Civilians in a World at War, 1914-1918

Introduction

[ 1 ] Introduction In war, civilians are cheap things at best. —Ellen LaMotte, The Backwash of War “I would make a good soldier,” twelve-year-old Elfriede “Piete” Kuhr confided to her war diary on August 4, 1914, in her East Prussian town of Schneidemühl.1 That same month on the other side of the developing battle lines, ten-year-old Yves Congar was playing with his toy soldiers when the Germans marched into his home town of Sedan, France.2 Across the Channel in England, a teenaged Girl Guide packed a special bag with provisions, which she tied around her waist at night in order to “be prepared” for the call to active service in the war.3 Meanwhile her fellow Girl Guides in Poland faced invasion of their country and banning of their organizations, while Russian Jewish children found themselves on train cars, deported to an unknown future. All these children were civilians in a world at war, faced with the sudden mobilization and militarization of their lives. Like their adult counterparts, children found themselves caught up in a wartime world that was transforming before their eyes, forcing them to find a place in this transformed world. The actions that ordinary people decided to take in the face of war help frame the central question of this book: what does it mean to be a civilian? This seemingly simple query delves into the heart of our modern notions of war, morality, heroism, and sacrifice. In recent wars, most Introduction [ 2 ] notably in the United States’ war in Iraq begun in 2003, the generic term “civilian” almost always refers to Iraqi civilians, living in the war zones. While technically American citizens were also civilians in this war, they are rarely referred to as such. In fact, the experiences of Iraqi civilians and American civilians are nothing alike. Showing abstract “support for our troops” has little in common with the threat of roadside bombs, rolling power outages, or the presence of armed soldiers in the streets. Even U.S. civilian contractors live removed from the Iraqi civilians, under the protection and control of the American military, yet still defined as separate from soldiers, both by their pay and by their titles. For some, war is a present and daily reality. For others, it is a distant echo, perhaps even a vague annoyance. For yet others, war blurs the lines between civilian and military identities, putting ill-prepared citizens into uniforms and calling them soldiers while simultaneously uniforming This French family is equipped for the dangers of industrial warfare with gas masks. U.S. Signal Corps, National Archives and Records Administration. Introduction [ 3 ] other personnel and naming them noncombatants. These odd juxtapositions and relocations, the disruptions of war, reshape identities fundamentally , but sometimes only temporarily. A civilian drafted into service as a soldier who is captured in his first battle and put in a prisoner-of-war camp looks little different than a civilian man of military age interned because he could be a soldier in his own country. Both have little experience of war or of killing, but their perceptions of self are somewhat different since one has actually worn a military uniform. Given the significance of military service as a symbol of masculinity in the twentieth century, even being a soldier for a day or a week sets a man apart from one who has never shed his civilian status. Using World War I, the first modern, global war, as a lens, this book examines the different ways civilians work and function in a war situation . The years between 1914 and 1918 witnessed the invention of the modern “civilian,” the first mentions of the “home front,” and the advent of a totalizing war strategy that pitted industrial nations and their citizenries against each other. For the generation born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, civilians’ role in warfare became both more and less central. In actual experience, civilians were crucial to maintaining modern industrialized warfare, yet rhetorically, armies defined civilians as separate from battle and in need of protection. World War I heralded a new era of warfare, which consolidated and expanded changes that had been building throughout the previous century, but it also instituted new notions of war. The 1914–1918 conflict witnessed the first aerial bombing of civilian populations, the first widespread concentration camps for the internment of enemy alien civilians, and an...