The outbreak of war has an unfortunate tendency to disrupt the production of travel writing more than it does that of most other literary forms: journeys assume a sudden necessity and an unaccustomed seriousness, and cross-cultural contact is suddenly transformed in ways that the genre is not accustomed to chronicling. This was certainly the case during the First World War. Between 1914 and 1918, the popular exoticism of the belle époque and its fin de siècle variations, as well as the travel-inspired writing associated with the recently emerged colonial literary school, was suddenly brought to a standstill. This was nevertheless a period of great mobility, as the war triggered the mass movement of a generation of young men, including for the first time many colonial troops who were suddenly faced with a European reality that contrasted starkly with expectations generated by the rhetoric of the ‘civilising mission’. The writing to emerge from such journeys, with its extremes of patriotism and pacifism, disrupted the implicit geographical and ethical norms of earlier, especially Romantic, travel writing. Channelled through a range of forms, particularly poetry, novels, and diaries, the literature of 1914–18 tended inevitably to betoken different forms of conceptualising, relating to and finally textualising otherness.

Inter-war journeys

The impact of the conflict on travel, and on the modes of its literary representation, was considerable.