Gabriel’s Map: Cartography and Corpography in Modern War

Abstract

The usual image of the Western Front during the First World War is of static warfare, but this was the product of a dynamic and eventually industrial cycle of aerial reconnaissance and map preparation through which each side had detailed and up-to-date knowledge of the dispositions of its enemy. War on such a scale was a paper war: it had to be planned from those aerial photographs and maps. To staff officers and military planners, therefore, the battle space was a carefully calibrated one in which advances and assaults were meticulously timed and choreographed – in effect, a sort of ‘clockwork war’, which was apprehended in a visual-optical register. But to the infantry who were most intimately involved in those offensives the battle space was a battlefield – what Santanu Das calls a ‘slimescape’ – whose stubborn materiality often confounded the orderly plans of the generals. In order to survive, those troops developed a radically different apprehension of the battle space which did not privilege sight. Their improvisational knowledges were intensely corporeal and constituted a ‘corpography’ whose constructions relied primarily on sound, smell and touch.