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Record W2995161697 · doi:10.4324/9781315668628-10

Churchill’s War Horse: Children’s Literature and the Pleasures of War

2015· book-chapter· en· W2995161697 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Paul Stevens

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicThemes in Literature Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHistoryLiteratureArt

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Even after a century, the rst day on the Somme, the rst of July, 1916, remains the dening moment in our culture’s perception of the First World War. From Blackadder to Birdsong, we all know the story only too well. Lions led by donkeys: thousands and thousands of khaki-clad soldiers going over the top, struggling out of their trenches only to nd a wasteland of death and horror. Not gardens to trenches, but trenches into an utterly unexpected and unimaginable Devil’s garden. All those “lovely lads,” as A.E. Housman might have put it, scythed down by German artillery and machine guns. Between 7:20 a.m. and dusk, the British Fourth Army, whose elite 29th Division included the 752 men of the Newfoundland Regiment, attacked the Pozières Ridge just north of the River Somme. Within a matter of hours, it had been decimated – almost 20,000 young Britons and Newfoundlanders from this and the anking Third Army were killed. Another 40,000 were wounded, missing, or captured.1 Writing in the Sunday Pictorial shortly after the opening of the battle, Winston Churchill, unlike many on the home front, sensed that the popular conception of the war as a grand imperial adventure was no longer tenable: “The faculty of wonder has been dulled,” he wrote, “emotion and enthusiasm have given way to endurance; excitement is bankrupt, death is familiar, and sorrow numb” (WSC, III: 791). Within the Devil’s garden itself, however, it was still possible to nd traces of an earlier, more innocent world, our rst garden. Many Germans appeared to be overcome with compassion for their young enemies. Lance Corporal Hugo van Egeren of the Second Guards Reserve Division tells this story: During the night I was approached by an ofcer of the Rie Brigade. He had a white ag and asked if he could remove the wounded. I could speak English and told him that I would put his request to my leutnant. My ofcer gave permission but he only informed the troops on either side, not the H.Q. in the rear. We helped the English to nd their wounded. Sometimes we carried them over to their own side, sometimes the English laid a white tape to the wounded men so that their stretcher-bearers could nd them in the dark. When it got light we got orders that we should stop what we were doing but, by then, most of the good work was done. We red warning shots to tell the English the truce was over. We were hardened, experienced soldiers. It wasn’t fair to send these young soldiers against us. Some of them were only students and we felt very sorry for them.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.007
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.297
Threshold uncertainty score0.591

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.007
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.002
Science and technology studies0.0310.035
Scholarly communication0.0120.009
Open science0.0020.007
Research integrity0.0050.012
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0180.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.015
GPT teacher head0.207
Teacher spread0.191 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

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Citations0
Published2015
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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