1The winter of 1914 nails fighters in a tragic and almost immobile war of position. The « war factory » establishes and starts in the trenches its appalling « line of the production of the death »¹. In the European memory, it was not kept any precedent for a similar situation. The Great War reaches at least three tragic primates. First thing, it successfully exploits, employs and promotes the highest technological development of human history until 1914 ; secondly, it realizes for the first time the size of mass and pervasive war on a continental basis and over ; last but not least, it takes millions and millions of soldiers to the primitive condition of men trapped, nailed to the ground and hidden in caves. The habitat of the nationalized masses becomes the trench. From the North Sea to the Vosges, from Flanders to the furthest reaches of the eastern Alps, a web of cracks flows through the lands of Europe.

2For five years, the map of the trenches is the new map of the continent. A maze of pits altering not only the perception that the soldiers have of themselves, but the tragic retaliation of a continent that, having received the highest degree of cosmopolitanism and internationalism of its ruling classes and bourgeoisie, now spills its imagination and emotional geographies. An immense tangle of narrow underground paths becomes the drainage channel through which millions of lives, harnessed between surface and subsurface flow out. Soldiers arrive in trenches and describe their impact with the new reality as a descent into hell, a slow gait and bewildered in a world of disconcerts, a setback to the dens :

« Je me trouvai tout d’un coup devant une étroite gorge terreuse où les autres un à un, plongeaient. “C’est la tranchée, me souffla l’homme qui me suivait. On la voit bien qui commence, mais on n’en voit plus jamais la fin. Ben quoi, avance !” »²

3This reality is very partially known to all those who stayed at home. Government and individual self-censorship put in place by the fighters in their letters to the families and the play of removals and not wanting to know, circulating in the world been free in its civilian clothes, lubricate all together a removal mechanism filled with unspoken thoughts and things.

4André Chéronnet-Champollion (1880-1914), born in Paris but moved to America at the age of twelve, returning to France because of the war, describes his impact with the war telling to a friend the world of the trenches, of which in the United States they have a vague perception :

« We are in a forest in a regular labyrinth of trenches, some entirely underground, and we are plastered with mud from head to foot. […] The trenches are lines, one behind the other of course, but joined together in all directions by every kind of communication-trench, like the streets of a city, for a man never shows his head above ground. »³

Scattered and disoriented pilgrimages

5A large complex of literary and epistolary sources tells us that, from winter 1914-1915, the trenches become the main topic of discussion, not only in the European public debate, but especially among soldiers, their family members and friends. Soldiers and civilians immediately begin to interrogate themselves, and to reciprocate information, on this unknown and disturbing universe. The first involuntary trenches tourism was born in the exchange of letters between the war front and the families and in the stories told by the soldiers reaching their home countries on the occasion of the rare licenses handed out to them. Their tales from the start, the rite of passage they consume at the stations, the train trip, and the long and difficult forced march towards the front are, in their way, already travelling and descriptive stories. At the end of this sequence of transitions, it is the terrible impact of the trenches, a real pilgrimage between the front lines and in the trench tunnels.

6The Western Front and, from the fall of 1915, the front lines of the Italian-Austrian war, unchangeable their respective differences, distress the common experience of the trenches. Thousands of contact wires are stretched, twisted and often break between fighters and their family. Persisting these outages, it begins the ordeal of inaccurate and fragmentary information, anxieties and expectations. This sleep state stimulates tormenting mental trips, raids on churches, soliloquies and dialogues with God, in the hope of a resumption of broken contacts. The trickle of inaccurate and summary information, the difficulty of understanding the geography of the front and identifying places push the families in many cases to undertake for themselves the search of their relatives fallen in battle or died of wounds. Often they are women to go to the front, to make a journey with an uncertain destination, and with the prospect of an even more unsuccessful outcome in search of a body or a burial⁴.

7Prior to the future proper war tourism, arose after the end of the conflict, there is a constellation of small and minimum, often made secretly or clandestinely, « going to » and « coming from » the trenches. Silent movements involving relatives, friends and fellow soldiers, especially those still located in the same area of the war front or living in the vicinity. The goal is a visit to a small makeshift cemetery, in search of a rough and hasty burial. The concrete geography of the trenches is revealed in a broken whisper, interrogating residents and survivors. Maps and cartography, with their unthinkable war spread, are of little use for these investigations⁵. The direct approach to the combat zones overlays the features of a heroic geography to the physical ones drawn from seemingly neutral sign of maps. These individual crossings of both the war zone and the front, performed by many people on an individual basis, arise from the desire to adhere to a painful rite of recognition of the places where a family member or friend is dead. By these « excursions », generally made in a piecemeal, several people, spontaneously and fortuitously, act a psychological and emotional tour the implementation of which takes place only few years later.

8In Italy, for example, already April 23 1916, the young Count Novello Papafava goes in search of the temporary burial of Aldo Rosselli, the elder brother of Carlo and Nello, killed in action on Pal Piccolo, one of the alpine mountains of Carnia, March 27 1916⁶. It is certainly an extremely minority ritual that took its first, uncertain steps. However, as conditioned to arise slowly and sparsely, and depending on the distance of the family from the front and the economic conditions of the relatives, it provides the tenuous and rudimentary embryogenesis of the trenches tourism.

The war tourism by curiosity to commercial patriotism

9At the end of 1914, it seems that a flush of optimism, real or contrived, still circles in Europe. The Times, on the 12 of December, publishes an article, entitled Visiting France, probably echoing the concerns of Thomas Cook & Sons which, with its over 170 branches and agencies operating worldwide, is carefully scrutinizing the progressive decline of the tourist market. This slender thread of optimism, however, is broken in the early months of 1915, when the expectation of a short war does not survive long. France provides advantage point for a survey of intercultural experiences produced by the Great War. The conflict, in fact, allows the outcrop of encounters and clashes, resistances and acceptances, concerns and unavailability, outbursts and rejections addressed to the disparate and heterogeneous presence involved by war on French soil. The conflict leads to flow, in France, troops and auxiliary forces from around the world : British, North Americans, New Zealanders, Australians and Canadians, as well as military forces from both the French and British colonies, including Africans and Indians. In addition, France and Britain recruit and land in the metropolitan territory nearly a hundred thousand Chinese laborers, playing a crucial part in the trench warfare7. People fighting or working, but also moving, looking around, scouring, trying to understand and to be understood, to accept and be accepted. Each group retaining their uniforms, their colors, clothes, hats or headgear, rites, religion, food.

10A melting pot of differences and diversity placed at the crossroads of several France and Europe routes. This situation carries news and events changing the perception of others and themselves by the people experiencing it. This intersection of arrivals and presences does not feed a tourist movement, understood in the proper commercial and cultural sense of the term, but it gives off, however, a great influence and impact on widespread and consolidated habits that, in a short time, outline a novel or little known « tourism » produced by the ongoing war on the battlefields and in their rear. Within this intersection, often confrontational and not immune to violence and disputes, it takes consistency an incipient and primordial tourism of forced cohabitation.

11The Chinese, Indians, Africans, etc., in their letters and diaries tell their encounter with France and Europe. They transmit to their distant countrymen a certain curiosity about the places from which they write ; but, at the same time, with their presence they do arise as much curiosity in French, Europeans and the Western in general for the imaginative geography and landscapes of their Far East and South Asia’s countries. We could speak of a kind of « intermediated » tourism of curiosity.

12Many of these « exotic » presences also mark the European territory with lasting stays : for example, a part of one hundred thousand Chinese transplanted into France by the war, at the end of the conflict emigrate in Italy, constituting there the basic nucleus of a presence that, through various and difficult story, will never be erased. The war tourism born during the war is probably not only that of the trenches, cemeteries and monuments, in which there is a predominant rhetorical and celebratory component and an indelible imprint of self-referential and identity values. The war tourism that well deserves to be studied in its implications, movements and in the most remote resonance range of its novelty is just that one transmitted by « exotic » mediators, leaving in Europe the curiosity of their « world » and bringing in their own countries the curiosity of old Europe, in the folds of the first experience of the shared and promiscuous modernity of the First World War.

13Leaving aside these profiles of curiosity, it should be now remembered that, during the war, there are many civilians who reach the front and the trenches : bearers of supplies, friends and relatives of the fighters, entertainers, singers, war correspondents, writers, poets, artists, painters, and people animated only by curiosity or pushed to the battle and death lines by a religious piety or by civic solidarity8. These are weak clues of front trips, very fragile but tenacious ; interchange lines and areas of interpenetrating between the civilian and military worlds at a stage of loosening of the respective and mutual borders and boundaries. Jean Alazard, for example, telling the life that takes place in the French trenches to the Italian readers of a popular magazine, writes that in those trenches one can also find « some chair available for possible visitors »9. The front lines as « landscapes of geomancy »10 and area of deployment of an early war tourism not only involving the inhabitants of the front places. For example, next to civilians of the West Front countries, some allied and colonial soldiers, as well as the Chinese manpower, are visiting, passing through, and especially feeding a practice, till now little studied because its quite elusive and poor written testimony levels, oriented to search and acquire all kinds of « gadgets » from places of war and especially from the trenches. Photographs especially document this practice.

14If we carefully leaf through some illustrated magazines, designed and built precisely to describe the war, we find some useful confirmation of our thesis : for example, a reportage consisting of five pictures, each with a terse and tiny caption, entitled Civilian Curiosity in the Evidences of War. The first picture shows « two children near Ostend collecting spent cartridge-cases, bullets and other objects as playthings and souvenirs of the fighting ». The third one depicts « two members of a British cavalry regiment […] object of keen interest ». Then it follows a picture showing a large number of « people of Senlis contemplating the awful ruin of their town ». The last picture in this series is probably the one that tells us something particularly interesting, suggestive and pregnant with future developments : « Civilians […] hunting in the grass where the Battle of Senlis was hottest, looking for German bullets and other souvenirs of the fight. Souvenir-hunting has become quite an industry where the first of battle has raged. The traffic in war souvenirs always flourishes in the years succeeding hostilities, when the battlefields become the haunt of summer tourists ». This reportage, dating from 1914-1915, not only confirms that in such an early date « the traffic in war souvenirs always flourishes » ; but it even makes a prediction, also seeming a hope, very precise and guessed : « the battlefields become the haunt of summer tourists »¹¹.

15The birth of a stream of interest in the geography of the West Front and the trenches has the most important focus in the United States. It is an intent devoid of precise outlets whilst the war is still fiercely fought, but identifying with certainty an « industrial » vision of the real and concrete way of construction of the war tourism. Publishers and tourist agencies having entered together the publication of numerous and easily accessible cartographic instruments on the American Civil War are now ready to put the Great War at the center of their interests. They begin to discuss the possible trips to the battlefields of the West Front and, above all, France. The American tourism of war – so far aimed to the battlefields of the American Civil War in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania – thanks to the good level of industrial organization achieved in the early years of the 19^th century, feels ready to include Europe still fighting. This « new » tourism is indeed « unleashed by the First World War »¹².

16The track to follow is no doubting this. In the first months of 1915, « some Americans and privileged Britons were given conducted tours of select trenches »¹³ in France, but it is a very small number of people who enjoy significant support. The same Rudyard Kipling is required by the General Robert Georges Nivelle to perform a personal tour of the French first line : the commander of the Second French Army is convinced that all the fighters know Kipling’s books. Gathering all these clues, Thomas Cook & Son think of organizing guided tours of larger size, and much less occasional than in the past, to the French battlefields. However, their proposal does not obtain the approval of the French government, which seeks to prevent the problems and barriers that the development of such a trip would bring between the front lines. On 31^st of March 1915, the top management of Thomas Cook’s takes note of the French opposition and declares to The Times « that they would not be organizing sightseeing expeditions to the battlefields, at least until the war was over, owing to French opposition »¹⁴. The article in The Times, eloquent and peremptory from its title, Trips to Battlefields. No « Conducted Tours » Till The War Is Over, puts a provisional end to the debate. This, however, provides the evidence that « during the Great War, many people were conscious that the battlefields would become a focal point for tourists after the war »¹⁵.

A European Congress for war tourism

17Closing the doors to the initiative of the tourist industry, European governments start to develop their own strategy about war tourism. With their initiative, they seek to serve at least three goals : to dictate a line of development that, in accordance with their policies of war, is bypassing every pacifist infiltration; to define a « sacred geography » of Europe coming out of the war able to confirm the differences between the two factions that fought each other ; to braid economics and patriotism. The « sacred geography » can only be those of the battlefields, destroyed villages and monuments as a worthy environment and habitats of an indispensable « making heroes of the fallen fighters ». As has been rightly observed, the dead are not the only parameter of sacred geography, because « dès le début de la guerre, les ruines sont sacralisées et héroïsées »¹⁶.

18Since 1915, moreover, the war cemeteries are the focus of the authorities. Countries at war begin early to appoint commissions and committees for the honours to the fallen, to promote an accurate survey of the provisional cemeteries and eventful burials. Eminent architects and designers are involved while the war is still going on¹⁷. Cities, places, landscapes, monuments, and the cult of the fallen flow into the « sacralisation model » conceived and pursued by national Governments to « provide valuable insights into the evolution of contemporary tourist attractions »¹⁸. The predominant government initiative wants the patriotic intentions coincide with the state pedagogy of war. As in any hegemonic narrative in progress, the marking of the concrete space of the war, as well as the relevant implications and projections, both mental and metaphorical, becomes so deep that « the Western front landscape still has the power to evoke an imagined community »¹⁹.

19Italy, with the inherent duplicity of his war, matching the front lines and the alpine barrages, has not only a problem of the « sacredness » of the trenches, but that of involving in the « sacralised model », the extreme and dizzy verticalization of its battle sites, climbing up to almost 4 000 meters of hight²⁰. In this respect, the definition of an Italian « sacred geography » suffers the strong influence of the political and cultural nationalistic trends speaking of the Alps as the « natural boundaries » of the Nation. It is no accident that a prominent leader and nationalist senator, Tommaso Tittoni, on the 17^th of May 1917, opening the Third International Parliamentary Conference of Trade, a possible and hoped embryo of a future inter-allied joint body for the economic reconstruction after the war, dedicates his inaugural speech to the economic relations between the Allies in post-war Europe²¹. Tittoni approaches the problem without diversions :

« We are discussing the problems of post-war while still rages the war […]. Of course, we are patriots both before and after the war; but if during the war, excitement and passion nourish patriotism, after the war is necessary that it is calm and reflective. »

20We must await the report carried out by Godefroy Bardet to the « Congrès de Monaco pour favoriser le Développement des Stations Hydro-Minérales, Maritimes, Climatiques & Alpines des Nations Alliées », strenuously wanted by Prince Albert but started only in 1920, to know that the idea of convening a European conference on tourism issues dates back to 1916²². In Italy, this project is almost immediately brought to the attention of politicians, hotel entrepreneurs and scholars of tourism. The Milan entourage of the Touring Club Italiano is simultaneously filtered out some indiscretion or anticipation through its spread magazines²³. It is a debate mainly made of discrete and soft approaches taking place for internal and somewhat underground lines. No one wants to be in the risk of appearing as a business planner forgetting the fallen and the yet ongoing destruction. What is most striking is that in 1917 the discussion on the future does not concern the traditional concept of tourism, resorts, and art cities, but for the first time it focuses the battlefields :

« Just after the war, the wet places, sacred by as much generous blood, will be visited by millions of religious pilgrims, eager to keep the overview of the theater where it is carrying out the most terrible tragedy of humanity. »²⁴

21The problem is not to favor the usual, elitist and bourgeois tourism, but to arouse a mass interest, potentially capable of combining the economic expectations of the tourist industry and a renewed patriotic education understood as civil religion. This frame urges publications, duly cropped itineraries, and studied trips. In the fall of 1917, France promotes the publication of a series of easy and little Michelin guides. These publications have not only the objective of illustrating with care some sectors of the Western Front, but of « restoring the truth » about German atrocities, denied by Baedeker Guides printed in French²⁵. For its part, the Touring Club Italiano, long aiming to achieve a « Guidebook of Italy »²⁶, carefully evaluates the series newly made in France and takes it as a template to design the Italian « Guide ai campi di battaglia »²⁷ :

« Interesting and revealing is this connection glimpsed between war and tourism through the idea […] that it can be discussed about the battlefields, where and whilst the fighting is still going on, as the next tourist destinations. The idea reveals how the climate of the war has also permeated the world of tourism. With apparent ease, the above idea draws […] in a secular and national patriotic key, the religious pattern of the pilgrimage, which, through the centuries, has already somehow foreshadowed the mass tourism. »²⁸

22In her conspicuous work, Anna Treves rightly points out that, in the argumentation for orienting the tourism to the battlefields, the lexicon of patriotism is soaked in religious and even mystical terms : « millions of devout pilgrims », « sacred sites », and « generous blood » are not only rhetorical phrases. They also build an interchange between religious practices and rituals with mechanisms of foundation or re-foundation of civilian cults and religions :

« The model, in short, is not oriented to a mere travelling trying to reach more or less hedonistic purposes for recreation or information, but a pattern for a tourism capable of being a cult instrument, bearing of symbolic meanings […] : a tourism with goals of national education. »²⁹

23To emphasize the importance of the perspective promoted by Anna Treves, it suffices to note that the entities and networks taking charge of the organization of leisure and tourism play a not insignificant role in encouraging the nationalization of the European bourgeoisie at the beginning of the twentieth century³⁰. In this frame, the Touring Club Italiano, the Club Alpino Italiano and other stakeholders in the sector do not differ from their European and non-European counterparts³¹. The Great War is not yet over when, with a certain gradualness, the cult of the fallen and the spilled blood sanctification attract inside the perimeter of the war tourism also the natural landscape³². In 1917, while the Touring Club Italiano speaks of « pilgrimage », French guidebooks, published by Michelin, express their plan for a tourism religiously patriotic and, to this end, they employ a lexicon adequately calibrated on both of said profiles. In the Foreword of the first Michelin Guidebook dedicated to the battle of the Marne, output in 1917, authors write :

« For the benefits of tourists who wish to visit the battle-field and mutilated towns of France, we have tried to produce a work combining a practical guide and history. Such a visit should be a pilgrimage, not merely a journey across the ravaged land. Seeing is not enough, one must understand; a ruin is more moving when one knows what has caused it; a stretch of country which might seem dull and uninterested to the unenlightened eye, becomes transformed at the thought of the battles which have raged there. »33

24A different perspective emerges from the book of John Masefield, published in 1917 but written a short distance from the great battles of the West Front. The display of the American writer is certainly not the same as tour operators or institutional networks, interested in developing a patriotic and nationalized mass tourism. Masefield retraces some places and villages located on the front. He seems to want to reassure future visitors that the battle has left those places :

« Presently, they will be quiet country roads again, and tourists will walk at ease, where brave men once ran and dodged and cursed their luck, when the Battle of the Somme was raging. »34

25Soon after, he realizes that it will take some time before the crowds of visitors can access the battlefields :

« It may be some years before those whose fathers, husbands and brothers were killed in this great battle, may be able to visit the battlefield where their dead are buried. Perhaps many of them, from brooding on the map, and from dreams and visions in the night, have in their minds an image or picture of that place. The following pages may help some few others, who have not already formed that image, to see the scene as it appears today. What it was like on the day of battle cannot be imagined by those who were not there. »35

26Under his trip to the front lines, Masefield pauses to think about what the future visitor will see and the psychological and spiritual condition of so many unknown « tourist » ; but he still thinks of a crowd of individuals or a small group of relatives, not of a « mass » flow. He therefore does not formulate pedagogical recommendations or instructions for the « use » of the battlefield. In his speech everything flows in a minor key, quietly, following an almost melancholic cadence :

« Near the road and up the slope to the enemy the ground is littered with relics of our charges, mouldy packs, old shattered scabbards, rifles, bayonets, helmets curled, torn, rolled, and starred, clips of cartridges, and very many graves. »36

27Scrolling the page of Masefield, the human step of the visitor wandering among objects now obsolete and, in the midst of so much junk, ready to be promoted relic, may find an antidote to the whirring ferocity of nationalism just touching « heroes » and « tombs » amid a mountain of useless objects.

28Moreover, before the mourners and the curious are able to go to the trenches to visit the dead or to look for souvenirs, it is necessary that the calendar signs the date of November 11 1918 bringing something resembling peace³⁷.