Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Heather A. Warfield, Stéphane Michonneau and Franck Viltart

Introduction

Heather A. Warfield, Stéphane Michonneau et Franck Viltart

Introduction

Benjamin Gilles

1 Revenir à Verdun. Les significations du pèlerinage de Jean Norton Cru

Laura A. Macaluso

2 Three Rude Crosses: Reflections on the Jerome Family Pilgrimage to France, 1919

Elise Julien

3 Des voyages empêchés aux voyages encadrés : les Allemands sur le front Ouest

James Taub

4 Leurs Frères Sont Nos Frères

Franck Viltart

5 Du vestige de guerre au lieu de pèlerinage : la Caverne du Dragon sur le Chemin des Dames (1918-1945)

Florian Hensel

6 Le Hartmannswillerkopf, une mise en mémoire à la française ?

Aaron Heft

7 When the Last Man Is Gone

Chantal Kesteloot et Bénédicte Rochet

8 Pèlerinages et Seconde Guerre mondiale : nouveaux lieux, nouvelles pratiques, nouveaux pèlerins ?

Paul Hardin Kapp

9 Iconography and Meaning of the First World War American Cemeteries and Monuments in France

Mourad Djebabla

10 Pèlerinage de Vimy : définition et usages d’un lieu de mémoire national canadien (1936 à nos jours)

Yann Lagadec

11 La construction d’une mémoire régimentaire : les pèlerinages des anciens poilus du 19^e régiment d’infanterie, de la Grande Guerre aux années 1970

Megan Kelleher

12 Hallowed Ground: British Battlefield Tourism to the Former Western Front

Philippe Diest

13 Pèleriner dans les régions françaises envahies avec les guides Michelin des champs de bataille

Heather A. Warfield

14 The Belleau Wood Battlescape: A Natural Environment that Offers Affordances for Pilgrims

Contributor Notes

Index

Pilgrimage Studies

Heather A. Warfield, Stéphane Michonneau, and Franck Viltart

Introduction

This volume emerged from a symposium, held in the Chemin des Dames and Château-Thierry, in the Aisne Department, in October 2023. The originality of the collective work lies in its multidisciplinary and international approach. On the one hand, historians, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and art historians strive to understand the pilgrimage gesture in its practice and historicity. In addition, the diversity of sources in this work reflects the diversity of research perspectives: war diaries, correspondence, press, illustrated guidebooks, photographs and films, private archives, interviews, monuments and plaques, and so on. The wide range of sites studied covers the entire Western Front of the First World War, from Diksmuide in Belgium to Hartmannswillerkopf in Alsace. Finally, specialists from a variety of geographical backgrounds have attempted to account for the commonalities and differences affecting pilgrimage practices documented in the project: United States, France and United Kingdom and their empires, Belgium and Germany.

The book, based on the symposium papers of various contributors, does not claim to be exhaustive: there are still many prospects for future work. For example, the mourning practices of colonized populations have not yet been identified, with the exception of Canada, a singular case in some respects. Similarly, the pilgrimages of German pilgrims certainly deserve greater attention. Finally, what is true for the Western Front is not necessarily true for the other fronts of the conflict, whether in Eastern Europe, Italy, the Eastern Mediterranean, or the colonial empires. Future volumes may explore these other dimensions of pilgrimages.

Positioning Battlefield Pilgrimages within the Field of Pilgrimage Studies

One of the aims of this volume is to forge a connection between battlefield pilgrimages (historical and contemporary) and the growing academic field of pilgrimage studies. As such, we view the myriad iterations of battlefield pilgrimages as expressions of global pilgrimage phenomena. In a broad sense, pilgrimages are timeless human practices, historically rooted in religious and spiritual traditions, and which serve as transformative journeys for individuals seeking meaning and connection. Battlefield pilgrimages extend these religious and spiritual traditions into landscapes of war, often viewed as hallowed ground and imbued with a unique sacred energy that is tied to the soldiers who fought, and died, there. The battlefield, as a site where death occurs, becomes a “thin place” where this world merges with the “other world.” Visiting such places is rooted in ancient practices that include the establishment of a shrine or chapel in the midst of a battlefield. These shrines served many purposes which included being a place for prayer for the families of those who died, a place to commemorate the battle, and a place to seek solace and reflect on the meaning of war, peace, and reconciliation. An example of this type of shrine is Battle Abbey, a historic site located in the town of Battle, East Sussex, England. The shrine was erected by William the Conqueror between 1070-1094 to commemorate his victory at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The abbey was built on the site where the battle took place, with the high altar of its church reputedly marking the spot where King Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, was killed. Pilgrimages to Battle Abbey began immediately after the shrine was built and continue through the present day.

Battle Abbey, along with other types of sacred sites, is at the center of a growing global trend of pilgrimages. Often at the intersection of cultural and heritage tourism, these sites offer a point of connection with people and events of the past and many who visit them state they are on a pilgrimage. After the COVID-19 pandemic, a large percentage of travelers have become interested in meaningful experiences that reflect a connection with history, the natural world, and with other people. Similar to Battle Abbey, the battlefields, cemeteries, memorials, and monuments at the First World War (FWW) Western Front offer the types of connections people are seeking as well as the pilgrim identity that links pilgrims across the world. The fact that pilgrimages to these sites have been occurring since the FWW heightens the bond between modern pilgrims and their historical counterparts. All of these pilgrimages offer insights into how people make meaning after war, conflict, and trauma as well as how collective memory is formed and maintained. As a result, the study of battlefield pilgrimages contributes to our collective understanding of the types of rituals, commemoration activities, and structural edifices that humans prioritize after war. Battlefield pilgrimages also enhance our holistic understanding of all pilgrimage phenomena.

At present, the scholarship on battlefield pilgrimages is multidisciplinary in nature, but its lineage is grounded in military history, an unsurprising fact given the contextual factors that precede these types of pilgrimages. Mark Connelly’s recent book Postcards from the Western Front: Pilgrims, Veterans, and Tourists after the Great War is not only steeped in his expertise as a military historian, but a bridge into the field of pilgrimage studies due to Connelly’s emphasis on the personhood and identity(ies) of the pilgrim.¹ It is precisely the identity construct that is fueling the global rise of all types of pilgrimages and is central to our understanding of both interwar era and contemporary pilgrimages to the Western Front. In addition to Connelly’s text, John Eade and Mario Katić explored battlefield pilgrimages in their edited book Military Pilgrimage and Battlefield Tourism: Commemorating the Dead. The collection explores topics related to commemoration, healing, and the experiences of military groups that make pilgrimages to other groups’ places of pilgrimage.²

Moreover, there are a number of scholars within the field of pilgrimage studies, spanning myriad academic disciplines, who have turned their attention to battlefield pilgrimages. From a broad perspective, battlefield pilgrimage phenomena are nested under the domain of “dark tourism” or “dark pilgrimages.” “Dark tourism” refers to the practice of visiting locations that are associated with death, disaster, tragedy, or suffering. These sites may include battlefields, concentration camps, memorials, underground sites, or places associated with natural disasters, prisons, or places of public executions. While closely related to dark tourism, “dark pilgrimage” often carries a more personal or spiritual dimension. It refers to journeys undertaken to places of tragedy, suffering, or martyrdom for the purpose of remembrance, mourning, and commemoration. While “dark tourism” can sometimes involve casual interest, “dark pilgrimage” tends to involve intentional reflection and emotional or spiritual engagement with the past. Notable publications on the topics of “dark tourism” and “dark pilgrimage” include Dark Tourism and Pilgrimage³ and The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies.⁴

The pilgrimages represented in this volume reflect different occurrences of pilgrimages that began during the Great War and, in many cases, continue to present. There is considerable overlap between tourism and pilgrimages; however, guidebooks and other publications during the immediate post-war era distinguish between activities that occur within the battlefield context and those that are adjacent to the battlefield. For activities that occur at the battlefield, and associated cemeteries and monuments, there is broad consensus that such activities are labeled as pilgrimages. The activities that occur outside of this context, such as a military parade, are not considered a pilgrimage.

Definition of Terms

As this volume is structured to examine the pilgrim, the site, and the practices that connect them, it is useful to define the terms. The site is the easiest to define. Battlefield pilgrimages occur at battlefields, which include the terrain where the battle occurred, military cemeteries, and memorials or monuments erected to commemorate the battle or the soldiers who died during the course of war. Because the volume is specifically focused on the Western Front of the FWW, the sites are those that are geographically positioned within the territory known as the Western Front from 1914 to 1918.

Unlike the site, what, and who, constitutes a pilgrim is a more difficult question to answer. In a general sense, a pilgrim is one who visits the aforementioned sites with the intent to engage in thoughtful reflection, and who may also engage in commemorative or remembrance practices. During the interwar era, pilgrims were collectively recognized as such due to their direct, personal connections to the battlefields, military cemeteries, or memorials and monuments. The two most notable examples were veterans of the war or family members visiting the graves of loved ones or the battlefields where their loved ones fought.

With regards to contemporary pilgrims, a useful distinction between a tourist and a pilgrim can be understood by the historical precedent outlined earlier. Many modern pilgrims have personal connections to battlefields, cemeteries, memorials, and monuments. For example, a direct ancestor may have fought at Verdun or may be buried in the military cemetery. Another example of a pilgrim is someone who is retracing the steps of their great-grandfather in the Somme or connected to the landscape through another group identifier, such as a Canadian youth, who is undertaking a pilgrimage to Vimy. In the case of the latter, there is a national infrastructure that supports one’s status as a pilgrim and, in the former, one may choose to identify as a pilgrim based on the personal significance of the battlefield and the connection to one’s ancestor. In the absence of this personal connection, a pilgrim is one who either (a) intentionally sets out on a journey called a pilgrimage or (b) accidentally becomes a pilgrim due to the inner processes that occur at a site and that have a lasting effect.

The pilgrimage practices, or the journey, are those internal and external actions that link the pilgrim to the site. Many practices have remained constant throughout time, such as taking photos of a grave, removing soil from the grave site, or participating in a commemoration ceremony. Other practices have evolved. For example, interwar era pilgrims sailed mainly on ships, which led to intense communal experiences during transit. Conversely, such intense communal experiences are now often encountered virtually, and amongst pilgrims who are not geographically bound to one another. Practices are also individually constructed, based on the motivations for the pilgrimage, and are reflected in the types of connections the pilgrim has to the sites.

History of Battlefield Pilgrimages in Europe

As previously noted, battlefield pilgrimages have existed in some form for as long as wars have been fought. However, it is in the 19th century that the practice took root culturally and socially, involving a mutual co-construction of pilgrimage and war site. In his work on this topic, Gilles Malandain has clearly shown that battlefields were the site of a multiplicity of practices involving a variety of actors, from the Schlachtfeldtourismus organized by the military both to record battle plans and to pay patriotic tribute, to the scholarly visits developed by antiquarians, those practiced by doctors for the purpose of experimentation, and, finally, for tourists and pilgrims.⁵ These pilgrimages, with their diverse motivations, focused on surveying the terrain where battles were fought, notably at Waterloo, which became the matrix of this infatuation with places of war. They were also linked to the development of the transportation infrastructures that made them possible.

The 1860s marked a turning point, when the marking of Napoleonic battle sites took off in Europe. Visits to battle sites became part of the quest for “monuments” to the national past, and were extended to older sites, in line with the “battle-history” prescriptions of the time, tending to re-signify insignificant landscapes according to new values (Bouvines and Alesia are good examples in France, with the UK as a pioneer). The 1860s also saw the reappearance of war on the European stage, accelerating the movement to imitate the United States on Civil War sites. The compilation of battlefields became serial, despite investments that were necessarily dependent on the political circumstances of the present day. Historians, antiquarians and archaeologists were the first to appreciate the need to visit historical sites: by surveying the sites, they came into contact with the past, as second eyewitnesses to the battle. The “desire to grasp history” redoubles the logic of patriotism.

By this time, battlefield visits had become a relatively familiar experience: humanitarians (Henry Dunant at Solferino, for example), “onlookers” (nicely named “battle strollers” by the Germans) and press correspondents all attest to the growing presence of civilians on the battlefields, halfway between philanthropism and voyeurism, and in competition with the soldiers themselves. These seem to be opposed by “good visitors” motivated by patriotism, followers of a new cult of the fatherland’s dead in the form of necropolises (the first occurrence of which appeared in Italy in 1870). In Germany, patriotic excursions took on unprecedented proportions, with national pilgrimages promoted by the Emperor (in Metz, for example), in order to sacralize the new state’s frontier space. The Franco-German War of 1870 was not forgotten, even by the French who visited the sites of defeat: no fewer than 450 commemorative monuments and 25 ossuaries were inaugurated in France between 1870 and 1878. Here, the national reappropriation of a mutilated territory is experienced in an emotional and funerary mode. At the end of the century, battlefield tourism intensified, thanks to the distribution of compilations and atlases of famous battles, increasingly dense marking of sites and a certain form of spectacularization of war sites (e.g., panoramas, re-enactments, first films) in a recreational mode. The final step was taken in 1913, when the Belgian government designated the Waterloo site as a remarkable “site” or “monument,” paving the way for a new avatar of the notion of heritage: the memorial landscape.

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a profound shift in sensibilities: while Romantic sensibilities tended to consolidate the battle scene as a central motif in the collective imagination, between dread and fascination, where the scopic vision combines both the beauty and ugliness of war, the battlefield as a place of triumph and heroism was transformed into a field of death, a place of carnage, “a cemetery without walls.” This shift in perception of the battle site altered pilgrimage practices: new attention was paid to soldiers who died on the battlefield, and to their medical or hygienic treatment. The gathering of corpses in ossuaries or ad hoc cemeteries became the norm, transforming the battlefield into an orderly, sanitized place. The treatment of officers’ bodies was extended to the common soldier in the form of collective graves, then individualized and finally monumentalized ossuaries. By the end of the century, the ossuary had become an instrument of collective mourning and reparation. Thus, the necropolization of battlefields, increasingly institutionalized (Le Souvenir français was created in 1887, for example), paved the way for the consecration of the monument to the dead of the 1914–1918 war.

The sphere of the sacred broadened to consider war relics and ruins as relics, invested with new memorial values, far removed from the looting and plundering practices common at the beginning of the century. At the same time, the need arose to preserve these remains in small museums that structured visits and accompanied the rise of military museums at the end of the century.

The nineteenth century thus transformed the battlefield into a “place of memory” and a historical site whose visit arouses emotion, reflection and inspiration. For pilgrims, there is a clear tension between a cognitive pole (to know and inspect the battlefield) and an emotional pole (to walk through it). While militaries exercise their professional expertise in the context of staff exercises (i.e., “staff rides”), the passion for antiquarianism is another modality of visit that proceeds from an in-depth investigation of the battle site and, in its own way, participates in the constitution of a scientific field. Tourists, on the other hand, prefer to visit sites charged with concrete meaning (the Wellington elm, for example, and later remains and monuments). Their visits are more akin to a symbolic appropriation of the battlefield than a rational grasp of the territory: the panoramic viewpoint, the re-enactment shows, and the surveying of the site engage their bodies and senses in a sensitive rather than intellectual experience. This “experience” of visiting the site from a human perspective, centered on the memory of the dead, foreshadowed the many pilgrimages that followed the FWW.

It is estimated that over 9 million combatants lost their lives in the FWW. In the end, it was the Western Front, between France and Belgium, that caused the greatest loss of life, and where the outcome of the war was decided. During the war itself, as territorial gains were made, soldiers returned to the temporary cemeteries where their comrades had fallen. From the end of the war, and in the decades that followed, tens of thousands of veterans, families of the deceased and official delegations undertook pilgrimages to the battlefields in search of missing loved ones, in a vast movement of collective or individual homage unprecedented in history and on a global scale.⁶

To help them on their journey, pilgrimage guides to the old front were published, outlining itineraries, objectives and prescriptions for these pilgrims, such as the famous Michelin Illustrated Guides to the Battlefields, published in several languages and selling some 1.5 million copies between 1917 and 1926. In France, from 1919 onwards, railroad companies set up regular circuits to visit the battlefields of the North and East, departing from Paris and certain cities. These “patriotic pilgrimage” circuits, promoted by poster campaigns, enabled visitors to visit numerous sites around which itineraries were structured. One of the aims of the first pilgrimages to what Roland Dorgelès called “flattened countries” in his 1923 book Le Réveil des morts, was to stun visitors with the sheer scale of the war’s devastation.⁷ To this end, tours organized by transport or tourism companies must be above all edifying. This is also the case for schoolchildren, who were encouraged to justify the existence of the conflict by seeing the extent of the damage caused by the enemy. As part of these organized pilgrimages, or on their own, bereaved family members visited battlefields and cemeteries as part of a mourning process, in search of a body and to give meaning to the death of a loved one.