Civilians in a World at War, 1914-1918

4. Caught between the Lines

[ 113 ] [ 4 ] Caught between the Lines [T]here is no moment when one can escape the actuality of the horror. When the far off cannon is not booming, as it is today—it is a fairly clear day—the aeroplanes are flying, and one thinks every minute of the butchery going on, and of all the terrible brutality of this thing thrust on a peaceful world. —Mildred Aldrich to Harriet Levy, February 19161 Virginie Loveling, a well-known novelist living in Ghent (Belgium ), faced the prospect of war with resignation in 1914, when she began a war diary at age seventy-eight. From the time Belgium mobilized to face the German threat in August until the armistice in 1918, Loveling kept a secret journal, describing life in the Etappen (staging zone for the German army) of Belgium. While she recorded the occasional fright of an air raid warning or an encounter with soldiers on the streets of town, her diary, like many other civilian accounts of war in the front-line and occupation zones, showed the small stresses of life during wartime that eroded morale and attacked the fabric of society. Her entry for March 4, 1916, serves as an example of the daily adjustments that became a way of life for civilians at war: Butter is nearly impossible to get, few eggs, unless through a particular favor from your shopkeepers. . . . The bread is hardly edible, it has no wheat taste at all: 250 grams per day for each. . . . Each week the economic outlook worsens. What state can we expect? Famine? In the past week . . . in Mons . . . seven men were shot in the head. They were among thirty accused Caught between the Lines [ 114 ] of espionage. . . . And I dare not write about wartime events for fear [that I’m risking] my life.2 The daily food battles listed here give way to the fear of greater privation and to the seemingly arbitrary terrors of war and occupation. What shines through in every word Loveling writes is a sense of uncertainty regarding the future. As Loveling’s diary demonstrates, unlike civilians living at a “home front,” with its distance from the actual battle and a certain measure of protection, civilians living at or near the fronts or in occupied zones faced a different experience of war. Civilians living between the lines in the midst of the action were subject to much more violence and upheaval. They not only faced demands upon their time, their work, and their resources, but they also often shared the psychological strain of war with soldiers. Many lived within sound or striking distance of guns, and they suffered from the extreme violence of invasion and retreat. On some fronts, occupied populations suffered from deliberately cruel policies, while in other regions, neglect was the order of the day. All found their lives militarized and their safety threatened. In his study of civilians in wartime, Hugo Slim lists “seven spheres of civilian suffering,” including (1) killing, wounding, torturing; (2) sexual violence and rape; (3) spatial suffering (deportation, forced labor); (4) impoverishment; (5) famine and disease; (6) emotional suffering; (7) postwar suffering from bereavement , loss, displacement.3 Slim uses these categories to point to the broad range of ways in which war impinges on the lives of those classified as noncombatants. In the First World War, civilians living in front-line or occupation zones experienced all seven of these spheres, often in great measure. Many sought to evade such dangers by fleeing battle and occupation zones or becoming refugees in their own or other countries. Others were forced to evacuate their homes by the movement of armies or by deliberate government policies. Still others reacted to the invasion of their homelands with resistance in a variety of ways, while some of their neighbors chose varying levels of compliance or collaboration with military forces. Whether they lived in exile or under occupation, the war was a visible presence in the daily existence of these ordinary people. For some, Caught between the Lines [ 115 ] the war created opportunity; for others it brought disaster. For the majority of those under foreign occupation or living as refugees, their lives were certainly not separate from the war being fought around them. Their homes had, in effect, become fronts. Refugees and Displaced Peoples War creates refugees, and for some civilians in front-line zones, fleeing was the only option, either because of forced relocation...