The First World War: 100 Years On

Many of these posts derive from a journey I made in August 2014 to sites of the First World War on the Somme and in Flanders.

Others are records of such things as exhibitions of work by the war artists, and books that I have read on the subject.

To the Somme and Flanders

• Bugling for the Missing of WW1: cutting back to what’s left on the bone
• On the road to the last resting places of three poets of WW1
• Deserters, mutineers and the German soldier who warned of the first gas attack
• The sacrifice: remembering those who came from near and far
• Otto Dix’s War: unflinching and disturbing, but dedicated to truth
• Noel Chavasse: WW1 hero from Liverpool
• Kathe Kollwitz’s ‘Grieving Parents’ at Vladslo: ‘Seed Corn Must Not Be Ground’
• The Chinese labourers who served on the Western Front

The war poets

• History and war in the 20th century: a storm blowing from Paradise
• Simon Armitage’s elegy for the Great War
• Ivor Gurney: The Poet Who Loved the War
• Edward Thomas: Now All Roads Lead to France

The war artists

• The Art of War
• The Great War in Portraits: patriotism is not enough
• A Terrible Beauty: British artists in the First World War
• Stanley Spencer’s Sandham murals: ‘a heaven in a hell of war’
• Paul Nash and World War One: ‘I am no longer an artist, I am a messenger to those who want the war to go on for ever… and may it burn their lousy souls’
• Truth and Memory: British Art of the First World War at IWM (part 1)
• At the Imperial War Museum (2): The disturbing vision of William Orpen
• At the Imperial War Museum (3): Percy Delf Smith’s ‘Dance of Death’
• At Manchester Art Gallery: The Sensory War 1914-2014
• Leeds art: pain, war, atonement and dance

The war recounted

• The Beauty and the Sorrow: a wonderful summer, then an abyss of horror
• ‘The heartbeat of who we are’: Jeanette Winterson on war, wealth and creativity
• The Missing of the Somme: Have you forgotten yet?
• Europe sleepwalks to war
• The Long Shadow: time removes everything but the memory
• War Horse: they had no choice
• Michael Morpurgo, Blackadder and Oh! What a Lovely War
• Europeans who knew war and freedom lost
• The Five Acts of Harry Patch
• From Nineveh to Mosul: what’s that fluttering in the breeze?