Between Mythology and Memory: French Railways in the Remembrance of the Great War

My paper will analyze ways in which the construction of the memory of the Great War in France involved different textual and visual narratives of French trains and French railways in the aftermath of the Great War.  A contemporary, Lieutenant Colonel Brevete Fischer, argued that railways were “the major culprits of the war:” trains brought provision to troops and, it seemed, the war could last an indefinite amount of time. French poets and writers (Jules Romains and Georges Duhamel) compared trains with monstrous creatures that devoured young healthy men and spitted dreadfully disfigured human bodies, i.e., a live cargo of sanitary trains, back to French train stations after every major offensive. Romains defined trains as “the accomplices in the slaughter of the war.” Of especial value, military historians and war veterans presented their critique of the performance of railways during the war and mobilization.

Despite this critique, in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, the managements of the French railway companies put remarkable efforts to praise the efforts of the French railway companies during the Great War and to include the heroic narratives of French railways in the public memory of the conflict. The Northern and Eastern railway networks played an especially important role in organizing commemorative tours to the battlefields. The management of the Northern railway company printed travel guides for visitors and also commissioned posters promoting trips to the devastated region. The history of railways during the war was the central theme in the tours and in the narratives of travel guides.  

Most notably, there was an apparent paradox in the fact that if in 1919 and 1920 the French and British bourgeoisie expressed its deep interest in taking such tours: during the Great War, the European elite often showed little or no desire to learn about the tragic reality of the Great War. My presentation, therefore, invites the reader to consider whether commemorative tours to the battlefields could, indeed, provide somewhat authentic impressions of the Great War or, to the contrary, they became a kind of entertainment stimulating wartime experience--thrilling, captivating, but ultimately safe. The tours spurred the imagination of sightseers. Such tours, nevertheless, could not possibly give visitors the full comprehension of the horrors of the war: there were no corpses on battlefields or on urban streets. The tours, organized by the Nord and the Est, accentuated material losses, that is, destroyed buildings and train stations, and debris--what were left from once prosperous downtowns. The tours could only simulate the experience of being at the war; the experience that such visitors received from the tour became a simulacrum of being at the war. Train trips, therefore, provided a simulacrum of the experience of being at war. The war became a thrilling adventure, a horrifying, but ultimately safe voyage that shook the imagination but would never claim the lives. Roland Barthes’s emphasis on mythology as an underpinning for modern identities helps to understand ways how the memory of wars was constructed.