Behind Their Lines

Käthe Kollwitz, "The Mothers" Although best known for her Anne of Green Gables fiction series, L.M. Montgomery was first publishe...

The Sisters , by Edmund Dulac IWM ART 2059 One of the best-known English poems of the First World War is one of the earliest written: Lauren...

  Red Cross Hospital #6-7, Souilly France (Oct. 1918)  Library of Congress, Signal Corps On the night of January 19, 1919, a sentry on the d...

For a long time, people have hand-copied poems that they love. The scribing of a poem slows our reading of it; writing out a poem makes us p...

Just four days before her twenty-fourth birthday*, Kathleen Montgomery Coates lost her only brother. Twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant B...

Charing Cross Station Detraining Wounded Lobley J Hodgson,  ©IWM ART2758 In early May of 1916, Helen Mackay recorded in her wartime journal,...

“Undaunted April crept and sewed     Her violets in dead men's faces...”* A previous post on this blog has shared Muriel Stuart’s “ It’s...

Vestal Virgin, by Antonio Canova (Getty Museum) In the podcast episode “Surplus Women,” Caroline Campton says,  In 1921, the British governm...

Aline Kilmer with Kenton, c. 1909 (Joyce Kilmer House & New Brunswick Historical Society) Joyce Kilmer was a rising American poet, famou...

The Great Offensive, Samuel Begg ( Illustrated London News, 1916) In 1918, shortly after the death of her brother on the Western Front, Marj...

Lt. Arthur Greg, Quarry Bank archive, NT On April 23, 1917, 2Lt Arthur T. Greg was killed in aerial combat over St. Quentin, France. He was ...