Books by Linda Maynard
Brothers in the Great War. Siblings, masculinity and emotion, 2021
Siblings are our longest lasting relationships. Narratives of the Great War abound with the war s... more Siblings are our longest lasting relationships. Narratives of the Great War abound with the war stories of brothers and sisters. Their emotional experiences span the novelty of departing for war or taking up war work, the turmoil of facing combat, the effort to provide ongoing support for family members, the ever-present anxiety for soldier-brothers, the depth of sibling grief and the multifarious ways surviving siblings sought to preserve the memory of their fallen brothers. This social and cultural history places siblinghood at the heart of our understanding of the war generation and how they balanced conflicting obligations to the nation, the military and their families. Drawing on a range of material, Brothers in the Great War, reveals how sibling bonds sustained fighting men and presents a novel insight into twentieth-century familial life.
Brothers in the Great War, 2021
Brothers in the Great War, 2021
This chapter explores the concept and experience of ‘brotherly love’ in its historical context. A... more This chapter explores the concept and experience of ‘brotherly love’ in its historical context. A focus on military comradeship and middle-class brother-sister bonds has overshadowed fraternal relations. Many men expressed deep feelings of closeness and affection for their brothers. Quieter masculine values of kindness, unity and sympathy, instilled by parents and reinforced by moral instruction, infused brotherly practices. Within the confines of modern warfare, brothers and sisters strove to maintain their sibling ties, maintaining practical and emotional support through correspondence or, when possible, in person. Addressing the archival bias against young men of serving age, sibling letters reveal distinct patterns of brothering or sistering at a distance. Displaying the relational nature of correspondence, they reflect shared interests and concerns. Narratives of brotherly meetings show the solace of sibling bonds during wartime. Some men went to extraordinary lengths to track down and visit their siblings. Face-to-face meetings fulfilled many functions: the comfort of the touch of a fraternal handshake or embrace, the opportunity to relax and talk to a trusted confidante, and relaying reassurances to anxious family members back home.
Brothers in the Great War, 2021
This chapter focuses on the transitional moment of departing for war. Viewing the dynamics of vol... more This chapter focuses on the transitional moment of departing for war. Viewing the dynamics of volunteering and enlistment from a sibling’s perspective uncovers the emotional limits that men placed on their patriotic duties. The fear and anxiety observed and expressed by siblings of all ages realign our understanding of heroic masculinity. Personal narratives affirm the relational nature of anxious feelings, recording concerns for the wellbeing of combatant brothers and other family members. Expressions of fatalism, excitement and familial pride accompanied departures. For men and women of all classes, adventure and militaristic glamour masked the brutal carnage of trench warfare of the First World War, offering an opportunity to escape the dreariness of domestic and work routines. Sisters, wearied by repeatedly seeing their brothers, cousins and friends depart, some never to return, developed superstitions around these partings. Retrospective reflections of this war fever provoked feelings of guilt and shame. Battle-hardened men saw no shame in warning their brothers to keep out of the conflict or to avoid the most dangerous arenas of battle. Many brothers derived comfort from serving alongside each other, an aspect of the make-up of the Pals battalions that is largely overlooked in the historiography.
Brothers in the Great War, 2021
Financial concerns and familial duty anchored men’s thoughts to familial survival. Evidence of th... more Financial concerns and familial duty anchored men’s thoughts to familial survival. Evidence of their attitudes emerges from the hearings of the military service tribunals established to determine exemptions under the Military Services Act. Comparing men’s private letters with the public record shows the underlying anxieties over the conscription of brothers. Four factors affected deliberations concerning brothers: government policy regarding single men; the relative ignorance of the vital support single, young men made to the household economy; tribunal treatment of brothers as economic units, and the role of the military representative. Exchanges between tribunal members and claimants expose tensions between fraternal, familial and national interests. Local newspaper reports show how tribunals became an arena where men’s behaviour was criticised and praised according to specific circumstances. Although the war work of siblings hardly ever influenced the appeal process, multiple losses sustained by individual families swayed local opinion. Fraternal decisions were made with an eye to current needs and future prospects, enabling men to pick up their family business and personal affairs when the war ended. Men often adopted a pragmatic view of conscription, balancing their manly duty to their nation with their responsibilities to their loved ones.
Brothers in the Great War, 2021
Amid the horrors of trench warfare, many men derived strength and comfort from serving alongside,... more Amid the horrors of trench warfare, many men derived strength and comfort from serving alongside, or in close proximity to, their brothers. Blood ties prevailed over the traditional comradeship of the fighting unit. This often improved the efficacy of soldier-brothers, increasing their bravery under fire and acting as a stabilising influence at moments of high tension. Proximity came at a price as men witnessed the woundings and deaths of siblings. The trauma of fraternal casualties shattered men’s emotional armour, sometimes bringing them to breaking point. While empathising with their predicament, men’s comrades were discomforted by brotherly grief. Letters conveyed graphic details to siblings of mechanised warfare and the strain this inflicted on their soldier-brothers. In this important way siblings supplemented the support provided by mothers, while also sharing the filial duty of shielding mothers. When men’s nerves shattered, brothers intervened to remove them to safety or to ensure that they received all due care and attention. With medical treatment varying considerably according to men’s class and financial means, sufferers welcomed any influence brought to bear by brothers. Fraternal interventions were an effective shield against complete psychic breakdown.
Brothers in the Great War, 2021
This chapter, with its specific focus on loss, forms the heart of this study. Focusing on the nex... more This chapter, with its specific focus on loss, forms the heart of this study. Focusing on the nexus of emotional codes shows men’s intricate negotiation of conflicting duties to family and nation. Brotherly loss unleashed a gamut of powerful emotions, including anger, hate and guilt. Fighting and weeping were not mutually exclusive. Men and women often registered the profundity of their loss in isolation, seeking out private spaces in their desire to hide strong and unsettling emotions. Shouldering responsibilities to families and comrades was a way of demonstrating manly love and dedication. Adherence to these codes led to grieving soldiers being treated sympathetically by their comrades and officers. Shielded by the respect and sympathy accorded to the loss of close kin, blood ties provided men with a much-needed safety valve – a permit to grieve openly. Exploring the language adopted by bereaved brothers and sisters demonstrates the difficulties they faced when trying to express their feelings while upholding normative emotional codes. Instances where siblings returned to this subject in later life allow us to trace subtle shifts over time. Surviving siblings’ determination to mark the deaths of their childhood companions emotionally and factually overcame their reluctance to expose their grief.
Brothers in the Great War, 2021
The final chapter looks at the myriad ways in which siblings used material and written forms to m... more The final chapter looks at the myriad ways in which siblings used material and written forms to memorialise brothers, setting this within a wider deliberation on the impact of death and grief in interwar Britain. Motivated by the need to ensure that the heroic sacrifice of their siblings was not overlooked or forgotten, they memorialised their brothers as individuals, restoring their individual achievements and qualities from the mass of war casualties. By sharing their stories, they link the personal and communal memories of the war. Painful emotions crept in as siblings reflected on the loss sustained by themselves, their families and their wider communities. As such, they can be regarded as an adjunct to the ‘disillusionment’ stream of memoirs. Guilt, anger, and grief infuse these accounts, becoming evident in a lack of composure. In the post-war decades, some siblings drew on the emerging war literature of the period, particularly its poetry and music, to express their loss. With the passing of years, this added poignancy to collective occasions, providing an emotional ‘punctum’ that pierced stoical masks. Rather than finding such open expressions of emotions discomforting, men and women derived comfort and companionship from a generational shared understanding of grief and trauma.
Articles by Linda Maynard
History Today, 2021
During the First World War, the British government consistently rejected calls to legalise marria... more During the First World War, the British government consistently rejected calls to legalise marriages between a man and the widow of his deceased brother, despite having passed the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act in 1907. Wartime relationships developed when surviving brothers stepped in to provide financial, practical and emotional support to the widows and children of brothers killed in action. Men and women voiced their dismay when their desire to legitimise these bonds was thwarted. A conservative estimate by The Woman’s Leader put the number affected at approximately 2 per cent of the 240,000 women widowed in the United Kingdom. Viscountess Astor, a key proponent of the measure, received between 200 and 300 letters on this emotive subject. Parliamentary debates and letters to the press media and the Department of Pensions, often focused on gendered stereotypes of breadwinning and respectability. Underpinning these, we find expressions of fraternal duty and grief. The Deceased Brother’s Widow’s Marriage Act was eventually passed in 1921. Often overlooked in discussions of the post-war treatment of widows, this statute was much sought after by the affected parties.
Challenging the convention that male grief was always carefully managed and contained, personal n... more Challenging the convention that male grief was always carefully managed and contained, personal narratives can reveal the range of emotional responses to the wartime deaths of brothers including weeping, anger, and guilt. Studying these reactions enables us to explore how predominantly young men traversed the difficult territory between expressions of public and private grief in the Second World War and its aftermath. Awareness of societal demands favouring the ‘stiff upper lip’—the ultimate masculine display of self-restraint—was insufficient to staunch passions. Men showed an acute awareness of the need to demonstrate emotional mastery by restricting their displays of emotion to private spaces and through their readiness to prioritize military and familial obligations over their own personal grief. Despite these conventions, for some men, their determination to mark the feelings they felt for their dead siblings and their memories of childhood companions overcame any reluctance to expose their grief.
Book chapters by Linda Maynard
Pettitt, Joanne (ed), Covid-19, the Second World War and the Idea of Britishness (Peter Lang, 2021), 2021
During the first phase of the COVID-19 crisis, Captain Tom Moore’s fundraising effort for the Nat... more During the first phase of the COVID-19 crisis, Captain Tom Moore’s fundraising effort for the National Health Service forged a grip on the public imagination, meeting a need for a unifying ‘good news’ story. This chapter examines how representations of ‘Captain Tom’ relied on a multi-layered understanding of his status as both a veteran and an exemplar of the war generation.
Paradoxically, the public appropriation of one veteran, grounded in the collective memory and myths of the Second World War, drew attention away from the harsh impact of the pandemic on the much-lauded ‘Blitz’ generation, mirroring a pattern of age discrimination found in the total wars of the twentieth century. The disconnect between the positive discourse surrounding this generation of ‘Captain Toms’ and the effectiveness of the ‘protective ring’ intended to safeguard this vulnerable cohort sheds light on societal attitudes towards older people in the twenty-first century.
Conference papers by Linda Maynard
Institute for Historical Research, 2020
Siblings are an ‘absent presence’ in the historiography of the First World War. If, as Michael Ro... more Siblings are an ‘absent presence’ in the historiography of the First World War. If, as Michael Roper argues, men’s domestic and military lives were ‘structurally connected and interdependent’, we lose a vital part of this network through the omission of sibling relations. In the absence of an explicit language of love, vital signifiers of affection are shown in the breadth and depth of the support, comfort and protection provided to both combatant and non-combatant siblings. This paper explores how affectionate working-class siblinghood was experienced and expressed in oral interviews and memoirs. Growing up, men and women relied upon the values instilled by parents and moral instructors when defining their sibling ties. Patterns established in childhood and adolescence extended into wartime behaviours providing a lateral perspective on our understanding of the web of familial ties sustaining fighting men.
Legacies: International Conference for First World War Studies, 2019
Emotional economies of wartime loss have been the subject of much analysis. The seismic casualti... more Emotional economies of wartime loss have been the subject of much analysis. The seismic casualties of the Great War proved a watershed moment in English cultural norms of mourning and bereavement. Male grief, in particular, is under-estimated, sublimated by the anguish felt by bereaved parents, or masked under the cultural weight of stoicism. By demonstrating the prevalence of fraternal loss in memoirs and autobiographical novels written by surviving brothers and sisters, this paper adds a sibling-eyed perspective to our understanding of gendered grieving practices and the emergence of a regime of emotional repression during the twentieth century.
Revealing and recording love, Kate McLoughlin observes, is one of the vital functions of war writing. Preserving the memory of brothers and their sacrifice is a recurring motif in many ‘verbal memoirs’, a final act of sibling devotion. My approach specifies the agency of remembrance. In their published works siblings perform a complex act of remembering and commemoration, sharing the poignancy of loss common to so many families. Siblings were able to circumvent the dominant ideology of state remembrance and the depersonalisation of the war dead by restoring the individual personalities and particular war stories of their brothers.
Within these narratives we also see a subversion of codes of silence as siblings wrote publicly about the depth of their loss. By acting as, what Jay Winter terms, ‘silence-breakers’, some sibling acts of memory-keeping deliberately sought to place intimate loss in the public sphere to inform later generations of the personal ravages of war.
The First World War: Past, Present, and Future, 26 – 28 June 2019, Edinburgh Napier University, 2019
In this simple statement Pat Campbell summarised both his memory of the Great War and the role hi... more In this simple statement Pat Campbell summarised both his memory of the Great War and the role his older brother played in the conflict. Brothers’ efforts to give a voice to their dead siblings, to ensure they are not forgotten, form a significant body of fraternal memory keeping. Male grief is under-estimated, sublimated by the anguish felt by bereaved parents, or masked under the cultural weight of stoicism. Focusing on the nexus of cultural and familial emotional codes, this paper considers the complex acts of mediation undertaken by men striving to honour their brother’s sacrifice.
Men often registered the profundity of their loss in isolation. Yet brothers also wrote publically about their grief in the preceding months, years and decades. Within these narratives we see a subversion of codes of silence. By acting as, what Jay Winter terms ‘silence-breakers’, brothers broadcast distressing memories outside family boundaries to inform later generations of the personal ravages of war.
Public memories of the Great War often drown out more intimate memories. Individual names became subsumed in the mass of losses. This anonymisation of the dead explains brothers’ compulsion to mark the particular war stories and sacrifice of brothers, salvaging individual stories from the incomprehension of mass slaughter. The cultural focus on the war dead has sidelined the experiences of men returning home from the front. Fraternal memoirs provide a medium where the stories of both converge to present a fuller picture of men’s wartime service and its aftermath.
Social History Conference, University of Lincoln, 2019
Deep affection for brothers is a commonplace in personal narratives of the Great War. The relativ... more Deep affection for brothers is a commonplace in personal narratives of the Great War. The relative youth of fighting men intensified the emotional salience of sibling relationships. Despite this, brothers are ‘an absent present’ in the historiography of war, displaced by the language of military brotherhood.
This paper explores fraternal bonds in wartime through narratives of touch. This sense, as Santanu Das highlights, possesses an intimate and elusive quality. Percy Cearn’s evocation of the comfort derived by his older brother’s shielding presence as the siblings slept together during one of their frontline meetings, shows how the depth of fraternal bonds can be rendered via descriptions of bodily contact. Discussions of non-genital tactile tenderness have focused on camaraderie or eroticism, overlooking pre-existing patterns of familial bodily contact. Examining instances of brotherly tactility at distinct points in the chronology of men’s wartime experiences presents a more complex picture.
Experiential narratives provide accounts of fraternal embraces, handshakes and other bodily contact at different stages of the war: departures and homecomings, visits on leave and at the front, before and after combat, and when brothers were wounded or killed. At these times of heightened emotions, men used touch to convey or deflect feelings of anxiety, relief, nostalgia, and grief. In the absence of an explicit language of love, accounts of fraternal bodily contact provided combatants with a means of expressing both their affection for their brothers and their profound emotional responses to their wartime experiences.
The Senses and Spaces of Death, Dying and Remembering, University of Leeds, 2018
Brothers appear as an ‘absent present’ in the historiography of war yet references to brothers ar... more Brothers appear as an ‘absent present’ in the historiography of war yet references to brothers are embedded in the remembrance and commemoration of the global conflicts of the twentieth century. Safekeeping the memory of brothers and their wartime sacrifice is a recurring motif in many fraternal narratives, a final act of devotion. These acts of emotional labour are aimed at restoring the individual personalities who comprised the anonymised mass casualties of modern industrialized warfare. This paper draws on the work of Daniel Miller and Nicholas Saunders to explore how photographs and war artefacts provided men with a continuing bond to their dead brothers. Such intimate preservations of sibling memories contribute to our understanding of how conflict is remembered. Although some acts of fraternal memory-keeping remained hidden from view, others were planted in the public sphere. Material reminders of fraternal wartime service were displayed in the public areas of households and integrated into household routines. Some men actively sought out mementos relating to the wartime service of their brothers; creating what Anat Hecht terms ‘private museums of memory’ bestowing new meanings on them and enfolding them into the wider family story. In this way, men were able to circumvent the dominant ideology of state remembrance by restoring the individual and particular war stories of their brothers.
Motherhood, Loss and the First World War, Big Ideas, 2018
Although emotional economies of wartime grief have been the subject of much analysis, male grief ... more Although emotional economies of wartime grief have been the subject of much analysis, male grief is often under-estimated, sublimated by the anguish felt by grieving parents, or masked under the cultural weight of stoicism. This paper considers how fraternal grief was shaped and moulded by familial expectations. In the midst of their own grief, bereaved men were expected to provide emotional support to mothers. As male role models, they steered younger siblings through the codes of expected mourning behaviour.
Privileging wartime comradeship has led to the importance of sibling bonds being overshadowed in comparison. Distancing strategies to protect men against the cumulative effect of casualties proved ineffective when applied to fraternal deaths. Societal and familial failure to recognise the loss suffered by a bereaved brother could result in what Kenneth Doka terms a ‘disenfranchisement’ of their grief. The prevalence of accounts of fraternal loss in men’s wartime narratives provides insight into how combatants balanced their personal loss with the duty to provide solace and support to other family members.
Concepts such as Reddy’s ‘emotional regimes’ and Rosenwein’s ‘communities of emotion’ provide a useful framework when considering public and private discourses influencing emotional behaviours. Playing close attention to the intersections of differing codes of emotions, shows how men navigated their way through expectations of normative manliness.
Piecing together the support mechanisms within individual families shows how the strength of familial ties reinforced or strained these emotional obligations. Shouldering the emotional ‘labour of loss’ within families was a way of showing manly devotion to mothers. Negating grief became an act of filial love, and as such, provided some small comfort to these grieving men. Sharing loss in this way could bond families together with what one man termed a ‘mutual clinging closer’.
Although the additional burden this placed on serving men remains largely hidden from view, many accounts testify to the loneliness of the grieving process for surviving brothers. Michael Roper has demonstrated the phenomenal efforts made by mothers to support their young sons on the front line. Fraternal grief narratives provide a counterweight to this crucial maternal support by illustrating the emotional strain that privileging maternal grief placed on fighting men.
Anxious Forms, University of Glasgow, 2016
Making a Memorial, Leeds, 2016
Spaces and Places of Childhood and Youth, University of Reading, 2015
The poet Ted Hughes described how he sustained his relationship with his brother through the ‘dre... more The poet Ted Hughes described how he sustained his relationship with his brother through the ‘dream’ of their shared childhood landscape. This paper explores how men, separated from their brothers during wartime, turned to nostalgic memories of shared childhood spaces as a means of expressing their emotions. Men are often recalled vivid, sensory landscapes of play and leisure, outside of the family home. These private landscapes present a different perspective on domestic life and routines, and expand our understanding of the meaning of ‘home’ for these brothers. Their narratives support Roberta Rubenstein’s observation that nostalgia can represent not only the yearning for an emotionally significant place but also the longing for an emotionally important person strongly associated with that place. Haunted by sensory memories, these childhood landscapes became ‘palpable emotional spaces’ where men not only recorded and marked their brotherly separations and losses but also reflected on the dislocations of war.
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Books by Linda Maynard
Articles by Linda Maynard
Book chapters by Linda Maynard
Paradoxically, the public appropriation of one veteran, grounded in the collective memory and myths of the Second World War, drew attention away from the harsh impact of the pandemic on the much-lauded ‘Blitz’ generation, mirroring a pattern of age discrimination found in the total wars of the twentieth century. The disconnect between the positive discourse surrounding this generation of ‘Captain Toms’ and the effectiveness of the ‘protective ring’ intended to safeguard this vulnerable cohort sheds light on societal attitudes towards older people in the twenty-first century.
Conference papers by Linda Maynard
Revealing and recording love, Kate McLoughlin observes, is one of the vital functions of war writing. Preserving the memory of brothers and their sacrifice is a recurring motif in many ‘verbal memoirs’, a final act of sibling devotion. My approach specifies the agency of remembrance. In their published works siblings perform a complex act of remembering and commemoration, sharing the poignancy of loss common to so many families. Siblings were able to circumvent the dominant ideology of state remembrance and the depersonalisation of the war dead by restoring the individual personalities and particular war stories of their brothers.
Within these narratives we also see a subversion of codes of silence as siblings wrote publicly about the depth of their loss. By acting as, what Jay Winter terms, ‘silence-breakers’, some sibling acts of memory-keeping deliberately sought to place intimate loss in the public sphere to inform later generations of the personal ravages of war.
Men often registered the profundity of their loss in isolation. Yet brothers also wrote publically about their grief in the preceding months, years and decades. Within these narratives we see a subversion of codes of silence. By acting as, what Jay Winter terms ‘silence-breakers’, brothers broadcast distressing memories outside family boundaries to inform later generations of the personal ravages of war.
Public memories of the Great War often drown out more intimate memories. Individual names became subsumed in the mass of losses. This anonymisation of the dead explains brothers’ compulsion to mark the particular war stories and sacrifice of brothers, salvaging individual stories from the incomprehension of mass slaughter. The cultural focus on the war dead has sidelined the experiences of men returning home from the front. Fraternal memoirs provide a medium where the stories of both converge to present a fuller picture of men’s wartime service and its aftermath.
This paper explores fraternal bonds in wartime through narratives of touch. This sense, as Santanu Das highlights, possesses an intimate and elusive quality. Percy Cearn’s evocation of the comfort derived by his older brother’s shielding presence as the siblings slept together during one of their frontline meetings, shows how the depth of fraternal bonds can be rendered via descriptions of bodily contact. Discussions of non-genital tactile tenderness have focused on camaraderie or eroticism, overlooking pre-existing patterns of familial bodily contact. Examining instances of brotherly tactility at distinct points in the chronology of men’s wartime experiences presents a more complex picture.
Experiential narratives provide accounts of fraternal embraces, handshakes and other bodily contact at different stages of the war: departures and homecomings, visits on leave and at the front, before and after combat, and when brothers were wounded or killed. At these times of heightened emotions, men used touch to convey or deflect feelings of anxiety, relief, nostalgia, and grief. In the absence of an explicit language of love, accounts of fraternal bodily contact provided combatants with a means of expressing both their affection for their brothers and their profound emotional responses to their wartime experiences.
Privileging wartime comradeship has led to the importance of sibling bonds being overshadowed in comparison. Distancing strategies to protect men against the cumulative effect of casualties proved ineffective when applied to fraternal deaths. Societal and familial failure to recognise the loss suffered by a bereaved brother could result in what Kenneth Doka terms a ‘disenfranchisement’ of their grief. The prevalence of accounts of fraternal loss in men’s wartime narratives provides insight into how combatants balanced their personal loss with the duty to provide solace and support to other family members.
Concepts such as Reddy’s ‘emotional regimes’ and Rosenwein’s ‘communities of emotion’ provide a useful framework when considering public and private discourses influencing emotional behaviours. Playing close attention to the intersections of differing codes of emotions, shows how men navigated their way through expectations of normative manliness.
Piecing together the support mechanisms within individual families shows how the strength of familial ties reinforced or strained these emotional obligations. Shouldering the emotional ‘labour of loss’ within families was a way of showing manly devotion to mothers. Negating grief became an act of filial love, and as such, provided some small comfort to these grieving men. Sharing loss in this way could bond families together with what one man termed a ‘mutual clinging closer’.
Although the additional burden this placed on serving men remains largely hidden from view, many accounts testify to the loneliness of the grieving process for surviving brothers. Michael Roper has demonstrated the phenomenal efforts made by mothers to support their young sons on the front line. Fraternal grief narratives provide a counterweight to this crucial maternal support by illustrating the emotional strain that privileging maternal grief placed on fighting men.
Paradoxically, the public appropriation of one veteran, grounded in the collective memory and myths of the Second World War, drew attention away from the harsh impact of the pandemic on the much-lauded ‘Blitz’ generation, mirroring a pattern of age discrimination found in the total wars of the twentieth century. The disconnect between the positive discourse surrounding this generation of ‘Captain Toms’ and the effectiveness of the ‘protective ring’ intended to safeguard this vulnerable cohort sheds light on societal attitudes towards older people in the twenty-first century.
Revealing and recording love, Kate McLoughlin observes, is one of the vital functions of war writing. Preserving the memory of brothers and their sacrifice is a recurring motif in many ‘verbal memoirs’, a final act of sibling devotion. My approach specifies the agency of remembrance. In their published works siblings perform a complex act of remembering and commemoration, sharing the poignancy of loss common to so many families. Siblings were able to circumvent the dominant ideology of state remembrance and the depersonalisation of the war dead by restoring the individual personalities and particular war stories of their brothers.
Within these narratives we also see a subversion of codes of silence as siblings wrote publicly about the depth of their loss. By acting as, what Jay Winter terms, ‘silence-breakers’, some sibling acts of memory-keeping deliberately sought to place intimate loss in the public sphere to inform later generations of the personal ravages of war.
Men often registered the profundity of their loss in isolation. Yet brothers also wrote publically about their grief in the preceding months, years and decades. Within these narratives we see a subversion of codes of silence. By acting as, what Jay Winter terms ‘silence-breakers’, brothers broadcast distressing memories outside family boundaries to inform later generations of the personal ravages of war.
Public memories of the Great War often drown out more intimate memories. Individual names became subsumed in the mass of losses. This anonymisation of the dead explains brothers’ compulsion to mark the particular war stories and sacrifice of brothers, salvaging individual stories from the incomprehension of mass slaughter. The cultural focus on the war dead has sidelined the experiences of men returning home from the front. Fraternal memoirs provide a medium where the stories of both converge to present a fuller picture of men’s wartime service and its aftermath.
This paper explores fraternal bonds in wartime through narratives of touch. This sense, as Santanu Das highlights, possesses an intimate and elusive quality. Percy Cearn’s evocation of the comfort derived by his older brother’s shielding presence as the siblings slept together during one of their frontline meetings, shows how the depth of fraternal bonds can be rendered via descriptions of bodily contact. Discussions of non-genital tactile tenderness have focused on camaraderie or eroticism, overlooking pre-existing patterns of familial bodily contact. Examining instances of brotherly tactility at distinct points in the chronology of men’s wartime experiences presents a more complex picture.
Experiential narratives provide accounts of fraternal embraces, handshakes and other bodily contact at different stages of the war: departures and homecomings, visits on leave and at the front, before and after combat, and when brothers were wounded or killed. At these times of heightened emotions, men used touch to convey or deflect feelings of anxiety, relief, nostalgia, and grief. In the absence of an explicit language of love, accounts of fraternal bodily contact provided combatants with a means of expressing both their affection for their brothers and their profound emotional responses to their wartime experiences.
Privileging wartime comradeship has led to the importance of sibling bonds being overshadowed in comparison. Distancing strategies to protect men against the cumulative effect of casualties proved ineffective when applied to fraternal deaths. Societal and familial failure to recognise the loss suffered by a bereaved brother could result in what Kenneth Doka terms a ‘disenfranchisement’ of their grief. The prevalence of accounts of fraternal loss in men’s wartime narratives provides insight into how combatants balanced their personal loss with the duty to provide solace and support to other family members.
Concepts such as Reddy’s ‘emotional regimes’ and Rosenwein’s ‘communities of emotion’ provide a useful framework when considering public and private discourses influencing emotional behaviours. Playing close attention to the intersections of differing codes of emotions, shows how men navigated their way through expectations of normative manliness.
Piecing together the support mechanisms within individual families shows how the strength of familial ties reinforced or strained these emotional obligations. Shouldering the emotional ‘labour of loss’ within families was a way of showing manly devotion to mothers. Negating grief became an act of filial love, and as such, provided some small comfort to these grieving men. Sharing loss in this way could bond families together with what one man termed a ‘mutual clinging closer’.
Although the additional burden this placed on serving men remains largely hidden from view, many accounts testify to the loneliness of the grieving process for surviving brothers. Michael Roper has demonstrated the phenomenal efforts made by mothers to support their young sons on the front line. Fraternal grief narratives provide a counterweight to this crucial maternal support by illustrating the emotional strain that privileging maternal grief placed on fighting men.