ABSTRACT
The period 1914 to 1918 was a time of shifting cultural categories in the United Kingdom that were the result of World War I and its corollaries: death, mourning, terror and shock. The young English poet Roland Aubrey Leighton (1895–1915) was engaged to the author Vera Brittain (1893–1970) when he was killed in France in 1915. Brittain recalls in her 1933 memoir that she was present when the uniform Leighton had been killed in was returned to his family, still filthy, shredded by bullet holes, muddy and bloodstained. The horrific relic subjected Leighton’s loved ones to the reality of the War, while its gruesome materiality threatened to destroy their ‘counter memories’ (to use Roland Barthes’ 1981 terminology) of Leighton, which had been preserved in photographs of him in military dress. Indeed, Leighton himself had been horrified by seeing fallen soldiers’ shredded uniforms on the battlefields, aware that each garment represented a wasted life. This chapter examines ephemera, popular culture and literary sources from the period to reveal how fallen soldiers’ uniforms traumatised the living, reminding them of the human body’s fragility and the failure of authority within the traumatic context of World War I.
