 Welcome everybody who's joining us. We'll get started in just a moment. In the meantime, if you'd like to tell us, introduce yourselves and tell us where you're calling in from. You can post in the chat. There's a button at the bottom that says chat. And then on the right, you can see all panelists, but please press all panelists and attendees so that everybody can see your message because I can see my fellow panelists so typing and I think only we can see it. So those joining us, please do press all panelists and attendees and feel free to introduce yourselves as we wait. Okay, well, I think we'll just get started and we'll make sure we maximize our time. So I can see the attendee numbers rising. Thank you all so much for joining and for being with us today. It's an absolute pleasure for me to welcome everyone on behalf of the Sir Michael Howard Center here at King's College London and our center promotes the scholarly and study of the history of war in all of its dimensions. We train research students, we host research projects and conferences, and essentially we promote the study of war from the ancient world to the recent past and so today we're taking you back. Just over 100 years ago to look at what we call of course the Great War, and we're going to be celebrating very much the launch of this book. We've got multilingual environments in the Great War, edited by Julian Walker and Chris of the clerk or here on the call with us, and you'll be here to the book, and we'll have plenty of opportunity to ask your questions as well. And so right at the bottom of your screens you can see a button called Q&A. And that's where we'll be asking for everybody to submit their questions and you don't have to wait till the end of all of the opening remarks you can start putting them in as you go along. And if you would like to dedicate your question to a specific speaker, please do make that clear as well and we'll know to pass it to answer later on in the Q&A. And so with that with introductions on their way, and I'm really delighted for us to get going with a very action packed program. And it's a real particular pleasure for me as well to be welcoming first the editors of the volume to deliver some opening remarks, especially because way back in 2014 I actually had my academic start in another volume that they produced on the First World War. And so they gave me my own start in academic publishing as well so it's a great privilege to still be collaborating with them here today. So I'll pass over for opening remarks to Mr. Julian Walker first. Thank you very much. I hope everybody can hear me. Thank you, Hilary. Yeah, I've been involved in this project for about 10 years now I think really. And for about 10 years I've been wondering why I feel it's why I'm fascinated by it still. And I think it's because I feel that at the heart of it there is a paradox. I mean we're looking at war language in wartime but war is amongst many other things is a failure of language war happens when language breaks down. And I've thought about this in many different ways and recently I've been thinking of a sort of comparison model that we look at a lot of the aspects of this positively but we might equally look at the negatively. So for example, we might say that slang is a cynical attempt to cover disaster with fancy dress that phrase books are superficial and lazy attempts to shoehorn one language into another. And that the failure to learn another language is often little more than stubborn xenophobia. The language differentials, which we see a lot of during the First World War, were a way of maintaining oppression between peoples and between social classes, and that censorship represented people as data, fitting more or less into forms. Equally we could turn this round and think of this as so often happens that that when you have crises, then people become creative, particularly with language that slang represents a demonic need to take control using the most expressive and the least suppressible means of applying language that phrase books were rushed out to make communication between people's possible. Lingua Frank has emerged very quickly, and there's enough evidence to indicate that they were very widely embraced that slang actually moved up and down social classes and brought people together. And that people got round censorship as they always will do. So, there is this paradox really that I feel drives the whole subject forwards it does for me that in this environment of industrialized destruction language turned out to be an extremely creative means of expression. Going back to how this particular stream started, which was following the publication of trench talk in 2012 by Peter Doyle military historian and myself, which was a study of British wartime slang and new terminology. And the meetings that follow that between Peter and myself and crystal who's a translation scholar developed into the first conference in 2014 in developing connections and comparative methods of the changes affecting language in this period of sustained international conflict. This project brought a new way of looking at those societies in conflict and also model for looking at society in conflict in the century that followed that was largely shaped by the Great War. Undoubtedly the project benefited from the centenary period and the increased academic and family and general focus brought by that, and that added to the depth and the breadth of thinking of ways of ways of thinking about the subject, particularly in terms of family stories and personal stories from the war. We've had a lot of influences during the past 10 years, encouragement and guidance from people who I would like to mention Hillary foot it. Thanks Bayon, Amanda Laugerson, Mike Kelly, Odile Roy Nett, Julia Coleman, Linda Muggleston and many others who've been very important in maintaining the forward movement of this project, and particularly mentioning that Amanda Laugerson had worked previously on the language of the Australian Army and Odile Roy Nett had worked on the language of the French armies. So overall this project has produced two international conferences, three volumes of essays, and a blog which I looked at this morning and it has 23,670 hits which I feel quite pleased with. We're going to finish now, but just a brief thank you to Hillary for organizing this and also to Lisa Michael Howard Center for war studies who are hosting it and I'll pass over to Christoph. Thank you very much. Thank you again, or Hillary for doing this and thank you all. You can hear me just following on from what Julian said is that when we were editing this book and as people were moving forwards with their contributions, we were of course struck with this pandemic. And this is also where some echoes came through or more to the fall how echoes were resonating how states managed crisis 100 years ago. In that aspect, we thought it was interesting to see that nation based blaming, particularly the sort of attribution the normalized attribution of the origin of COVID-19 to China. We actually echoed some of the first world war issues such as the shaming of Germany for the atrocities committed in Belgium in 1914, but equally so labeling the influenza pandemic of 1918 1919 as a Spanish flu. We had some similarities there, but not everybody was seemingly impressed with these parallels or the war references even though usually those less impressed references referred to the second world war. We have gathered in the book as well are a couple of headlines, like the blitz spirit won't protect Britain from the Corona virus or why the cruel myth of the blitz spirit is no model for how to fight the Corona virus. This is a reference intended to a current prime minister, but we have seen that during the corporate pandemic language found ways of building a barrier against fear, be it in an ironic manner or cynical. The pandemic itself it created quite some lazy appeals to a rhetoric of jingoistic xenophobia, but it has also driven very creative procedures, it has driven communities and the ways of behaving. And it has brought into familiarity words and terms that were previously fairly unknown, if not more had limited applications such as furlough before March 2020 not that many people knew how even to pronounce furlough. Let alone, for instance, the word lockdown that was something that was done in order to spread a fire in a power system or masking up even that's what old fashioned bangrobes did in films. So that language became definitely more creative in terms of not being familiar with it before the pandemic. What we hope to do with this third book of essays is to consolidate the position of language study in the overall structure of thought about the lift experience in the first world war. We hope to do so with very valuable contributions. Many people currently present, which is great, and that we have developed a transnational viewpoint of the experience of war and revealed less expected areas of language during that conflict but also in the lived experiences of that war. And with this volume we've also tried to take the study beyond the Western front we're not there just yet there's still lots to cover, but we have examined experiences in many regions including Africa, Armenia, post war Australia, Russia and Estonia. And we've also examined experiences in a variety of contexts from prisoner of war camps and internment camps to food fuse and post war barracks. The languages we draw up on in this book are equally far right this Esperanto this Flemish this Italian is what he Lee Portuguese Romanian Turkish. There's quite a few languages in multilingual environments in the great war. And that then brings together these language experiences of conflict from both combatants and non combatants. So let's try and connect language and literature with the linguistic analysis of what we call the immediacy of communication so I hope you enjoy the book as you will enjoy the contributions from some of the authors today. Hillary back to you. Thank you so much, Julian and Chris stuff. And so having heard a little bit about what inspired the book what's the background as well as the major themes in the book I'm sure you're all very keen now to hear from some of the actual contributing authors and to hear about what they've put in this volume to entice you to go and read a bit more in full. So we're going to hear from a few of the contributors will have about again about five minutes per person, and it gives me great pleasure to hand over first, and to Dr Chris chemical, who is a senior research fellow at the center for army leadership. That's sandhurst. Thank you very much, Hillary thank you very much indeed everybody for for coming I've been looking forward to this for, yeah for quite a while now. So my chapter in this book is called authentic histories and racial insults memoirs on African American soldiers in the First World War, and as you might suspect from the title of it to kind of give a heads up to anybody who's going to settle into the content for is difficult the language involved in it is fairly dreadful in places it was not an easy thing to write so it may not necessarily be either. So that's worth bearing in mind when you settle in to take a look at it. But the chapter is itself, what I've attempted to do is look at language as a method for understanding the ways in which interaction with society is both attempted by people and limited by people. The chapter essentially deals with that tension through the writings both by and about African American soldiers during the First World War their experiences, the perception and the importance of their race, both during and after the conflict. And the way that the chapter approaches this is effectively along two distinct strands that then come together at the end. The first one is by looking at the writings and experiences and publications by African Americans during and after the war to describe their experiences and the experiences of those amongst their race and indicative of this is the inside cover of W Alice in Sweeney's 1919 book which is called history of the American Negro in the Great War and it gives explicit instructions on how best to sell this book to the and I quote, more than 12 million Negroes in the United States. This book is in his own words a thorough race book which should be sold to members of the race first this writing by African Americans and African American authors is designed and intended to utilize wartime service and experience into a tool for furthering black emancipation. And Kelly Miller in his book the authentic history of the Negro in the World War rights after the Negro has proved his value and worth in all of these trying ways, when after this he asks for a full measure of equal rights, what American will have the heart or the likelihood to say him name. The idea behind these publications is to utilize the wartime service and experience and kind of emerging power of African Americans to then jump start elements of the civil rights movement. Now the contrast to this are the writings and memoirs by white officers that are about African American soldiers and the language in these and the approach to these is very different indeed. One of the things that appears constantly in these writings and memoirs is the reproduction of a spoken form of dialects by African Americans that you do not see in any other nation or writings that I've ever encountered in the First World War, where white officers are attempting to reproduce a speaking style of Southern black soldiers in a manner that effectively describes them as being children, unevolved, uninterested, unintellectual children who need to be led, rather than who need to be interacted with on any form of equality. This is an indication to his book from Harlem to the Rhine, the story of New York's Colored Volunteers Arthur W. Little who was a white major at the time, wrote about how he aimed in his book to add to the sagas of a race that I've learned to understand and respect. What we hear in this statement is that understand and respect are not synonymous with love, or view equally, but might be more synonymous with tolerate. And if anything it's the language of anthropology major little and other white authors study their command as objects of scrutiny, and then rework the language of those interactions to deliver them to a white audience. And then trans interact with each other repeatedly across the chapter. And the aftermath of the First World War, both in France and then back in America is emerging racial violence of white soldiers and white people against African Americans and ex African American servicemen, particularly in regards to the red summer of 1919. In the later part of the chapter is the reworking of this language, and the reworking of these experiences, effectively to weaponize it as a tool to correct a perceived political imbalance amongst white America in the African Americans have become empowered to an extent by their services in the First World War and their experiences with friends of billions of soldiers, and the writings are an indication of this, and the rebalancing of this is a reworking of those languages for white audiences, and also the application of violence and racial violence against black Americans to ensure that the power dynamic in America was not overly disrupted and that effectively is what my chapter is about I'm sure you all think it feels incredibly ugly. Thank you so much Chris and I can immediately tell there was probably going to be questions on that. And so we'll move swiftly on now to Dr Steve with who's the director of the Center for Global Studies at the University of Illinois. Thank you Hillary. Thank you Chris. That's a very timely topic, especially today in the US where some of these very topics are still being debated and it's a growing part of our public discourse. My chapter really bookends the war in a way and focuses on the the internationalist movement and the language of internationalism that emerged both as a specter of the oncoming war and as a memory of the Great War, propelling a movement towards a new type of language that was describing growing global consciousness amongst certain populations. So this chapter explores the proliferation of the phrase international mind, which was a trope used to both promote internationalism around the world and create a globalized mindset that could employ public opinion to support institutions of global governance for a peaceful world order. During and after the war, this language of internationalism really served to demarcate the boundaries of transnational communities of people and also serve to exclude those who didn't respect civilized norms. So, during the war, this language of internationalism was used to separate the barbarism of the central powers, and as Christoph noted that the atrocities of the German army in Belgium, and it separated them from what were described as civilizational and enlightened aspirations of the Allied powers. Beginning with the buildup to the war and engaged really on a global scale during the interwar period until World War II, organizations such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace promoted this idea of the international mind through economic networks, political circles, and a transnationally conceived community with the attempt to change global public opinion. This was led largely by Columbia University's president, Nicholas Murray Butler, and he directed this international campaign. This was a direct response to the conditions that that both led to the First World War, and the atrocities of the war. Creating the international mind became the answer to replacing the nationalism that began war with an internationalism that found personal and national self interest to global civil and economic interests. In this chapter I trace the origins and the use of the international mind from the pre war peace movement, and then as a post war rallying cry to support the League of Nations, and the development of systems of global governance at preventing and preventing future conflicts. The advocacy for the international mind seems to have derived from the French term the street international excuse my poor French, a term that emerged from within the transatlantic peace movement with the work of Belgian intellectuals Henry Lafontaine and Paul Oatley. In 1907. The term was used when describing that society village the sociology publication movement sociology, international. And then soon during the 18th Mohawk peace conference in New York. In 1912. Nicholas Butler. Use the same phrase and coined the international mind to expound upon the phenomena used by his acquaintances, Oatley and Lafontaine. In 1916. This term was being used in Japan, and was being advocated by in also in the Tobay, who was the future under Secretary General of the League of Nations, and he translated the term into Japanese as coax machine. After the war, the cultivation of the international mind became a key means to promote a Western liberal democratic economic system that animated that was animated by populations of globally conscious citizens. This was supported by the League of Nations, and funded largely by organizations such as the Carnegie Endowment. The chapter follows this movement and the use of media and specifically libraries as mechanisms for spreading the words of internationalism and using literature books and histories as a way to change public opinion towards globalism against nationalism. As we can see from the outcomes. This hasn't worked. And we're still debating these same issues of globalism and nationalism that we've alluded to, especially in the context of COVID-19 and some of the populist movements we've seen around the world. So, thank you very much and I appreciate any questions people have later. Thank you very much. And so now we'll move on to hear from our third speaker, Dr Fabien van Samang. And is your sound working now Fabien? I hope it works. Yes, we have him here with us and he's extra dedicated because he's still teaching at the moment and has still managed to find time to squeeze us in so we're really happy you could make it Fabien I think you'll deliver the remarks much better than me reading them out for you. Okay, that's perfect. Thank you. Hello to you all. As a title of my article in the book indicates, I am especially interested in how mechanisms of mass violence, and in particular, genocidal violence come about many mechanisms that lead to genocides are already known from psychology from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and so on. But I went looking for an explanatory factor in linguistics. So I asked the question, is there a connection between the way Hitler and national socialist leaders spoke and the genesis of the Holocaust. For example, as a major exception, this area of research has been very poorly studied. So I set out to investigate it. I looked at Hitler's public and private languages in so far as it dealt with the Jewish question, and I applied it to 11 different national socialist institutions, of which I analyzed references to 29 concepts, potentially related to murder. To cut a long story short, contrary to Clemper's assertion, the main feature of national socialist genocidal language is not its poverty, but it's increasing chaos, as far as meaning on the lexical semantic pragmatic discursive and intertextual levels is concerned, a phenomenon I have referred to as semantic entropy. In a conference organized by Julian and Christophe, and for the book published by Bloomsbury, I applied my analysis to the language used by Ottoman officials during the First World War on the Armenian question. While I don't speak Turkish nor Armenian, I used 67 sources written by Ottoman perpetrators, collected, translated and published by the distinguished French scholars, Raymond Kivorkian, and Yves Ternon. That's the conclusion that the language use deviated very much from Nazi discourse, whereas national socialist discourse revealed a big gap between the so called prototypical meaning and the specific national socialist meaning. Systematic disintegration of the explanatory model and increasing contradictions between textual units. No such increasing ambiguity could be found in the Ottoman sources I analyzed. To be sure, this discrepancy between national socialist and Ottoman discourse may have many causes. It may say something about the nature of the massacres, but it may also be due to inadequate source material. Perhaps there are multiple genocidal discourses, or there may be one genocidal discourse, but for various psychological mechanisms that lead to different outcomes. In any case, I found it enlightening to look into the mechanisms of language use and genocide, and I hope that the readers of my article will see this at the beginning of a broad debates on the difficult but interesting relationship between language and mass violence. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much Fabian. And so now we'll pass over to Dr Connie Ruzik, who's Professor of English at Robert Morris University. Thanks so much for attending everyone. I'm really happy to be here and I was able to introduce the section language and identity in this volume, and wanted to say that, as Julian has so eloquently put it language is far more than a tool of communication, than a tool of marks and shapes identities. It may function as a symbol of resistance, or a tool of oppression, an expression of status, an instrument of persuasion, a sign of affiliation, or a mark of otherness that language both provides and denies access to power, community and culture. And in the section language and identity essays explore these opportunities as well as these tensions. And they explore the language choices of bilingual authors and their insertion of other languages into poetic texts. For example, Thomas notes that for authors such as the bilingual Breton soldier Jan Burkhoff, the decision to write war poetry in a dialect of Breton was a political act in support of Breton identity and autonomy, as well as an attempt to shape political recognition and French national policy after the war, who knew poetry could be so powerful. So if you take histories and racial insults. You've already heard Chris Kempstahl talk about what he is doing a really important contribution to this volume in examining the ways in which African Americans spoke about themselves, as compared to the ways in which they were referenced by their white officers. Thomas essay politics of words language and loyalty of Czech speaking soldiers and Austro-Hungarian army examines language diversity within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the ways in which language became a tool of identification rather than communication linked to regional and ethnic identities and loyalties. Important things when you consider how an army runs and how soldiers are treated or mistreated. Rounding out the section are two essays by contributors who could not be here but I would really recommend them to Christina Aliana focuses on the post war writing of three Romanian officers and Mark Kuldke examines a 1915 German Estonian phrase book, arguing that phrase books are not neutral texts but rather predictive ones that anticipate contact and social relations between groups. These contributions to be really rich and relevant to my own research on international poetry of the First World War. So, obviously, Julia and I both have worked with the Breton poet yonder calaf. He's included in an anthology that I prepared. Chris's reading on African American writers and texts has been enormously interesting to me and for those who wish to read that African American writers talking about themselves in their own words. I found the writings and included in the anthology Alice Dunbar Nelson, Joshua Henry Jones Joseph Seaman Cotter junior and James Reese Europe, a man who was the first black industrial leader on Carnegie Hall, who was the band leader of the Harlem Harlem Hellfighters, and was the first black American to enter the trenches and the first black American officer to lead troops in combat. And I just want to say those names because those are voices that should not be forgotten. Well, in translation, it is so important to honor the original languages and I really have appreciated all of the people in the section who have contributed and talked about both the importance of paying attention to and the identity moves involved in translation. I'm certain scholars will find research here that deepens their own understanding and its linguistic environments. Thank you. Thank you very much, Connie. And I can see you've got at least two of your chapter contributors here and I've only got one of mine so I must have scared them off. So, okay, we'll move on to Julia. And so I'll introduce Miss Julia Rivera Thomas, and she's currently doing her PhD at the University of Paris and tear. I hope that I've got that right. There's almost a lingual pronunciation going on here. Julia, over to you. Thank you. Thank you, Hillary and a Sir Michael Howard Center for this wonderful event. Thank you, Julia and crystal for your relentless editorial work. And thank you to all of the other authors with whom it has been an honor to share what is my very first book chapter as well just as Hillary's experience a couple of years ago. And the contribution focuses on the fact that for bilingual poets of the First World War, the poems themselves are multilingual environments, and as such, they not only represent but also build multiple identities for these poets. Now, when I try to visualize these multiple identities funnily enough it takes me back to school physics lessons, more particularly dynamics, when we have to solve problems about how different force vectors acted upon objects. And when you are multilingual writing a poem in one language rather than the other is a choice of allowing oneself to be pushed in one of these directions, representing but also reinforcing an identity. A poem is therefore, as Cornet just said, a marker of identity. My chapter does have some theoretical presuppositions. The first one is that poetry is at the intersection between the individual and the cultural and the particular cultures my poets are interacting with our French poetic culture. And what is called the culture they get so a symbolic repertoire shared by all those who lived through the conflict. I also posit that poems are culture patterns in the Gertzian sense that they act as models of the culture of war, representing it, but also models for the culture of war so building it. In other words, as you express an identity in a poem you are performing that identity you are changing your own experience of war, because you are accepting to live it as a member of this or that community. So another presupposition is that identities are performed, something that I've borrowed from gender studies. Finally, I insist on identities, plural, because poets belong to multiple imagined communities at the same time. To illustrate that I draw on, for example, in another language here who was a Colombian poet born in Paris, and who fought and died in the French foreign legion. The language here did not write war poetry, but his poems predating the war, which he had chosen to write in French, were re-signified as war poems as a premonition of souls of his sacrifice. And in this optic, choosing to write in French is analogous to choosing to die for France, and death becomes not only a choice but also a poetic choice. My second example is Edmond Adam, and I cheekily included him in the chapter because even though he was multilingual, the poems I examine are written in ancien français, so technically it's still French. But what interests me is the way in which Adam changes linguistic codes and resorts to ancient French and to medieval fixed form poetry to defend himself from accusations of anti-Frenchness whenever that is convenient. In response to one of his poems being censored, he writes another poem, but this time it's a rondeau in traditional French. And in doing so, Adam claims from himself a double legitimacy. His love of France should not be questioned, one because he's in the trenches, but also because he is a French poet, a direct descendant of one of the first French war poets of the 17th century. Now the third example I look at is Iain Bechelot, Coney has already talked about it. He was a Breton militant before the war, and during the war he abandons French verse altogether and resorts back to his own dialect. And because I don't speak Breton, I look at the only war poem he translated into French himself, and we can see how this linguistic shift back to his native dialect is accompanied by a shift in the representation of the words denoting home in his poetry. And now instead of presenting himself as belonging to both communities, he insists on the fact that he is a Breton willing to die for France. So France is now indebted towards Brittany. And my last example is probably my favorite one because it brings together Portuguese, which is one of my own mother tongues and French, which is the language I'm trying to write my thesis in. José Alagoinha was not a professional poet, he was a member of the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps. And when he got to France, the linguistic shock was so great that he decided to write a poem about how hard it was for him to learn French and I can definitely empathize with that. It doesn't get any easier 100 years later. But what is interesting in this poem is the superposition of meanings, because even though he is saying that it's very difficult for Elizabethan people to learn French by putting words such as bello and bought side by side. He also highlights how similar Latin languages can be and he creates the sense of community between Portugal and France and ends up justifying the war itself. So these examples are definitely part of my own larger combat for poetry to be taken seriously as an epistemology of warfare, a means of understanding the war. But within the general aim of this collection, I think my chapter shows that a multilingual environment with all the multiple layers of cultural identification entails can be the space of a poem and examining something as small as a poem's can be a way of understanding this complex relationship between multilingualism and the multiple identities at play in the First World War. After all, to quote the anthropologist Clifford Goods, seeing heaven in a grain of sand is not a trick only poets can accomplish. Thank you very much. Julia. And so now we'll pass over to Yezhi Kutechka, calling us from the Czech Republic. Thank you for the, for making this webinar happen and thank you to the editors for the hard work that put this fascinating collection together. I'm really glad I can be part of it. To briefly summarize the key points of my chapter, it explores the way language use and abuse really in the Austrian-Hungarian army has helped to sharpen the edges, so to speak, of Czech speaking soldiers, national identity during the First World War. Before the war, language use at schools and government business and public space generally was a key battlefield or key background of nationalist partitions of all sides and Bohemian and Moravia ever since 1870s, and the state itself was somewhat caught in the middle The army was drawn into this from time to time with the nationalists increasingly targeting their rather Baroque language practices, literally multilingual practices, or its inner workings where the army had a language of command, which was German, language of administration, which was German and Hungarian, and then regiment languages with regiments with up to four languages of everyday use to cover the truly multilingual experience of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And I had the example of the so-called is that here a fair of 1898 mentioned in the article this is probably the most famous and example of these nationalist pressures against the army practices. It's very illustrative in that it shows how the language as a contested symbolic space literally was introduced into the army. And how did the military authorities understand the issue in a highly symbolic way as well as a threat to imperial unity. By looking at the soldiers' personal accounts, the soldiers who wrote them during the First World War, I tried to see how they actually did understand themselves, the symbolic meaning of language. If it was similar to what the army thought or if it was similar to what the nationalists thought, I ended up arguing actually that while at the beginning of the war it was mostly a matter of practical communication, class identification with only occasional hints of actually having a really nationalized meaning, the army as an institution in the eyes of many actually seems to be quickly abandoning its supposed linguistic tolerance and came to understand the use of Czech language in a highly politicized way as a suspicious activity bordering on treason for some. And as an example, it was quite not unusual for regiments to sing Czech patriotic songs while marching to the train station in the summer of 1914. By the end of the same year it was basically thrown upon by the army authorities and in the spring of 1915 the activity was outright banned as a political provocation. Why did that happen and what were the consequences? The first, the lack of military success led the army command to search for scapegoats as early as the fall of 1914 and of course the memory of Czech nationalists and their activities pre-war were quite fresh and readily available. And the more military disasters happened involving Czech speaking troops and there were some spectacular examples in the spring of 1915. Their Czechness was increasingly seen as the underlying cause and the language they used started to be seen as a badge reflecting their character literally. In parallel, the army lost most of its regular officers in the first few months and the reserve officers who replaced them came mostly from the ranks of German and Hungarian middle classes who were vastly overrepresented in the reserve officer corps. And this led to somewhat nationalizing the social background of the officer officer corps and these new commanders were very often even more heavily handed than the army itself in their treatment of suspect minorities. The consequence, as I think that's really obvious in a soldier's personal account, was that since late 1914, speaking Czech and using Czech language in surveys could get one into deep trouble and many soldiers, and we're talking about one million Czech speakers being conscripted into the army by the end of the war, felt increasingly betrayed and disrespected by this behavior of the authorities experiencing and expressing in writing a sense of gross injustice happening to them. They have disgruntled and increasing the disillusioned attitude is evident in their accounts and especially towards the end of the, towards the second half of the war, language was literally instrumental in this process as the opponents of the perceived Czech nationalism used as a crude and imprecise instrument of how to identify the suspect subversives as they call them and inadvertently helping to form a group identity whose interest became divergent from those of the Habsburg monarchy at the end, could simply the army language policies as my sort of conclusion for this, for my paper, the army language policies make more Czech speakers sometimes literally painfully aware of their sense of national belonging than any pre-war radical politician could hope for and that's about it and thank you for your attention. Thank you so much. Okay, and so we'll move now to last but definitely not least as the saying goes maybe it's saved the best for last, we go over to Jane Potter and Jane who is at the Oxford International Center for publishing studies Oxford Brookes University over to you Jane. Thank you Hillary well I hope it's something worth waiting for and not sort of something to be got through anyway thank you so much for inviting me and to Julian and to Christoph for editing this wonderful volume and also to all the contributors I'm just finding it fascinating reading through all of the other chapters, and I was fortunate enough to be asked to do the introduction to the non competence section. And my section is or focused on a range of non competent categories from what may loosely be defined as the home front, including civilians and refugees to POWs. And as I mentioned in my introduction to this section, total war. In total war it's not only soldiers who are faced with linguistic challenges and the need for a new vocabulary to define their experiences. Non competence to we're engaging with language and new ways and or creating a vocabulary that would fit into their day to day experiences and that's really what the chapters in in this section are highlighting. And they demonstrate just how varied that adaptation was among non competence and the degrees to which multi lingualism was crucial to emotional and cultural if not actual physical survival. And it's that physical survival that's highlighted and features in Yaroslav Bolivinov. I'm so sorry if I can pronounce the name wrong. Again multi lingualism or not an action in my case. In his chapter where he shows out every day life language was transformed in Russia and particularly around the practices of surviving and around food and access to food, and how these were reflected and changes to the language as what he calls old and rare practices became ubiquitous and also found a new significance, and he focuses specifically on the practice of queuing for consumer goods for for food in particular, and how social practices and the stereotypes associated with that, anywhere from what he became termed as bag men, people carrying bags consumers, but also profiteers, both external and domestic, who were seen to be praying on the consumer, and how words for those stereotypes and context and individuals were then added to the Russian language, and how also the resilience of the Russian language in this unprecedented time, provided a kind of an adaptability to invent new words to describe this acute need and everyday need for food which is an aspect of total war and the first world war that has only really recently been given, you know, really good critical and historical attention I think. So those that are wearing internment camps, the, there was an everyday need for food of another kind for mental stimulation and that's really the focus of Jamie, Kalendine's chapter on the roulette been civilian internment camp, and he talks about how the W's there were using their time to do what he calls a rigorous and passionate study of the multilingual environment of the many languages and he identifies about 10 major languages that were amongst the sort of diverse cohort of people. And he talks about the courses that were delivered by teachers who were interned who were formerly teachers in the Berlin school in the institute in the years before the first world war. So this environment that that fermented within within the camps, I think is is such a fascinating aspect. And finally, in this section. Dr. Clerk talks about Belgian charity books in Britain and talks about how the practice of Victorian and the wordy and philanthropy impacted on the way that refugees were dealt with, and either welcomed or presented or not welcomed in Britain who came to Britain in their thousands at the outset of the war, but also and I think crucially how these very often traumatized individuals and exiles also became a tool of propaganda that were used not just to justify Britain's involvement in the conflict but to kind of reinforce that participation and he focuses on these really interesting publications called charity gift books, some of which are called King Albert spoke Princess Mary's gift book the glory of Belgium, and a Belgium, a book of Belgians gratitude so you can, you can kind of get a sense of what of where these were heading. Um, so there's a really varied group of chapters and the only thing I wanted to mention before my, my time is up, besides saying, please go and read them there. There are such a fascinating window is in rereading these chapters for today two things that struck me one is on a sort of more personal research level which is really about thinking about willford Owen, who had been a language tutor in France during the first at the beginning of the war, was there well into 1915, and had he say been a tutor with the Berlin School in Germany rather than in France, how his circumstance would have been very different. I mean then finally, to some extent that all the non competence in these chapters, whether officially or not are all prisoners of war in some sense. Because whether they are civilian internees, or whether they are people queuing for food in an environment in which they are literally held captive by the need for survival. Or whether they're refugees in a country that they are that they are beholden to in many ways and also used for that country's war aims as well so I recommend these to you and I think they're going to add very much to, they not only add to the volume but to our further sort of understanding of the non competent experience. Thanks very much. Thank you so much Jane, and thank you all for delivering your remarks or introductions for sharing a little bit of the of what I think is really some extraordinary work here in the volume. And so now what we're going to do is we're going to open up to questions from the audience so it's your opportunity to also pick up on the whole range of points that have been put forward from identity to violence to culture to. I don't even know where to begin so and so at the bottom of your screen you can see a Q&A button so please feel free to type in questions there. And as we wait for them to come in. And if there's anybody else on the panel wants to ask each other any questions are based on all of that please feel free to also do so as well because I could already see people picking up on each other's points. I think Julian you said you had a question. So maybe I can come to you first. And in the meantime, perhaps the audience will come in with their questions as well. Yes, I am I am just sort of noticing that there seems to be slight problem about typing in questions so I'll, while that sort of have a go at sorting that out I just want to sort of this is, I mean this starts with a question to Chris, which is about the, you know, the use of quite a childish language by white officers to, to black soldiers. And in the conference in 2014 we had a paper by Richard Fogarty was looking at pity for say which is the form of French used by almost directed to be used by French officers for the Senegalese soldiers and Senegalese obviously would have a broad range of so colonial French soldiers from Africa. I've also noticed in my own studies a few instances of baby talk where soldiers would soldiers and spouses would exchange letters using baby talk and this is an area that I was really quite fascinated by and tried to find out about. I just, I mean, to you, but also to, to, to anybody, is there a sort of sense of a linguistic paternal relationship paternalistic relationship between either officers and men or between particular language language groups and other language groups, does anybody sort of notice that I mean, you get a quite strong feeling in the British army of juniors the second lieutenant who may be sort of 20 to 23 years old feeling quite paternalistic towards the soldiers that they're commanding who might be old enough to be their parents. Yeah, if I just, if I just jump in with with that one I mean you certainly see elements of that in the British and the French armies the idea that officers are there to bother or kind of serve as role model is in a paternal sense to the soldiers under their command and that ties in very much into specific concepts of leadership in the two, which differ a bit depending on whether or not you're in the British or the French army the idea to which are supposed to be kind of a kindly role model in a strict disciplinarian. And that definitely comes out. But in regards to the childlike language with the examples of what soldiers quoting African Americans what I'm going to do is I'm going to paste a little bit of it into the chat. And that's exactly what it is I'm talking about, and to kind of give you a little bit of a leading in that you know I've read British soldiers writing about French soldiers and French soldiers writing about British soldiers and pretty much everything in between, and you never really see them attempting to turn a spoken form of dialect like this into a written form to be to be read. The accounts written by African Americans they don't do this to themselves. They write it as if it's written in non spoken dialect. So to give you an example. That's the type of thing that we're talking about where it ends up being a very weird mishmash of spoken drawl and weird kind of half written dialect, and it is almost exclusively limited to white soldiers writing about African Americans under their control. And it's generally used as part of a story that always follows the same arc regardless of the details. It's African American soldiers did something because they didn't understand what was going on. We spoke to them about it and this is what they said, and it turned out that they misunderstood because basically their children. And that is the narrative arc of every one of these anecdotes appears in the memoirs and the like of white American soldiers. And it's always reproduced in that type of thing, which when you actually try and read it out loud just sounds even I mean you know I'm reading out loud with like a accent, but there's there's still an element of it that it's, it makes it look like it's written so that white audiences are supposed to be out loud and imitate in a fairly mocking way the spoken style of the African Americans who white officers have studied in an anthropological way. So that Chris do you want to respond to you. I can just jump in with something that may seem irrelevant and I apologize if so, a number of years ago, the help was a very popular novel, and I remember one of my friends who had written to it was now a professor at Colorado College Heidi Lewis, who's does research on black feminist experience. It said to me that language of that book is terribly racist in the way it represents dialect. And I had read the book and not noticed it and so did a dialect study and found the kinds of things that Chris is talking about in that in that book, which is nearly 100 years later, what you find written by a white woman is an attempt really to understand each other and the only dialect represented again with these strange phonetic spelling this it's not as as seriously strange as what Chris has posted up there, but the only dialects that are represented that way are those typically of African the character who I was interested in is there is a class character who is sort of white trailer trash in the book and I wonder well what would the author do with her dialect that also is other to the central experience of the of the novel, and much much less attempt to demonstrate that she speaks any dialect it's really not only a mark of childishness but just definitely of other this is this is not us. It's very noticeable. If you look at cartoons in punch before the war that a large proportion of the private soldiers are represented as Irish dialect speakers, and that as it progresses from 1914 onwards you get far more Scottish accents being transcribed in this isn't specifically cartoons in punch. It's an indication that the typical soldier in the British army before the war is Irish and from the same from 1916 onwards far more sense of projection that the typical soldier is Scottish. I was. Yeah. No, I was just checking the one poet. The one point I work with where a white poet assumes the local identity of a colonial trooper does not have any type of dialect or anything like that it's the superior to serve under that car from a pollinaire when he actually writes as a Senegalese trooper and there's there's no such thing. But on the other hand, going back to Julian's original question. I have seen an overplay of form from younger soldiers trying to assert their authority so they resort back to Alexandrine to romantic models. I'm not sure if the authority they are trying to emulate is a military authority or a literary authority though. But they, there is this play on form whenever they want to to to pretend to be older than they really are. Let's put it like that so they do result back to traditional first forms. I just wanted to add something in relation to what what for instance Chris said is that in the Belgian army there's you know during the war there is this sort of difficult, but also contested aspect of language use between Francophone officers on the one hand and Flemish soldiers on the other hand. And it's in the exile press that this actually takes shape and initiates a front movement of Flemish nationalist soldiers. But I'd be interesting to see whether anything of how the Flemish soldiers experienced their French commands, whether that would resonate between the Francophone officers in a very in a sort of like half written dialect with childish reproduction as well. I mean, how, how would they actually reproduce the Flemish of their soldiers. So I don't think that's been done so far yet. That'd be really interesting. I'm not entirely sure the current Flemish nationalists enjoy that fall but fair enough. That's great Chris always always good to identify the next project and the one after that and then we do have a question about next steps but I'm going to save that for a little closer towards the end because it will be a good way for us to then look ahead to the future but we do have another question that's come in from Jessica Meyer, who is, of course, a well established first world war scholar herself and you've probably read her book, an equal burden and so she's asking, Well, she's thanking all the panelists for their talks and she's got a question for Chris, and this relates to Julian's question. And so she's asking how does the language that white officers put in the mouths of black soldiers, compared to that of the use of class based vernacular that appears in British novels and memoirs in this period. She's talking of Kipling's voicing of Tommy Atkins specifically, but it turns up in lots of literature right throughout the interwar period. Chris, any thoughts on this? So this is a really, really good question. And it is something I thought about previously. I think it came up at the conference briefly when when I first kind of presented some of this. And I wonder, this is not, this is not going to be, I feel, a particularly satisfying answer or necessarily all consuming. But I wonder if there is an element or a nugget or a seed of the concept of, I don't know, for one of the words, simple nobility about the about Tommy Atkins in that he is unsophisticated. He talks in a strange way. He's serving his country, and he's doing the things. And there's something admirable about that. I don't think there is supposed to be anything admirable about the African Americans and the way they talk. There is no kind of simple nobility to their lifestyle. It's just strange childish and backwards. Whereas Tommy Atkins is an unsophisticated British man, but he's still British. Whereas African Americans, they're not viewed as being Americans. They're certainly not viewed as being adults either. So there's a tension there between what lies at the heart of Tommy Atkins lifestyle and the way that he interacts with the world and what lies at the heart of the African American man and how he interacts with the world. So I think it's basically that you can be working class and talk funny and be unsophisticated and be a bit dirty and not, you know, fit for wider society but still be British and it's fine. Whereas the African Americans, they're still there to be studied. It's not to be appreciated. I don't know how satisfying that answer is really I'd want. I think more about it but every time I start thinking about it, I start thinking about the African American writings and then I get kind of sad and angry. So, yeah, somewhere somewhere I think there's something in there to be thought about. Thanks Chris and I can see Julian wants to come in on this as well. Over to you Julian. I mean having said that about Scotty soldiers being sort of seen as the taking over from the Irish soldiers I think there's a certain amount of competition within Britain for as regards accent and in the sense that the, the cockney accent tends to predominate more and more during the war and is pushing out other accents to the point where a typical Ward Muir who served as an orderly award, a surgical orderly and he said that by the end of the war that comedians appearing in Glasgow music cause would have to assume a cockney accent, because that would be what would be expected by that stage. And the idea that in Glasgow cockney accent would push out a Glaswegian accent is quite extraordinary. There's a recurring theme here as well of constituting identity through language as well which I know was a big part of Yeji's pieces but of course in a different way because this is it's we're looking at seeing the other through what Chris and Julian are talking about. We've also got a comment in the, in the chat from Connie. I don't know if you want to speak to it and about how many African American poets wrote in dialect, such as James Seaman Cotter senior. And it would be fascinating to compare their own use of representation of dialect that used by white officers. You can see more more new projects coming out of this, and coming out of this discussion already, perhaps volumes five, six, seven, and into the mix. We've got we've so we've answered Jessica's question and I'm saving Christina's for the end because we will definitely talk about next steps. And, but I wonder if there was anything else that anybody wants to ask in the, in the interim. Yes, Julian. I really don't want to be hogging this at all but just something and Fabian has, has, has left us here he's teaching I believe I don't want to raise this question of the withholding of language as a linguistic act and how this relates to the, the, the, the banning of language now usually is talked about this progressive movement by which eventually check came to be so strongly suppressed. And we see it in the this happening through all the competent nations I think the that in Australia, the use of German is, is banned at one point in Britain there's huge discouragement against people studying German at universities. And I wonder how we link this to the, to the withholding of language which is such an important post war trope. The, the, the, the idea that people don't talk about their experience of the war for 10 years, and then suddenly after the after 10 years there's this the, the, the, the boom in war books. And also if you start if you look at it there's a lot of people talking about not talking about the war. And I, I just feel that this, this, this suppression of language either individually or officially is a is a huge aspect of the socio linguistics of the of the conflict. And that's just sort of thrown out for anybody to react to it. Somebody will. I'll jump in. I am, I've just been this week, putting the finishing touches on a draft of an essay on that that idea of silencing yourself. And in this case, in the, it is related to Canadian women and their expression of grief across across the UK morning was forbidden as being a problem with morale. I'm looking at Ellen Montgomery is for novel Rilla of Ingleside in the ways in which women are always putting on cheerful facades and not talking publicly about their own traumas. So I just think that's something that gets neglected often when we think about what soldiers don't talk about that women on the home front. Don't talk either. I think this is, this is very strong. There's an interesting correlation to what is actually happening today that in Britain. There is a song being promoted in schools, which is, and I can see despairing there. Look it up on the internet, we're all despairing about this, but it just sort of reminds me in the, I think it was in 1916, the Daily Mail had a campaign for cheerfulness. So the cheerfulness would combat frightfulness. And there are these specific words which are used almost as almost like bullets really to, to explode a sentiment that you're trying to, trying to suppress. It's, it's, it's quite extraordinary how we seem to be revisiting so much in the sort of 100 years on. I'm just suggesting both Ellen Montgomery and HD had stillborn children during the war that they and HD speaks much more directly Ellen Montgomery and her journals about that not being able to grieve still born are always sort of the disenfranchised grief but HD writes and I'm not going to get this anywhere close to being in her language but that her husband is able to talk about Richard Aldington is able to talk about his trauma but they won't let her talk about hers. Well, let's go to Jane and then Julia. I think I saw another hand but you first away with me okay crystal. Yeah, I was just going to add to that. I'm not to sort of talk about my research again but it's something that Carol Acton and I did work on in terms of medical personnel and more time in the way that both doctors and nurses wouldn't discuss their own trauma they they didn't either. It wasn't so much that they couldn't find the words although that was part of it but there there was this who is allowed to speak who is allowed to use language it's not just about not wanting to but feeling that it's not part of who I am as this individual as a practitioner. The pain of the soldier is more important than than my own and and so that's and so we looked at the ways in which how that is missing in memoirs or the other kinds of words they use to discuss trauma or how we read into that as literary scholars as to as to finding a different kind of language or no language or the ellipsis or or euphemisms or you know that kind of thing so I think it's it's also about it's very much who is speaking and who is allowed to use language in a particular way. And that's not a particularly well formed sort of segue into anything but I think it is about the individuals that are speaking as well have a lot to do with it. Yes. Thank you. Again at the risk of sounding repetitive and and to comative in my defense of poetry I think that one of the beautiful things of the perfect genre is that it allows for all of these meanings to come together both merriment silence and conversations and I don't have an example from the First World War right now, but who would have known I make the jump from the Daily Mail to Brazilian resistance fighters, but during the military dictatorship in Brazil, when they were promoting the 1970 football team and the economic miracle. A poet and songwriter Brazilian poet and songwriter called Don Zet wrote a song where he talked about happiness and how happiness invaded everyone's life. You can listen to that song from both perspectives of it's a good thing that we are still happy during the military dictatorship but also one of the elements of oppression used by the dictators was this need to be happy. And I think that the perfect genre where there's song or written forms of poetry allow for the superposition of meanings and that is one of the reasons that we need to read poetry more carefully because maybe things that are absent from memoirs as Jane just said are often present in one of the multiple layers that poetry allows. Thank you Julia for the crystal. It's just adding to that suppression I mean in various projects I've spoken to lots of children and grandchildren of Belgian refugees and it's the suppression of language as well if the member of the family who was a soldier during the First World War didn't talk about the experience. Whatever dinner table kitchen table, then the family member who was a refugee didn't even remotely think of mentioning that. And that's only aggravated when they return to Belgium I mean this most of the population just stayed and endured four years of hardship and occupation and then, especially those refugees who stayed in Britain, more or less had a reasonably. Okay experience for four years, much better than the compatriots in occupied Belgium. So upon return, quite a lot of them basically had to move house or move down the road just just outside their own community. And so the experience of being a refugee and returning to the whole nation now you know that community that they've been trying to connect to for four years from it from a distance. That is a non language, and that hasn't good for what up to now. Thanks Christoph. If anybody else want to come in on this point. Yes. Sorry, my mic was off. On top of what I said about Czech soldiers basically the same thing happening to them. As mentioned by Christoph with the Belgian refugees because most of these soldiers of course ended up, you know, they fought the war and spend the war fighting for the wrong side so when the Czech Republic is created. They have really hard time actually speaking up about their wartime experience because it suddenly makes no sense it doesn't fit the overall narrative, even though they are literally like literally like 90% of the Czech combatants in the war fought for the country. It doesn't fit the national narrative of what the war was supposed to mean. So for them, it's mostly about trying to find a way how to live with it and generally not speaking about it even in public they have very difficult time to fit into the general structure of conversation so they sort of became become quiet for 10 years probably. And only at the end of 1920s, they start to find language of how to deal with this experience and how to do with the experience of being sort of bent for the second time, just bent by the Austro-Hungarian authorities during the war but then by the, but not officially it never happened they were allowed to speak about it but they sort of felt it wasn't welcome. So there's this unwelcome experience that was not supposed to be talked about and only later on they try to find a language and it's very interesting to see how they use the language of, they borrow from the Czechoslovak legions who are of course the right type of Czech soldier and they try to fit into that even in terms of using language during 1930s because of course the 1930s Czechoslovakia is becoming endangered in terms of the political situation in central Europe. So they suddenly try to pick up that language and fit into the new narrative of the republic in danger. And so it's early even goes to this in the same direction as already mentioned. In my own research and a part that I'm just now starting to explore is these book collections that were disseminated to generate this international mind. There are a lot of children's books and collections and those often depicted war stories and and how children were affected by war so there's quite a few about child refugees displaced by by war. One in particular about an Albanian child and what she had gone through. And it's these are invariably written by American authors or Western authors and and describing these experiences. One thing this conversation leads me to wonder is how the language of these children is being represented and whether it's in a, you know, a standard vernacular or if people are using them, you know, trying to create dialects or still to type language to either represent the youth of the characters or their their ethnic identities. Steve, let's go to Julian for also wants to come in on this point and then we'll take Christina's question about the next steps so Julian your response first. I want to respond to both usually and Steve there actually usually first of all that I don't know if anybody has done a comparison between the Czech situation the Irish situation because again this was a group of people who were fighting for the British Irish soldiers fighting for the British Empire who halfway through the conflict suddenly find themselves being pulled in two directions and the experience for a lot of the Irish people who who stayed fighting for the British Empire was that after the establishment of the Irish Free State as it was. They became almost persona non grata they couldn't they couldn't talk about having been British shoulders in the in the first four war. I want to swing around to Steve just because I actually have to have it with me, but this is, this is a children's book that was published during the war, and it's for it's called Dolly's review and I think it was published in 2016 that double page spread that I've got there has includes the words do your bit and the German souvenirs so children that early that young were having soldiers slang pushed at them, but also there's a celebrated collection of essays written by children about air raids, and they speak incredibly realistically and harshly about bits of flesh stuck to lampposts and people going mad because their families have been killed it's an extraordinary collection of writing by I think they are 11 12 years old these children quite quite extraordinary because it works anyway that's just responding to a couple of points there. Julian you're shattering the illusion that we academics only read big hefty tomes but we're actually also reading children's books. These are immense novels for some of my research so you know, these are far more expensive than. Okay, well, something that is not for more expensive is going to be this book because we do have a discount code for it which I'm going to put into the chat for those who've been greatly inspired by what they've heard today and they're going to rush straight to buy the book right after this cold so I'm going to put that discount code into the chat. I'm also going to put again the link to the blog in case anybody would also like to contribute their pieces. And just as we come to to closing. So this is the perfect question, which is about sort of what's next. We are still going to be another project in the future and a follow up volume. What are the next steps. So I don't know if Julian or Christoph wants to speak to that first. I can see, I can see Julian keeps his microphone muted. Concrete plans as of just yet, but I think that after today I'm sure there's going to be some emails flying about inquiring about who would like to take this further with us or with some of us. And I also believe that it would be great to sort of have a particular association or maybe even continue an association with the Sir Michael Howard Center for history of war for instance. So I think having a particular having a home at some point would help continuing the project beyond of what we already have. Just in terms of subject areas. With this volume we've moved out of Europe a lot, a lot more particularly to Africa, which was I think really important, but they do remain areas that we that I think do are crying out for research to know what happened. What was the relationship between Turkish and German on the Ottoman front in Gallipoli. And how can communications managed within within the allies between with the Chinese labor corps. The Japanese Japanese fleet I believe in the Mediterranean. How was that negotiated. What was the what was the management of Arabic in the with the Allied soldiers in particularly stationed in Egypt and then moving around into into Palestine and so forth. We have a fascinating essay by by Yaroslav, but there are hundreds of languages within the Russian Empire at this time. I mean, I may be exaggerating there but how are they, how are they managed within the Russian army. And looking forward to this looking forwards after the war to the post war period I am particularly interested in in how the silence was managed and the, and the talking about the war and the talking about not talking about the war. And so I think this, you know, there are lots of ways this can go on, because as we said the Great War cast its shadow over the 20th century. So much and directs the way people think about relationships with other peoples. There's a scope for us to publish a book that's got empty pages and we say, you know, a representation of those not talking about the war I think that would give you and Chris up a bit of an easier time I think then hurting us cats for this one. But Jane, I know you wanted to come in so I'll take a last comment from you. I just wanted to say that I think this is also about emerging sources, and I think that so much of the research that's been carried out has been on really available sources but in in in sources that are say based on oral testimony oral languages, or records that I haven't thought of tapping into that this is a continuing sort of it, you know, the, and I've argued this in other areas of my own research, you know, the writing and the discussion and the academic inquiry about the first world war doesn't end with the centenary. It's an ongoing discipline and an academic endeavor and I think that this as we have new scholars coming through looking at various sources and new sources. I think that that this will continue to I think be a really enriching area so it's not just about you know focusing on what we have but actually realizing where the where the gaps are how do we, how do we get to those silences and gaps and new information so that brings us to the end of our time and thank you so much to all the attendees who have stayed and listened and asked questions throughout the past hour and a half. All that really remains is for me to thank wholeheartedly all of our contributors both on the screen today and to the volume, even those who couldn't be on the call today. Thank you so much for the quality thank you to usually Julia Christoph Chris, Steve, Connie, Jane and Julian. It would have wonderful hour and a half and a chance to actually get some spoilers from you all because I need to go and read the rest of the chapters now that the books I hope everybody else will have a chance to get their hands on this and to read it for themselves and I think it just to share one sentence that I thought I can't really capture all the, all the themes but I think it reflects one sentence I put in my introduction where I said that it shows how language can be a functional and expression of the highest ideals, a source of connection and the source of contention and so I think all of this comes out really well in everything we've heard today and also in the book itself so it's been a privilege to host you all with the Sir Michael Howard Center at King's College London, Longmere collaboration collectively continue and whether it's a new volume all the different project ideas that have been sparked in this session and contribute to the blog everybody and we'll see where his journey continues to take us. And I think that's that go go buy the book. Thank you all very very much. I'll briefly say thank you enormous thanks to Hillary and to the Sir Michael Howard Center for the study of war. Exactly thank you, Hillary. Okay, thanks everybody see you all very soon. Hi. Thanks, everyone. Thanks Julian and Christoph for your, your leadership throughout this whole process. Thank you. Thank you. Well, thank you for your contribution. we need the people to contribute to make it happen, so thank you to everybody present and with us in spirit. Thanks a lot everyone. Okay, stay safe, take care, bye.