Making a new world
For the past year or so, Imperial War Museum London has given over its third floor to four related but very different exhibitions marking the end of the First World War a hundred years ago.
The four are presented under the overarching title of Making A New World, a major season which has also included a programme of live music, performances and public debates, all addressing aspects of the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Here’s the promotional video of the season as a whole.
The biggest of the four exhibitions is titled Renewal: Life after the First World War in photographs. Over the next few days I’ll review the other three exhibitions.
Renewal: Life after the First World War in photographs
In the years after the First World War, countries, cities and individuals had to regenerate and rebuild themselves on an extraordinary scale.
The exhibition uses poignant and evocative photos, diagrams, posters and objects from IWM’s vast collections to convey the challenges and experiences of peace which were faced by soldiers, societies, and Europe as a whole.
Armistice celebrations in Birmingham, 1918 IWM (Q 63690)
Each individual photograph or object comes with an informative wall label, which is well worth reading and pondering.
There are about 130 objects in all, covering a wide range of subjects and formats, from a big map of Europe, black-and-white footage of the ruined town of Ypres, a wall-high reproduction of architects’ designs for new homes fit for heroes, through to recruiting posters for the army, an example of a prosthetic leg made for an amputee, photos of demobbed soldiers, diplomats, abandoned munitions, and – isolated and forlorn – a broken ceremonial sword once belonging to a German officer.
Room one: reconstructing the individual
More than 70 million fought in the First World War, some 16 million died, tens of millions were displaced. In Britain, many soldiers wanted to return home as soon as possible, although many were injured and condemned to spend the rest of their lives in care homes. There was suddenly a crying need for houses and jobs for all the demobilised men.
Installation view of Renewal: Life after the First World War in Photographs © IWM
Topics in this room include:
Returning Home
Including photos of demobilisation offices, crowds of soldiers being demobilised. Sometimes the hold-ups led to frustration and there demobilisation riots in some places.
Regaining Freedom
Around eight million soldiers became prisoners of war during the conflict. Allied prisoners were released immediately upon the Armistice but were often given little help. One poignant little case contains a pair of wooden clogs given to a returning British POW who had no boots by a Belgian peasant, which the Brit obviously kept to the end of his days and donated.
Pair of clogs given by a sympathetic Belgian to a shoeless British prisoner
In contrast, prisoners from the defeated nations were only slowly released, some being kept in captivity for up to two years after the war ended. France, in particular, was tough on the Germans, forcing German POWs to help rebuild all the villages and towns the war had ruined. There is a photo of German POWs rebuilding the Basilica of St Quentin in 1919, and many other photos showing the complete devastation of northern France and Belgium
Horses and men of 1st Anzac Corps on their way past the ruins of the Cathedral and Cloth Hall in Ypres © IWM E(AUS) 1122
Starting Again
The theme of rebuilding runs through the show. Many photographs show citizens who had fled the fighting returning home and setting up house again amid the rubble. There are photos of the new wooden houses built among the ruins of Ypres, and the first tobacconists shop blossoming among the rubble.
Apparently, Winston Churchill had suggested that Ypres be left a rubble-strewn ruin as testimony to the men who lost their lives there, but the people – as the commentary wryly puts it – didn’t go along with his suggestion, and soon began rebuilding.
Soldiering On
Many soldiers found it hard to adjust to peacetime, both psychologically and, in practical terms, found it hard to get work. There was a major economic slump after the war. By late 1919, with most of the British forces demobilised, many men decided to re-enlist in the new, smaller, more professional British Army, Navy and Air Force, since it offered the best hope of steady work, plus opportunities to travel and ‘see the world’ which were not available to most of their working class peers. Thus the exhibition contains some colourful 1920s posters singing the praises of a career in the forces.
See the World 1919 recruitment poster
Restoring Independence
Many men had been blinded in the war. They couldn’t return to their old jobs and risked poverty and isolation if left to themselves. A section of the show is devoted to the work of St Dunstan’s Lodge in Regent’s Park, a charity devoted to helping blind ex-soldiers. The photos belonged to Dorothy Irving-Bell, a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse who worked with blind patients and whose album amounts to a social history of the charity.
The black and white photos of rows of smartly dressed young man, every one of whom has been blinded for his country, some with bandages over their eyes, others wearing dark glasses, was quite upsetting. But something snapped in me when I saw the colour photos of blind men being shown how to weave tennis nets and fishing nets, from which they could eke a living. God, the waste. The waste on a scale we just can’t conceive today. It’s what makes John Singer Sargent’s painting, Gassed, almost unbearably moving.
The charity still exists and supports blind veterans of the services.
Repairing the Body
Not just eyes, every conceivable part of the human body had been eviscerated, gouged, melted and burned during the war. A section documents the advances in medical techniques which helped soldiers survive at the front, and then took care of them at home. This included a sequence about the doctors, nurses and patients at Roehampton which specialised in men who had lost a limb. Over 41,000 men lost limbs during the war.
Roehampton, patients being taught to use their new artificial limbs © IWM (Q 33690)
Rejoining Society
Disabled soldiers received state pensions but most others needed help registering for work, and claiming other benefits. This section displays some of the forms and documents required by the state or the many private charities which were set up to help soldiers.
Room two: A country fit for heroes?
Rebuilding society
British servicemen returned home to find a country short of houses (when has Britain not been short of houses?) The British economy almost immediately went into a slump. Fearing discontent on a large scale might trigger a Bolshevik-style revolution, the authorities move quickly, pledging to build thousands of homes for for heroes, and introducing a generous new unemployment benefit scheme.
There is a fascinating sequence of photos showing land being cleared at Becontree in Dagenham, and then a huge new estate being built, using new materials and modern (though not Modernist) designs.
Rebuild or preserve
Of course the problem of building in Britain was as nothing to the challenge facing the authorities in those parts of northern France and Belgium which had been devastated by the war. Here the authorities had to decide whether to rebuild a city like Ypres, brick for brick, or start again from scratch. The French did, in fact, leave a couple of villages in utter ruins, as a reminder of the pointlessness of war, and we are shown photos of them, Omes and Fleury, ‘the villages that died for France’.
A refugee family returning to Amiens, 17 September 1918 © IWM (Q 11341)
This room contains a slideshow on a big monitor showing photos taken by Louise Briggs, a British traveller who visited Belgium many times after the war, photographing the ruins then the rebuilding of Ypres, along with nearby villages and war cemeteries.
It comes as a shock to learn from the captions to several of these photos, that immediately the war ended the tourists started to arrive. Obviously not quite ‘tourist’ in the way we think of today, but plenty of British people wanted to come and see the sites where their sons or brothers or husbands had fought and died or been wounded. Some of the first buildings erected in post-war Ypres were makeshift wooden hotels for just such a clientele. Postcards were quickly manufactured showing views of famous battlefields, along with maps and other merchandising. Hard not to find this ghoulish.
Rudyard Kipling, much condemned now for his racism and imperialism, wrote a number of powerful stories about the Great War and its shell-shocked victims. And one really haunting story about a British woman who makes the pilgrimage to the grave of her dead son.
New Opportunities
When the war ended all sides found themselves with vast amounts of munitions and arms and equipment on their hands. The tens of thousands of cars and lorries could be quickly converted for civilian use, but what about the primitive airplanes of the war?
A fascinating little sequence is devoted to explaining the rise of the Handley Page Transport Co which built its first plane in 1909, was commissioned to make heavier ‘bombers’ during the war, and then very impressively converted these to carry passengers, and thus became one of the first manufacturers of long-range passenger planes. Photos show the cramped interiors of these earliest passenger plans, alongside altogether more glossy and stylish 1920s posters for Imperial Airways, formed in 1924.
Room three: Reshaping the world
The world which emerged from the war was shaped by the peace conference of 1919 to 1920 and the series of treaties which emerged from it and continued to be negotiated into the 1920s. Thousands of books have been written about the compromises, haste and bad decisions made at the conferences. Most controversially, the defeated nations didn’t have representatives present and so were forced to sign to all kinds of conditions which they would have rejected, and which caused lasting resentment among their populations, such as the massive reparations Germany had to pay France, as well as the big chunks of territory Germany lost to France in the West and Poland in the East.
Peace Treaties
One wall of this room is dominated by huge photos of the leaders of the victorious allies, Lloyd George of Britain, Woodrow Wilson of America, Clemenceau of France.
Continuing Conflict
But it is often forgotten that the Armistice did not end the fighting across huge swathes of Europe and Asia Minor. The Russian Revolution led to a civil war which raged across that huge country until 1922. In 1920 Russia invaded Poland and it was only the Poles stopping the Russian advance at the great Battle of Warsaw which prevented the Bolsheviks reaching and helping the communist uprisings in Germany. Street violence continued in Germany for years after 1918. A bitter civil war erupted in Ireland when the southern part of the island was given independence from Britain. Hungary became a communist republic under Bela Kun in 1919, which was eventually overthrown by a militaristic regime. A terrible war broke out between Greece, egged on by the Allies to take advantage of Turkey’s defeat, and Turkey which surprised the West by driving the Greek forces into the sea in scenes witnessed by the young reporter Ernest Hemingway.
Occupation
All across Europe occupying forces moved in to administer civil authority and oversee the transfer of power to peaceful regimes. British forces were involved in the occupation of Germany, Austria, Bulgaria and Turkey. Photos show our boys fraternising with locals, chatting about horses and, in one vivid photo, toboganning in the snows of Austria
Disarmament
Stunning photos showing the vast, vast piles of abandoned rifles, artillery, shells and so on. What a breath-taking, awe-inspiring waste of raw materials and industrial resources, epitomised by the pile of 32,000 rifles awaiting destruction by British forces in Cologne.
Installation view of Renewal: Life after the First World War in Photographs at the Imperial War Museum, showing the huge pile of rifles at Cologne (middle right) and Allied ships anchored at Istanbul (top left). Photo by the author
Thoughts
The three ‘rooms’ have actually been created for this exhibition out of grey cloth stretched across wooden frames. They have windows so you can look into them from the corridor between. And there’s audio, a continual mix of ambient doodling over which we hear voices, crashes, military sounds. I couldn’t decide whether this was irritating or inspiring. But certainly by the end I felt moved, moved to tears by the pointless suffering of so many people, and then horrified, wanting to run away from the scale, the unimaginable size of the catastrophe, the end of the world.
It is to the exhibition curators’ credit that from this vast holocaust they manage to identify clear threads and themes to give the horror shape and meaning, and have selected 130 black and white photographs, documents and objects which really bring home the impact of something so inhumanly vast on individual human beings, whose stories we can approach and understand.
German sword taken at the end of the war in Cologne. Photo by the author
Related links
- Renewal: Life after the First World War in photographs continues at Imperial War Museum London until 31 March 2019
World War One-related art reviews
- Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One @ Tate Britain (September 2018)
- Heath Robinson’s War Effort @ the Heath Robinson Museum (November 2018)
- Frank Brangwyn and the First World War @ William Morris Gallery (July 2014)
- The Great War in Portraits @ National Portrait Gallery (March 2014)
World War One-related book reviews
- The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End 1917 to 1923 by Robert Gerwarth (2016)
- Lenin on The Train by Catherine Merridale (2016)
- Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia by Dominic Lieven (2015)
- Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (2010)
- Forgotten Victory: the First World War Myths and Realities by Gary Sheffield (2001)
- A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz (1946)
- Complete Memoirs of George Sherston by Siegfried Sassoon (1936)
- Sagittarius Rising by Cecil Lewis (1936)
- All Quiet On the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1929)
- The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme And Ancre, 1916 by Frederic Manning (1929)
- Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
- Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden (1928)
- In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (1925)
- Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger (1920)
- Under Fire by Henri Barbusse (1917)
Books & Boots 