The Imperial Periscope: Germany Through the Lens of Empire in British and French Great War Trench Newspapers

Abstract

A hundred years after the start of the Great War, its images and narratives have become part of the common cultural currency of Europe. The horror of the trenches, the underside of technology, the foolishness of generals, the betrayal of youth, and the inevitable disillusionment that followed are all familiar tropes, found in an abundant body of literature, poetry, and historical works. As Samuel Hynes suggested, the war was a “great imaginative event,” which changed the way people thought and resulted in a new set of simplified narratives.1 At the time of the centenary, scholars of the war are re-examining and complicating the familiar narratives of the conflict, from its beginning to its end.2 One of the major directions in recent war scholarship has been to restore the place of empire to the conflict, by reconciling the realities of imperial contributions and experiences to the overall narrative of the war. Valuable works have brought the experiences of colonial troops into the foreground, emphasized the importance of colonial contributions and explored the fighting outside of Europe. Among those works which stand out are Joe Lunn’s Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First World War (1999); David Omissi’s Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters 1914–1918 (1999); Richard Fogarty’s Race & War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918 (2008); The World in World Wars: Experiences, Perceptions and Perspectives from Africa and Asia, edited by Heike Liebau, Katrin Bromber, Katharina Lange, Dyala Hamzah and Ravi Ahuja (2010); and Race, Empire and First World War Writing, edited by Santanu Das (2011).3 At the same time, scholars of European empires have increasingly turned their attention to imperial culture and the ways