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Accepted Paper:
Going on holiday to imagine war: tourists on the battlefields of the old Western Front
Jennifer Iles (University of London, Roehampton)
Paper short abstract:
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Paper long abstract:
The First World War is now almost beyond the reach of living memory, yet it continues to wield a profound fascination over the modern imagination. The Western Front in Belgium and France in particular, which was the decisive theatre of operations for the Allied troops, has created its own iconic representation and mythology and has retained a firm place in British modern memory.
This paper proposes that tourists are required to use their imaginations and emotions in order to construct an empathic and historical connection to the symbolic, commemorative spaces of the Western Front landscape. Four years of fighting over the same areas of ground left millions of servicemen dead and a devastated landscape. Today, though, the rolling and unremarkable topography of the region has now almost completely obscured the momentous nature of the battles fought across the terrain. Yet in a landscape characterised by emptiness and absence, there is a constant stream of thousands of tourists who are drawn to visit the former battlefields every year. Many of the people who travel to the battlefields are repeat visitors, attracted to its highly evocative dimensions, or in the words of Edmund Blunden, it's "peculiar grace". For some, the region has become a kind of nostalgic "home from home", and their trips enable them to physically enact a sense of historical connection with a place associated with an imagined collective past, untarnished by the values of contemporary society. This paper will also explore the tensions that exist in a foreign landscape which remains redolent with British historical association. From time to time, however, there are flashpoints between visitors who are identifying with a terrain soaked with the exclusive memory of their own social identities and losses, and the present day needs and wishes of the local population. While for the visitors this is a sacred landscape full of memory, for the hosts, this is often a mundane, day-to-day working landscape which they see as being nothing special, hence its contested nature. My discussion draws on continuing ethnographic fieldwork carried out on the battlefield sits of the former Ypres Salient and Somme regions of the Western Front.
Great expectations? Anticipation, imagination and expectation in the tourist
Session 1