Exorcising the Trauma
By JOHN TERRAINE*
T THoucirr I knew a good deal about the .lemotions and hysteria which the name of Haig is capable of arousing after nearly fifty years. I was sadly wrong; and I am particularly grateful to Robert Kee in the Spectator for providing the best indication of where I went wrong. Referring to the way in which the emotions well .uri this subject, Kee said: It's then . . . that one is in danger of thinking that Haig himself was somehow responsible for the whole appalling experience of West European man between 1914 and 1918, and that by attacking him at his many
vulnerable points one is somehow exorcising the trauma.'
Kee is right; it is a trauma. To my knowledge su far, only one other reviewer of my book on tialg has realised this so clearly. He is Robert Blake, who provided in the Yorkshire Post a model of how to review a book and at the same time write a reasoned and informed essay.
On the subject of it. He, too, referred to the traumatic experience of the First World War,
Which has 'given Haig the quasi-symbolic status that he holds.' The difference between the two IS that Blake is conscious of the trauma, while Kee is a victim of it. All through his review
sensed the unhappiness of his position, as reason grappled with emotion, fact with legend. This, surely, is what produced certain painful contradictions, 'as when he dismissed all his own opening paragraphs with the phrase: 'Not of course that it is the role of the military historian himself to draw any lessons other than the military ones . .'—and then immediately had second thoughts about this, and produced a string of qualifications. No sooner done than doubts creep in again: 'Not that this should have anything to do with it.' These pendulum swings, these jerks from one position to another, unhappy in all of them:are pure trauma mani- festations-
What is the trauma about? Up to a short time I would have said: it is about First World
war casualties. But as Robert Kee indicates in the. sentence I quoted at the beginning of this article. that is not so. How could any British general be held responsible for 'the whole aPpalling experience of West European man,' uless it could be proved that the general was s°me large way responsible for starting the war. ? And that, of course, is an absurdity; from which it follows that it is an absurdity to talk rout West European man. What we mean is vritish man; and the trauma of British re- IS about British casualties.
;Author of Douglas Haig: The Educated Soldier. 'ewer' in the Spectator of April 26 by Robert Kee. Now what is the truth about casualties? The first thing to be admitted is that the full truth will never be known; the second is that the British losses, though frightful, come a fair way down a ghastly list. At the top of it, as one might suppose, stands Russia, with an estimated 9,000,000 (1,700,000 dead). Probably next comes Germany, with an official figure of 6,673,610 (1,808,545 dead); but there are manifest inac- curacies in this statement; working from regi- mental rolls, the British official historian places the number of German dead at almost twice the figure given. Then there was Austria-Hun- gary, with a total of 7,481,600, admitting 1,200,000 dead. Then there was France, with a statement of 2,831,600, which did not include an estimated 2,000,000 mutiles de guerre, but did include 1,385,300 dead. Only then do we come to Britain, with a total of 3,260,581 for the whole Empire, including India, of whom the total deaths amounted to 947,023. This is the right figure for comparison with France, since colonial contingents are comprised in the French total. For the United Kingdom (with Ireland) the death total was 744,702; for Metropolitan France the French authorities say that one should deduct 58,000 from the,above total, but I should say considerably more, in view of the tapping of French colonial manpower during the last years of the war.
Anyone who has managed to fight his way through this awful mortality rate will agree in- stantly, I think, that only the most perverse view can continue to focus exclusively on the British losses. Only the most hysterical sentiment can concentrate passion against British generals, when one sees what was being suffered by Russia and Austria. (Italian deaths, let me add, amounted to almost exactly two-thirds of those of the United Kingdom.) And to straighten the record just a little more, it may be as well to point out that the entire roll-call of deaths, military and civilian, for all nations, during the First World War, added up to about two-thirds of the loss of life in the Soviet Union alone during the Second World War (10 per cent of the entire population, admitted by Soviet census returns). Or, to put it another way, all the deaths, in all the battles, land or sea, of soldiers of the British Empire during the First World War, came to one-sixth of the number of Jews exter- minated during the Second World War. If one adds to that the dropping of two unnecessary atomic bombs, one may well wonder whether the above-mentioned trauma should not urgently seek a new form of expression.
Of course, you can't argue with a good trauma. Out of all this one central fact emerges: the shock to the British consciousness was out of proportion to the comparative loss. Why? The reason, I suggest, is simple: this was the only time in British history that the British public at large was presented with the bill (in blood) for the policies which it chose to follow. Always before, ever since Britain emerged as a primarily naval power, it had been the practice to con- duct land operations on the principle of limited liability, with a small (and despised) Regular Army, and above all by getting other people to do the heavy work. (Even in the Regular Army, let it be noted, there was always a high pro- portion of Irishmen and Scotsmen, so that one may particularise even more, and say that the shock was severest to the English and Welsh middle and lower-middle classes which for cen- turies had believed that all this rough stuff was nothing to do with them.) And in the Second World War, by an accident, the same pattern was repeated: at bottom, it was the Russians who smashed Germany, and the Americans who smashed Japan. The result was a grand total of 357,116 British deaths (264,443 military) in the Second World War—and the brilliant position we occupy in the world today.
Yet I know from bitter experience that the trauma victims will make little of all this. That British losses on the Somme, for instance, were largely incurred in the cause of preventing more French losses (already far too high); that German losses on the Somme, or at Passchendaele, were tremendous; that during one month, when the British were fighting Passchendaele, the Italians contrived to lose 165,000 men on the Isonzo (two-thirds of our loss in one-third of the time); that Russia lost 2,000,000 in 1915—none of this seems to have any impact on that rock-solid insularity and parochiality which lies at the heart of the British (and above all, English) tem- perament. One might suppose, given this pre- occupation with British deaths, that those who enjoy tossing selective quotations to and fro might pay attention to Haig's question to the War Cabinet on October 19, 1918: 'Why ex- pend more British lives—and for what?' But I don't expect they will.
The amazing thing, food for the most search- ing reflection. I suggest, is that this is 1963— the year in which we were to enter the Euro- pean Common Market, and all he good Euro- peans. Yet it is precisely among the younger generation of critics, some of whom were also the most ardent Marketeers, that the recog- nition of the cost of being European is most feeble. Is this also part of the trauma?
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