Occupation: Dreamland (Ian Olds, Garrett Scott, 2005)

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2Repeated military failures or strategic errors have widened the gap between the military and civilians, leading soldiers themselves to even question the sense of their mission(s). The experience of war, which separates the military and the civil population, also makes transition from war to peace more difficult. The silence surrounding some events testifies to the trauma of war, complicating the return of the ex-soldier to civilian life and undermining civilians’ acceptance of the veteran.

5Moreover, the narratives of wars are subject to adjustments, orientations and points of view that give a particular flavor to wars fought by the populations (anonymously and/or hidden in an organization, secret or not) and by the military (from high command to the ‘unknown soldier’). The narratives of wars evolve with the benefit of hindsight, the writing of history textbooks and the constant (re)interpretations of archives (newly discovered or already known) and the official version one country wants to put forward according to its political agendas and visions of patriotism. The narratives of wars vary with the context and the need for men and women to express their inner feelings when faced with the torments and human atrocities of war; they may also reflect the place of individuals within a group and the issues of group cohesiveness. Narratives of wars may be further distorted by silence, for instance through the reticence of veterans and victims to share their experiences.

7The first part consists of three articles aiming to question the political rhetoric of war as a source of distrust among civilians. The aforementioned divide between the military and civilian spheres is rooted in a series of scandals that has shaken Western societies since the 1960s’ commitment to the Vietnam War and its Cold War framing. Nicole Cloarec sheds light on Tell Me Lies, a British film made by Peter Brook in 1968, which mixes fiction and documentary techniques to question viewers’ responses to war images. Aiming for the “confrontation” that Peter Brook devised through staging his plays, the film uses disruptive effects to unsettle the spectators and raise awareness as to the precariousness of his/her position in the face of lies used to cover the horrors of war. The war images inserted in the film recall both the realities of war on innocent children civilians and the distance of viewers staring at the first so-called “living-room war.” The film enhances the gap between watching and acting at a time when involvement into the Vietnam War was becoming unpopular. Stephen Whitfield’s article on the Pentagon Papers retraces how the press asserted its role as the Fourth Estate by publishing a critical investigation into the U.S. government’s Vietnam War lies. Detailing the justice embroilment (including an espionage trial against Daniel Ellsberg who decided to leak the Top Secret documents after realizing that President Nixon had consciously engaged his country on “the trajectory of a moral and military disaster”), Whitfield offers an interesting case study of whistleblowing that foretold the Watergate scandal. The focus on Ellsberg’s transformation from hawk to dove in the span of a few years calls attention to the fragility of truth in times of war. The Pentagon Papers nowadays resonate as a warning against all war lies. Anne-Lise Marin-Lamellet furthers the argument that some wars are more controversial than others by focusing on the representation of the Falklands War (April 2-April 14, 1982) in British cinema. Although few British directors have actually engaged with the stories of the war itself, Marin-Lamellet provides an overview of the films tackling the subject and demonstrates that the veteran is a recurring figure of discontent, exposing the discrepancies between official speeches and realities. The war may have been a victory for Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister who ordered the Falklands intervention, but Marin-Mellet argues that most veterans express resentment at a government that abused their naiveté with false promises. In the last article of this section, Delphine Letort explores the issues of ethics raised by fiction and nonfiction films that plumb the moral depths of drone warfare. Eye in the Sky (Gavin Hood, 2016) and The Good Kill (Andrew Niccol, 2014) redefine the war film by slowing down the narrative to open up space for debating the “remote killing matrix” that transforms the rules of war. By turning the members of the drone operating teams (including the image analysts and the operator expected to carry out the “targeted killings”) into the spectators of their own acts, the films enhance the time left for them to ponder the meaning of their acts. The urgency felt by soldiers risking their lives on the ground dissolves into the mental conflicts which drone operators are confronted with, obliged as they are to make decisions of life and death from positions that put them at a safe distance from the conflict zones. When the ‘just war’ principles no longer prevail, confusion sets in and makes room for trauma.

8The second part examines several artistic or cultural projects that question the human impacts of war. Mathilde Rogez focuses on South African writer Craig Higginson’s The Landscape Painter (2011), a novel that intertwines two timelines through the memories of its protagonist Arthur Bailey. While the story is set in post-war London where the narrator lives his old days, the painter also reminisces events of the Boer War in the late 1800s. Higginson uses the dual time frame to draw connections between the two periods, using photographs as prompts to re-frame the past. The painter’s memories keep haunting the present and the author aptly captures the details of the traumatic Battle of Spion Kop by delving into the visual imagination of his character-narrator. Rogez highlights the aesthetic impact of the Boer War on Bailey whose painterly gaze cannot reconcile the Sublime with the spectacle of empty landscapes to be colonized. Richard Tholoniat sets aside fiction to read the Carnet de Campagne (1902) written by Colonel Georges de Villebois-Mareuil and published two years after his death in South Africa. Tholoniat uses the diary to better understand the colonial and personal mission that motivated Villebois-Mareuil, a decorated veteran who believed that Dreyfus had tarnished the honor of the French army. Volunteering to command a Boer regiment during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), Villebois-Mareuil was soon promoted General commanding the International Legion. Hailed as a hero in some circles, including among the Action Française anti-republican sympathizers, Villebois-Mareuil is now a contested historical figure and the statues commemorating his bravery at war are regularly degraded. Simona Tobia studies the oral archives left by former women prisoners of war who testified about their experience of interrogation by Nazi soldiers on immigrating to the U.S. Analyzing the sound archives of the Veterans History Project within the Library of Congress, and at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, DC, which both hold records of these testimonies, Tobia sheds light on the vulnerability the women expressed in the face of rape used as a weapon of war during interrogations. Their testimonies are integral to their healing process as women moving to a new life in the U.S., an empowering process that Tobia illuminates through a close analysis of their words. Subarno Chattarji’s contribution is based on two novels by Dương Thu Hương, a former member of the Women's Youth Brigade who tended to wounded soldiers during the Vietnam War and believed in the communist ideals of the revolution. Yet Novel Without a Name (1995) and Memories of a Pure Spring (2000) reveal her frustrations at postwar Vietnam where the dominant narratives of war left no place for the enduring trauma the writer could not silence as a witness. Her novels use fiction to convey “granular descriptions of war horrors” and its terrible aftermaths. This led to her being imprisoned, demonstrating the controversial aspects of the Vietnam-American war memories at a national level within Vietnam.

9The last part of this issue moves from the topic of war to the construction of peace. Slimane Hargas explores the essays written for the British Council funded project Lives Entwined (2000), which assembled an array of authors from Ireland and the UK to discuss the cultural and historical ties between British and Irish people. Examining these primary source materials in detail to assess the significance of cultural and political assumptions about British and Irish populations, Hargas is able to decipher how the colonial and postcolonial British-Irish relations have evolved in the wake of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, allowing for a complex discussion of anti-Irish and anti-British stereotypes. Lives Entwined includes testimonies, political analyses, academic essays, artistic works, articulating a variety of perspectives that help the scholar comprehend the long-term stakes of a ‘dormant’ conflict. Lives Entwined provides a platform for a better understanding between British and Irish people. Drawing on the British feminist magazine Spare Rib, which published a series of articles about the Greenham Women’s Movement fighting against the presence of American nuclear weapons at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, Florence Binard examines the strategies and political beliefs behind the women’s collective determined to bring change through protest. The women’s action started in 1981 and continued until the last missiles were removed in 1991. Binard evokes the media response to shed light on the diversity of motives among the women committing to the nuclear free world. Michel Prum concludes this issue with an article that provides a challenging reading of war through Darwinist principles. Prum demonstrates that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution encompassed in the “survival of the fittest” formula may be misleading as regards the notion of war, for the laws of Nature do not provide a code of morality and politics. Prum thus posits a critique of social Darwinism by arguing that Darwin’s evolutionary thought cannot be appropriated to justify war, which he abhorred.