The White Distance’ is a work of fiction set in Australia and Antarctica at the time of World War I. The story focuses on two lovers, Dora and Daniel, who are part of Australia’s vigorous anti-war movement. Each of the lovers comes to the movement for different reasons. Dora’s beloved brother has been killed in France; Daniel is a printer interested in the new left-wing ideas emerging in Europe, especially Russia. Wanting to escape public pressure to join up and fight, Daniel takes a position with an Antarctic expedition and travels there with a small team from the Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology to collect weather data. This was a time of major Antarctic exploration, with the Australian expedition led by Douglas Mawson taking place in 1913. In Antarctica, in the novel, the leader of Daniel’s expedition suffers a nervous breakdown and becomes dangerously violent, believing his men are German spies. Daniel and his colleagues have to consider the possibility that the only way to stop their leader might be to kill him. After Daniel leaves, Dora joins a more radical anti-war group led by the charismatic Malachy Mara. She is forced to reconsider what she believes when the group decides to place a pipe bomb in a railway station, which will kill many civilians. Worse for her, she is likely to be the one selected to put the bomb into position. ‘The White Distance’ is also a love story about two lovers who, after being very close, are separated by a great and unfathomable distance. Dora and Daniel struggle to keep their love alive by writing letters to one another, even though they cannot be posted, and keeping journals that will not be read until Daniel returns. Each confronts a deep personal crisis without the other there for support. They use their words to one another to draw the strength to hold on. Although set in the past, the novel raises issues which are relevant to current international and national concerns such as the clash of ideals and personal morality, terrorism, public violence, war and pacifism, love and separation. Exegesis The accompanying exegesis, ‘Reframing the Past for the Present: Writing ‘The White Distance’’, examines the research material and creative influences behind the development of the novel, ‘The White Distance’. It considers the issues which I confronted in writing an historical work of fiction, and concludes by placing the novel in the wider context of current debates about Australian historical fiction. / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2008

English composer Gerald Finzi's (1901-1956) early life was plagued by the deaths of close friends and family, and the beginning of the first world war. Before his eighteenth birthday, Finzi lost his three brothers, his father and his beloved composition teacher. To mourn these deaths and perhaps as a reaction to the first world war, Finzi began to compose his Requiem da Camera (op. 3b, 1924). Finzi completed three movements of this four-movement work during his lifetime, and left sketches for the completion of the unfinished third movement. Beginning in 1984, Philip Thomas, with the blessing of the Finzi family and the Finzi Trust, began examining the extant sketches in an attempt to complete the unfinished third movement. Thomas completed and published his edition of the Requiem da Camera in 1992. After a careful examination of this completion, a number of editorial questions were raised. This document was created to address these questions. It sets out historical parameters to provide context for Finzi's original composition, goes on to describe the development of liturgical and non-liturgical requiem composition, and discusses the development of British non-liturgical requiem (and requiem-like) compositions in the twentieth century. Thomas's completed third movement is compared to Finzi's source material. Four major areas of discrepancy are presented and examined to bring the movement closer to Finzi's original compositional intent. The document concludes with a new completion of the third movement. It combines the work of Finzi and Thomas, along with information gleaned in the process of creating this document, the remainder of the original Finzi composition, and other of Finzi's compositions with similar qualities from this era.

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Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Mark P. Parillo / War occupies an important place in the collective memory of the United States, with many of its defining moments centered on times of intense trauma. American memory of World War I, however, pales in comparison to the Civil War and World War II, which has led to the conflict’s categorization as a “forgotten” war—terminology that ignores the widespread commemorative efforts undertaken by Americans in the war’s aftermath. In fact, the interwar period witnessed a multitude of memorialization projects, ranging from architectural memorials to literature. It is this dichotomy between contemporary understanding and the reality of the conflict’s aftermath that is at the heart of this study, which seeks to illuminate the prominent position held by the First World War in early twentieth century American society. The dissertation examines three war memorials: the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri; the District of Columbia World War Memorial in West Potomac Park, Washington, D.C.; and Kansas State University’s Memorial Stadium in Manhattan, Kansas. The work also analyzes seven volumes of soldier poetry, published between 1916 and 1921: Poems, by Alan Seeger; With the Armies of France, by William Cary Sanger, Jr.; Echoes of France: Verses from my Journal and Letters, March 14, 1918 to July 14, 1919 and Afterwards, by Amy Robbins Ware; The Tempering, by Howard Swazey Buck; Wampum and Old Gold, by Hervey Allen; The Log of the Devil Dog and Other Verses, by Byron H. Comstock; and Rhymes of a Lost Battalion Doughboy, by Lee Charles McCollum. Despite the presence of some thematic similarities between the two modes of remembrance, each mode had different objectives and audiences, contributing to the creation of distinct and competing forms of collective memory regarding American involvement in the Great War. Taken together, the two modes provide a more complete picture of American memorialization to World War I than if studied independently. This interdisciplinary approach to understanding commemorative efforts during the interwar period is vital to understanding the war and its legacy, and thus beneficial to both historical scholarship and the public.

A study of the rebirth and development of Poland after World War I.

General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck’s East African Campaign was a conventional war of movement. Lettow based his operations on the military principles deduced from his thorough German military education and oversea deployments to China and German South West Africa. Upon assignment to German East Africa, he sought to convert the colony’s protectorate force from a counterinsurgency force to a conventional military force. His conventional strategy succeeded early in the war, especially at the Battle of Tanga in October 1914. However, his strategy failed as the war in East Africa intensified. He suffered a calamitous defeat at the Battle of Mahiwa in November 1917, and the heavy losses forced Lettow to adopt the counterinsurgency tactics of the colonial protectorate force.

Magister Artium - MA / Mathew Arnold's 1867 poem presents romantic love as a condition of permanence that can offer refuge from a changeable world. Sixty years later, however, Virginia Woolf observes that romance has become rare as a subject of modern poetry. Her suggestion that there is an historical explanation for this change in literary subject matter is the starting point for this study of the representation of women in the early poetry of T.S. Eliot. Whereas Woolf tentatively dates the "death" of romance to the First World War I will suggest that this change in poetic sentiment is evident in Eliot's early work, some of which predates the war. In the poems under discussion, written between the years 1910 ("Portrait of a Lady" and "The Love Song of J.

The entry of the United States into the Great War was enthusiastically endorsed by Congress on April 3, 1917. Even after the declaration of war, however, the exact nature of American participation was unclear. This thesis examines the role of American involvement in the war, as it responded to requests for support from Great Britain and France.

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