Chalk, Englishness and the Great War: From Southern England to the Somme
In their seminal works on the Great War’s effect on English culture, Samuel Hynes and Paul Fussell argued that a crisis in communication was created as those who experienced the realities of the front scrabbled to describe the indescribable. Art historians have explored the issue from a slightly different standpoint often highlighting the retreat from abstract modernism to representationalism as a result of witnessing the modern battlefield. Both approaches are marked by reference to the landscape and the challenge of interpreting its seemingly alien nature. This paper will focus on a particular aspect of that landscape: the very soil of much of the British Western Front. As British soldiers quickly noticed, France and the Somme front in particular, were chalk downlands. In turn, this inspired associations with southern England and its geographical and geological peculiarities. Thus, British wartime culture drew upon older pre-existing concepts of chalk and it came to be regarded as the imaginative bridge linking Britain (via a southern English gaze) to France as was exemplified in the writings of Edward Thomas and the artwork of Paul Nash and William Orpen. Then, in the post-war years, the impact of such intensive engagement with chalk on the Western Front became reflexive as writers and artists returned to the chalk country of southern England with renewed vigour and interest.
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This page was last updated on 30 June 2024