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Censorship in Surprising Places: Uncovering the Letters of Wilfred Owen

By Jean Cannon
Research Associate, Harry Ransom Center

Among the first and most acute observers of the First World War and its impact on individuals were the British trench poets. Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and others half-mockingly referred to themselves as “Recording Angels.”

Wilfred Owen

As one of the curators of The World at War, 1914-1918, I conducted extensive research in the Ransom Center archives of British trench poets including Owen, Graves, Edmund Blunden, and Siegfried Sassoon, among others. One of my most jarring discoveries was that official wartime censorship—carried out by the military, the War Office, and the press—coincided with the self-censorship that psychiatrists of the time identified as a major contributor to shell-shock and to the disillusionment expressed by combat veterans. The archival record captures the military’s desire to mask the locations of troops. When writing letters home, for example, soldiers were encouraged to obscure their whereabouts with the now well-known phrase “Somewhere in France.” But the archives also testify to soldiers’ ingenious efforts to subvert such measures. While researching in the Wilfred Owen and Edmund Blunden archives, for example, we found out that Owen had embedded secret codes in his letters in an attempt to communicate his position to his worried family. When Owen used the word “mistletoe,” the second letters of each word in the following lines would spell out his position. We found one letter in Owen’s archive that ominously spells out “S-O-M-M-E.”

Royal_Irish_Rifles_ration_party_Somme_July_1916

The Royal Irish Rifles in a communications trench on the first day on the Somme, July 1, 1916 (Wikimedia Commons)

Perhaps the most heartbreaking evidence of censorship we uncovered dates from the post-war years. Before agreeing to publish the letters of his brother Wilfred in 1967, Harold Owen took India ink to the collection of correspondence that he had received in the years leading up to Wilfred Owen’s death on the Sambre-Oise canal barely a week before the cease-fire. The Owen archive therefore houses more than a dozen heavily redacted letters, which appeared in the Collected Letters with misleading placeholders such as “one page illegible,” masking the fact that Harold, rather than water damage, or mud, or bad penmanship, was responsible for making some sections unreadable. Wilfred Owen, who desired so badly to communicate with his family during wartime that he resorted to cipher, was later silenced by the friendly fired of his brother’s heavy redaction.

Why did Harold Owen censor his brother’s letters? In his autobiography, Journey from Obscurity, Harold indicates that he redacted the letters in order to protect the privacy of family and friends who were mentioned in the letters. But can we trust that this is true, or the only reason Harold Owen had to censor his brother’s letters? In 1917, Wilfred Owen was diagnosed with shell-shock and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, where he met fellow poet and mentor Siegfried Sassoon, and wrote some of his most affecting poems. Very often during the First World War soldiers who “broke down” during or after combat were simply considered to be suffering from cowardice, rather than what we know as post-traumatic stress, and were accused of being “scrimshankers” who malingered in psychiatric hospitals rather than returning to the fight. Was Harold Owen, protecting his brother’s reputation, hiding evidence of Wilfred Owen’s neurasthenia from public view? Like Sassoon, Wilfred Owen also had had homosexual relationships that—though it is doubtful he wrote frankly about them to his brother—might have brought his posthumous reputation under scrutiny.

No scholar has been able to read the letters of Wilfred Owen in full, as they were redacted before being made accessible to the public once they were acquired by the Ransom Center in 1969. But now, while working on The World at War, 1914-1918, we have been collaborating with University of Utah’s computer programming expert Hal Ericson, whose retroReveal software has allowed us to recover sections of the letters previously rendered unreadable. Ericson’s web-based image processing system works to uncover hidden text from obscurity, and it is our hope that one day we will be able to read all of the redacted passages of the letters that Owen composed during wartime. Visitors may see the humble beginnings of our project in a section of the gallery dedicated to explaining the various forms of censorship in place during the Great War. In a letter written to his mother from the front, Owen claimed that he “came out in order to help these boys—directly by leading them as well as an officer can, indirectly by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them.” Through our retroReveal project, we hope to help Owen finally achieve his wish in full.

Drawing from the Harry Ransom Center’s rich archives of diaries, literary manuscripts, letters, artwork, photographs, and propaganda posters, The World at War, 1914-1918 highlights the geopolitical significance of the war and its legacy, while also providing insight into how the conflict affected the individual lives of those who witnessed through the years 1914-1918. The artifacts on display illuminate an event that changed forever human beings’ relationships with violence, grief, history, faith, and one another.

The classic work on the trench poets and their memories of World War I is The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell

For more reading on World War 1, visit our Featured Reads page.

Pages from Wilfred Owen’s letters reproduced with the permission of the Harry Ransom Center.

“It is a Wide Road that Leads to War”

By Joan Neuberger

On January 1, 1900, an editorial in the New York World predicted that the twentieth century would “meet and overcome all perils and prove to be the best that this steadily improving planet has ever seen.” The war that broke out just a few years later in 1914 showed that the twentieth century would become something entirely different.

By 1900, most European countries had constitutions, elected representative governments, and limits on monarchical power. Increasing control over nature with industrial machines and modern capitalism offered many Europeans and Americans an unprecedented degree of material comfort and prosperity. With that came a growing sense of their individual achievement, as well as the technology and prosperity to assert their national power in new ways over other people at home and in colonies abroad. But the Europeans’ use of modern power to dominate, educate, classify, and economically exploit others created new conflicts over culture, identity, sovereignty, security, even over different ideas about the basic components of human nature. These conflicts, beginning with colonial liberation struggles and especially the First World War would call into question the very foundations of European power and Europeans’ faith in progress and in the genuine achievements of the entire previous century.

There was considerable enthusiasm for a war in the summer of 1914. Serious disagreements beset every country in Europe: conflicts over political rights, human rights, economic developments, and colonial and other policies. Many people believed that a short war would somehow “wipe the slate clean,” and allow material progress and prosperity to continue. And everywhere people believed that the deep cultural and economic connections among European nations would prevent war from continuing for more than a few months. Nineteenth-century wars in Europe had been of limited scope and duration due to visionary international agreements made in Vienna in 1814-15 after the defeat of Napoleon. Europeans thought they had become too “civilized” to fight a drawn-out, destructive conflict.

The_Outbreak_of_the_First_World_War,_1914_Q81832 — Crowds outside Buckingham Palace cheer King George, Queen Mary and the Prince of Wales (who can just be seen on the balcony) following the Declaration of War in August 1914. (Wikimedia Commons)

The declaration of the war brought crowds of people to the streets of every capital city in Europe to celebrate. Friedrich Meinecke, later a major German historian, described the outbreak of the war as “one of the great moments of my life, which suddenly filled my soul with the deepest confidence in our people and the profoundest joy.” In many countries, even workers, who had been locked in battle with their governments, hastened to join the middle-and upper-classes in the support of the war.

There were, however, other voices. Peasants, who would make up the bulk of the war’s cannon fodder, were indifferent to the political conflicts that divided European nations and resented the draft. And a few prescient diplomats recognized the folly their leaders were embarking upon. Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador to Russia, wrote in his diary: “So the die is cast . . . The part played by reason in the government of peoples is so small that it has taken merely a week to let loose universal madness.”

westwardho — “Westward Ho,” a satirical poster by Eric Gill

It would take only a few weeks for the truth of the Russian peasant saying to be apparent to all: “It is a wide road that leads to war and only a narrow path that leads home again.”

The documents, posters, letters, and photographs currently on display at the Harry Ransom Center illustrate the way ordinary people on the home front and the battlefront experienced the narrowing of that road.

More events, sponsored by the Harry Ransom Center

Please join us for a symposium on World War 1 sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies at UT Austin:
Remembering World War 1 on its Centennial,” April 16, 2014. 3:30-5:30. GAR 4.100. Free & open to the public.

World War I: Teaching at the Museum

From the Editor: At universities, not all teaching takes place in the classroom. The University of Texas at Austin has a number of archives, libraries, and museums with public exhibition spaces for teaching students and the general public about topics covered by their collections. This month Not Even Past features a discussion with the curators of The World at War, 1914-1918, the show currently on display at UT’s renowned Harry Ransom Center. Elizabeth Garver and Jean Cannon spent months culling through the HRC’s rich collections of posters, letters, photograph albums and other materials to find just the right balance of objects to convey the experience of the war that was supposed to “end all wars” as it was lived in numerous countries in Europe.

This April we will be rolling out the story of the teaching exhibit differently than in the past. Today we present some of the propaganda materials from the exhibit as well as some that are available through the HRC’s online digital collections. Next week we will post comments from the curators about constructing the exhibit and then we will post a video interview, in which they discuss the selection of materials to teach viewers about World War I as well as some of their favorite, most moving documents.

Propaganda Posters

Propaganda was invented during World War I. Although the declaration of war was greeted enthusiastically all over Europe, support quickly waned. Governments of Britain, France, the US, Germany, Italy and Russia all printed posters to lift morale and encourage support for the war effort. These posters come from the HRC’s digitalized collection (more of the collection can be found here).

Many posters demonized the enemy, often by showing the enemy threatening women and children.

Others simply encouraged men to enlist…

…sometimes recruiting women and children to encourage them.

This French poster celebrates the soldiers recruited from their colonies in Africa.

Women, meanwhile, were and taking up active roles, entering the workforce to replace men sent into battle, for example.

Even in the era of technologically enhanced, mechanized killing machines, horses played a large role in the war effort of all the combatants. And they needed to be supported too.

Dogs too were trained for specific roles. The HRC blog tells us that they could enter No Man’s Land and identify wounded men.

World War I went on much longer than expected and it was expensive. Governments sold bonds to raise money to continue to fight and the circulated posters calling for public financial support.

Individual groups used posters to raise money for specific support projects like ambulances and other kinds of medical care.

Food was in short supply everywhere. These French posters encourage people to save bread by eating potatoes and eat fish to save meat.

Another post on the HRC blog shows the ways Russian posters made food seem unpalatable. This one shows how the Devil gardens–transforming vegetables in German enemies.

And this one, which represents each of the combatants as food types, makes them all look pretty yucky.

State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State by Ulrike Strasser (2004)

by Julia M. Gossard

Munich’s central square, Marienplatz, is best known today for its magnificent Rathaus-Glockenspiel that delights tourists and townspeople alike with its melodies. But until the nineteenth century, the square’s main attraction was a golden pillar adorned with the Virgin Mary known as the Mariensäule. Still standing today, the Mariensäule is a reminder of the religious reformations Bavaria endured as well as the Bavarian state’s early attempts at centralization and modernization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Erected in 1638 by order of Elector Maximilian I of Bavaria to thank the Virgin for protecting the city from an attack by Protestant Swedes during the Thirty Years War, the Mariensäule not only represented Maximilian’s fervor for Catholicism, but, as Ulrike Strasser writes, also represents his use of “virginity as a master metaphor to elaborate ideas about good governance and a functioning society.” Usually used to imply innocence, purity, and occasionally frailty, images of virgins and virginity were among Maximilian’s strongest metaphorical tools. State of Virginity explores how Maxilimilian employed female virginity to increase patriarchal power and limit female agency and facilitate Bavaria’s centralization.

Drawing on a wide variety of archival documents including Bavarian laws, civil court records, ecclesiastical court documents, and select convents’ records, Strasser investigates the ways in which marriage, family organization, and female religious life changed as a result of the new emphasis placed on virginity as the female moral and political ideal. Strasser explains that judicial records are useful to her study because they show how individuals explained their own behavior, emotions, and identities under the eye of powerful institutions. These records permit her to observe the state or the church at work, and to see how people reacted to mandates from above.

Starting with an examination of Bavarian marriage, Strasser notes that people explained their attitudes toward marriage and sexuality in the context of competing religious and secular judicial discourses. The Catholic Church wished to have all couples marry, regardless of social status, in order to affirm their respect for the sacrament in marriage and avoid licentious behavior. The state, on the other hand, took a rather paradoxical approach to marriage with its establishment of Munich’s marriage bureau. Of the utmost importance to the marriage bureau was a bride’s virginal status. If a woman was not a virgin, the union was unlikely to be approved by the marriage bureau. The state saw this virginal prerequisite to marriage as a way to prevent poor people from procreating outside of marriage, and reduce sexually licentious unions. However, in addition to virginal status, the marriage bureau also scrutinized the financial stability of couples. On top remaining chaste, the prospective spouses also had to prove they were capable of providing for a family. For the poor couples, this was often difficult to achieve. Therefore, the creation of the bureau resulted in marriage becoming a type of social status reserved for the upper echelons of society.

By making the prerequisites of marriage so strict, Bavarian authorities required women to “uphold the boundaries of a new social and sexual order” that made virginity a moral obligation, among both upper and lower classes. When wealthy women remained chaste, their families’ economic interests and possible alliances with other wealthy families remained intact, benefitting both the families and the state, which relied on these families for money and support. When women from the lower sorts remained chaste, the state believed the number of illegitimate children and single mothers would greatly decrease. This would also further strengthen the patriarchal household that the Catholic state viewed as being essential to an orderly and stable society. Although virginity became the female moral and political ideal, as Strasser argues, that was often difficult for women of the lower sorts to achieve. With marriage being denied to poor couples, these couples entered into nonmarital sexual relationships that were not sanctioned by the state. Strasser hints that the “perpetual state of virginity” that the state advocated for women who were denied marriage by the bureau, was simply an unrealistic goal. One of the only institutions that guaranteed a perpetual state of virginity for women was a convent. However, just like marriage, in the seventeenth-century, Bavarian cloisters turned away poorer women and increasingly became depositories for elite, unmarried women. Though groups of unmarried, uncloistered virgins, like the English Ladies, were established, they too consisted of “honorable women,” meaning those from the upper-middling classes or the elite. Although poor women may have remained chaste, the Bavarian state began to view unmarried and uncloistered poor women, regardless of their individual virginal status, as a “social and sexual threat” to the Bavarian state.

With marriage, family, and the convent all becoming elite institutions, what happened to the unmarried, poor, virginal woman? Are we to believe that she merely succumbed to “the sins” of the lower sorts and entered into profligate relationships? Strasser suggests, without much evidence, that the new marriage regulations and convent restrictions may have strengthened the state’s control over noble society but actually led to more relationships outside of marriage among the lower classes. Despite this lack of evidence, State of Virginity is an innovative piece of scholarship. Other studies have focused solely on the impact that this new “virginity” had on women’s experiences, but while Strasser does include the effects on women, her most poignant arguments explain how the state’s regulation of virginity brought about changes in societal structure, specifically the centralization of the Bavarian state. State of Virginity successfully repositions the role of the female sexualized body as a factor in the strengthening of Bavarian patriarchy and the process of state building under Maximilian I.

Photo Credits:

Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria, with his wife Elisabeth Renée of Lorraine, 1610 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Hand colored illustrated of Maximilian I at the age of 11 (Image courtesy of Penn Provenance Project)

Munich’s Rathaus-Glockenspiel (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The Hour of Our Death by Philippe Ariés (1982)

by Zach Doleshal

History is full of dying, but before this book was published historians rarely concerned themselves with how a society thinks about death. We have lists upon lists of casualty counts in all manners of battles throughout the ages but we have little understanding of the ways the idea of death has changed over time. Philippe Ariès’ monumental work, The Hour of Our Death, was something of an exception, as it offers rare insight into European representations of death from the eleventh century to the twentieth. Beautifully written and admirably translated, the work takes the reader through a dizzying array of cemeteries, epic poems, and deathbeds to provide a view of the ever-evolving place of death in European society. After reading it, one will never look at death the same way again.

The book rests on the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious, which means that Aries is attempting to find similar artifacts across a range of sources and regions that show the “unconscious expression of the sensibility of the Age.” In order to do so, he follows three themes through one thousand years: individual versus collective memorials, ideas of transitions between life and death (or “tame” death versus “wild” death), and the physical proximity between the dead and the living. The result is an eloquent description that conveys the mutability of western attitudes toward death.

And yet, Ariès anchors his continually evolving coffins with commonalities. For example, “the idea of sleep is the most ancient, the most popular, and the most constant image of the beyond.” Death as sleep, as a neutral state of repose, uninterrupted calm and peace, is a belief that survived despite the best efforts of the Catholic Church, which sought to persuade society of the soul’s mobility after death. But Ariès finds recumbent figures in literature and statuary from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries to document the persistence of the idea of death as sleep. Likewise, Ariès finds the monuments themselves, from the Mediterranean to England and from Spain to Germany as having a “genetic unity of forms,” which suggest an ongoing tension between the Christian liturgy and an older, pan-European idea of death as the big slumber.

The second half of the book concentrates on a different tension when Ariès presents a dramatic break in attitudes toward death with the advent of the twentieth century hospital death. For Ariès, the modern hospital death is an “absolutely new type of dying” because, quite simply, people lost control over their own deaths. For thousands of years death was a moment that could be foreseen by the soon-to-be deceased, and considered best spent in the company of friends and family, who were to provide a serene point of departure while the dying person gave orders and advice. In the modern era, Ariès argues, it became a moment of machines and professionals who kept the dying in ignorance of their condition, in sterile rooms far from the public’s attention. This loss of mastery to Ariès meant that death became a moment of diminished consequence. In the past, each death was a critical event in an ongoing, communal, struggle against evil spirits where each person’s salvation was a social project. Now, in a society striving to avoid it, death has become a hollow, empty affair. Ultimately, Ariès’ book makes a case against the modern hospital death. For him, writing in 1977, dying had been increasingly marginalized in proportion to society’s loss of faith.

A pioneering work on the study of death when it was first published; Ariès’ book remains an important read today because it was at the forefront of the natural death movement. His condemnation of contemporary practices pushed social activists to develop more humane practices and historians to think about death as an important subject, with its own questions of rights and social justice. Anyone curious about the evolving conceptions of dying would do well to start at The Hour of Our Death.

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