The cataclysmic events of the First World War—or, as it was then known, the Great War—still cast haunting shadows. Horrific images of battlefield trenches turned into mustard gas mass graves merge with historical analysis pointing to a conflict conjured by bumbling diplomats and short-sighted nationalists to leave one feeling, even nearly a century after the fact, numb in the face of human evil. Making sense of such events demands, at least in part, attention to the experiences of ordinary participants in such extraordinary circumstances. How did people far from the capitals and the war rooms respond to choices that demanded their participation as soldiers or civilian supporters? In recent decades this desire to see human history from the "bottom up" has become a focus for scholars seeking to recover the voices of those who were central to history’s events even while they were shut out of the decisions guiding those events. Doubly muzzled are voices of conscripts in army training camps who, on grounds of Christian conscience, objected to the war by refusing arms and in some cases any cooperation with military orders. How can we understand American Mennonite Great War conscientious objectors (COs) in particular, whose peace stances rendered their already minor status as mere conscripts yet more marginal? For literary scholar Melanie Springer Mock, a key to unlocking this hidden historical world is the private diary. In Writing Peace: The Unheard Voices of Great War Mennonite Objectors, she analyzes and contextualizes writings of Mennonite COs to see what these ordinary records of daily detail suggest about the larger issues that placed these men in army barracks and kept them from taking up arms. As literary and communication theorists have contended, diaries represent a special sort of personal and historical record. In the leaves of a diary, one can retrospectively order the disorderly events of life, creating patterns on the page even when the elements of life seem maddeningly random. The often routine and even monotonous nature of diary entries actually belies a teeming world, the chaos of which is held in check by the regular entry of some small consistencies, some ability to point to the predictable. Perhaps no setting offers more chaos than a world at war, and the diaries of those caught in its global grip are especially telling sources. Mock not only examines the diaries themselves, exploring how their owners inscribed reality on their blank pages; she also places the objectors’ texts in a wider literary context. COs confined to army camps were hardly the only men whose Great War experience found literary outlet. Indeed, a generation of so-called trench poets and essayists emerged from the senseless carnage of World War I. For some, the brutal quest for manliness and patriotism gave way to cynicism; for others it birthed pacifism. For Mennonite objectors, Mock explains, the issues were both different and the same, caught as they were in a war that promised to remake the world and that used the language of future peace in its very call to arms. Not content to give herself the last word, Mock allows four representative diaries to speak again through her edited transcriptions included here. The four writers—Gustav Gaeddert, Ura Hostetler, John Neufeld, and Jacob Meyer—brought Russian Mennonite, "old" Mennonite, and progressive Amish Mennonite convictions and sensibilities to their war-time CO stances and to the written records of their experiences, thoughts, and feelings. The series Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History is pleased to present Writing Peace as a contribution to an ongoing and multidisciplinary conversation with the past. SAMH embraces reflection on the past from many sources and academic perspectives and Mock’s contribution from literary studies is a welcome addition to Mennonite histories of the Great War that have focused on ecclesiastical concerns or theological developments. As Mock notes in her opening pages, the
personal response of these Great War objectors speaks to
our contemporary concerns. The desire to run order
through personal and global chaos, the ongoing
celebration of war and violence in our society, and the
claims of faith, family, and community remain keenly
personal and pressing concerns in the twenty-first
century even as they were for these diarists in the early
twentieth. May their witness continue to find a hearing. Writing Peace orders:
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