Posted from the Past

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Fighting the War of Words

In a conflict like the First World War, deadlier than any that had come before it, much of the public discourse surrounding the war concerned the new methods of waging war that the conflict introduced. Weaopns like the machine gun, mustard gas, the trench gun, serrated bayonets, and the flamethrower brought on accusations of wartime atrocities from both sides. In the press, the war was framed as a battle between the civilized and the uncivilized, with both the Allied Powers and the Central Powers claiming they were the former. The propaganda machines on both sides got to work early in the war in painting their enemies as barbarians.

Postcards were one of the most popular ways to circulate propaganda during the war, and much of the propaganda produced by both the Allied Powers and the Central Powers was intended to demonize the enemy through racial stereotyping. Since the Central Powers were by and large the ones occupying territory, accusation of Allied atrocities wouldn’t work. Instead, they took aim at the Allies’ numerous colonies. Germany, though its leaders desired colonial expansion for the latter half of the 19th century, held far less territory than the French or the British. German postcards the one to the right derided their enemies for their close association with what many Europeans considered inferior people. The caption reads, “Old England, the culture propagator among his employees.”

Germany frequently used its enemies’ colonies against them, despite desiring those colonies for itself, framing the war as a battle between civilized Europeans and barbaric African colonial troops. Much of their focus was on French troops from their colonies in Senegal, depicting them as savage fighters. French propaganda responded in turn, but not in the way you’d expect. Rather than defend their soldiers from the racist barbs of their enemies, French propaganda used the barbaric image the German’s had created against them, suggesting that if these barbarians were superior in battle to the Germans, the Germans must fall below them on the racial hierarchy. 

Other Allied postcards, reinforcing their position as the civilized party in the war, accused the Central Powers of aggressive militarism. As the leader of the Empire, Kaiser Wilhelm II was a common subject of this type of postcard. The postcard to the right was made in Italy, shortly before they joined the Allied Powers, and reinterprets Germany’s aggression as the Kaiser’s hunger to devour the world. Notice the exaggerated features of the Kaiser; caricature was key to crafting images that were immediately recognizable to viewers, and the Kaiser was known for his moustache.

Anti-German sentiment was so high among the Allied nations that anything associated with Germany was shunned completely. A notable Canadian example is the renaming of Berlin, Ontario, to Kitchener, after the British War Secretary. This sentiment made its way into postcards like the one to the left, rejecting the Dachshund, simply for being a breed of dog with a German name.

The First World War was one of the first and greatest examples of total war, in which battles are fought not only on the battlefield, but in the mind of the public. A key weapon in this fight was the postcard, and ones like those previously mentioned played a huge role in reinforcing the platforms and goals of both sides in the minds of their citizens.

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Alex Foster-Petrocco

Alex has a BA in History from Carleton and is currently a 2nd-year Professional Writing student at Algonquin.

Posted from the Past

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Finding Comfort in the Trenches with Fergus Mackain

“A matter of about five minutes ago Fritz was bombing us, and I have just got up off the ground where I was laying for about twenty minutes. One fellow has been hit, but not severely by shrapnel. This is his second visit this evening.”
— William Charles Frederick Wiggs, Royal Engineers

See the full transcript of Wiggs’ letter at the UK National Archives website.

Unsurprisingly, experiences like William Wiggs’ made up the majority of letters written back home to family and friends during the First World War. And though it might be odd to think about, these awful experiences weren’t always taken so seriously. Some experiences were so miserable that only a soldier could laugh about them. Picking up from where we left off in my last post, let’s look at the work of Fergus Mackain, and what role humour played in the life of a soldier.

Mackain was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, and worked in the southern United States as an illustrator before enlisting in the British Army in 1915. He served in a regiment that fought at the Somme and Vimy Ridge, survived the war, and returned to the U.S. where he passed away at the age of 38. The series of postcards he created during the war, titled “Sketches of Tommy’s Life,” give us a playful and sometimes morbid take on life in the trenches. What’s striking about Mackain’s art is how well it captured a soldier’s experience, and how it turned miserable situations into something soldiers could joke about as a wartime version of gallows humour.

This can be better attested to by someone who lived through the war. It can be easy to forget, some 100 years later, that these cards weren’t meant as artifacts for us to look back on, but were living objects. A set of Mackain’s artwork belonging to a soldier known only as “E. A. Y.” include his own commentary on how well these cartoons captured a soldier’s experience. Browse the gallery below to see his comments.

There is some support among psychologists that this kind of relatable imagery of shared trauma can act as a sort of glue to bring together a group of people. They helped to build a sense of community among people who have lived similar experiences but would likely never meet face to face. Having these kinds of experiences so succinctly recorded on cards that could be easily circulated between the British soldiers on the Western Front made them the snail-mail version of the relatable internet memes of today. E. A. Y. may as well be posting each image on his Instagram story with the caption, “me lol.”

The thing that has always attracted me to history is its materiality. Ever since I was young, it amazed me that museums just had things on display that people from hundreds, sometimes thousands of years ago created, used, or touched. Objects with a real, tangible connection to history, things that belonged to somebody, are a weird and fascinating insight and intrusion into the essence of a person. Mackain’s art and E. A. Y.’s notes offer rare insight into the lived experience of a soldier and make these postcards unique historical objects.

For more of Fergus Mackain’s art, and a detailed history of his life and work, visit http://www.fergusmackain.com/

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Alex Foster-Petrocco

Alex has a BA in History from Carleton and is currently a 2nd-year Professional Writing student at Algonquin.