Military and Civilian Mapping (ca 1912–1930) of the Great War: A Selective Private Collection (Including Postcards)

Civilian projects or military conflicts will, alongside explanatory texts and statistical tables, initiate graphic sketches – maps/charts – to promote the objectives and to invite comments. The longer a project or conflict lasts the more likely are its source materials to result in a greater quantity and quality, and variety of media and format, adapted for differing ‘audiences’. Information and publicity (propaganda included) on the Russo-Japanese War from February 1904, concluded by the Treaty of Portsmouth (Kittery, Maine, USA) on 5 September 1905, was comparatively limited. In contrast, the Great War (afterwards ‘First World War’), triggered by the unstable undercurrents of the 1912–1913 Balkan Wars, extended over a period of four and one quarter years. Its post-conflict treaties of 28 June 1919 to 10 August 1920 caused reverberations for another dozen years, exemplified by the quadripartite occupation by Belgium, France, Great Britain and USA of the Rhineland and by plebiscites affecting Germany’s peripheries. The period, media and format range in this (mainly British) selective carto-bibliography encompasses military map-reading manuals and training maps, a trench map, ‘stand-alone’ folding maps commissioned from leading map-makers by newspapers, bird’s-eye-view and panorama maps for weekly ‘popular’ magazines, maps in insurance company year-books and in geographical journals, and ephemera – notably map postcards: i.e. items encompassing both civilian and military needs.