Nicholas J. Saunders & Paul Cornish (ed.). Contested objects: material memories of the Great War.

Nicholas J. Saunders & Paul Cornish (ed.). Contested objects: material memories of the Great War. NICHOLAS J. SAUNDERS & PAUL CORNISH (ed.). Contested objects:material memories of the Great War. xx+311 pages, 87 illustrations.2009. London: Routledge; 978-0-415-45070-6 hardback. Papers on the ethnology, material culture and archaeology of WorldWar I are assembled in the book under review here, the proceedings of acolloquium held in 2004 at the Imperial War Museum in London. The 2004gathering followed a first meeting, also organised by the Imperial WarMuseum, which considered similar themes and which was published in 2004as Matters of conflicts: material culture, memory and the First WorldWar. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Nicholas Saunders and Paul Cornish who organised the meeting andedited the volume set an extremely broad agenda: it embraces themes asdiverse as purely anrhropological approaches to the Great War, analysesof its material culture and objects (as varied as the multiplecomponents of the nations engaged in that conflict), reflections onnotions of territory marked by conflict (landscape), or more prosaicallycombat zones (battlefields). We end in the mud of the trenches, withsome thoughts on what an archaeology of the Great War in western Europemight be. After 7 pages of introduction, it seems legitimate to askwhether it is really possible to provide even the beginnings of ananswer to all these questions or to treat even in a synthetic mannersubjects as widely defined. The 20 contributions to the volume demonstrate the range of subjectmatter which the organisers of the colloquium wished to address but alsoits too great diversity. Indeed the papers presented often treat but one(too) specific aspect of the themes retained, and this rather succinctly(the papers are rarely longer than 15 pages including illustrations andreferences). And while some articles reveal fascinating andwell-mastered fields of research, others seem to be little more thanstylistic exercises chosen purely because they fitted the scope of themeeting. In the first category, there is an interesting analysis of theaesthetic, or other, impact of the German steel helmet (Stahlhelm)outside its area of origin throughout the twentieth century. However,the most original research is, in my opinion, a typological study oftrench clubs (for use on trench raids or in hand-to-hand combat); theseobjects, examined in six London museums, form the basis of a systematicconsideration of a sensitive subject in First World War studies. At theother end of the spectrum, the relevance of certain contributions couldbe questioned: amongst them considerations of British war trophies, thesymbolism displayed on British war medals, British military heraldry,grand-father's diary, postcards from the Argonne, or the over-useof quotations to make up for the lack of a broader vision within anarrowly defined topic. In the end the most accomplished contributions to the volume arethe articles, for example on Flanders and northern Italy, which take thefirst steps towards an archaeology of the Great War--a discipline whichis still looking for a legitimate place in the archaeological agenda ofmany countries. In reviewing the state of research in their country oforigin in 2004 each author has shown the potential of archaeologicalenquiries into certain aspects of World War I. Since then First WorldWar archaeology has grown in stature, notably in France, and we canreasonably expect that the discipline will be taken into properconsideration in the near future. Unfortunately, because of the wish to address topics too varied andtoo diverse, the proceedings of the second colloquium at the ImperialWar Museum end up as no more than a collection of disparate articles.Significantly, the multifaceted aspects that the organisers of thiscolloquium mention in their introduction are not comprehensively summedup in a conclusion. By embracing so many subjects whose only link seemsto be a connexion with the history of the First World War, the messagehas become diluted. A French proverb (warning against biting off morethan one can chew) sums this up well: 'qui trop embrasse, maletreint'. YVES DESFOSSES Direction regionale des affaires culturelles, Service regional del'archeologie de Champagne-Ardenne, Chalons-en-Champagne, France(Email: yves.desfosses@culture.gouv.fr) (Translated from the French byReviews Editor)