'Let Ireland Weep' - Poetry of Loss in the First World War

The 2014 centenary of the outbreak of the First World War was marked on the Champs Elysées in Paris by a series of enlarged black and white photographs, mounted on mini billboards running the length of the city’s most prestigious boulevard. The images focus on the social and cultural impact of the fighting, varying from cigarette-puffing Tommies in the trenches of the Somme to pots and pans being melted down to make munitions. The photographs show just how international the war turned out to be, with soldiers from all five continents engaged in the four year struggle for supremacy in Europe. Images of ordinary human interaction, even between the combatting troops, point to the enormous human cost entailed in the playing out of old treaties and alliances. The war touched the lives of millions of people throughout the world, and the exhibition is a prescient reminder of just how much damage was wreaked during the fighting. The photographs serve another function, however. They are indicative of the technological advances that marked this particular war, with tanks, machine-guns and aircraft complementing the traditional horse-mounted cavalry, the bayonet-armed rifles and crude trench fortifications. This contrast marks the First World War as something of a social, political and military watershed, traditionally unsophisticated in the sense of the enormous loss of life for the gain of little territory, yet radical in terms of the extent to which the war was filmed, recorded, photographed and, most significantly, written about. Indeed, this exhibition is a very early example of the photo-journalism that is such a feature of contemporary war reporting in that the images are designed not as propaganda for any one side but act as an objective record of the degree to which the war affected the ordinary lives of millions of people, least of all the estimated sixteen million people, both military and civilian, who died in the process. It can be argued that the globalisation of society, which many present as a relatively recent phenomenon, finds some of its roots in the conflict played out largely in the flat, fertile plains of the north western European continent, and that the First World War was the first global conflict to truly lodge itself into the burgeoning media-saturated culture that is so familiar in the 21st century.