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In 1958, A.J.P. Taylor's essay The Troublemakers explored the tradition of dissent against power politics in the United Kingdom. Gaetano Salvemini, who had always shown a consistent interest in British political and cultural debates, shared many of the positions put forward by these 'troublemakers', such as free trade, the fight against military expenditure, and suspicions regarding standing armies. At the outbreak of the First World War, Salvemini used these arguments to support Italy's involvement in the war against autocratic and militarist central powers. Salvemini's journal L'Unità reported the stances expressed by a 'troublemaker network' called the Union of Democratic Control, despite their criticism of the United Kingdom's line of action during the war. In the course of the conflict, Salvemini kept in close contact with a specific group of 'troublemakers' around Robert Seton-Watson's journal The New Europe. Salvemini championed The New Europe 's fight for subject nationalities in the Habsburg Empire, though he criticised their support of Yugoslavian claims to Istria, Trieste and Venezia Giulia. This essay will focus on the complex relationship between Salvemini and these British 'troublemakers' through the former's writings and correspondence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most recent archaeological studies of prisoners of war have concentrated on resistance to confinement and identity creation within the camps. In contrast, the findings at Les Blanches Banques, Jersey, occupied by German military prisoners during the First World War, are here viewed through the lens of the varied placemaking strategies applied by both prisoners and camp staff. The prisoners created places of meaning within the regimented and confined conditions of their internment, but the guards were also limited by their duties in their assignment to this remote location, though all also saw the camp within its wider island landscape setting. This is the first study to consider placemaking at a prisoner of war camp at nested scales and from different perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The entry of the United States into the First World War and the integration of women into mobilization expanded women-run private initiatives and integrated their associational efforts into the war effort. This created greater visibility of women and children to state and federal governments. In the end, however, the increased attention and mobilization of private organizations by the state around women's issues was fleeting. The alacrity with which North Carolina dispensed with these mechanisms for mobilization is an example of their purpose as associational measures to manage the dynamics of wartime and maintain pre-war hierarchies of power. Throughout the war, the bifurcation of work based on gender and the unfixed status of women created a situation in which their participation required constant negotiation. The need to negotiate participation in the mobilization was itself an outgrowth of the conflicted relationship between American government and civil society over women's issues. After the war, these issues again became the purview of private organizations and other systems of extra-governmental governance that leveraged a more associational relationship with federal and state governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows the significant role played by religious politics in the German Revolution of 1918. It examines first how the secularist subculture within German socialism contributed to the formation of wartime opposition that led to the 1917 split of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). It then follows the actions of secularists during the revolution itself, beginning with the attempts of one of Germany's most prominent secularists, Adolph Hoffmann, to force through a radical program of secularization upon assuming a key position in the revolutionary government of 1918. It traces the politics of religion in the writing of the Weimar Constitution before taking up the relationship of secularism to the "pure" council movement, which emerged in the years from 1919 to 1922 as an alternative both to parliamentary democracy and Bolshevik party rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates how Franz Schreker's Die Gezeichneten and its early reception reflected an uneasiness about the confines of manhood. As an opera with a complex genesis and a difficult reception history, Die Gezeichneten 's allure comes from its resistance to being reduced to only one thing. I nevertheless seek to locate this opera around the time of its premiere towards the end of the First World War. I contend that Die Gezeichneten and its immediate reception charted a key transition in Austro-German masculinity. Specifically, the opera's early performances marked a move away from the period's normative models of bourgeois masculinity (and their corresponding ideas about appearance, health and nationhood) and towards an alternative masculinity preoccupied with degeneracy. I focus on the opera's masks, arguing that, through acts of concealment and disclosure, the opera's two male protagonists struggle to negotiate expectations of an emotionally controlled modern manhood, calling attention to wartime anxieties about what it meant to be a man. Such anxieties resulted in a hardening of attitudes towards the masculine gender, which influenced contemporary music criticism too. Die Gezeichneten 's highly sensationalist early reviews relied on a language of degeneracy. Yet I suggest that the opera's initial reception captured a critical moment in this language's history before it was subsumed under Nazi ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the comparative reading of Italian literature of the Great War (letteratura di guerra) published between 1915 and 1940, it will be shown that both among veterans of the conflict and civilian writers there existed a standardised image of falling 'beautifully' in combat that entailed specific components relating to location, time, final gestures and last invocations, and which aimed to make death in battle more militarily and culturally palatable for Italian audiences. At the same time, the letteratura di guerra presented naturalistic descriptions of the anonymous mass death of peasant soldiers and, thereby, created a pathos of beauty and suffering that made the Italian literature of the Great War prototypical for a new kind of spiritual realism that became one of the mainstreams of cultural expression in Fascist Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay investigates the occupation of the city of Rijeka (1919–20) by an irregular army led by Italian poet Gabriele d'Annunzio, focusing on the concepts of sovereignism and populism. While people with different mentalities and ideological horizons took part in the endeavour, it was d'Annunzio that gave the occupation its profound meaning. The poet attempted to put into practice his political vision centered around a 'noble people', composed of warriors and producers, opposed to the liberal elites and in competition with revolutionary socialist movements. In this sense, the Free State of Rijeka grew into the prototype of a new society based on the integration of racial, plebiscitary, corporate, aesthetic, and political themes. At the same time, the city became a beacon of opposition to the new international order proposed by US president Woodrow Wilson, since it advocated and worked towards the birth of sovereignty for small countries resisting new supranational bodies such as the League of Nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hugh Edmund Ford (1851–1930), first abbot of the English Benedictine monastery at Downside in Somerset, had a reputation, especially in monastic circles, as a scholarly and reforming monk. He is much less well known than his contemporary confrères, Cardinal Aidan Gasquet and Abbot Cuthbert Butler, lacking Gasquet's public profile and Butler's list of much-respected publications. Ford's considerable political and diplomatic skills were honed in the promotion of a monastic reform movement which transformed the English Benedictine Congregation. He travelled widely on monastic business and also on account of his always delicate health. More surprisingly, in 1918, he acted as an agent for the British government on a mission to neutral Switzerland, where the Benedictine abbey of Einsiedeln provided a refuge for many Germans displaced from Rome when Italy entered the Great War in 1915. Ford made use of the various ecclesiastical networks available to him,including the Benedictine Confederation centred on S. Anselmo in Rome and connections made through the school at Downside. This article places Ford in these and other Catholic networks and demonstrates how they were put to use in the Allied cause during the First World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argument: This article contributes to a global history of relativity, by exploring how Einstein's theory was appropriated in Belgium. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, yet the early-twentieth-century Belgian context, because of its cultural diversity and reflectiveness of global conditions (the principal example being the First World War), proves well-suited to expose transnational flows and patterns in the global history of relativity. The attempts of Belgian physicist Théophile de Donder to contribute to relativity physics during the 1910s and 1920s illustrate the role of the war in shaping the transnational networks through which relativity circulated. The local attitudes of conservative Belgian Catholic scientists and philosophers, who denied that relativity was philosophically significant, exemplify a global pattern: while critics of relativity feared to become marginalized by the scientific, political, and cultural revolutions that Einstein and his theory were taken to represent, supporters sympathized with these revolutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our special issue discusses different perspectives on the important changes that took place in the transition from empire to nation-state at the end of the First World War, focusing especially on transnational connections, structural and historical continuities, and marginal voices that have been fully or partially concealed by the emphasis on a radical national awakening in 1918. Specific articles broach topics such as the implications of 1918 on notions of gender and ethnicity, 1918 and the violence of the "Greater War," and the legacies and memories of 1918 across the 20th century. Our approach treats the "New Europe" of 1918 as a largely coherent geopolitical and cultural space, one which can be studied in an interdisciplinary fashion. We contend that 1918 is not simply a clean break in which one epoch cleanly makes way for another, but rather it is an ambiguous and contradictory pivot, one which created an "Old-New Europe" caught between the forces of the imperial past and those of the national future. Our intention is not to dismiss entirely the importance of the transformations of 1918 but rather to show how there exists a tension between those changes and the many continuities and legacies that cut across the traditional chronology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses Czechoslovakia as an example of the process of transition following the end of the First World War and the dissolution of Austria-Hungary. It analyzes the military context of the transition itself, showing how difficult, violent, and prolonged a process it was, in contrast to the traditional assumption of a quickly emergent successor state built on the ethnic-based enthusiasm of its Czech-speaking population. In the second part, it goes on to analyze the memory of the transition and the position it came to hold in the overall narrative of this period of the interwar years, with specific attention given to the way Czech-speaking veterans of Austro-Hungarian service tried to retell the story of the transition, and why their proposed narratives ill-fitted the official discourse of the war as the "national struggle for independence" of Czechoslovakia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses a gap in the literature on military adaptation by focusing on the first step in the adaptive process: detecting failure. We argue that institutionalised feedback loops are a critical mechanism for facilitating detection. Feedback loops are most effective when they filter information and distribute lessons learned to senior tactical commanders. In turn, effective filtration depends on incorporating frontline soldiers and specialists into intelligence cells while creating a protected space for dissent. We evaluate our theory against both irregular and conventional wars fought by the British Army: the counterinsurgency campaign in the Southern Cameroons (1960–1) as well as the evolution of British assault tactics on the Western Front of the First World War (1914–18). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this article is to demonstrate the value of a global perspective on pandemics for understanding how global pandemics caused by novel viruses can unfold. Using the example of the 1918 influenza pandemic, two factors that were central to the evolving pattern of global pandemic waves, connectivity and seasonality, are explored. Examples of the influences of these factors on pandemic waves in different locations are presented. Viewing the 1918 pandemic through the lens of compartmental models of infectious diseases, our analysis suggests that connectivity played a dominant role in the initial stages. With the passage of time and the progressive infection and consequent immunization of more and more people, however, the role of seasonality increased in importance, ultimately becoming the driving force behind the emergence of future waves of infection. Implications of these observations for pandemics caused by novel viruses such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argument: This article contributes to a global history of relativity, by exploring how Einstein's theory was appropriated in Belgium. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, yet the early-twentieth-century Belgian context, because of its cultural diversity and reflectiveness of global conditions (the principal example being the First World War), proves well-suited to expose transnational flows and patterns in the global history of relativity. The attempts of Belgian physicist Théophile de Donder to contribute to relativity physics during the 1910s and 1920s illustrate the role of the war in shaping the transnational networks through which relativity circulated. The local attitudes of conservative Belgian Catholic scientists and philosophers, who denied that relativity was philosophically significant, exemplify a global pattern: while critics of relativity feared to become marginalized by the scientific, political, and cultural revolutions that Einstein and his theory were taken to represent, supporters sympathized with these revolutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over 2,000 Radcliffe College students, administrators, and alumnae irregularly involved themselves in World War I (WWI) activism. While most matriculating and matriculated Radcliffe members collectively contributed to war work, their individual records illuminate peculiar paradoxes that challenge historical concepts of America's WWI culture. Radcliffe females generally assumed war tasks untethered to their professional experiences and political aspirations. Many undergraduates and graduates contended that they chose, circumscribed and concluded war-connected work at their discretion—not Radcliffe's and/or America's. Moreover, domestic efforts designed to awaken Americans' war patriotism and activity encountered a decidedly dormant and indulgent Cambridge college compound. Not until fall 1918—over a year into U.S. belligerency—did Radcliffe's campus completely mobilize for 'selfless' war service. Radcliffe's WWI-related chronicles—including its members' post-hostilities humanitarian activity—suggest that "coercive voluntarism" and "complete citizenship" were not ubiquitous forces in WWI America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines relations between the Orthodox Church of Cyprus and the British colonial government during the First World War. I argue that the Great War constituted the first turning point in Church-State relations during colonial rule in Cyprus which, following other developments, finally collapsed during the 1950s. I discuss how the dynamic of the Enosis movement for the union of Cyprus with Greece was bolstered during the Great War. This in turn, the article will show, had significant repercussions on the attitudes of the Orthodox Church and the British authorities, transformed their relationship and opened the way for future developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines one of the most consequential legal–political models for the confiscation of private property in the twentieth century: the Trading with the Enemy Acts (TEAs). Two laws with this name were passed in Britain (1914) and the United States (1917), enabling the large-scale expropriation of 'enemies' and 'aliens'. The extra-territorial application of these laws during the era of total war led to the globalization of its paradigm of expropriation in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The TEAs made the administrative process of dispossession effective and profitable for liberal states. The US law was repurposed for domestic use during the New Deal, while its British counterpart played an unforeseen role during decolonization and the great partitions of the late 1940s, as the nascent nation-states of India, Pakistan, and Israel used it to constitute themselves as territorial and economic units by taking land and property from 'evacuees' and 'absentees'. The article provides a short history of these four national cases in their international context and argues that the history of the TEAs shows that state-driven mass expropriation was much more common throughout the mid twentieth century than usually supposed; the 'age of extremes' was also in part an 'age of expropriation'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conventional historic account maintains that international criminal law (ICL) was 'born' after the Second World War. This account is incomplete, as William Schabas's book, The Trial of the Kaiser (2018), captivatingly shows by richly portraying the (aborted) First World War initiative to try the German Kaiser before an international tribunal. However, this article (after providing an overview of Schabas's book) argues that Schabas's account of a First World War ICL 'birth' is also incomplete. ICL during the First World War era was but one link in a much longer historical chain. The essay demonstrates this fact by presenting certain elements of the long (forgotten) history of ICL, which provide answers to questions that have been left unanswered, not only by the conventional account (of a Second World War ICL 'birth') but also by Schabas's account (of a First World War ICL 'birth'). As the article discusses, the unveiling of a greater ICL history indicates that international criminal tribunals are not a modern innovation, and reveals the origins of 'crimes against humanity', of 'aggression' and of the universal jurisdiction doctrine. The essay further discusses reasons for the non-remembrance of the long history of ICL, the importance of acknowledging that history, and the likelihood of it becoming widely acknowledged in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the formative years of flight in the United States and argues that Pan-Americanism served as a guiding ideology in the development of the nation's early aeronautic endeavors. With the advent of the airplane at the turn of the twentieth century, U.S. Pan-Americanists believed that aviation would provide a solution to the sociological and practical problems that hindered the development of international unity among the American republics. By physically transporting individuals, products, and cultural media rapidly across the hemisphere via the sky, aircraft would unite the peoples of Latin America and the United States and promote inter-American cooperation. To see the Pan-American potential of aircraft fulfilled, Pan-Americanists cooperated with private U.S. aviation organizations to expound the value of flight and to generate interest in aviation across the Western Hemisphere. Although a variety of Pan-American initiatives were successfully undertaken during the 1910s, the outbreak of the First World War hindered the movement and ultimately led to the transformation of aviation into a tool of U.S. imperialism in Latin America. By examining the origins of U.S. aviation through the lens of Pan-Americanism, this article seeks to reevaluate the pervading imperial narrative of the history of U.S. aviation in the Western Hemisphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the years leading up to and during the First World War, patriotic films featuring self-sacrificing child protagonists formed an important sub-genre of Italian film production. This article looks at Film Artistica Gloria's Cuore series (1915–1916), adapted from De Amicis' novel, with particular attention given to the two war-themed films, Il tamburino sardo (UK: The Sardinian Drummer Boy , 1915) and La piccola vedetta lombarda (The Little Lookout from Lombardy , 1915). An examination of the way in which advertising, reviews, and promotional materials worked to reframe these Risorgimento stories within a new historical context shows how the transmedial relationship between the novel, films and paracinematic texts helped to transform De Amicis's civically-minded patriotic tales into an endorsement of Italy's intervention in the First World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The military ossuaries (sacrari militari) that were built to house the remains of fallen soldiers of the First World War offer a striking example of how Italy has dealt with the legacy of Fascism. Located along former frontlines in north-eastern Italy, the ossuaries occupy an ambiguous position in Italian heritage as both national monuments and the remnants of a difficult past. Whereas originally they functioned as instruments of Fascist propaganda, they have been reinvented as monuments of Republican Italy. Thus, while challenging the notion of Fascist remains as 'difficult heritage', this article suggests that the ossuaries might be seen as palimpsests that have been overlaid with different and ever-changing memories. To this end, the article traces the afterlives of ossuaries from 1945 to the present in search of evidence of evolving attitudes towards the Fascist period. It also examines a recent resurgence of public interest in the ossuaries in conjunction with the centenary of the First World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Britain's 1917 National Baby Week and specifically how it played out in London. Pageantry and celebration were an important part of the event, and possibly a welcome distraction from the trials and horrors of war, and they were embraced by women of all social classes. But there was much more to it, as women who led the event seized the opportunity for political purposes, in what appeared to be an unthreatening environment of celebrating motherhood. Their goal was to promote the material wellbeing of, and state support for, women and children, and in this they were remarkably successful. Baby Week was also seized upon as an opportunity to showcase other welfare systems as a model for Britain, focusing in particular on New Zealand, with its free and comprehensive health service for infants. Rather than reflecting the eugenic and pronatalist concerns of the establishment, the event should be seen as a moment of politicisation of women arguing for cross-class social reform targeted at mothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Harley Granville Barker was invited to stage a theatre season in New York following the outbreak of the First World War, senior figures within British politics seized on it as an opportunity to promote the British war effort in the United States. It was, however, Barker's impromptu decision to extend his stay and tour Euripides' The Trojan Women to major colleges on the East Coast that saw him come close to realizing this goal. Through an examination of the production, the discourse that surrounded it, and the changing diplomatic relations between Britain and the USA, Philippa Burt explores in this article the extent to which Barker used Euripides as a propaganda tool through which to engage and educate the largely isolationist North American public. At the same time, she argues that Barker challenged the propaganda machine by refusing to perpetuate the dominant nationalistic and xenophobic narratives and, instead, intended a condemnation of all war. Philippa Burt is a lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her previous publications include numerous articles and a chapter on Barker's work with choruses in the forthcoming The Great European Stage Directors, Vol. 4: Reinhardt, Jessner, Barker (Bloomsbury Methuen). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After his abdication in November 1918, the German emperor Wilhelm II continued to haunt the minds of his people. With the abolition of the lese-majesty laws in the new republic, many topics that were only discussed privately or obliquely before could now be broached openly. One of these topics was the mental state of the exiled Kaiser. Numerous psychiatrists, physicians and laypeople published their diagnoses of Wilhelm in high-circulation newspaper articles, pamphlets, and books shortly after the end of the war. Whether these diagnoses were accurate and whether the Kaiser really was mentally ill became the issue of a heated debate. This article situates these diagnoses of Wilhelm II in their political context. The authors of these diagnoses – none of whom had met or examined Wilhelm II in person – came from all political camps and they wrote with very different motives in mind. Diagnosing the exiled Kaiser as mentally ill was a kind of exorcism of the Hohenzollern rule, opening the way for either a socialist republic or the hoped-for rule of a new leader. But more importantly, it was a way to discuss and allocate political responsibility and culpability. Psychiatric diagnoses were used to exonerate both the Emperor (for whom the treaty of Versailles provided a tribunal as war criminal) and the German nation. They were also used to blame the Kaiser’s entourage and groups that had allegedly manipulated the weak-willed monarch. Medical concepts became a vehicle for a debate on the key political questions in interwar Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Great War, the Bulletin International des Sociétés de la Croix Rouge covered the immense work of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (National Societies). This article focuses on one particular angle of that work: the tensions and even contradictions between the ICRC's duty of neutrality and impartiality, on the one hand, and the national and sometimes nationalistic commitments of National Societies, which were naturally opposed to each other in wartime, on the other. While some of the Bulletin 's articles revealed real advances in thought on war and the protection of victims, others reflected the inertia caused by this fundamental contradiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will use past issues of the International Review of the Red Cross to examine how the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement (the Movement) has engaged with the issue of civilian protection over the course of its history. Although founded to organize humanitarian relief and legal protection for wounded and sick combatants, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the wider Movement have increasingly incorporated civilian war victims into their remit since their establishment. Yet, as this article will highlight, this process has not been straightforward. Focussing on the critical period between the two World Wars, the article will use the Review to illustrate why the Red Cross began engaging with the "civilianization" of conflicts in response to the threat of new technologies like gas and aerial bombardment. Using articles from the Review to highlight the key challenges faced by the Movement in protecting civilians over this period, it will also consider the gaps in the Red Cross's initial conceptions of who "the civilian" was, why belligerents attacked them, and what was the best means of protecting them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the meaning of photographic portraits of First World War Italian migrants, in terms of the tensions that emerge from their visual codes and the extent to which the subject’s interior reality and individuality might emerge from the reassuring surface imagery of photography and war. By analysing photographs of Italian migrants who either joined Italy’s army or enrolled in their adopted country’s army, we can see how the ‘otherness’ of the war – its artificial face of idealised glory, honour, and ordinariness, as presented through the portrait’s aesthetic codes – supplants the ‘otherness’ of the migrant individual, that is, their ambivalent life in between different cultures, traditions and identities. Yet, beyond the physical and psychological annihilation of the modern war, the photographic portrait, with its fabricated order and ‘otherness’, becomes, for the migrant soldier, a means of giving coherence to his dislocated existence. The nostalgic visual codes of the photograph, however, evoke an order that is now denied by the destructive mobility and mobilisation of both migration and war. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many have been deeply critical of the Church of England's response to the First World War, which has been seen as insufficiently critical ofGovernment policy andtoo influenced by the war spirit. Charles Gore (Bishop of Oxford, 1911-19) provides a fascinating case study of how one independently minded Anglican thinker arrived at swift and unwavering support for the war, while simultaneously trying to mount a 'counterpoise' to some elements of the war mentality. This article describes and evaluates Gore's use of the just war tradition, and the efficacy of the counterpoise he attempted. Analysis of his thought reveals a curious mix of hard-headed strategic realism about what would secure a just and lasting peace, and striking naiveté about what war actually entailed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For half a million ‘Syrian’ Ottoman subjects living outside the empire, the First World War initiated a massive political rift with Istanbul. Beginning in 1916, Syrian and Lebanese emigrants from both North and South America sought to enlist, recruit, and conscript immigrant men into the militaries of the Entente. Employing press items, correspondence, and memoirs written by émigré recruiters during the war, this article reconstructs the transnational networks that facilitated the voluntary enlistment of an estimated 10,000 Syrian emigrants into the armies of the Entente, particularly the United States Army after 1917. As Ottoman nationals, many Syrian recruits used this as a practical means of obtaining American citizenship and shedding their legal ties to Istanbul. Émigré recruiters folded their military service into broader goals for ‘Syrian’ and ‘Lebanese’ national liberation under the auspices of American political support. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Great War ushered in a new era of long-distance combat. For the first time, weapons with a very long range were massively deployed, in previously unheard-of places: under the sea and in the air. Stealth fighting also included espionage and propaganda, now orchestrated on a global scale. In reaction to the carnage in the trenches, a degree of moral rehabilitation came to be conferred on the weapons initially associated with a “cowards’ war”. This in turn encouraged experimentation with the new, unmanned technology that would lead to the first prototypes of guided munitions and drones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great War was globalized and totalized1 by the inclusion of colonial and newly independent people from all over the world and of civilians, old people, women and children. The European war became a laboratory for all the suffering of the century, from the extermination of the Armenians to the refugee crisis, the internments, and the unending modernization of warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides insight into how, during the First World War, the ICRC handled the oversight of the respect of the 1906 Convention on the Wounded and Sick and the 1907 Hague Convention on Maritime Warfare, steadfastly working to uphold the law. It examines the ICRC's view on the applicability of the Conventions, describes its handling of accusations of violations of international humanitarian law and, finally, shows how the ICRC engaged in a legal dialogue with States on the interpretation of various provisions in the 1906 Convention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The election of Giacomo Della Chiesa as Pope Benedict XV coincided with the outbreak of the First World War. His pacifism led to vigorous attempts to halt the war, which failed because of the Vatican's isolation and poor diplomatic prestige. The most notable attempt was Benedict Peace Note of 1917 that set out seven proposals for negotiating peace. Despite Benedict's failure to alter the course of the war, his diplomatic efforts were matched by humanitarian action on behalf of prisoners of war and famished children. Benedict's legacy has been greater diplomatic resources for the Vatican and an energetic search for peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay falls into two parts. In the first I offer a panorama of my book, In Defence of War (Oxford University Press, 2013), highlighting its main features. These comprise: its rhetorical position; its opposition to the 'the virus of wishful thinking', pacifism, legal positivism, and liberal individualism; and its promotion of the early Christian tradition of just war reasoning and of three kinds of realism - moral-ontological, Augustinian-anthropological, and practical. Then in the second part, I consider four controversial issues that the book raises: love, proportionality, Britain's entry into the First World War, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]