The truth of war
From Jane Kelly
Sir: So what is the truth about the Great War? Come along then, tell us. I haven’t yet read The Great War: Myth and Memory by Dan Todman, but Hugh Cecil who reviewed it (Books, 21 January) obviously felt that Todman had got it right in his attempt to overturn the ‘myth’ about the war being a bad thing; a view which Cecil says now dominates our thinking despite ‘a wealth of first-rate historical research’ carried out by what he calls ‘conscientious historians’, as opposed to all those Tired Tims and Weary Willies who go about insisting that the whole thing was a terrible mistake.
Nowhere in the review did he actually tell us the case for prosecuting that war. He did mention that the Hun threatened the Channel ports and that overall our casualties were low compared with others, but is that his argument for a world war, the death of millions of men, and the total collapse of Germany, which led to even worse horrors later?
Jane Kelly London W3
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