ABSTRACT
If, as Osborne (1999: 56) states, ‘archives have beginnings but not origins, they are both controlled by gatekeepers and worked upon, are never innocent,’ then military archival sources have in the process of production almost certainly already undergone a particularly fierce round of editing and checking. Official military documents are informative in content, pared in delivery and commonly sealed from prying interpretation, until their period of confidentiality has expired. They may be rich in detail (recording precisely the ‘wheres’, ‘whens’ and ‘hows’ of battle plans, fields and operations), yet for documents that record so much action and bloodletting they are often dry in tone. While soldiers’ actions are accounted for, the embodied experience in these sources is left to linger uncommented. Thus, the challenge is how to get under the clipped language, to consider the experiences as well as the strategic impacts. Some researchers have managed successfully to negotiate these issues by looking elsewhere for viable sources. Woodward, Winter and Jenkings (2010) have used soldiers’ photographs taken during tours of duty in recent conflicts to tell stories about the role of the soldier in active military spaces and territories. They have also explored the image of the soldier in contemporary print media, and Woodward and Jenkings (2011a, 2011b) have considered the role of the military memoir to the social production of the contemporary British military. These studies employ diverse military sources to tell an embodied account of the military experience, and they suggest the possible means to draw on creative and lively military archives.
