ABSTRACT
There is a banal sewing kit in the collections of the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne, in the heart of the Somme battlefield (Becker 1996: 46–7). For me, it is totally emblematic of the Great War of 1914–18, and of all the ensuing conflicts of the twentieth century, where men and women suffered and united around shared values, before discovering that wounds, prisoners’ camps, internment/concentration camps, 1 or death, would be separating them, for a very long time, or forever.
