Digitized diary of mother of a First World War soldier preserved online - Ireland's Technology News Service

I expect will see more history online as we get closer to the 2014 centenary.

A digitized diary written in 1916 offering a candid and poignant insight into the life of families of Irish soldiers during the First World War and the turbulent events of the 1916 Rising has gone live.

The Diary A Family at War: Mary Martin’s Diary, 1 January – 25 May 1916 is an online resource developed and produced by students on Trinity College Dublin’s M Phil in Digital Humanities and Culture, and the Digital Arts and Humanities PhD in UCC, using a manuscript treasure from the collections of the National Library of Ireland.

Martin, a widow and mother of 12 children, living in the affluent Dublin suburb of Monkstown, began a diary shortly after she received official word that her son Charlie, a soldier with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, was missing in action on the Salonika front.

She wrote in her first entry on New Year’s Day 1916: “Since I heard you were missing as well as wounded, it has occurred to me to write the diary in the form of a letter. We hope to hear from you soon. Till then cannot communicate with you & later on when you read this it will you know what has been happening.”

Digitised diary of mother of a First World War soldier preserved online - New Media - New Media | siliconrepublic.com - Ireland's Technology News Service

The First World War vol.1 1/4 and 2/4

Not sure where the last two clips are, or where the other volumes might be, but here's 1 and 2.

Poetry and the first world war: Late starter | The Economist

A biography of Edward Thomas reviewed here:

Poetry and the first world war: Late starter | The Economist

Another book for my Shelfari list.

The Wellington Advertiser - Raid on Guelph novitiate drew national attention in 1918

First in a series, chasing shirkers in Canada,

Conscription seemed to add fresh fervour to the words and actions of the super-patriots, who were vocal in their characterization of Germans as heathens. They wanted the war pushed aggressively whatever the cost in dollars and human lives.

Much of their attention was directed at shirkers - young men who avoided military service by claiming to be agricultural workers (who were exempt from military service during the 1917 harvest), and those who faked physical incapacities to avoid service.

In the spring of 1918 they focused on a another target: the Roman Catholic novitiate at Guelph, which they believed was overrun with young men determined to avoid military service.

Charges that draft evaders had taken refuge at the college began to circulate in the spring of 1918. An article published in the Orange Sentinel, a paper published by the Orange Order, made the charge a much more serious one. That article was republished by several newspapers in Ontario.

That resulted in a visit by members of the military and government officials to the novitiate on June 7 at about 9:30pm. Major C. A. Macauley, who headed the group that included military personnel and Guelph police officers, presented their credentials.

The Wellington Advertiser - Raid on Guelph novitiate drew national attention in 1918

Art on the battlefield and a lost generation - Books - Yorkshire Post

More WW1 literature by a contemporary author.

Art and war collide in Booker Prize winner 
Pat Barker’s latest novel. The author talks to Yvette Huddleston about Toby’s Room.

“What I am interested in is why human beings slaughter each other on a mass scale,” says novelist Pat Barker.

“Most other animals don’t do that. What is it about the nature of human beings that we do?”

Barker’s latest book, Toby’s Room, focuses on the experiences of a group of young men and one young woman during the First World War. It is an era Barker has explored before, in the 1990s, in her powerful and moving Regeneration Trilogy – Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and the Booker prize-winning The Ghost Road. At the centre of the three novels was the pioneering work of Dr William Rivers in the treatment of the psychological trauma of war.

Barker was initially inspired to write about the First World War by family history. “My grandfather was bayoneted – he had a huge scar – and my step-father was gassed in the trenches at the age of 15,” she says.

What brought Barker back to “the war to end all wars” for Toby’s Room was writing one of her more recent novels, Double Vision (2003), which dealt with modern warfare and featured a photojournalist among its characters.

Art on the battlefield and a lost generation - Books - Yorkshire Post

The Grimsby Chums Memorial Projects

A site I’ll have to add to the links.

The Grimsby Chums Memorial Projects

Why we should celebrate the First World War as well as commemorate it | BBC History Magazine

Conclusion from Hew Strachen’s column,

In 1904 Britain and France came to an understanding which formed part of the reason why the British army went to Europe ten years later. The entente required Germany to see it as a hostile alliance for it to become one. It was a resolution of outstanding colonial disputes between two imperial powers, a continuation of old diplomacy between two great powers, more than it was a harbinger of the war which ushered in the modern world. But the Manchester Guardian, whose editor CP Scott would oppose Britain’s entry to the war in July 1914, welcomed "the new friendship" for ‘"the chance it affords of a genuine alliance between the democracies in both countries for the furtherance of a common democratic cause".

We need to reintegrate these ideas, which suggest that the First World War was fought for values that we also respect, as we approach its centenary. If we cannot admit competing and sometimes contradictory interpretations of the war, then its commemoration is unlikely to deepen our understanding, and so will prove as futile and wasteful as the stock clichés about its appalling losses.

Why we should celebrate the First World War as well as commemorate it | BBC History Magazine