SOS (Save Our Souls)!
Apocalyptic representation and the normalization of violence in the memory of the Portuguese soldiers of the First World War
p. 147-159
Texte intégral
Introduction
1The “Danse Macabre” became the protagonist of a great catastrophe1. The natural progression of generations was suspended – more than 10 million men perished, most of them young – and with them, the possibility of keeping the narrative thread of life intact. The First World War profoundly affected politics, society and, above all, those who fought in it. It was not only a conflict of total breadth and depth2, but also a deeply intimate experience.
2The First Republic, which ushered Portugal to war in 1917, mobilized more than ten thousand men, of which nearly seven thousand lost their lives3. The human loss, however, went far beyond the dead. In spite of the fact that no fighting occurred in metropolitan territory, the absence of consensus regarding intervention in the European front and the political instability did not facilitate the process of rebuilding the nation by capitalizing on the war effort. The First World War’s politics of memory during and after the conflict was conducted as a negotiation between the veterans, who were more or less organized, and Republicans, despite the fact that the political order evolved first into a military dictatorship and then into a fascist regime. From 1941 on, Salazar prohibited ceremonies for the Great War outside the confines of cemetery walls. But before the advent of fascism in Portugal, commemorative projects proliferated. In the First Republic (1910-1926), especially, a set of funereal commemorative practices was centered on the cult of the dead who gave their lives not for the nation but rather for the motherland. These practices were based on familiar forms adapted by the Republicans both from Christian tradition and from the period of the foundation of the modern nation-state4. The Portuguese case, therefore, throws considerable light on the argument that commemoration presented a banalization of violence in war and thereby helped brutalize society and politics in the post-war years5. In the Portuguese case, commemorative practices are far removed from the modern forms present in fascist culture, particularly in the Italian case6.
3Analyzing the written recollections of Portuguese soldiers who fought in the First World War, we see how, in the post-war context of a forced return to normalcy, the authors employ language and temporality that are apocalyptic in nature. This return to an earlier chiliastic language rendered the conflict narratable. That is, faced with the strangeness of the modern war experience that suspends biographical linearity, the soldiers, navigating multiple layers of censorship, found ways to narrate the catastrophe while integrating it into their own individual life stories.
4This article seeks to understand the devices used by Portuguese soldiers in their effort to make sense of and thereby normalize their war experience. We set aside for the moment an analysis of silence as a language of narration. It will analyze the narrative strategies of their memoirs written in the post-war and demonstrate, on the one hand, what leads the soldiers to write and, on the other, how they do this in a dialogue with the public metanarrative of tragedy. Finally, it will interrogate the way in which soldiers give meaning to the situation of extreme violence for which they are mobilized and then demobilized; moreover, it will seek to understand how the modern war experience of mass anonymity is transferred to the sphere of the individual, the member of a group, without ceasing to be mediated by cultural memory.
Testimonies of catastrophe
5The event, in its exceptionality, suspends historical narrative and annihilates causality. One who, stricken by this catastrophe, cannot find in the present a narrative framework that permits him to narrate his experience and integrate it into his sense of self, falls, not infrequently, into a post-traumatic silence. The trauma results from a “catastrophic history that requires a shift in understanding, as well as unprecedented modes of action and response”7. According to Walter Benjamin, the First World War is a symbolic moment in which “transmitted experience” is substituted by “lived experience”, fragile, volatile and ephemeral8. Millions of people, overwhelmingly young ones, were torn out of their social and mental structures.
6For Nicolas Beaupré, war literature emerges from the search for identity, although “Stabilizing narratives of unstable memories are inherently filled with tension”9. The same individual may, according to Smith10, contain in themselves several contradictory histories – multiple identities – which may or may not be adapted to the metanarrative of tragedy. It is important to note, then, how testimonies attempt to pin down a definitive narrative and narrator. According to Jay Winter11, the soldiers use the authority of first-hand experience to present and crystalize their “truth” about the war. The soldier is a moral witness12, one compelled to speak from personal suffering, and who never speaks in a vacuum but, rather, via a “very subjective construction of the extreme conditions under which they lived”13. This moral duty of “writing to the Portuguese people” appears in many of the testimonies, such as that of the republican António Granjo, comprising what he understood to be “[his] patriotic obligation”14. They do not write with lighthearted enthusiasm, but necessarily in unpretentious language that seeks to convey only the truth of facts without the “flourishes” of professional writing or of patriotic rhetoric:
Only now, implored by comrades and friends, I make public these notes, taken at the place of the events and soon after them, not because they have to do with myself but, rather, since they involve others, I do not, in truth, have the right to leave them to oblivion, to which I had previously condemned them, due to a particular modality of my spirit. And so here they are, misaligned, almost as if they were part of my canon15.
7Claims of authority are a result of contextual demands and often serve to re-enforce collectivities, whether by subscribing to romantic narratives of heroism or dismissing them, avoiding the political appropriation of their experience in the interwar period. Claiming to be removed from all passions, an overarching claim by the veteran’s movement in Portugal16, Granjo comments on the apolitical nature of his testimony:
I free myself from any damages that may bind me to the system. I wash my hands of all commitments that tie me to any political party or person. And I try to make the words and judgments flow from my pen, as naturally and truly as light from a flame. I wish my words would touch the heart of the people, because I wish to measure reality, as that pendulum measures the present, as the canon, from afar, measures the future17.
8The object of our study is the genre of war memoirs, understood here as a complex, critical and reflexive form of personal narrative. Unbound to any great literary tradition, these war narratives do not attempt to sing an ode to war nor to investigate the reason for its eruption and the motivations of those responsible for it. Rather, these narratives “are experience books; they are about what happened, and how it felt”18. This article does not set out to evaluate their literary qualities, in spite of their popularization in the post war period, since they are far from adhering to any tradition; nor is it a comprehensive representation of the Portuguese soldiers’ universe of experience, given the level of illiteracy19 and the limits placed on literature by violence (e.g. self-censorship, censorship, guilt, trauma, resentment, etc.). Pina de Morais, in his second book of memoirs, attests to these boundaries: “I certainly have, as do all soldiers, memories of the war, which I did not write in “Ao parapeito”, which I have not yet written and do not write voluntarily only because they are so painful that I suffer at their recollection” and continues “no one read, in my pages, the wound of war or that longing for love that moved me most”20.
9These narratives – not unlike an autobiography, though “a war narrative concerns a separate life that, however vividly it remains in the memory, is not continuous with the life the teller lives as he writes”21 – attempt to give meaning to personal experience. Writing appears here as a privileged means of “eternalizing and supporting memory”22, of the positioning of lived experience. Given the scope of silence and invention that the war provokes, these texts “are characterized not only by a reciprocal relationship between memory, narration and identity, but also often as a self-reflexive evaluation of the problems and limitations of memory”, producing a fiction of memory, where “the mimetic obligation to reflect objective truth”23 is mediated by the inevitable erosion of time and the framing devices of cultural memory. As such, given the impossibility of a “true” testimony about the “negative heritage” of war experience24, this article explores cultural memory which, in Jan Assmann’s assessment, goes far beyond the individual, the only one who legitimately possesses memory understood as traces retrieved of past experience in the mind of one single person. But individuals can speak or write about their memories only within social frameworks. Thus, individual narratives about a person’s past result from the interaction between psyche, conscience, society and culture. Public and private, individual and group intersect and collide in the call for the normalization of post-war life and writing war narratives become part of a strategy to imagine a future when memory is “tamed” in the sense of being no longer able to overthrow the individual’s sense of self.
Myth, Manichaeism and Strangeness
10The demand made of these men to quickly return to normalcy proved impossible, as the world around them had irrevocably changed. They are confronted with resistance to their stories. If, on the one hand, giving testimony, speaking of themselves, signifies passing the “burden” to others (wife, child, friend), those who demonstrate an incapacity to return to normalcy put themselves in the position of transgressors or wanderers25. For Eric Leed, the impossibility of forgetting the traumatic event establishes the difference between a normal and abnormal – pathological – reaction to the experience of war, the latter leading to isolation or neurosis. Thus, “[t]he reason why forgetting is asked of men fighting our modern wars lies in the fact that they are fought by men who must change their identities, from civilian to soldier and back again”26. This condition cannot be overlooked in a war fueled by armies of citizens. In order to address this demand for sanitization – both physical and mental – the writers employ a language that acts upon events, producing a coherent reality through use of myths, and in this way confronting and overcoming incredulousness. One important school of thought follows George Mosse’s notion that the creation of myth from the experience of war allowed the nation to transcend the horror of war and make the experience thereby sacred. This myth of the war experience, according to Mosse,
summarized some of the main themes which had moved men during one or another stage of the war: the spirit of 1914, the war as a test of manliness, the ideal of camaraderie and the cult of the fallen soldier – a whole series of attitudes which helped men confront and accept this unprecedented experience, and informed many of the literary, artistic and political perceptions after the First World War27.
11In a universe which demands the sanitation of the war experience, narrative solutions are created that permit soldiers to tell their stories of the war, giving it meaning, albeit a meaning that has more to do with the post-war demands than with the real experience of war itself. Complex temporal and spatial experiences are circumscribed into Manichaean formulas that present the conflict as a great catastrophe and the hero, the trench soldier, as the martyr. This dovetails with what Leonard Smith defines as a metanarrative of tragedy28. In this narrative, the soldier possesses two apparently contradictory identities, which are actually complementary – the victim and the brute –: on the one hand, the epitome of virtue through honesty and courage while, on the other, a trifling youth. We find abundant evidence of the force of Mosse’s argument in Portuguese war writing. This anonymous soldier victim, inconsequentially joyous and brave, recurs throughout the memories of the Portuguese soldiers:
But, when the period of virility had come, at the full development of my faculties, animated by the flame which creates, preserves and instigates grand heroic projects, they put me in a uniform, forced upon me a terrible oath, replacing my name with a number and, herding me along with the others, sent me to the battlefield to defend ‘the liberty of the small oppressed peoples’29.
12This interpretation offers the post-war a redemptive narrative in which the conflict would be interrupted by the promises of progress and rationality, imbuing the victim with the hope of regeneration and recuperation from the catastrophe. The myths would become necessary for reconciling men with memories which were truly unimaginable. Hermínio Lusitano, the pseudonym given by Lapas Gusmão to one of his soldiers, “marched, vague, absorbed, as if slowly awakening in an unfamiliar, strange and indefinable world”30. At the heart of such memories is not the horror of war, but its difference from any other imaginable experience. In the strange culture of modern war, Granjo recalls, “[what is] essential is to collect the sum of that unconsciousness necessary for the beastly life that has become the existence of all those who kill and grind their teeth”31. It is the effort of an individual’s reconfiguration between a national demand, on the one hand, and an image of the self that reaches beyond the victim/perpetrator binary, on the other, ultimately rendering the subject ambiguous.
13In sum soldiers were very well aware that they were trapped between silence and the gross misrepresentation of the combat in industrialized war. The catastrophe of modern destruction went beyond conventional language, and thus the soldier writer was forced to live in the margins of language, acknowledging the absurd nature of combat and yet being forced to try to integrate it a series of utterances their readers will be able to understand.
Memoirs in apocalyptic form
Here was the grave and the cradle of Life, – the whipping post and the Penitence, the Calvary and the Redemption32.
14Augusto Casimiro has synthesized, in this fragment of Calvários da Flandres, the key to our reading of the memoirs written by the Portuguese soldiers who fought in the Great War: penitence; calvary; and redemption, in that order, following the Way of the Cross.
15While a series of studies argues the cultural language provoked by the conflict created a rupture of modernity, Jay Winter sees the dominant forms of recollection of war as a traditional in character33. War literature is no different in this sense: the use of imagery from an apocalyptic tradition – initially religious but ultimately political – “shows how the conflict expanded the literary pace occupied by an older set of icons carrying messages about the end of time, the collapsed order, the final judgement”34.
16It is not our intention to analyze a literary genre but, rather, the ways in which these texts take shape in the broader context of cultures of war and remembrance. The commemorative processes of the First World War in Portugal are traditional, in spite of being extraordinarily new, given the conflict’s dimension and impact; they stem from a Republican effort to consolidate a historical memory that guarantees the continuity of national identity35. The same is true of the testimonies in question, in which the soldiers make use of familiar narrative strategies to render the experience comprehensible to the world and to themselves. The First World War resulted in significant literary36 production in Portugal. Considering works published in the early postwar years, from the political protagonists to those at the base of the military hierarchy, all manifest the need to give testimony. One objective of a more expansive project on war memory37 would be an analysis of the memoirs of those who participated on the European and African fronts of the conflict. We have, so far, collected 89 memoirs from 69 authors; 54 of which were published until the end of the First Republic (1926). More than 16 titles were issued in 1919 alone. In this sample, common and recurring narrative devices reveal the importance of framing individual remembrance in cultural memory.
17The apocalyptic writing tradition, familiar to the Portuguese via the Roman Catholic tradition, appears in the memoirs as “a “subversive vision”, an affirmation both of doom and of divine justice”38. The apocalypse, through the triad of crisis, judgment and salvation, as formulated in the last book of the New Testament, enables a metaphoric and allegoric language, necessary for representing a conflict of such dimensions that it “defies realistic description”. It also allows for a temporal linearity that gives historical fiction a possible form for introducing structure to its narrative. The mimetic desire, implicit in the act of remembering, is evident in the use of narrative strategies close to processes of “entification” of history in its Judeo-Christian matrix, inasmuch as moments of decadence must be considered in the context of a perspective that is totalizing and future-oriented39. That is, the Great War comes to be framed as the end of times, the culmination of a great crisis, in which sacrifice will be redeemed in the final judgment, guaranteeing a new order. We see this process materialize in a selection of memoirs by Portuguese soldiers.
18The crisis is presented to us through macabre images of terror, worthy of hell, where the veil between the living and the dead vanishes. Death, the most extreme threshold of existence, is omnipresent both in the more realistic descriptions and in the allegories. In Pina de Morais’s Ao Parapeito the living are barely distinguishable from the dead, a pile of skin-clad bones – “you can feel your skull, those miserable bones” – all of which may anticipate the same destiny – death –, a destiny that amuses itself in watching them survive. This destiny laughs “at ourselves, as if it knew all the fatalisms of existence and was amused to see us live”40.
19The state of limbo is overtaken and the war is no longer a war, but an inferno in which masked soldiers appear as “satanic figures in a Dantesque circus”, who “slip among the hills like sinister ghosts from a subterranean world”41. Dante announces the end of hope at the Gates of Hell. The rejection of a cyclical vision of Christianity announces the importance of historical time. In a cyclical temporality the liberation of suffering would never be possible, while in a linear temporality, faith in the future allows the past to serve as preparation, the present as revelation and the future as consummation – not an epiphany but a theophany. Existence meets its limit, as does the possibility of giving testimony. Hermínio, however, facing the “labyrinth of death” where “Dante had inscribed in Hell: ‘Ye who enter…’” would have the power to overcome the crisis in a “glorious ascension”42. Hell is not the end. Calvary guarantees the salvation of the dead since, in the final judgment, those who had sacrificed themselves will be redeemed:
What rude calvaries God puts us through in order that Life should conquer and His law dominate!… Can your pain redeem them? […] And in the midst of the great field where the corpses sleep, I rise up to the hallelujah of the near victory, I foresee the new spring, I know that men will be purified of their crimes, remorseful43.
20The sacrifice of simple men – the martyrs – is not in vain, just as, analogously, Christ’s death had not been in vain; both would return at the end of times. This is worship of the “innocent victim”, the hero who willingly faces martyrdom44. This regenerative dimension of death – of the soldier and of the nation – makes a humble appearance in Augusto Casimiro:
Dead?… Why is it hard for me to say this word to myself? Death does not annihilate nor reduce those truly living… And the dead of this war lived the true life. Death, the obligatory threshold of eternity, alleviated them of their miseries, made them transparent and, integrating them into the great current of devotion that floods the world and renews it, gave them, who had been silence, the resignation of sacrifice, divine active forces, immaterial existence, the inexhaustible strength of the symbols that, through the ages, have cradled the heart and guarded the dreams of the world. They are all the dead, those of today and of yesterday45.
21The duration and impact of the conflict made it necessary to construct explanations for the new order – the war comes to be seen as being fought in the name of the motherland and against the enemy of humanity, a veritable crusade combining sacred elements with civic lessons46. The myth of war experience cancels the horror of death, through alternatives based on familiar themes, highlighting the sacrifice in battle of a generation on a crusade47. The common soldier-citizen who “happily sacrifices himself” in defense of the nation is elevated to the pantheon of heroes of the civil religion, forging himself as the new man, guarantor of the nation’s future. The apocalyptic form, then, makes possible the narration of an exceptional experience – the crisis of the end of times – giving it the linearity of the Judeo-Christian tradition in which the future is promised through the present sacrifice of martyrs, soldier-victims who take on a spiritual and political role.
Conclusion
22Despite the First Republic’s effort to secularize the state, Portuguese war literature is deeply marked by a Christian religious dimension, marrying present experience with the comfort of traditional beliefs, independently of the political or ideological position of the author. The apocalyptic archetypes, in a syncretism of history and religion, make it possible to give the world meaning, beginning with the present. Cultural memory is, therefore, a set of strategies, which help individuals frame their memories of the conflict in such a way as to integrate them into the national liturgy. Such an effort was for many ex-soldiers a matter of survival. What they saw and what they knew threw into doubt their ideas as to who they were and of what they were capable. Traditional cultural codes, both latent and retrievable, enabled them to escape from limbo, and to rejoin the nation, through their writing. Soldiers’ memoirs bring into play a remote past in order to make sense of the chaos of the war in which they fought.
23The indisputable authority of those who lived renders the past sacred. This is not, however, always the case and, though it was not discussed in this analysis, many of the narrated memories reveal profound dissonances with Manichean war narratives. Faced with the demand, placed on soldiers in the post war, to normalize the experience of conflict, individual memories are harnessed in an attempt to give the catastrophe meaning and integrate it into the continuum of the soldiers’ life story. These attempts at integrating catastrophe into normalcy take place in numerous ways. One is through the mediation of either public metanarratives that are the product of a modern nation-state project; another is through the familiar and sacred liturgies of the pre-modern past. The catastrophes of the present drive these men not to the margins but to the center of their culture, through a return to the inherited liturgies that enable them to make sense of their lives.
Bibliographie
Casimiro Augusto, Calvários da Flandres, Porto, Renascença Portuguesa, 1920.
Granjo António, A Grande Aventura. (Scenas da Guerra), Lisboa, Imprensa Portugal-Brasil, s.d. (1920?).
Gusmão Lapas, Visão da Guerra, Lisboa, Empresa Nacional de Publicidade, 1932.
Mamede Coronel Paes, O rato cinzento, Coimbra, Coimbra Editora, 1925.
Morais Pina de, Ao Parapeito, Porto, Renascença Portuguesa, 1919.
Oliveira Major J. Braz de, O Exército Português em A Grande Guerra. Scenas e Factos, Lisboa, Tipografia do Diário de Notícias, 1924.
Pimenta Eduardo, A Ferro e Fogo, Porto, Renascença Portuguesa, 1919.
Notes de bas de page
1 Special thanks to Jay Winter for the important suggestions, as well as the careful revision by Pedro Caldas and Francisco Ferreira. Translation by Adi Gold. An adaptation of this chapter was published in Portuguese (“S.O.S. (Save Our Souls)! Representação apocalíptica e normalização da violência na memória dos soldados portugueses da Primeira Guerra Mundial”, in Correia Sílvia, Moreli, Alexandre, Tempos e espaços de violência: a Primeira Guerra Mundial, a desconstrução dos limites e o início de uma era, Rio de Janeiro, Autografia, 2019).
2 Chickering Roger, Förster Stig (Ed.), The Shadows of Total War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
3 On the Portuguese numbers, among other works, see: Correia Sílvia, “The veterans’ movement and First World War memory in Portugal (1918-33): between the Republic and Dictatorship”, European Review of History-Revue européenne d’histoire, v. 19, 2012, pp. 531-551; Meneses Filipe Ribeiro de, “Introduction: The Lusophone World at War, 1914-1918 and Beyond”, e-JPH, v. 15, n. 1, June 2017, pp. 1-14.
4 Correia Sílvia, Entre a Morte e o Mito. Políticas da memória da I Guerra Mundial (1918-1933), Lisboa, Círculo de Leitores, 2015; Correia Sílvia, “Celebrating victory on a day of defeat: commemorating the First World War in Portugal, 1918–1933”, European Review of History-Revue européenne d’histoire, v. 24, n. 1, 2016, pp. 108-130.
5 Isnenghi Mario, Il mito della Grande Guerra: da Marinetti a Malaparte, Bari, Laterza, 1970; Mosse George, Le guerre mondiali dalla tragedia al mito dei caduti, Roma, Laterza, 1990.
6 Correia Sílvia, Entre a Morte e o Mito…, op. cit.; Correia Sílvia, “Celebrating victory on a day of defeat…”, art. cit.
7 Caruth Cathy, Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, p. xiii.
8 Benjamin Walter, Traverso Enzo, O passado, modos de usar, Lisboa, UNIPOP, 2012, p. 12.
9 Beaupré Nicolas, “Soldier-writers and poets”, in Winter Jay (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 466-467.
10 Smith Leonard, Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War, New York, Cornell University Press, 2007.
11 Winter Jay, Remembering war: the Great War between memory and history in the twentieth century, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 101.
12 I will develop this idea in an upcoming work.
13 Winter Jay, Remembering …, op. cit., p. 271.
14 [“como é [sua] obrigação de patriota”] Granjo António, A Grande Aventura. (Scenas da Guerra), Lisboa, Imprensa Portugal-Brasil, s.d. (1920?), p. 181. After earning a degree in law, António Granjo became the director and owner of several newspapers through which he actively contributed to the propagation of republican ideals. He was a defender of Portugal’s intervention in the Great War, serving as an officer on the European front from May to December of 1917 (Leal Ernesto Castro, Nunes Teresa, António Granjo: República e Liberdade, Lisboa, Assembleia da República, 2012).
15 [“Só, muito instantemente, rogado por camaradas e amigos faço hoje sair à publicidade estes apontamentos, tomados no próprio logar e logo em seguida aos fatos, não por se ligarem à minha pessoa, mas porque, envolvendo outras, eu não tenho, na verdade o direito de os deixar no olvido, a que eu próprio os condenava, por uma especial modalidade do meu espírito. Aí vão pois, desalinhados, quase como figuram no meu canhenho.”] emphasis ours. Oliveira Major J. Braz de, O Exército Português em A Grande Guerra. Scenas e Factos, Lisboa, Tipografia do Diário de Notícias, 1924, p. 9. João Braz de Oliveira (1851-?) was registered as an artillery lieutenant in the Bulletin of the CEP. He embarked for France on August 1917, was reported missing in the Battle of La Lys and returned to Portugal in December of 1919 (PT AHM-DIV-1-35A-1-05-1528_m0001.jpg).
16 Correia Sílvia, “The veterans’ movement…”, art. cit.
17 [“Liberto-me de toda a espécie de prejuízo que me prenda a sistemas. Desfaço-me de toda a espécie de compromissos que me ligue a partidos ou a pessoas. E procuro conseguir que as palavras e os juízos me corram da pena, tão natural e verdadeiramente como a luz corre duma chama. Desejarei que as minhas palavras toquem o coração do povo, porque desejo medir a realidade, como aquela pêndula vai medindo o presente, como o canhão, ao longe, vai medindo o futuro.”] Granjo António, A Grande Aventura…, op. cit., p. 182.
18 Hynes Samuel, The soldiers’ tale: bearing witness to modern war, New York, Penguin, 1997, p. 11.
19 The illiteracy rate was, in 1920, about 65 % of a population of 6,825,883 (Candeias António, “Inovação, ruptura e continuidade na 1ª República. Um balanço crítico sobre a educação”, Revista da Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, n. 18, Lisboa, Edições Colibri, 2006, pp. 211-231).
20 [“[t]enho decerto, como todos os combatentes, recordações da guerra, que não escrevi no ‘Ao parapeito’, que não escrevi ainda e mesmo não escrevo voluntariamente só porque são tão dolorosas que me faz sofrer a sua lembrança” and continues “[n]inguém leu nas minhas páginas a ferida da guerra ou a saudade de amor que mais me emocionou”] Morais Pina de, Ao Parapeito, Porto, Renascença Portuguesa, 1919, p. 68.
21 Hynes Samuel, The soldiers’ tale…, op. cit., p. 8.
22 Assmann Jan, “O que é a ‘Memória Cultural?”, in Alves Fernanda Mora et al., Estudos de Memória. Teoria e análise cultural, Famalicão, Edições Húmus, 2016, p. 206.
23 Nunning Ansgar, “A “verdade da memória” e o “frágil poder da memória”?”, in Alves, Fernanda Mora et all., Estudos de Memória…, op. cit., p. 221-233.
24 Améry Jean, Além do Crime e Castigo, Rio de Janeiro, Contraponto, 2013, p. 178.
25 Cabanes Bruno, “Negotiating Intimacy in the shadow of war (France, 1914-1920). New Perspectives in the Cultural History of World War I”, French Politics, Culture & Society, vol. 31, n. 1, Spring 2013, p. 16.
26 Leed Eric, “Fateful Memories: Industrialized War and Traumatic Neuroses”, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 35, n. 1, Special Issue: Shell-Shock, 2000, p. 88.
27 Mosse George, “Two World Wars and the Myth of the War Experience”, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 21, n. 4, 1986, pp. 491-513.
28 Smith Leonard, Embattled Self… op. cit.
29 Pimenta Eduardo, A Ferro e Fogo, Porto, Renascença Portuguesa, 1919, p. 122. Eduardo Pimenta (1865-1922) was a lieutenantcolonel physician at the Health Services of CEP from January 1917 to September 1918 (PT AHM-DIV-1-35A-1-01-0027_m0002.jpg).
30 [“caminhava, vago, absorto, como se houvesse de súbito despertado num mundo desconhecido, estranho indefinível”] Gusmão Lapas, Visão da Guerra, Lisboa, Empresa Nacional de Publicidade, 1932, p. 19. Lapas de Gusmão (1886-1962) was an officer who served in Angola and, from 1917, in the CEP, while also dedicating himself to journalism [https://capeiaarraiana.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/%c2%abuma-noite%c2%bb-de-lapas-de-gusmao, 17/04/2020].
31 [“[o] essencial é ganhar a soma de inconsciência necessária à vida animal em que se transformou a existência de toda esta gente que se mata e que range os dentes.”] Granjo António, A Grande Aventura…, op. cit., p. 101.
32 [Aqui foi o túmulo e o berço da Vida, – o pelourinho e a penitência, o Calvário e a Redenção.] Casimiro Augusto, Calvários da
Flandres, Porto, Renascença Portuguesa, 1920, p. 192 (emphasis ours). Augusto Casimiro (1889-1967) was a supporter of republican ideas, a writer and military man who fought in the Great War and wrote about the experience. One of the most recognized memorialists of the conflict, Casimiro displays a patriotic, messianic conviction of the national effort.
33 Winter Jay, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
34 Winter Jay, Sites of Memory…, op. cit., p. 203.
35 Correia Sílvia, Entre a Morte e o Mito…, op. cit.; Correia Sílvia, “Celebrating victory on a day of defeat…, art. cit.
36 In the 1920s several editions referenced this wealth of publications, whether via an analysis of the literary products (e.g. Cidade Hernâni, Quelques aspects de la littérature portugaise de la Grande Guerre, Lisboa, Institut Français au Portugal, 1937) or via bibliographic lists published in the 1920s, in which many of the memoirs were included (e.g. Melo José Brandão Pereira de, Notas subsidiárias para uma bibliografia portuguesa da Grande Guerra, Lisboa, Sá da Costa, 1926; Brandão José, Bibliografia portuguesa da Grande Guerra, Lisboa: Tipografia Minerva, 1920; Beja Nuno, Esboço de uma bibliografia portuguesa da Grande Guerra, Coimbra: Tip. Reis Gomes, 1922). The majority of memoirs are collected at the Biblioteca do Exército (BIBLIEx) and Biblioteca da Liga dos Combatentes.
37 This chapter is part of an ongoing research project “Representation and Limit: Memories of the Portuguese Experience in World War” that seeks to produce a critical study of the experience/s of the First World War as narrated by Portuguese soldiers.
38 Winter Jay, Sites of Memory…, op. cit., pp. 200-201.
39 Catroga Fernando, “Caminhos do fim da História”, Revista de História das Ideias, v. 23, 2002, p. 134.
40 [“[…]podes apalpar numa massagem a tua caveira, aqueles ossos miseráveis […] De nós mesmos, como se soubesse todos os fatalismos da existência e se divirta a ver-nos viver”]. Morais Pina de, Ao Parapeito, op. cit., pp. 119-120. João Pina de Morais (1889-1953) left for the European front in April 1917 and returned to Portugal at the end of the war, playing an active role in the defense of the First Republic in the exile after the military coup of 28 May [http://www.cm-vilareal.pt/gremio/images/ciclos/pina_morais.pdf, 17/04/2020].
41 [“figuras satânicas de um círculo dantesco”, que “resvalam entre os taludes como fantasmas sinistros de um mundo subterrâneo”] Granjo António, A Grande Aventura…, op. cit., pp. 66-67.
42 Gusmão Lapas, Visão da Guerra, op. cit., pp. 22-23.
43 [“Que calvários rudes nos faz Deus subir para que a Vida vença e a Sua lei domine!… Poderá sua dôr redimi-los? […] E ao meio da messe enorme onde ficam os cadáveres dormindo, ergo-me à aleluia da vitória próxima, adivinho a primavera nova, sei que os homens se purificarão dos seus crimes, maguados dos seus arrependimentos”]. Casimiro Augusto, Calvários da Flandres, op. cit., pp. 92-93 (our emphasis).
44 Becker Annette, « L’histoire religieuse de la guerre 1914-1918 », Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France, v. 217, 2000, pp. 539-549.
45 [“Mortos?… Porque me custa dizer esta palavra, a mim? A morte não aniquila, nem reduz os verdadeiros vivos… E os mortos desta guerra viveram a verdadeira vida. A morte, limiar obrigatório da eternidade, aligeirou-os das suas e das nossas misérias, fê-los transparentes, e, integrando-os na grande corrente de devoção que alaga o mundo e a renova, deu-lhes, a êles que tinham sido o silêncio, a resignação do sacrifício, divinas fôrças activas, a imaterial existência, a fôrça inexaurível dos símbolos que através das idades veem embalando o coração e guardando os sonhos do mundo. Eles são todos os mortos, os de hoje e de ontem.”] Casimiro Augusto, Calvários da Flandres, op. cit., pp. 177-178 (emphasis ours).
46 Audoin-Rouzeau Stéphane, Becker Annette, 14-18, Retrouver la Guerre. Paris, Gallimard, 2000. For the Portuguese case, see Correia Sílvia, Entre a Morte e o Mito…, op. cit.
47 Mosse George, Le guerre mondiali…, op. cit., p. 7.
Auteur
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Sílvia Correia
Professor at the History Institute of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) since 2013. She presented her PhD dissertation entitled The politics of memory of the First World War in Portugal, 1918-1933, in 2011, at the NOVA University of Lisbon (Portugal), and in 2015 had it published as a book in Portugal and Brazil. Her ongoing research project is titled Representation and Limit: Memories of the Portuguese Experience in World War I.
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