Horrores y verdades de la guerra

Among the handful of World War I female journalists is Spanish writer Sofia Casanova (1861-1958), who witnessed the war on the Eastern Front from her home in Warsaw. Between October 1914 and December 1915 she published chronicles of the war in one of Spain's foremost newspapers, the ABC, which in 1916 appeared in book form as De la guerra: Crónicas de Polonia y Rusia. The article explores the way in which her articles reveal aspects of this war that the majority of journalists on both sides the conflict silenced, due to either strict censorship or because they believed that their role as reporters was to exalt their country's national interests. In her articles Casanova exposed what she believed to be were the horrors of the war by depicting its brutality and destructiveness and by focusing her gaze on the injured bodies of soldiers and the displaced Polish civilian population.