Enemy Intimacies and Strange Meetings in Writings of Conflict 1800–1918

Abstract Propaganda others the enemy as brutish, brutal, and lacking in humanity. By contrast, a wealth of literary and first-hand writings present switches in which the enemy becomes, as Wilfred Owen famously put it, a ‘strange friend’. This book focuses on moments of intimacy and reassessment between military enemies—truces, treatment of the wounded, relationships with prisoners of war. It is concerned with the work done by declarations of fellow feeling, both to challenge and enable militarism. The book explores enemy intimacies in literature, philosophy, and life writings to ask questions pressing for our contemporary moment about the nature of amity, enmity, familiarity, and otherness. It ranges across British conflicts of the long nineteenth century, a period in which ideas about the uniqueness of combat experience coalesced with a European effort to secure a distinctive version of so-called civilised humanity. The sense that soldiers of the other side, bonded by experiences unavailable to civilians, were ‘just like us’ came into tension with views about the alterity of other nations and races. This book considers which enemies can become familiar and which are held as other, investigating dividing lines of nation, race, religion, and culture. Enemy Intimacies and Strange Meetings asks how far these affectively powerful encounters can shift individual and wider narratives about civilisation and humanitarianism. This book uncovers a rich cultural history of enemy intimacies to consider different orientations of cosmopolitanism and humanitarian fellow feeling, while recognising and explaining the ways in which full international kinship remains elusive.