World War I

In light of Pearl James’s introduction, “Reading World War I Posters” (in Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture [2009]) and of Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, I chose to read the poster “Remember Belgium. Buy Bonds. Fourth Liberty Loan.” by Ellsworth Young from the World War I Posters Collection of McFarlin Library Special Collections at the University of Tulsa.

Vera Brittain recalls that when she was assigned to a hospital ward for wounded German soldiers, her initial thoughts were of common stories of German atrocities. She had been told often that the Germans “had crucified Canadians, cut off the hands of babies, and subjected pure and stainless females to unmentionable ‘atrocities.’ ... I half expected that one or two of the patients would get out of bed and try to rape me” (374). Although Brittain knew many of the stories had been exaggerated or even fabricated, she surely also knew that real atrocities and individual acts of brutality had occurred on all sides throughout the war.

Michael Howard, in his The First World War: A Very Short Introduction, mentions that the German invasion of neutral Belgium—which was thought a quick and necessary route to Paris—strengthened British and American will for war. Those Belgians who did not, or could not, flee “were treated by the invaders with a harshness intended to pre-empt the kind of ‘people’s war’ of sabotage and assassination that the French had begun to wage against their invaders in 1870” (30). Thousands of civilians were shot, and civilian buildings were burned (31). True and exaggerated reports of German harshness spread, becoming fuel for the kind of propaganda found within, for example, the “Remember Belgium ...” poster.

The poster depicts in silhouette a caricatured German soldier (with large, scruffy moustache) pulling along a young Belgian girl. In the background rise the flames of a burning landscape, and superimposed are the words: “Remember Belgium,” “Buy Bonds,” and “Fourth Liberty Loan.” The image is meant to remind the reader of the stories of German atrocities in Belgium, particularly of rape and of the indiscriminate burning of cities, and to evoke an outrage that would turn into a desire to act by purchasing war bonds.

In connection of our class's reading of Pearl James' "Introduction:  Reading World War I Posters", I have found a perfect illustration to support James' emphasis on reading World War I posters in context.

In the McFarlin Library's collection of WWI posters, I was drawn to this poster depicting Joan of Arc with a bloody sword.  (Due to Special Collections' copyright, I cannot upload a version directly to this blog.)  What particulary interested me was the intersection of idealized femininity and its (as James would have predicted, sanitized) depiction of bloodshed, with the pink 'blood' on her hand and sword.

However, upon searching for more context for this particular poster, I discovered this:

Other surviving copies of this poster have no blood at all.

There are several possible explanations as to how the McFarlin specimen came to have this "blood".  This addition may be 1) an accidental spill that occured prior to archiving, 2) a limited-edition version by the artist, Haskell Coffin, or 3) public graffiti.

I am inclined to believe in the third option.  The coloring is too specifically in the area of hand and sword to be happenstance, and the shape does not coincide with those usually made by spilling or dripping dye/paint.  This is particulary so where the coloring ventures into the white border, where it takes a sponged-on effect.  The blood does not have the same saturation as the rest of the poster, suggesting that it is not made with the same ink.  I additionally doubt that Coffin would have spent so much time on the design, only to haphazardly add desaturated blood, letting it contaminate the pristine blue background and run into the outside border.

The question remains, however, is who added this blood and why.  Was it a feminist protesting the sanitization of women's role in combat?  An anti-War citizen calling attention to the horrible costs of the conflict?  A Catholic who took offense to this ommision of this (then only beatified) warrior woman's role in The Hundred Year's War?  I believe that finding an answer to this question, especially in connection with other wartime protest, would be an interesting project.

After having read Pearl James’ “Introduction: Reading World War I Poster,” you can see many different elements of WWI propaganda within this specific poster. Initially, I noticed the color scheme in the poster: the large, blue background; the white stripe rising up behind the figure, as well as the white block behind the letters; and the red hair and lips of the figure, along with the red belts of her armor.  Because the figure of Joan of Arc is not one automatically tied into American patriotism, we are given the colors of red, white, and blue to associate her with America.  On top of this, she is attractive by traditional standards, and despite being dressed in armor, she still has a somewhat slender waist.  These elements of beauty, along with the patriotic color of the poster, catch the eye of the walker-by.

Considering that this is an American poster, it is important to consider President Wilson’s speech asking for a declaration of war on German.  This speech featured the idea of America crusading for democracy in the world.  Because of the power of the speech itself, the crusader was a very prominent symbol in American propaganda posters. Obviously, the artist behind this poster was trying to play on this.  We get a classical figure, made famous by her fight for her country, presented with a classical pose: raising the sword in defiance or even victory.  On her breastplate, there is a single, red vertical line which reminds one of an ornate cross on the armor of a knight.  Perhaps they chose to leave out the horizontal line of the cross to distinguish the poster from similar Red Cross posters, especially since a woman is featured.  Additionally, Joan of Arc is representative of a country which was America’s ally in the war, which adds further distinction between the allies and Germany.

I also think that a feminist reading of the poster is important, as it features a female symbol of war which was unique back then.  However, I do not necessarily find this picture completely progressive; in fact, it could be read as just the opposite.  Joan of Arc is portrayed as classically beautiful with what appears to be a tiara-like helmet (her hair appears to me to come out above the metal strip on her forehead).  This aspect reconstitutes her as a woman, rather than as a “masculine” figure.  Also, as stated above, she still has a seemingly narrow waist (despite armor), and her hair, eyes, and lips create a very classically beautiful image.  As this is a poster for War Stamps, it is aimed specifically at both men and women.  The women read the lines “Joan of Arc Saved France/Save your Country” and are meant to see that the average woman should be able to do her part to “save [her] country.”  If a man from this era sees the poster, he might see it as a challenge: this woman was able to save an entire country, and that he should be able to do just as much, if not more than her.

As a mosaic of letters, news clippings, poems, and (like Casie mentioned) literary allusions, Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth bristles with intertextuality. In this week’s reading, Brittain again enfolds references to England’s WWI print culture. She mentions Britain’s weekly Punch magazine in three places, once to discuss the publication’s jingoistic editorial cartoons (257). While I couldn’t find issues from the dates she includes, I did find the cartoon above from 1921. The tagline, “The dead remembered—the living forgotten,” is clearly a public appeal to take care of the shell-shocked soldier struggling to assimilate into civilian life, an enduring problem in any war. We find Vera also grappling with this transition after her return from nursing in France where her energies had “definitely counted” (430). Now, she considers the banal responsibilities and conversations of everyday life a “constant dissipation of energy on what appeared to me to be non-essentials” (430). She has survived foreign service, but does not consider herself lucky to have done so. Brittain separates war survivors into two groups: those who, like Brittain, fixate on touching the dead and through guilt abandoning their “vital contact with life” (457) and those who avoid contact with the war altogether by elevating quotidian affairs and the “little things” on the home front above “the Army’s anguish” (431). As Brittain observes, neither coping mechanism offers sustainability. Crafting memorials seems to offer respite, and she continually returns to this idea of constructing memorials for the dead as a response to her survivor’s guilt.

The Punch cartoonist, in addition to etching an image of the surviving soldier’s plight and vagrancy, touches on eulogizing and remembering the dead by placing a large, stone memorial in honor of those who “fell in the Great War.” Memorials offer the grieving something to touch, to handle, even after the bodies of the dead are beyond the living’s grasp. After Roland is killed, Vera initially finds refuge in this tangibility. Her first memorial is both physical and spiritual. She constructs a “small shrine” and makes holy relics of the books they read together (248). We hear echoes of this spiritualism in the words of her tutor, who has also lost a loved one in the war, when she claims the dead were “not really gone but were with us always, canonized for us more truly than the saints” (260). Vera wants to fashion Roland into a sacred—and therefore enduring—figure; she wants his death to have been heroic, and knowing that he didn’t die for folly “seemed a matter of life or death” (243). Again she connects him to her reading of the Illiad, temporarily falling under the aegis of Greek honor and glory for the fallen soldier, and the temporary comfort she takes in this makes she and her tutor feel “shy, surprised, queerly exalted” (260). But soon, Brittain cannot come to terms with Roland as a figure of Achilles, and she must unravel the absurdity of this epic trope in a modern world and face the painful results. It’s wrapped up in her crisis of faith and tangled up in her efforts to demythologize “that voracious trio” of “God, King and Country” (450).

Again Brittain returns to May Morning. It is a touchstone for her war experiences, embodying first the freshness of youth and pre-war glow of her generation and then acting as a reminder of all that has changed (as she expresses in her poem about her “toil far distant, for a darker year / Shadows the century with menace grim” (269)). Significantly, May Morning again emerges as marking the day she learns of Geoffrey’s death. It is a recursive ritual, a historical marker she can use as a point of reflection and connection with what is real and beyond the war, with what once was and what can never be reclaimed. Thus, her spiritual and physical memorials soon pass away in favor of commemorations rooted in history. Unlike her literary shrine to Roland, Vera claims to abandon literature after Edward’s passing: “There was no rush to poems now, no black quotation book, no little library of consecrated volumes….What was the use of hypocritically seeking out exalted consolations for death, when I knew so well there were none?” (450). Rather than clinging to her pain and insisting on touching death, she learns “that if the living are to be of any use in this world, they must always break faith with the dead” (247). It is telling that Brittain turns to history when she resumes her studies at Oxford. After laboring to “find out as much as I could” and to reconstruct the minutia of the moments preceding Roland’s and then Edward’s death, Brittain works to place these death stories in their broader historical context (441). She wants to “understand where humanity failed and civilization went wrong” (472). Here, in looking at the recursive patterns of human history, she finds a balm for the survivor’s guilt. More than a memorial of wood or stone, it is this information, the knowledge of how these dead fit into a broader, enduring historical image (one that includes many May Mornings), that she wants to remember and pass on. “Perhaps,” Brittain muses, “that’s really why, when they died, I was left behind” (473).

Brittain writes of these experiences to incarnate such a history into a text to be shared (or as Casie put it, “words made flesh”). Testament of Youth then acts as a sort of testimony to the creative energy that can take the irrational slaughter of a generation and somehow fashion it into a narrative of human endurance. As a survivor, Brittain wants to remember her fallen friends, but the very act of remembering also requires breaking contact with the dead and, paradoxically, forgetting.

The high value Vera Brittain placed upon the art of music is evident from her many references to particular musical works throughout Testament of Youth. Her memory of events, both of the family life of her youth and of her experiences of the war, are often bound up with her experiences of music, and her recollection of particular works helps the reader gain important emotional detail concerning the scenes being described.

What follows is a selection of musical references in Testament of Youth with links to recordings. This is not an exhaustive list (although a complete annotated list of musical references in the book might be an interesting project). Many audio examples are from the Naxos Music Library and are direct links through the University of Tulsa subscription—a service also available through many other institutions.  

Selected References:

Vera’s mother “had an agreeable soprano voice,” and at musical parties often sang songs such as“When the Heart is Young,” and “Whisper and I shall Hear” (25).  https://archive.org/details/CorineMorgan-WhisperAndIShallHear1902

Edward was a “skilled and passionate violinist” even at eighteen (54), and Vera recalls supplying piano accompaniment for many of his holiday recitals, including: Beethoven’s Violin Sonata Op. 12, No. 1 http://0-tulsa.naxosmusiclibrary.com.library.utulsa.edu/catalogue/item.asp?cid=8.550284 and "the Mendelssohn Concerto" (unspecified—probably the Concerto for Violin and Piano in D Minor).  http://0-tulsa.naxosmusiclibrary.com.library.utulsa.edu/catalogue/item.asp?cid=TPD1039046

Edward plays Dvorak’s “Ballade” at a school concert (89). http://0-tulsa.naxosmusiclibrary.com.library.utulsa.edu/catalogue/item.asp?cid=DOR-90171

Victor recalls Roland being moved by a performance of Karg-Elert’s “Clair de Lune” (90). Roland had said the piece reminded him of Vera, “in its coldness and the sense of aloofness from the world” (90). http://0-tulsa.naxosmusiclibrary.com.library.utulsa.edu/catalogue/item.asp?cid=BIS-CD-1084

One of the many moments when music brings consolation during the war is by the singing of Cowper’s hymn, “God moves in a mysterious way” (119). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z0e_xSC8to

In a pivotal passage, when Vera is struggling with feelings of guilt at not feeling useful regarding the war, she recalls the annual singing of Te Deum Patrem colimus on May Morning at Magdalen College, Oxford (152). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keC6BD50P00

In the surgical ward of 1^st London General, the “blaring, blatant gramophones” (221) gave wounded men consolation, but to Vera, the songs added “a strident grotesqueness to the cold, dark evenings of hurry and pain” (221). Two of the songs mentioned particularly: “When Irish eyes are smilin’” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHSV8igDiEo 

and “If you were the only girl in the world” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYDEb05J9Ik

Vera plays through the slow movements of Beethoven’s No. 7 Sonata, which reminds her of Edward (270). http://0-tulsa.naxosmusiclibrary.com.library.utulsa.edu/catalogue/item.asp?cid=8.571255 She writes to Edward that, if she were to die, she would quit playing music because there are pieces she could never again play without the painful memories of her brother. For example, the “Liber scriptus proferitur” part of Verdi’s Requiem. http://0-tulsa.naxosmusiclibrary.com.library.utulsa.edu/catalogue/item.asp?cid=Audite23.415

Brahms Requiem sung at Southwark Cathedral (275), after which the British offensive of the Battle of the Somme begins.Brahms, Ein deutsches Requiem, Op. 45 http://0-tulsa.naxosmusiclibrary.com.library.utulsa.edu/catalogue/item.asp?cid=0094636539355

Vera attends a performance of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly while on a brief leave (321). http://0-tulsa.naxosmusiclibrary.com.library.utulsa.edu/catalogue/item.asp?cid=CDS59

Edward, changed by his experience of trench warfare, plays Elgar’s “Lament for the Fallen” from The Spirit of England, Op. 80 while home on leave (356). http://0-tulsa.naxosmusiclibrary.com.library.utulsa.edu/catalogue/item.asp?cid=CHAN6574

The second half of Brittain’s narrative deals with mourning and loss; the loss of loved ones but also a loss of self. After Vera discovers that Roland has died on the front, her words stand out when she states: “from that moment Roland ceased – and ceased for ever – to be Roland” (242). These words are quite profound. She does not say that Roland passed away or died, (and makes no speculation about the existence of his soul after death) but rather that he completely ceases to be or to exist, and furthermore, he ceased to be Roland. All those traits and aspects of his person that comprise his sense of selfhood are effaced and wiped from existence. The sense here of finality and the totality of the lack of his existence is incredibly stirring emotionally, but also quite important, I might argue, in the context of Vera’s continually rising disillusionment.

Vera’s preoccupation with this sense of self and existence continues in other areas of her narrative as well, when she worries about loved ones and their fate on the battlefield, but also when she encounters them after they have changed. When Edward has not corresponded after his great offensive battle she asks “was Edward still in the world – or not?” (277). She doesn’t ask whether he is alive (as one might expect), but whether he, and the things that make him Edward still exist. When she does see him again, one of her first observations is that “the Battle of the Somme had profoundly changed him and added ten years to his age” (283). The Edward who returned from the battle is not the same Edward that Vera remembers. Later, too, with Victor, Vera distinguishes between the Victor who physically “was there as usual” and the “real Victor” who seems to have disappeared in light of his growing delirium (357). She also explores the ways in which she herself has changed in response to the losses she faced in the war (though she is ultimately able to carry on and continue her life slowly and painfully but surely). Continually, though, she questions and connects this sense of selfhood and existence, linking them together in a way that comes across as both unusual and profound. Though death is one means by which selfhood and existence cease, war and the effects of war certainly produce similar echoes of this type of loss on Vera and the members of her generation.

One of the lingering things that has stood out to me in Brittain’s Testament of Youth is her sustained attraction to words. Over the course of the war, she continues to be drawn to books, to writing, to letters—even as she grows further disillusioned with meaning and goodness in the world around her. Her relationship to literature, especially, provides several connecting points with literary scholars: her ambivalence about “doing something” instead of pursuing academic study in the wake of disaster and suffering; the irresistible urge to go back to books that have shaped her in painful times; the sense of commitment to texts as something worth reading and attending to.

However, something I’ve noticed upon reading these later sections is that it seems like Brittain’s discussion of her relation to books often mirrors the overarching ethos of her story. Just as the author somehow manages to move in and out of her own story as a narrator—sometimes placing us in the perspective of the moment, sometimes stepping back to give greater insight—so do books serve both as a witness to her ongoing commitment to them and their changing roles in her life over time. It’s almost like she uses literature (in the broadest sense) as a character to reflect how she responds to experience. I’m not sure that makes sense, but I’m going to try to run with it.

This idea is evident, I hope, throughout Testament, but for the moment I’d like to focus on the earlier parts of Chapter VI, right after Roland dies. Part of me expected Brittain to discard her books in a dramatic flourish and refuse to keep reading after her world had lost all sense of meaning (maybe that would just be me). Instead, words/texts maintain a very real presence from the beginning. First of all, she sees fit to use her poem for Roland as the epigraph to this chapter—an indication that she has been able to give some substance to her loss in retrospect, despite its staying power in her life. Then, as she recounts the series of blurred memories from the days after his death, at least two significant references stand out: her remembrance of the biblical phrase, “I am the Resurrection and the Life” (Jesus is the Word made flesh) and her echo of Rupert Brooke toward the end (a very important choice) (240). Both of these examples resonate so much because of the ambivalence she feels toward what they represent: her stance toward religion and her lingering sense that “the old joy” (241) of pre-war times is gone for good.

Section 2 of Chapter VI provides equally provocative instances of her relation to texts in a different way. When she begins to recount how Roland died, she opens with a comparison to Journey’s End (a drama, which is notable in and of itself—and also one after the war, which means her retrospective self is making this connection—even more interesting), then spends three paragraphs detailing the events. The next paragraph, though, begins, “That was all. There was no more to learn” (243), and that’s the last we see of books for the rest of this section; she reiterates at the end, “I knew I had learnt all that there was to know” (244). Who needs books when there’s nothing else to learn? However, she can’t stay away for long, because four pages later she’s turned their favorites into a shrine and turned them into her own sacred texts (248). This moment is also pretty fascinating because she both gives us a glimpse of what gave her solace at the time and how she has maintained her love for words, even if the ones she loves have changed. Her shift from Benson to Russell is telling, and her choice to reproduce entire paragraphs from each author is an effective way to, again, make these texts function as quasi-characters, able to speak for themselves instead of just giving us her impressions of them.

I’m eager to look more closely at how Brittain’s relation to literature continues to play out in the parts of the book we haven’t had time to discuss. It seems so integral to her way of perceiving the world, and yet it also has the potential to bring pain or lose the power it once had. This non-linear, progressive relationship with words gives life to Brittain’s story and helps her frame things that resist shape (her poetry is a good example of this—“May Morning” (268-269) is almost as heartbreaking as the commentary that follows it (270)). Regardless of how much she may struggle to continue to believe in the things words stand for, she remains committed to the hope that they can stand for something.

In this second reading from Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, we see a lot of the trials that she is put through as a young woman throughout the course of the war.  She sees death on a daily basis and very seldom gets thanks for what she does as a nurse.  But perhaps the most harrowing part of her story is the death of those closest to her.  Last week, I discussed the amount of psychological depth that we get from Brittain, and I feel that this depth is shown even more so in this second group of readings.  All four of the men that she knows that are actual soldiers in the war die: her fiancé, Roland; her brother, Edward; and her friends, Victor and Geoffrey.  These deaths happen throughout the war, and in each case, she experiences a different reaction.  These reactions are what I would like to focus on in this blog. 

The first death that she experiences is the death of Roland.  In last week’s reading, the two young lovers get engaged and decide to wait to get married for three years or until the end of the war.  Very early into this week’s reading, Brittain discusses how she was excited that her, Edward, and Roland all have leave to see each other at Christmas which almost seems a “Christmas miracle.”   However, Brittain creates a strong sense of foreboding in the short chapter which makes the reader wonder if something may be wrong.  Brittain states that: “When, by ten o’clock at night, no news had come, I concluded that the complications of telegraph and telephone on a combined Sunday and Christmas day had made communication impossible” (236).  Personally, I automatically feared the worst.  On top of this, she also mentions Roland’s family’s disturbance at his lack of contacting them.  As a capstone on this tension, Brittain chooses to tell us in the very last sentence of “Part I” that his lack of communication was due to his death. 

As “Part II” begins, we see Brittain’s style lends itself well to the subject matter.  While we only got a simple sentence declaring his death at the end of “Part I,” we get the full force of its effect in “Part II.”  Specifically, in the chapter IV of “When the Vision Dies,” Brittain tells us that the weeks “unroll themselves like a kaleidoscope through [her] mind” (240).  Honestly, as she discusses this group of vignettes, it makes me think of both the fragmentation of Eliot’s The Waste Land and the Modernist tradition of stream-of-consciousness.  While this book has been written after these things had appeared, I definitely feel that they had their effect on the composition of Brittain’s mourning scenes.  She gives us a sharp collection of images: drinking coffee in a hotel, standing out on Brighton’s shore, riding an omnibus, Edward composing a “haunting memorial hymn” for Roland, her being on duty as a nurse, and her bursting randomly into tears in a store (240).  All of these are also displayed in present tense—rather than in Brittain’s usual past tense.  We get the sense that, for her, the images are still very much alive.

Her experiences with the other deaths are much different.  Victor’s death seems a shock, because he had already lost his sight.  He seemed to be in his right mind, and then he suddenly got worse.  She seems in utter disbelief about Geoffrey’s death.  She says that her emotions were “not logical at all,” and she was so spiritually struck by his death that she felt that his “presence was somewhere with [her] on the rocks” of the shore that she sat on (343).  With Edward’s death, however, we definitely see the biggest amount of disbelief.  Her brother, someone she had loved and cherished as companion her whole life, was now sucked away by the war as well.

Ultimately, these deaths make her immune to the feverous anxiety that leads up to the end of the war.  With no one to worry about, she works tirelessly in her nursing duties to past the time.  In her reflections on the end of the war, she explains how all of these deaths led to her becoming a pacifist.  

In later passages of her memoir and the middle years of the war, Vera seems to distance herself from the disillusionment of her early war years. While Brittain continues to characterize her younger self’s relationship to the war as extremely bitter and angry, we see a slight shift in young Vera’s opinions towards the meaning of the war. In the early stages of the war and her service as a V.A.D., Brittain explains her grunt work as being initially redeemed by “a sacred glamour” —a belief she then renounces. Brittain writes, “The temptation to exploit our young wartime enthusiasm must have been immense—and was not fiercely resisted by the military authorities” (210). In this instance, Brittain reveals her disillusionment towards the glory, glamour, honor of war; instead, she remarks on the way the nation and military exploited her youthful ignorance towards war.

Despite the disillusionment of these early pages, Vera oddly returns to glory rhetoric in her later memories of the war. Young Vera writes of Roland in her notebook, “He to me is the embodiment of the ideal of heroism—that ‘Heroism in the Abstract’—for which he lived and died, and for which I will strive to live, and if need be, die also” (264). While early-war Vera or middle-aged Brittain would likely disagree with this glorification of war and “heroism,” Vera in the middle of the war returns to its ideal. After the death of Roland, it is as if she wants to make his service and sacrifice mean something.

Her early war years, often spent in anger at the fruitlessness of the war, seem to revolve around the fear of losing Roland. Once the unthinkable—and yet inevitable—has happened and Roland has been killed in war, she momentarily forgets the full force of her disillusionment. Possibly in an attempt to understand and come to terms with her fiancé’s death, she allows herself to believe in the ideals he adhered to at the beginning of the war. Brittain explains her sadness that Roland never achieved war glory in its specific sense—for example, that he was never awarded the Military Cross he so desired, which Edward surprisingly received. Brittain writes, “He had gone unadorned to his grave without taking part in a single important action, while the friend who had been a mere peace-loving musician wore the coveted decoration” (287). Because Roland died without achieving any specific sort of glory, young Vera soothes herself by momentarily surrendering to the glory of war. In these middle years, she believes in the idea that any soldier who fights and dies in war is worthy of glory, lived an honorable life, and died for a supreme purpose.  By believing in Roland’s “Heroism in the Abstract” (264), Vera attempts to honor her fiancé.

            One aspect of Vera’s story that I found very interesting comes from the Times (a newspaper?) article that she cut out and sent to Roland. The article’s author relates “Breton” (now known as the cultural region of Brittany in France) to “the legend of the submerged city,” or the ancient Greek city Atlantis that Plato discusses in his writings (161). The author proclaims, “One day the waters will recede and the city in all its old beauty be revealed again” (161). These “waters” are “the high tide[s] of war” that have submerged so many cities throughout Europe, including cites in the Brittany region of France, and of course, London, England (161). What first struck me about this moment is the imagery of a sunken city, wallowing underneath an unbearable weight. What else other than war could place a boot big enough atop London’s crown to push it under? Also, the article seems to allude to the reality of trench warfare taking place throughout the western front in France that conjures up images of entire cities of men submerged underneath a desolate wasteland of artillery, suffocating smoke, and chemical weaponry. Are we meant to see these entrenched men in some way analogous to the classical heroes like Odysseus, Achilles, and Aeneas wagging war in the names of their homelands?

Although, the article that Vera cut does not seem to focus as much on the people or men that are “drowning” in these trenches and cities. Instead, it is Greek art, classical literature that has been lost in the bellicose sea of World War I. However, the author of this hopeful news piece believes that “[t]here is fortunately no truth in the idea of sunken literature…It is an inalienable possession and incorruptible part of man” (161).  Similarly, Vera notes just before she shares this article that her love of Greek did “[come] back to [her] in quieter days, more potent than life, more permanent than war” (160). It seems that Vera and British society treasure the Greek classics not only for their delight and instruction but perhaps in order to bring themselves and their “state” closer to the ideal state that Plato discusses.

            The ideal of classical literature and the perfect state is hopeful, it is romantic, and it even rings true for Vera after the war in the sense that she returns to her love of Greek literature; however, there is something else at play in the Times leader other than a romanticizing of Greek literature and the glorious return of French and British intellectualism and culture. There is certainly a level of propaganda at play in this article. I do not mean to be cynical when I refer to this news clipping as propaganda. In fact, I think this serves as a rare example in which nationalist propaganda unites its respective citizens by rallying them around their shared culture, past, and institutions like that of classic literature, the Roman empire, and the academies throughout France and Britain that keep such values alive and well. Vera, and the author of the news clipping, remind their respective audience that there is something greater than war, there is a past to be remember before this terrible happening and a future that will take place after it. I would say that this news piece and even perhaps Vera’s letters serve as propaganda in that they support a nationalist wartime cause with a homogeneous message (more or less) of “we will be victorious” and rise above our enemies. The reason I do not find the article as a cynical piece of propaganda is because it does not “attack” or “essentialize” the Central Powers.

            So, this leads me to ask, how do we define propaganda? Is it always negative, or essentialist? Can propaganda be romantic? Can the Greek classics be considered propaganda? Can we see Vera’s letters as taking part in any homogeneous nationalist message?