‘many sisters to many brothers’ In the preface toScarsUpon My Heart, Judith Kazantzis refers to how much of the
critical and lay knowledge of the war comes from the poetry of soldiers like Sassoon
and Owen. She goes on to say that we ‘know little in poetry of what that agony and
its millions of deaths meant to the millions of English women who had to endure
them—to learnto survive survival’.^55 The poems in Reilly’s anthology are one aspect
of the various ways in which women testified to this process. They also give voice to
the ways in which women found new identities in the war, ones which were as vital to
the war effort as the trench soldier. Ouditt claims that it ‘is likely that women’s most
commonly articulated (or unspoken) desire during the First World War was that
justice be done to women and that their part in the war, whether as crusading nurse,
desolated lover or pacifist activist, be acknowledged’.^56 The difficulty in articulating
these desires was that it had to be done through traditional modes of expression
if they were to be heard. All of the various forms of resistance and mourning
contained within the traumas and losses of the war must be acknowledged.^57 The
recent renaissance in First World Warstudies—including numerous conferences,
books, television shows, and films—clearly indicates that the war has not lost its
grip on the Anglo-American cultural imagination. This ‘new’ war is no untold
story, but it must be appreciated that it was partly articulated by women.
(^55) Judith Kazantzis, ‘Preface’, in Reilly (ed.),Scars Upon My Heart, repr. in Reilly (ed.),Virago Book
of Women’s War Poetry and Verse, p. xxi.
(^56) Ouditt,Fighting Forces, Writing Women,2.
(^57) For an example of the current revision of First World War studies, see my ‘Consoling Fictions:
Mourning, World War One and Dorothy L. Sayers’, in Patricia Rae (ed.),Modernism and Mourning
(Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 185–97. This piece is concerned with the ways in
which popular fiction in the 1920s and 1930s synchronized with the forms and processes of mourning
which dominated signifying practices, particularly modernism, after the war.