Landscapes of the First World War

This comparative and transnational study of landscapes in the First World War offers new perspectives on the ways in which landscapes were idealised, mobilised, interpreted, exploited, transformed and destroyed by the conflict. The collection focuses on four themes: environment and climate, industrial and urban landscapes, cross-cultural encounters, and legacies of the war. The chapters cover Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Africa and the US, drawing on a range of approaches including battlefield archaeology, military history, medical humanities, architecture, literary analysis and environmental history.
This volume explores the environmental impact of the war on diverse landscapes and how landscapes shaped soldiers' experiences at the front. It investigates how rural and urban locales were mobilised to cater to the demands of industry and agriculture. The enduring physical scars and the role of landscape as a crucial locus of memory and commemoration are also analysed. The chapter 'The Long Carry: Landscapes and the Shaping of British Medical Masculinities in the First World War' is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

Selena Daly is a Lecturer in Italian Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland. She was previously a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. Her monograph, Italian Futurism and the First World War, (2016), was nominated for the Italian-American bilateral Bridge Book Prize.
Martina Salvante is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Warwick, UK, where she is working on a project on Italy's disabled veterans of the First World War. She has published widely on Italian history with a focus on gender, masculinity, and war disability.
Vanda Wilcox is a Lecturer in Modern European History at John Cabot University, Italy, and Trinity College, Rome Campus, Italy. She is the author of Morale and the Italian Army during the First World War (2016), and is currently researching imperial and colonial dimensions of Italian participation in the Great War.

1 Introduction; Selena Daly, Martina Salvante, Vanda Wilcox.- Section 1: Environment, Climate and Weather at War.- 2 Making Oil Essential: Emerging Patterns of Petroleum Culture in the Era of the Great War; Brian Black.- 3 "Lamps never before dim are being extinguished from lack of olive oil": Deforestation and Famine in Palestine at War and in Peace under the late Ottoman Empire and early British Empire, 1910-1920; Jeffrey D. Reger.- 4 Rain and Bad Weather in Wartime: The Role of Climate and Environmental Factors during the Great War in Cameroon (1914-1916); Isidore Pascal Ndjock Nyobe.- Section 2: Urban and Industrial Landscapes Transformed.- 5 The First World War on the Streets: Urban Conformity and Citizenship in the United States'; Ross Wilson.- 6 Land of the Red Soil: War Ruins and Industrial Landscapes in Luxembourg; Sandra Camarda.- Section 3: Cross-Cultural Encounters across Landscapes.- 7 The Long Carry: Landscapes and the Shaping of British Medical Masculinities inthe First World War; Jessica Meyer- 8 Scientists in Uniform: The German Military and the Investigation of the Ottoman Landscape; Oliver Stein.- 9 The Home and the World: War-Torn Landscapes and the Literary Imagination of a Bengali Military Doctor in Mesopotamia during the First World War; Samraghni Bonnerjee.- Section 4: Legacies of the First World War in Landscapes.- 10 Neither Here nor There: War Memorial Landscapes in Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Emigration, 1914-1939; Aaron J. Cohen.- 11 Memory, Landscape, and the Architecture of the Imperial War Graves Commission; Tim Godden.- 12 Traces of Being: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on First World War Conflict Landscapes; Nicholas J. Saunders.