4. Gabriel’s Map: Cartography and Corpography in Modern War

What I have described as “cartographic anxiety” (Gregory, 1994) is advertised in Boyd’s epigraph to An Ice-Cream War, which comes from Rudyard Kipling’s (1910) The Brushwood Boy:

“He hurried desperately, and islands slipped and slid under his feet, the straits yawned and widened, till he found himself utterly lost in the world’s fourth dimension with no hope of return. Yet only a little distance away he could see the old world with the rivers and mountain chains marked according to the Sandhurst rules of map-making.”

Those “Sandhurst rules of map-making” were unbuttoned in the war in East Africa and, as I will show, were simultaneously enforced and confounded in the war in Europe.

I thought I had made the word up—I discuss its filiations below—but I have since discovered that Pugliese (2013) uses “geocorpographies” to designate “the violent enmeshment of the flesh and blood of the body within the geopolitics of war and empire”(p. 86). My intention is to use the term more directly to confront the optical privileges of cartography through an appeal to the corporeal (and to the corpses of those who were killed in the names of war and empire).

More specifically, Jay (1994) describes this as a crisis of ocularcentrism (pp. 192–217).

Saint-Amour (2003, p. 354) describes this as a “technological matrix” but I use “assemblage” to emphasize both its heterogeneity and its materiality.

For details of the various offensives, see Hart (2013). My own account is largely confined to the British experience, but Hart restores the French to the prominent place from which they have been evicted in too many English-language accounts of the war.

Sykes served as Chief of Staff for the Royal Flying Corps in 1914–1915.

My discussion of military cartography and its ancillary practices has two principal limitations. First, it is confined largely to the practice of the British Army, though this may not be as restrictive as it appears. Chasseaud (2002) shows that, for all the differences between them, “in almost every aspect of war survey and mapping” the British, French, and German armies “developed remarkably similar organisations and methods, suggesting that problems were clear and solutions obvious” (p. 201). Second, it is primarily concerned with the production of topographic maps and their trench overlays. As the conflict developed other geo-technical maps were required, based on the topographic series. Supplying water for troops, horses, and mules was a major problem—some estimates put the daily requirement at 45 liters per man or animal—and from 1915 water supply maps at various scales were used to identify likely sources and plan new boreholes. The development of tunneling and mining relied on geological maps and the production of meticulous mine plans (see Barton, Doyle, & Vandewalle, 2010; Doyle & Bennett, 1997; Rose & Rosenbaum, 1993). Towards the end of the war enterprising intelligence officers prepared terrain maps indicating the suitability (or otherwise) of the ground for tanks, but these “goings” maps were not always appreciated by staff officers. Haig’s Chief of Intelligence intercepted one of them, which showed how limited the safe (“white”) areas were, and returned it to its author with the curt instruction: “Pray do not send me any more of these ridiculous maps” (Macdonald, 1993, p. 116).

The canonical account of British military cartography is Chasseaud (1999, 2013); see also Murray (1988) and Forty (2013).

This increased the urgency for printing in theater, and by 1917 every Field Service Company was provided with powered printing presses for limited distribution, time-critical (“hasty”) runs. By then, fears of attacks on Channel shipping had also prompted the Ordnance Survey to open an Overseas Branch in a disused factory in northern France.

The definitive account is Finnegan (2011), but see also Slater’s (n.d.) highly informative series on “British Aaerial photography and photographic interpretation on the Western Front” at http://​tim-slater.​blogspot.​ca

The first “A” camera was handheld and required the observer to perform 11 separate operations “in thick gloves or with numbed fingers” to expose the first plate; its limitations were obvious, and by the summer a semi-automated “C” camera was fixed to the aircraft (Slater, n.d., Part 8; H. A.Jones, 1928, pp. 89–90).

Finnegan (2011, p. 55) calls this “the first imagery-planned battle” but the newly detailed map was not sufficient to turn aerial photography from a novelty into a necessity. Slater (n.d., part 10) argues that it was the critical shortage of ammunition for the artillery—which Sir John French also blamed for the military failure at Neuve Chapelle—that drove the search for more accurate and efficient methods of targeting that aerial photography promised to provide.

Slater (n.d.) claims that it was the Battle of the Somme that marked aerial photography’s admission to the very center of operational planning; for a vivid account of the RFC’s wider role in that offensive, see Hart (2012).

One of the principal managers of these production methods was Edward Steichen, who commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces. He organized the 55 officers and 1,111 men under his command into what Virilio (1989) described as “a factory-style output of war information” that “fitted perfectly with the statistical tendencies of this first great military-industrial conflict” (p. 201).

Hüppauf (1993) emphasizes how the photograph worked to project order onto a disordered landscape “by reducing the abundance of detail to restricted patterns of surface texture.” In his view, “the morphology of the landscape of destruction, photographed from a plane, is the visual order of an abstract pattern” (p. 57).

Even this could be undone by the violence of war. One artillery officer at Ypres in 1917 worried that “the ground was so devastated and wrecked that the usual camouflage netting might give you away. So we would make the [battery] position look as untidy as the surroundings…. We were told to do this by the RFC pilots. They said, ‘For God’s sake don’t have any kind of order’” (Arthur, 2002, p. 214).

See also Mattison’s discussion of the work of British-Canadian military topographer Walter Draycot(t) in “Representations of war as autobiographical media” at http://​www.​walterdraycot.​com

On some estimates artillery fire accounted for 58 % of all combat deaths during the war. On the role of artillery see Marble (2008) and Strong and Marble (2011).

Batteries were not wholly reliant on aircraft, but also used forward observers, flash spotting, and sound ranging.

There is an imaginative description of artillery ranging from the pilot’s point of view in McCarthy (2010, pp. 177–178).

For a more informal account that describes the everyday routine of the sound rangers, see Innes (1935).

The book was first published in German in 1920 but this passage was omitted by Jünger in subsequent revisions (which continued until 1961), and so does not appear in the (superior) English translation of the 1961 edition by Michael Hofmann (London, UK: Penguin, 2003). Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent references are to the Hofmann translation.

Hence, for example, this “synchronisation instruction” contained in Operation Order (no 233) from the 112th Infantry Brigade on 10 October 1918: “O.C. No.2 Section, 41st Divisional Signal Company, will arrange for EIFFEL TOWER Time to be taken at 11.49 on ‘J’ minus one day [‘J’ was the day of the attack] and afterwards will synchronise watches throughout the Brigade Group by a ‘rated watch.’” Edmund Blunden (1928/2000) describes the practice: “Watches were synchronized and reconsigned to the officers” (p. 91); and again: “A runner came round distributing our watches, which had been synchronized at Bilge Street [‘battle headquarters’]” (p. 254). Wristwatches were originally worn by women and pocket watches carried by men, but wristwatches became favored by soldiers and airmen because they required a “hands-free” way of telling the time.

That is surely something of an overstatement: just as the “optical war” was supplemented, subverted, and even resisted by quite other, intimately sensuous geographies so, too, must the impositions and regimentations of Walter Benjamin’s (1940/2006) “homogeneous, empty time” have been registered and on occasion even refused in the persistence of other, more intimate temporalities.

The models that were derived from aerial reconnaissance were also vulnerable to aerial reconnaissance: “These imitation trenches, or trench models, were well guarded from observation by numerous allied planes which constantly circled above them. No German aeroplane could approach within observing distance. A restricted area was maintained and no civilian was allowed within three miles …” But, Empey adds, “When we took over the front line we received an awful shock. The Germans displayed signboards over the top of their trench showing the names that we had called their trenches. The signs read ‘Fair,’ ‘Fact,’ ‘Fate,’ and ‘Fancy’ and so on, according to the code names on our map. Then to rub it in, they hoisted some more signs which read, ‘When are you coming over?’ or ‘Come on, we are ready, stupid English’” (Empey, 1917, pp. 237–238).

Bishop had started his military career as a cavalry officer, and claimed that “It was the mud, I think, that made me take to flying” (1918, p. 17). Yet even those down in the mud used the same imagery. In Fredric Manning’s (1929) semi-autobiographical novel The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme and Ancre, 1916 the troops are seen “moving forward in a way that seemed commonplace, mechanical, as though at some moment of ordinary routine … They had seemed so toy-like … they had moved forward mechanically” (p. 10).

Keegan (2004, p. 260) continues: “The army had provided them with some makeshifts to indicate their position: rockets, tin triangles sewn to the backs of their packs as air recognition symbols, lamps and flags, and some one-way signaling expedients, Morse shutters, semaphore flags and carrier pigeons …”

Captain Charles Carrington, in Arthur (2002, pp. 157–158).

The same was true for the German High Command, and Jünger (1920) wryly describes “episodes [that] prove the futility of the system of higher command with its headquarters far in the rear” (p. 243) and operations that “had been ordered from the rear and by the map, for it could not have occurred to anyone who had seen the lay of the land to give such orders” (p. 261)—and of the occasional runner “who carried the paper war even into this secluded spot” (p. 254)—but quickly adds “though of course I do not question the necessity” (p. 243).

“To many commanders, battlefields continued to be transposed onto maps” so that military strategies became “increasingly abstract” (Brantz, 2009, p. 74). Vismann (1997) draws a distinction between “the homogeneous space of geography” and “the specific space of the soil” (p. 47).

It is not difficult to hear echoes of Lefebvre (1974/1991) in these formulations, who identifies the aggressive production of an abstract space with the violent triumph of a visual-geometric-phallocentric space that “entails a series of substitutions and displacements by means of which it overwhelms the whole body and usurps its role.”

“For 14 hours yesterday, I was at work—teaching Christ to lift his cross by numbers… and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha”: Wilfred Owen, letter to Osbert Sitwell, 4 July 1918. (The Topography of Golgotha, 1918). http://​pw20c.​mcmaster.​ca/​case-study/​topography-golgotha-mapping-trenches-first-world-war

This is capable of generalization; I have explored the mud of the Western Front in the First World War, the Western Desert in World War II, and the jungles of the Vietnam War in “The Natures of War”, Antipode (in press).

Major Roderick Macleod, in Steel and Hart (2000), p. 138.

Major Richard Talbot Kelly, in Arthur (2002, p. 218).

Private Norman Cliff, in Hart (2013, p. 365).

Lt. James Annan, 1st/9th Bn Royal Scots Regiment, in Macdonald (1993, p. 126).

Le Bochofage: organe anticafardeux, Kaisericide et embuscophobe, 26 March 1917, in Audoin-Rouzeau (1992, p. 38). Le Bochofage was a French trench journal.

Huyssen (1993) sees Jünger directing his “entomological gaze” on this “garden” through an “armored eye”.

This aperçu was developed with most acuity by Cosgrove (1985).

2nd Lt. Thomas Hope Floyd, 2/5 Lancashire Fusiliers, 31 July 1917 in Barton (2007, p. 166).

Lt. J. Annan, 1/9 Bn., Royal Scots Regiment, in Macdonald (1993, p. 133).

Lt. Ulrich Burke, 2 Bn., Devonshire Regiment, in Arthur (2002, p. 241).

Private Aston, in Weir (2007, p. 42).

Booth (1996, p. 50) writes of the “corpsescapes” of trench warfare, which also evokes Blunden’s (1928/2000) description: “The whole zone was a corpse, and the mud itself mortified” (p. 98).

Henry Holdstock, in Levine (2009, p. 94); Lynch (2008, p. 144).

As that last sentence suggests, this fostered a sort of geo-intimacy. “Sometimes you wish the earth would shrink,” one private said, “so as to let you in” (Private Thomas McIndoe, in Levine, 2009, p. 38). And here is Remarque (1928/2013): “To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her, long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security …”(p. 41).

Lt. R. G. Dixon, Royal Garrison Artillery, in Steel and Hart (2000, p. 198).

Corporal Jack Dillon, Second Bn, Tank Corps, in Arthur (2002, p. 233).

Private N. M. Ingram, in Barton (2007, p. 309).

Das (2008, p. 86) cites Merleau-Ponty to sharpen the contrast between ocular vision and touch: “It is through my body that I go to the world, and tactile experience occurs ‘ahead’ of me.” There were of course other registers in which touch was central, and Das also beautifully illuminates the homo-sociality of this subterranean world in which forms of intimacy with other men—not just “mother earth”—were no less vital in rendering this stunted life endurable and meaningful.