The Propoganda of Endurance: Identity, Survival, and British Trench Newspapers in the First World War

This study explores the newspapers produced by British officers and men on the Western Front during the First World War. Although subject to censorship, significant scope was granted to the writers and editors of trench journals to express a seemingly strange combination of piety, humor, anger, and sadness concerning the course of the war. Trench newspapers therefore functioned as a cultural space in which the privations and competing desires of military life could be mediated. Through the juxtaposition of varying tones and views of the war, trench newspapers ultimately served to reinforce the hegemonic culture and values of the British Army by functioning as a propaganda of identity and endurance on the Western Front.

British trench newspapers both implicitly and explicitly compare the identities and experiences of soldiers and civilians, men and women, and officer and other ranks as British soldier-writers perceived them. In this way, British trench newspapers were able to examine the conflicts and privations of military life while ultimately reinforcing a common identity for British soldiers. Although civilians could be depicted as foolish or myopic concerning the course of the war, the trench journals could also express gratitude for gifts sent from Britain. Soldier-writers depict women much more favorably, though often simplistically as symbols of home or as objects of sexual desire. Within censorship, the trench newspapers express considerable skepticism, through humor, of the General Staff and the course of the war, but the necessity of fighting the war is never explicitly questioned. Finally, by addressing both violence and technology, trench newspapers obscure the agency of individual British soldiers in killing the enemy and dream of a swift conclusion to the war. Trench newspapers, therefore, are an invaluable resource for understanding the cultural history of the First World War.