A lovelier war
Hugh Cecil
THE UNQUIET WESTERN FRONT: BRITAIN'S ROLE IN LITERATURE AND HISTORY by Brian Bond CUP. £17,50, pp. 728, ISBN 0521809959 This book is much needed. Over the past 70 years the British view of the first world war has been steadily mythologised, and that myth, as Samuel Hynes has pointed out, has acquired a more potent cultural reality than what actually happened — which, because of the giant scale of suffering, came to seem inexplicable in conventional diplomatic and military terms. In The Unquiet Western Front Professor Brian Bond, Emeritus Professor of History at King's College, makes a thought-provoking bid to claw the first world war back to history, away from popular myth.
That myth, which has gained such a grip on British minds, is of an unnecessary war, without victory, without glory, fought during four years of stalemate in the trenches of the Western Front under the leadership of incompetent generals with unchanging and criminally wasteful strategies; a home front deluded into unquestioning support by lying government propaganda; a disillusioned British army quasi-mutinous after being duped into futile fighting on the Somme and in the mud of Flanders; countless shell-shocked soldiers shot at dawn for cowardice and desertion.
This myth has been fed from many sources, from literature to popular entertainment: these include disenchanted verse by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen; novels by Erich Maria Remarque (in translation), and Richard Aldington; memoirs by Lloyd George and Robert Graves; histories by A. J. P. Taylor and Alan Clark: anthologies and criticism by John Lehmann, V. de S. Pinto, Jon Silkin and Paul Fussell — and, above all, Lewis Milestone's film of All Quiet on the Western Front; Maurice Browne's anti-war production of Journey's End; Joan Littlewood's musical 0 What a Lovely War, and, more recently, Ben Elton's TV comedy, Blackadder Goes Forth, From the late 1920s, this generally disenchanted picture began to eclipse the earlier myth about the Great War: that civilisation had been gloriously saved by a selfless generation of young warriors, which found its most eloquent expression in the words of Arkwright's '0 Valiant Hearts (The Supreme Sacrifice)', at one time the bestknown war poem of all:
These were Thy children, in Thy steps they trod, Following through death the martyr'd son of God.
Victor he rose, victorious too shall rise They who have drunk the cup of sacrifice.
The newer myth, a revolt against patriotism and glorification of military prowess, intensified its hold in the 1960s when antiauthority youth culture spread, alongside protest against the Vietnam war. Bond remembers students pinning a new caption on Field-Marshal Haig's portrait at his old Oxford college, Brasenose: 'Murderer of one million men'.
This perception of the Great War — an expression, many today would claim, of the humane, anti-belligerent values on which we pride ourselves — dominates newspaper journalism and teaching at schools. The truth about the war' comes to today's schoolchildren almost entirely as the white-hot indignation of Siegfried Sassoon's and Wilfred Owen's powerful verses:
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory The old lie: Duke et decorum est Pro patria mori.
However, in the past 25 years, scholarly research about the Great War has made impressive strides. Brian Bond acknowledges the achievement of Nicholas Hiley, Jay Winter, John Terraine, John Keegan, Gary Sheffield, Tim Travers, Hew Strachan, Paddy Griffith and many other historians, and is convinced the tide is now turning in favour of historical truth: in 10 or 15 years, teachers may be demonstrating to their pupils that there were very strong reasons why the British had to fight the Great War and win it; that official propaganda on the home front was limited in extent and poorly funded; that far from the war being a time of disenchantment, altru istic ideals burned as brightly for many joining up in 1918 as they had in 1914 when Rupert Brooke thanked God for giving him the chance to fight — and more brightly than in 1939-45.
It may also come to be accepted by journalists and teachers that a majority of the British generals and senior officers were the equal of, or better than, many of their successors in the second world war; and that numerous staff officers, far from lurking 'safely in the rear', were killed and wounded; that not all the fighting, day by day, was like that on the nightmare first day of the Somme or the evil rainy weeks around Passchertdaele; that the British General Staff learned from their mistakes and developed highly effective tactics; that the army's morale withstood its battering at Ypres in the autumn of 1917 and during the German advances of spring 1918, powerfully impressing Britain's enemies; that the only serious mutiny was behind the lines at Etaples, against military police and NCO instructors, and not against the generals' strategy; that shootings for desertion and cowardice were relatively rare, death sentences being usually remitted; and not least, that the British army's steady daily advance from late July till November 1918 constituted what was arguably the greatest victory in its history.
As for the literary picture, it may finally be acknowledged by critics that Sassoon, Owen and Rosenberg, Aldington, Remarclue and Graves and other disenchanted writers told only one part of the truth and were outnumbered by the mass of patriotic poets and novelists (few of them, admittedly, of the same literary calibre) who wrote of their feelings and experiences during the war, right up to the end of fighting in 1918 and in the years that followed; that some of these patriotic writers — such as Ernest Raymond, Gilbert Frankau and Wilfrid Ewart — were popular for years afterwards; also that even writers as embittered as Sassoon and Aldington were not consistently anti-military: Sassoon, an exceptionally courageous fighter, was greatly attached to his battalion and loathed, because it denigrated bravery, All Quiet on the Western Front (which in any case was more about soldiers' feelings after the war than a faithful account of the fighting); while Aldington was exhilarated by 1918 by the power of the British Expeditionary Force:
Abrupt, huge, hairy, testicular ... specifically male, as opposed to the eunuch-like composition of sedentary townsmen.
Brian Bond's arresting, sensible book, concentrating in 100-odd lucid pages the historical evidence against the myth, is a gift to teachers and a welcome antidote to the distorted popular image of the first world war. It may be long before historians win their battle, but The Unquiet Western Front shows where the lines should be drawn.
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