Patrick Kennedy had one of himself and his friends, two other stretcher-bearers in the Manchester Regiment, and another of a local girl, Marie Souise, who may have briefly been the object of his affections during his time on the Western Front. 58 Sometimes, even postcards that had no picture were used to remember a person or persons. Frances Mahany cherished a postcard given to him by an injured French soldier, keeping it for many years. 59 Photographic postcards offered men the best opportunity to commemorate and share new relationships more vividly and with less effort than in letters or diaries.
MR 3/17/91: Papers of James Henry Cooper. A group photograph - photographic postcard of James Henry Cooper’s unit, undated. Reproduced with the permission of The Tameside Local Studies & Archive Centre.
Men also received an important source of emotional sustenance in the form of picture postcards of their children, wives, and wider family. John Edwin Mawer, upon requesting another image of his ‘wife & kiddies’, confided to his wife that he looked at another of their postcard-photographs every day, ‘often’ showing it to ‘the French people’. 60 The objects and correspondence they received from home were of the utmost importance to combatants – as evidenced in their diaries and letters, which included regular pleas for new or replacement images. 61 Private S. Smith’s surviving belongings illustrated this. Two postcards were found on his corpse. On one, a note from his daughter reads: ‘taken out of Dad’s pocket on the battlefield’. There were two photographs. The first, a picture of his wife and two young children taken in a studio, had been sent alongside the simple message ‘with love to father’. The other was an image showing just his boy and girl and was accompanied by the short note: ‘with love to father. From Ethel and Stephen Smith.’ In both cases the script was written in his wife’s hand, but this last card had four kisses in children’s scribbles. 62 Another tragic example was Percy Watson, whose family was sent, among other belongings on his person when he died, a postcard to ‘Daddy’ from his ‘loving daughter’, which also included a ‘big kiss’ and many ‘xs’. 63 Similarly, when Albert Reed was found dead an image of his sister and his nephews was still on his person. 64 Young children grow and change rapidly, so in a world of infrequent leave such photographs, in which men’s families smiled back at them, were cherished reminders of loved ones, which both embodied the pain caused by men’s absence and allowed them to remain part of the domestic world. 65
MR 3/17/145: Papers of Pte. S. Smith. Photographic postcard of Pte. Smith’s wife and children. Reproduced with the permission of The Tameside Local Studies & Archive Centre.
Depicting Soldiers’ Lives: Experiences, Sights, and the Passage of Time
Mass-produced photographic postcards of landscapes and scenes provided a window onto another world. Rather than simply describing their surroundings, postcards allowed men to show their loved ones what they encountered and saw in Belgium and France. Men familiarized themselves with the Western Front as soldier-tourists. War, for all its horrors, was also as an opportunity for travel and discovery. The existence of English–French dictionaries in soldiers’ small books and the publication of stand-alone phrase books demonstrate a desire to engage with their new physical environment and its population. 66 Major G.H. Greenwell wrote home, ‘Should I ever have seen Arras and Ypres, Albert and Péronne under such interesting conditions if there had been no war?’ 67 Lieutenant D. Henrick Jones hoped to see Rouen’s ‘cathedral and other famous places’. 68 After cameras were forbidden in 1914 a few intrepid men continued to photograph the front lines, charting their experience and focusing on the destruction. 69 However, the law was ever more forcibly enforced, and men were cowed by the threat of court martial. 70 While photography studios continued to operate in camps and towns, and official photographers were still granted access to the front lines, men wanted to reproduce the sights they had personally encountered. In lieu of cameras, postcards played an important part in recording soldiers’ journeys. They charted the sights and the passage of time. 71
The desire to share experiences was often undermined by the restrictions imposed by censorship regulations. Yet postcards offered men the opportunity to bypass some of these problems. The greater connectivity fostered by this was important and the soldiers’ families’ retention of these cards indicates the importance of this link. Private Cleasby sent his aunt cards from the Daily Mail Official Photograph series. She seemed to have been receptive to these and on one he wrote, ‘another card: your kind’. 72 It depicted a ‘wiring party going to the trenches’. While it lacks Cleasby’s commentary it shows the muddy conditions and the debris in the front lines. Another card, depicting a Church of England service near the line, included a very simple message: ‘Here is a pretty card for you: Service quite in the open: near the line.’ 73 He suggests that the scene was familiar to him. Many men collected and used cards from French series. R.G. Hyett bought a collection of postcards that charted the Battle of the Somme, showing both its destruction and German prisoners. 74 D.G. Le May sent home two cards of Vermelles from the French La Grande Guerre series ‘1914–1915’ and ‘1914–1915–1916.’ These series, released annually, showed how landscapes and townscapes changed and were defaced over the course of the war. Another was of the La Basseé canal. These highlighted an Allied military success but importantly showed in detail an area that was fought over. They displayed the terrain and topography of war to those on the Home Front. 75 Patrick Kennedy used postcards to chart his movements and the sights he encountered. On one card, showing the ruins of Maricourt, he noted that this had been his unit’s objective on 1 July 1916, which they had succeeded in taking. 76 Others were also used to chart his experience of the British retreat after 21 March 1918. 77
The use of postcards by soldier-tourists allowed men to show their friends and families the towns behind the lines, locations that were redacted in letters. French postcard series, which often charted the damage year-on-year, allowed combatants to provide civilians with more details about their lives. Men were desperate to share this information with their families, a number of soldiers developing a code through which information was more freely communicated. 78 Various phrases, numbers, or distinctive greetings were agreed upon, which would indicate the town or region in which the soldier had been billeted or posted. These postcards also allowed men to signal where they had been and what it looked (or used to look) like. While much, if not most of the war, was a combination of drudgery and horror, it also represented the first opportunity many of these men had to travel overseas. Some were unlikely to have left their town, city, or county before. At least at first, their visions of France and Belgium were novelties and the places they visited and people they met were things of interest. H.O. Hendry wrote on the back of one card sent home, ‘This is another building close by the church dear, I think it has been a school.’ 79 Here, he looked to share what he saw. Yet, he went on, ‘I could not get any decent cards love, this is a poor village, I wanted to get some ruins.’ 80
MR 3/17/126: Papers of Pte. John Peat. Soldier Tourists - The ‘Ruins of Ypres.’ Postcard from ‘La Grande Guerre’ series ‘Visé Paris No. 45. 45 La Grande Guerre - Ypres en ruines - Ruins of Ypres - LL.’ Reproduced with the permission of The Tameside Local Studies & Archive Centre.
These cards helped civilians to picture the geography and landscape their loved one now inhabited. Sydney Gill purchased a postcard produced by the YMCA and sent it to his wife in London. It included a painting of a ‘typical country road + village, such as can be seen all over France’. 81 He began by emphasizing that the image was not that of any particular place, perhaps because his postcards usually were, but explained that he wanted to ‘illustrate’ the scenes he was encountering. Postcards, unlike letters, could illustrate in this way. In fact, the collection of cards could become a commemorative act. Among the most prevalent postcards were French productions showing the towns in the area of British operations. In earlier years these had been entirely in French, but as the conflict dragged on they included English translations. Showing townscapes, many of these actually illustrated their gradual destruction. S. Smith had postcards showing the increasingly symbolic basilica of Albert. In one, a pre-war tourist card, the magnificent church remains intact, its famous virgin standing proud at its front. The next card shows its destruction after a German bombardment: the building now a ruin and the virgin hanging precariously. 82 Captain Maurice Asprey also sent a number of cards recording the damage done to Albert, titled ‘avant et après’. 83 Ypres lay at the heart of many soldiers’ war experience. Private John Peat sent home a collection of cards showing the badly damaged buildings of the city such as the Cloth Hall. Another card included the image of an artillery duel, providing evidence of what caused this devastation. 84 J.L. Hampson even sent a postcard that included a map of the Doyenne de Dohem in the Pas de Calais. Other postcards showed photographs of locations and streets in which he had been billeted. One, of the Grande Boucherie Tournaisienne, indicated where he had stayed in October 1918. Another, depicting the semi-dilapidated and bomb-damaged streets of Bailleul’s Rue de Cassel, highlighted one of the few buildings left standing, which had also previously accommodated him. 85 H.O. Hendry also sent a large number of postcards reflecting his experiences. These ranged from the photograph of an Ecole Communale in Mazingarbe to a Château de l’Administration. 86 Likewise, Captain E.L. Higgins collected cards to chronicle his movements on the Western Front. A number showed Doullens before it was damaged by the war. 87
Commercial postcards allowed combatants to vividly depict their lives and experiences both in and behind the lines. In late 1917 a young officer, Henry Lawson, wrote to his mother telling her how he wished he had brought a camera to war so that he could send photos home ‘to show that we are happy and do have amusing times’. 88 This was a desire that obsessed nearly every soldier in France. Their letters were filled to the brim with assurances that they were ‘A1’ or ‘in the pink’. Yet, descriptions could only do so much. Postcards provided an important source of comfort and, whether true or not, physical evidence of good health and a bright smile. Other cards sought to play down the dangers faced at war. Some included cartoons that depicted the Germans as babies or children, running away from the fight. 89 Others looked to portray the violence as a joke; by approaching these issues satirically they seemed less serious. 90 Soldiers adapted other cards to tell a particular story. Edgard Cleasby sent his aunt a Daily Mail card in June 1918, ‘an attack: waiting the signal’ showed men in a shallow trench. He used this photograph as an opportunity to illustrate the utility of their helmets, briefly explaining how shrapnel was released by exploding shells while emphasizing how ‘this hat saved the head’. The introduction of helmets did significantly reduce the incidence of head wounds. They were, however, by no means an assurance against any wound. Yet Cleasby’s remarks could certainly have been read in this way and provided reassurance to his worried family. 91
Some cards showed scenes from leisure pursuits, including sing-alongs and sports events such as inter-unit football. They reflected the continued relevance of popular culture. 92 M.F. Gower bought a postcard displaying his division’s singing group, ‘The Follies’, and used the writing space to describe how the group ‘depicted’ were ‘singers taken from the various regiments in the IV Division mostly pros. They entertained us here last night.’ 93 John Peat collected the series Sketches of Tommy’s Life (‘Out on Rest’). Each of these portrayed different scenes from life behind the lines. One showed two men resting in an estaminet, an old lady preparing them the British soldier’s staple of coffee and fried eggs. Another highlighted the dangers of work in the rear areas, where shells could still fall. Others indicated how soldiers ‘washed’ in the trenches and in rest areas. More still revealed the forms of billet they might expect and the archetypal characters that existed in many units – such as cooks, comedians, musicians, or ‘scroungers’. 94 These postcards and their annotations had the capacity to portray and depict events and places in such a way that allowed the sender and recipient to occupy the same imaginary space.
Sharing an Idea: Displaying Care, Consolation, and Comfort
Separation bred anxieties, but postcards also offered the sender the opportunity to console, comfort, and display care for the recipient. Women and men feared what was happening on the other side of the Channel. Postcards helped the soldiers to assure loved ones that they still occupied their thoughts. Many of the more intricate fabric cards, which were sewn rather than printed, were sent as presents. They highlighted, sometimes explicitly, that the soldier was ‘thinking of you’. 95 These embroidered postcards were often produced ‘somewhere in villages behind the battlefront, [where] French women and girls began to embroider flags and flowers and attach them to card’ and were ‘popular with the soldiers billeted in towns’. 96 They were occasionally sprayed with perfume. The impregnation of the cards with a familiar and pleasant scent offered the opportunity for a deeper connection between sender and recipient as they shared the same sensory space. 97 A postcard sent by H.O. Hendry, showing stitched British and French flags, which were ‘united for liberty’, was exactly the kind of card that might have been scented in this way. 98 These were sent as special and meaningful gifts, which signalled the care and love soldiers’ continued to feel for those at home. One soldier sent the embroidered card pictured above to his wife ‘Ada’ and his young daughter. The flags of France, Russia, and the United Kingdom suggests that a sense of purpose and resolve lay behind his choice of card. He explained that it was ‘70 centimes … so you will see they are dear’ and requested that this and subsequent cards were framed. It was both a meaningful gift and a relic of the war. 99
Author’s Own Collection: An example of an embroidered silk card from a father to his wife and daughter.
Author’s Own Collection: An example of an embroidered silk card from a father to his daughter.
Many commercial postcards explicitly referenced men’s continued connection with home. They included photographs or paintings, which were often in colour, and frequently depicted men sitting, sleeping, or writing in recreated trench scenes with the floating image of a woman appearing as an apparition or thought. Wives, sweethearts, and mothers were particularly popular motifs on card designs. These were usually located in a traditional ‘feminine’ setting: outside the cottage or in the kitchen, parlour, or laundry room. 100 Tellingly, the postcards found in the research for this piece never show women engaging in industrial work or taking part in traditionally male-dominated pursuits. The imagery reflected wartime understandings of the divisions of gender roles and what men were fighting for. Wives, lovers, children, and parents were waiting at home for their solider hero to return from ‘work’ in an idealized domestic setting. The man, even when away at war, remained both the family’s provider and protector in these images. The contrast between the soldiers’ physical and imaginary worlds lay at the heart of these cards. Their popularity is reflected in their existence in so many of the veterans’ archival donations. Many included printed descriptions, such as ‘night and a pause for a much needed rest. Bringing sweet memories of all that’s loved best.’ 101 Another, which reproduced a soldier’s cartoon, saw a man sitting in candlelight, writing a letter that conjured an image of the recipient in his mind’s eye. 102
MR 2/17/65: Papers of John Douglas Powell. Commercial postcard, ‘Dreams of Home.’ Reproduced with the permission of The Tameside Local Studies & Archive Centre.
The cards emphasized the resilience of the relationship between soldiers and their families. Their imagery and printed messages highlighted the prevalence of images of home and loved ones in the imaginations of the men. Their diaries and letters confirm that a central feature of their visions and daydreams was the home and those within it. The cards accurately recreate the soldiers’ own descriptions of dreams and fantasies of home. 103 These cards insisted that those on the Home Front were always on the minds of the soldiers and that, even if separated, their souls remained entwined. Christmas postcards contained similar messages and were always ‘from the heart’, providing reassurance that the sender had not forgotten the recipient. 104 One included an assurance that the men’s absence was, in part, ‘to bring you happiness’. It provided the consolation that if one kept ‘your face towards the sunshine’ the ‘shadows will fall behind you’. 105 Another, reproducing the words of an M. Byron, confided that the ‘glow’ of Christmas was the brightest of the ‘many sweetnesses that make our life worth living’, going on to promise the recipient that ‘Christmas and Friendship … are coupled in our thoughts of you to-day’. 106 In Fig. 7a, the emotive note, ‘Here are Kisses for you’, accompanies the image of a solider kissing the cheek of a young woman. In contrast, the written message – which contains a request to write ‘to a lonely soldier’, his hopes that ‘you are well’, and an appeal to ‘remember me to all your brothers’ – is much more restrained. Since censorship sometimes inhibited men’s willingness to express sentiments such as these, the cards were simultaneously an outlet and a comfort as men repurposed pre-packaged sentiment.
Author’s Own Collection: Pre-packaged sentiment in postcards. Postcard to Miss H. Smith, 17 September 1917.
Author’s Own Collection: Pre-packaged sentiment in postcards. Postcard to Miss H. Smith, 17 September 1917.
The majority of the cards found here were secular, but for some they also offered some religious consolation. Private H. Oldfield seems to have received two such cards at the end of 1917. These played on much older religious imagery in European art. The first, entitled ‘The Divine Comforter’ showed Jesus holding the arm of an injured or dying British soldier. Included on this card was a quotation from the book of ‘Isaias [sic]’, which asserted, ‘Fear not, for I am with thee; / turn not aside, for I am thy God.’ The other, in a similar vein, included an illustration that showed two soldiers who were accompanied by a glowing figure of Christ. Alongside this was the annotation ‘Lo, I am with you alway [sic].’ 107 Similarly one soldier’s niece sent a card that read ‘God be with you ’till we meet again’ and reassured him that she ‘daily pray[ed] that God will keep my hero in His care’ and ‘bring him safely back again’. 108 E. Grantham kept a postcard entitled ‘faith’ in his wallet for the duration of the war. This card exhorted its reader to have faith that a ‘brighter’ future would come. 109 By no means were all English soldiers particularly religious, but Adrian Gregory has proposed that a widespread, albeit internalized, religiosity existed in Britain during this period. 110 As such, these small tokens could provide consolation and reminders of their faith to men whose exposure to ecclesiastical services was often limited to Sundays.
Soldiers’ duty, obligations, and sacrifice were recognized as civilians chose to send cards that emphasized the combatants’ role as Britain’s and the family’s protectors. J.D. Powell, for example, received a postcard from his family entitled ‘A Message to My Hero.’ This card reassured him that ‘though others may win to a wider fame … there is one of the brave that I need not name’ and that ‘I cherish the thought that the day will come that will bring him across the sea’ since the sender was ‘longing to welcome home my hero’. Clearly enshrined was his role as defender of England and home. The printed message read, ‘For King and Country. Not Once or Twice in Our Fair Island’s Story. The Path of Duty was the Way to Glory.’ 111 Harry Bridge’s family also sent him cards that praised and portrayed him in a semi-hagiographic way. One, from his sister, included the comforting annotation that ‘I’m thinking of You [capitalized], dear, all the time.’ Those from his mother solaced Harry that she was ‘longing for Our Dear Absent Soldier’. 112 It included the assurance that those at home ‘only stand and wait and we are waiting, longing for you dear. And praying that your coming be not late.’ 113 Men’s role in the household was disrupted by the war. Women took on new roles, particularly in industry, due to the exodus of working-age males. 114 The stresses of separation fuelled anxieties over relationships. Postcards, again, were an opportunity to allay, at least partially, men’s doubts in this respect and had the capacity to assuage fears by conveying the ideas above. These series were mass-produced and were popular precisely because they played this role.
Celebrating Success: Postcards as Trophies and War Souvenirs
Postcards were also used as evidence of martial success. Soldiers actively sought out souvenirs and trophies from battle. These were sent back home as keepsakes and physical evidence of personal triumphs. 115 From German shoulder-straps and medals, through pieces of shrapnel, to vials of soil from the front lines, men grasped material evidence of their service. Enemy postcards and photographs became a part of this phenomenon. These were often taken from captured or dead German soldiers. In one collection, German combatants were shown in groups, posing in front of machinery, in captured settlements, and in bombed-out cathedrals. 116 Rifling enemy corpses and baggage is a practice as old as time. While sometimes objects of value were taken for profit, postcards cannot be categorized as such. Men were looking to remember and memorialize a feat of arms, or the defeat of their foe. 117 Cecil Littlewood sent one of his children a card that he seems to have picked up near Hazebrouck. This had originally belonged to a local, who had earlier fled the warzone – evidenced in the French writing and address. Yet it was taken by Littlewood and sent home as a souvenir. 118
Card designs also celebrated Allied unity and victories. Tommy Macartney sent a silk-embroidered postcard that showed the various flags of the Allies and read ‘Gloire des Allies [Allied Glory]’, with no message on the back. 119 Some units produced their own unique series of cards, particularly around Christmas and other festivals, which catalogued that year’s victories. The 14th (Light) Division’s 1916 Christmas postcard was festooned with each regiment in the division’s acronyms, it celebrated their capture of the ‘N.E. Corner of Delville Wood’. Illustrated with an image of the broken stumps of ‘Devil Wood’, it aestheticized the destruction that met the men. It also has the divisional flag emblazoned across the image and, surely, reflected upon this as a battle honour. Private J.C. Hold, the soldier who sent this card, wrote, very simply, ‘Wishing you all a Merry Xmas – J. Hold.’ The neutrality of this sentiment might have undercut the semi-triumphalism of the card’s message. Yet by choosing this as the vehicle for his Christmas greetings it also conveyed divisional success to the Home Front. 120
Demonizing the Enemy: Postcards and German Barbarism
Postcards also helped English infantrymen to justify the war by demonizing their enemy. While some enemy postcards were acquired as simple mementos and souvenirs, others played an important role in the transmission of anti-German sentiment. Some postcards provided a personal reminder of the justice of the Allied cause and the brutality of the enemy. While death was a topic touched on mainly through euphemism and humour in British cards, the files of Patrick Joseph Kennedy contain gruesome examples of German postcards taken as souvenirs. 121 On one card he included the brief explanation that it had been ‘picked up on the battlefield’ from a ‘German lad’. 122 The cards showed piles of Allied dead. In two cards huge numbers of unidentifiable British corpses are scattered across some woodland, seemingly stripped of their equipment and dumped unceremoniously face-first on the ground. In another, German soldiers, some smiling triumphantly, surveyed the bloodied corpse of a British soldier lying next to a shell-hole. 123 Another showed a further corpse: rigor mortis had caused its limbs to extend in odd, unnatural angles. In three others Highland casualties are exhibited – their kilts had ridden up unceremoniously to reveal their bare legs. Again, they lay face down. The last two cards showed charred corpses outside two immobilized tanks. These cards were numbered, suggesting they were part of a series. It seems unlikely that Kennedy would have failed to be moved by these and his retention of them suggests that he looked to remember exactly the kind of foe he fought. Indeed, if these were sent home, they were also a reminder to his relatives of the nature of the war being fought across the Channel.
MR 2/17/53: Papers of Joseph Patrick Kennedy. A German postcard showing dead British soldiers - German Postcard No. 294. Reproduced with the permission of The Tameside Local Studies and Archives Centre.
There is little evidence of the British producing similar postcards. The most ‘extreme’ cards produced for that market included dead horses or, in rare cases, bones. 124 While more macabre cards have not appeared in British series, it does not mean they did not exist. Yet, in Britain, while the dead appeared in the 1916 film The Battle of the Somme or paintings such as William Orpen’s Dead Germans in a Trench (1918), these were deliberately shocking. Such images were used precisely because they were not the norm and were anything but celebratory. When collecting battlefield trophies, the English soldiers studied here tended to choose materiel to symbolize their success and heroism rather than such overt evidence of death. 125 These omitted the horrific reality of battle and helped to nurture the image of a sanitized soldier hero. When faced by these awful German photo-postcards soldiers must have been struck by what appeared to be very different ‘moral norms’ underpinning their and their enemy’s approach to the war. These postcards may well have been taken as confirmation of German barbarity and their military atrocities. 126
This, perhaps, reflects that there is some truth in the hypothesis of scholars such as George Mosse, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, and Annette Becker, that the Great War saw the brutalization of some European cultures and societies. 127 John Horne and Robert Gerwath have nuanced and built upon the ‘brutalization thesis’ and have emphasized the role of the nation in ‘organising and endorsing the mass deployment of violence’ during this period. 128 Yet the nation was more than purely a political force. The changes brought about by the war meant that society’s cultural output also played a role. However, most countries supressed violent images and it is more likely that these cards were exceptional even for German soldiers. George Mosse has suggested that while postcards played a role in the ‘trivialization’ of war, ‘there is no picture of the dead or wounded as they must have appeared in the trenches’. 129 The German postcard industry contained, in the main, very similar messages to those found in the British archives. 130
It is unclear who took these photographs, or who printed and produced the cards. However, the photographs were not taken covertly, they were numbered, and at least one other soldier took the same series of cards from a German corpse. This indicates that they were taken with the authority of at least local commanders and suggests that they were part of a commercial series. 131 In this case, the German postcard industry did produce cards that celebrated violence and death. While the ‘culture of defeat’ played an important part in perpetuating post-war violence, might it also be that the experience of the conflict had already seen some populations become more open to violence? 132 Alan Kramer has convincingly investigated the way in which a ‘culture of destruction’ had come to mean, among other things, ‘the acceptance of the destruction, consumption, and exploitation of whatever it took to wage the war’. 133 Postcards, might offer new perspectives on this topic. While it is likely these cards were atypical, they provided individual English soldiers with vivid and shocking evidence of their enemy’s character.
Other cards were designed by companies in France and the United Kingdom to portray the enemy negatively. 134 H.T. Madders, for example, sent his nephew a complete postcard booklet named ‘Arras et ses Ruines: Conflit Européen Vues Détachables’. This collection demonstrated the Germans’ destructiveness: Arras’ rubble-strewn streets and dilapidated grandeur were evidence of enemy barbarity. 135 Others painted an even more extreme picture of the enemy. S.A. Newman sent home postcards that also depicted the city’s destruction. The printed message on one highlighted how ‘the Houses of the Square show the Huns’ passion for destruction’. Another reflected on damage to ‘The Belfry’ and the ‘systematical [sic] devastation of the vampires (the germans [sic; no capitalization])’. One included a simple printed message explaining how ‘The Grand Viziers street gives an example of the destruction of our cities by the Huns.’ Others showed a ‘Panorama of the ruins near the Guild-Hall (Deed of the Hun vandalism).’ 136 Such aggressive anti-German sentiment influenced the soldiers and the rhetoric used on these postcards percolated into some letters home. 137 Distance and time can and do dent motivation, particularly during times of war, but it would have been hard to misread these postcards, which were designed to provide an important reminder of Germany’s ‘true’ nature to civilians and soldiers alike.
What motivated soldiers to fight was a complex phenomenon, with myriad factors affecting it. Yet, in Britain (and elsewhere) many people supported the war in the confidence of the justice of their cause, which was underwritten by a belief that the war was defensive. 138 A key ingredient in this perception was an appropriately destructive and demonic enemy. Some postcards played a more overt role in the branding of Germans as war-mongering and despotic. Stephane Audoin Rouzeau and Annette Becker have argued that to understand the propaganda of the Great War (and, more broadly, the culture of 1914–18) one must conceive of the transmission of propaganda as a ‘horizontal’ as well as ‘vertical’ process. 139 Horizontal propaganda is ‘made within the masses … letting individuals condition … each other’. 140 Even after a number of years of intense, tiring, and increasingly demoralizing service, many men retained a sense that Germans – or more simply ‘Jerry’ or the ‘Hun’ – were a foe that needed to be defeated.
The Purpose of Postcards: Multiple Meanings and Nuanced Messages
Postcards were used in a variety of ways. Soldiers found that they were the easiest way to maintain contact with home amid their busy and tiring daily routines. More practically, they fitted easily into soldiers’ tunic pockets. 141 Importantly, in a world of censorship, postcards also offered men the opportunity to hide, nuance, and repurpose their intended messages. Sometimes there was a dissonance between images and message. Yet, as Peter Gilderdale has argued, this was often the purpose of a postcard. In the setting of the Great War, it allowed men to maintain their stoicism via the written message while ‘the pre-packaged visual vocabulary’ offered them the opportunity to exhibit ‘strong’ emotions. 142
A postcard took much less time to write and did not require an envelope. This proved to be a distinct advantage for the tired men of 1914–18. The British Army introduced Field Service Postcards, officially ‘Army Form A2042’, primarily to ease the pressures of censorship. Yet they became soldiers’ best and cheapest tool to quickly and simply update their families and friends about their well-being. Lt L.W.C. Ireland used the Field Service Postcard as a bridge between his longer, more detailed, letters. 143 Seemingly these offered little: basic information about health; whether they were being transferred to base; a reference to correspondence; and their signature. However, one should not underestimate the meaning that was embedded in these simple objects: they were evidence that the soldier was alive and thinking of those at home. 144 The familiar handwriting provided physical and familiar evidence of a loved one. 145 For others, the Field Service Postcards offered different opportunities. H.C. Brockwood used them to admonish his wife. His diary shows that he sent a Field Service Postcard only when he had not received any correspondence from home, or he felt that it was insufficient. The lack of detail was a punishment. 146
Author’s Own Collection: A Field Service Postcard, 11 February 1918.
For many, the images on the more detailed commercial postcards were at the heart of the thoughts they wished to convey. Captain Maurice Asprey sent a card to his mother showing Ypres’ cattle market. The image, which portrayed a bustling and attractive pre-war scene, was used to communicate his dismay at the ‘damage’ and ‘awful waste’ wrought upon such a ‘decent town’. Yet, this also allowed him to express his fear for his brother, Philip, who had been sent to an area of ‘pretty nasty fighting’. This was followed by a description of his flooded dugout. The postcard’s image was the perfect conduit for these notes. 147 Sergeant Henry Selly used postcards collected on a trip to the Museé du Luxembourg in a very different way. These might have been simple mementos of his leave in Paris. However, he chose to send images of Venus, ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’, to his ‘dearest and lovely Alice’. Another, of Serge’s Amor and Psyche, depicted a muscular angel being embraced by a naked woman. On this he discussed the angel self-referentially. He included some descriptions of the statues and made allusions to Venus being the goddess of love and to beauty, desire, sex, fertility, prosperity, and victory. These pieces of art were used to make reference, sometimes unsubtly, to his and Alice’s dormant sexual relationship. 148 Other soldiers also included messages that played on the themes included on the card. Edgar Cleasby sent his daughter a Daily Mail postcard on 12 October 1918. It contained an image of a Labour Battalion toiling away at a new road. After congratulating her on successfully caring for her mother, he noted that ‘the news is good’ and mentioned a recent ‘big bombardment’. This was sent when soldiers in the British Expeditionary Force could sense the end of the war, as the Allies made wholesale advances across the Western Front. The card’s message becomes more significant in this context and, perhaps, the industrious Labour Battalion, forging a new path, was also meant to be symbolic. 149
MR 3/17/124: Papers of Edgar Cleasby. ‘Daily Mail Official Photograph’ Postcard 130 - ‘A British Labour Battalion at Work.’ Reproduced with the permission of The Tameside Local Studies and Archives Centre.
In other circumstances, though, soldiers wrote notes that were either of no relevance to the card’s message or intentionally subverted its meaning, often using satire. 150 For example, H.E. Trevor ignored the original content of the postcards he sent home during September 1914. The images of Belgium had nothing to do with his descriptions of the heavy fighting, casualties, and the state of himself and his men. Another bore no relation to his account of the wet weather in the trenches, the men’s resilience, nor his assertion that the Germans’ supplies were running low and that their prisoners were ‘fed up to the teeth’. 151 Yet they provided the perfect conduit to rapidly disseminate his feelings. September 1914 was a particularly stressful period of the war, which offered little time to write letters, and it seems that Trevor bought cards as and when they became available. As such, for his recipients, these became a narrative of his movement across France and Belgium (reflecting the places he had been) and an insight into his reactions to the war. A similarly disjointed postcard was sent by John Edwin Mawer who, again, seems to have chosen any card to record a simple message to his daughter: ‘I thought you would perhaps like a card from me. Well I am glad to hear you goes [sic] to school & also a good girl … just look after Mac until I reach home.’ 152 Yet, Mawer still made a choice when purchasing the card, apparently on its aesthetic value. It allowed him to demonstrate his paternal concern for his young child and provided his daughter with physical evidence of her father’s existence.
The core attraction of postcards was their ability to convey different meanings, sometimes to different people. Some scholars have noted that postcards frequently included no message or only some brief notations. While the postcards studied here tended to contain more detailed comments, it is also true that ‘there is something automatic and ritualistic’ about the inscriptions. 153 Depending on the sender, the image and postcard’s pre-prepared content may or may not have had any significance. Consequently, it might well be that some of these postcards simply served as a point of contact. Nevertheless, even if they contained limited information, a postcard continued to have ‘strong expressive value’. 154
Conclusion
Here one can see just how two narratives (that of the postcard and those of people at war) can coalesce and fuse in a way that throws light on the culture of 1914–18, and the nature of long-distance relationships during the Great War. By focusing on the use of postcards, the strength, resilience, and continued importance of relationships between combatants and civilians becomes even clearer. The postcard, as the primary multi-media platform of its day, played an integral role in this. Indeed, the multifunctionality of postcards means that it is unlikely that a piece of this length would do full justice to their role in the Great War. This article highlights how subjective their use was: no one soldier would have utilized the variety of cards on offer for all of the reasons above. Their diversity and variety of uses underlines the importance of human creativity in military history. However, the pictures and messages included on postcards meant they were, as Brouland and Doizy have argued, unique among the mass media and cultural outputs of belligerents. While playing a part in the propagation of ‘war culture’ and horizontal propaganda, they were simultaneously ‘a message from one individual to another, within the framework of a personal – if not intimate – relationship’. 155 They contend that the forms of exchange and interaction made possible by the postcard industry are comparable to those offered by social networking in the twenty-first century. 156 While photographic cards of the front lines were sometimes censored, it was often possible for patriotic, sentimental, or satirical postcards – through their exaggeration, geographical placement, idealization, and metaphor – to bypass these restrictions and symbolize nearly anything. The cards found in the archives used here, while a relatively small sample, certainly reflect the postcard’s important role in the maintenance of relationships. Crucially, they presented men with lower standards of education with a medium that allowed them to transmit emotions, ideas, and messages with greater ease.
The research here confirms Bjarne Rogan’s hypothesis that postcards were rarely used in ‘linear’ communication. They were not purchased and sent with the intention of providing detailed information for another person or group. Postcards were, in the main, used as a form of ‘circular’ correspondence between people who already had close social relationships. Rogan contends that ‘the purpose of such communication acts’ was ‘to confirm or mobilize an already existing social relationship’ and that these were ‘activity orientated’. 157 Sometimes, of course, postcards were used when time was at a premium but the sender still wanted to touch base with someone close to them. Even here, however, a short message was capable of offering a sense of place, the weather, and a brief description of daily routines. 158 In this way, postcards provided a bridge between soldiers, their family, and close friends. People took the opportunity to embrace the medium for their own purposes. It is interesting to note that the vast majority of the examples found here come from the years after the British Army in France had become a force comprised of volunteers and conscripts. It might be that the use of the postcard in such large numbers is reflective of the continuation of civilian culture, and the increasing significance of writing and literacy – regulars being, in general, less literate than their New Army comrades. Without doubt this was indicative of many men’s desire to maintain the semblance of civilian life.
Finally, postcards help to explain the remarkable resilience of relationships between soldiers and civilians on the Home Front. The cards allowed people to share experiences, images, and even sensations despite separation. This was particularly important in the context of the Western Front, where free time was limited. The postcard was invaluable for those who were uncomfortable writing, and this, as well as their cost, made them a particularly useful instrument for the rank and file. For all, both rich and poor, they fed people’s imaginary worlds: a place to which they could retreat in the loneliness of a home lacking its soldier, or the horror of a dilapidated trench. What is more, they were most frequently positive in their message, containing assurances about welfare and the future and a morale boost. The ‘interchange of information’ between England and the Western Front, which is evidenced in the postcard, sustained an acknowledgement of sacrifice, facilitated mutual understanding, and ‘fostered a common perspective’. 159 These factors would have helped the overall British war effort by sustaining unity and morale. They are also evidence of the extent to which ‘war culture’ percolated through society with an intensity that top-down studies of the period may overlook. Their messages, images, and the ways in which these were used and manipulated means that postcards remain a relatively unused source that hold immense opportunity.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Professors Heather Jones and David Stevenson for their notes on previous drafts of this article. He also thanks Dr Adrian Gregory, Dr Emma De Angelis, Dr Paul Keenan, Dr Bastiaan Bouwman, Dr Anne Irfan, the anonymous reviewers, and the attendees of the LSE International History Seminar for their comments on its previous iterations. He would also like to thank The Tameside Local Studies & Archive Centre for giving him permission to use images of postcards found in the Manchester Regiment Collection.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was conducted with the help of an LSE PhD Studentship. It was also, in part, supported by a 2017 scholarship from the Centre International de Recherche de l’Historial de la Grande Guerre.