Smelling History: How our sense of smell can aid memory work

by Kasey

When I read Vera Brittain’s WWI memoir, Testament of Youth, in 2011, I never expected that my thoughts would still be so haunted by it five years later. At this point I’ve nearly reconciled with the fact that it is going to stay with me for the rest of my life. Having worked closely with it for a long time, there are certain passages that I know very well, and even during the busiest and noisiest of times, if I close my eyes, I can often see her words illumined in the darkness. I can imagine her experiences and the sufferings of the men she loved. And I feel something.

Vera Brittain as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, 1915

Roland Leighton

In subsequent moments of silence on November 11, one particular passage of hers is usually with me. Two days before Christmas in 1915, and two days prior to his scheduled return, Brittain’s fiance, Roland Leighton, was shot in the stomach and died from complications in a Louvencourt casualty clearing station. Upon being given the news, Brittain tries to calm herself with a cup of coffee and it is one of the most heart-wrenching moments of the memoir. Not long after this, Leighton’s clothes were returned to Brittain, and she recalls how they smelled of both stained blood and the French village where he was killed. The affective power of those smells shattered her idealized understanding of the War. They made her “realize what France really meant.” And when she was stationed in that very village as a nurse eighteen months later, the smell conjured the memory of those clothes and the suffering of the young scholar who wore them.

Leighton's grave at the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in Louvencourt, France

Interestingly, when I first arrived at the Redoubt over a year ago, one of the exhibits I was most taken by both explored and memorialized the experience of gas warfare in WWI and used smelling interactives to accomplish this.

The WWI smelling interactives at the Redoubt Fortress

Visitors were actually able to experience the smells of chlorine, mustard, and phosgene gases. In a war full of atrocities, the gas attacks in Belgium still reign in common memory as the most horrific.

Fritz Haber

The idea of weaponizing poisonous gas to be fatal belonged to Nobel Prize winning German chemist, Fritz Haber. He was on hand when it was first released by the German army at the Second Battle of Ypres, 1915, against the 1^st Canadian Division at Mouse Trap Farm on April 24, and then against the British at Hill 60 on May 5. 90 men died at Hill 60 before they could even be brought to a dressing station. Of the 200 that did make it somewhere for treatment, over 40 died shortly after. Every single one suffered, some longer than others.

What Hill 60, Belgium, looks like today

The agony of gas attack casualties is unspeakable. We know this.

But we don’t, really . . .

Eli Weizel, Nobel Prizing winning author
of Night - a haunting portrait of
 the Holocaust

And how could we? No description of asphyxiation or blinding or burns could possibly capture it. With the

smelling interactives, however, we can certainly glean a more experientially informed understanding of what those young men went through.

My familiarity with Brittain’s poignant passage about smell really makes me appreciate our exhibit for uniquely engaging a sense that is proverbially underused by museums. It made me think about the untapped potential of smell in memory work. Memory work asks difficult questions - ones that Brittain herself often grappled with. How do you make people care about things that happened in the past? About sufferings they never experienced? How do you make them see that remembering is important? In Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum, Susan Crane’s proposed answer to these questions lies in a visceral experience of that history. And for Eli Wiesel, holocaust survivor and author of Night, this experience cannot be visceral enough. It was his hope that the Holocaust Museum in Washington would provide one. “I want those people who go in there,” he writes, “to come out 2 000 years old.”

If Brittain’s experience is any indication, smell could powerfully achieve this. It can induce a visceral reaction like no other. It is also remarkably affective. It made Brittain remember. And it touched her deeply enough to make her despise war, planting the seed that would blossom into lifelong pacifist work.



The gas exhibition at the Redoubt Fortress
asks visitors to describe how the experience
of gas warfare makes them feel - bringing them
closer to the men who suffered in 1915

I think the Redoubt’s sensory evocation of the Ypres gas attacks is profoundly moving for visitors. And memorable. Sharing the visceral experience of smell with the men who died at Ypres essentially dissolves the 100 years that separate us from them. It dissolves the temporal gap that can lull us into mistakenly thinking that what they went through doesn’t matter. It might be idealistic, but it is not incongruous to imagine that visitors will leave that exhibit with a newfound compassion for the men who suffered all those years ago - that they will not only continue to remember what happened, but will understand and appreciate why it needs to be remembered. For in truly remembering, we can honour them, and maybe even save ourselves from the possibility of such horrors ever happening again.