ABSTRACT
It is conventional wisdom that wars have a destructive effect on travel and tourism. Wars cut off trafc ows and destroy landscapes, places of interest, and amenities.1 The troop movements war generates are generally regarded to be of a different nature than the voyages of travellers in peacetime. It comes as no surprise that writings by soldiers rarely gure as important sources in scholarship on the history of travel. Yet, rather than restricting travel, conicts like the First World War opened up spaces of encounter as they generated mass movement of soldiers and civilians alike. For the soldiers at the Western Front, the immobility of the war provided the opportunity to encounter French or Belgian culture and landscape on periods of leave. While the notion of war seems to imply a struggle for political and cultural hegemony, travel opportunities created by the war open up possibilities for ordinary soldiers to renegotiate identities in the encounter with the foreign. Interestingly, these wartime travel encounters are not just spatial encounters. Because wars are often conceived as transition periods, the foreign could also become a medium for the imagination of a post-war future. This chapter studies the relationship between international wartime travel encounters and the construction of future expectations by studying the case of German soldiers from the youth movement Wandervogel in Flanders during the First World War.2
