OH WHAT A WHINGEING WAR!

Correlli Barnett regrets that the latest BBC series on 1914-18 was content to trot out the same old stuff

STRAIGHT AWAY I must declare an interest. I wrote eight out of the 26 pro- grammes of the original 1964 BBC televi- sion series The Great War, and shared with John Terraine (who wrote almost all the rest) the Screenwriters' Guild Award for the best television documentary script of that year. Interest duly declared, I can state that the new BBC television offering in seven 45-minute programmes, 1914-1918, is a turkey if considered as a television production, and a Britannocen- tric muddle if considered as history.

The Britannocentric bias is proclaimed in the first words of the first programme, a sentimental anecdote about the death of the poet Wilfred Owen on the eve of the November 1918 armistice. The bias is emphasised in the same programme by the absurd statement that 'the Great War was born with the mobilisation of Britain' — i.e., of Britain's then all-professional army and navy numbered in hundreds of thousands. With many millions of French, German, Russian, Austrian and Serbian soldiers already marching towards battlefields spread from the Balkans to East Prussia, Poland to Bel- gium and France, would it not in any case have been a 'great war' without the British?

Then again, while the Anglo-French Dardanelles sideshow in 1915-16 and the Western Front battles of Verdun and the Somme in 1916 are gloomed over at length, the tremendous campaigns in those years on the Eastern Front between the Germans/Austrians and the Russians are dismissed in just two sen- tences, and the destruction of Serbia is not mentioned at all. Equally left out of the 1916 programme is the Italian offen- sive against the Austrians. In fact, unless I missed it, the first mention of the Ital- ians comes in the penultimate pro- gramme (on 1918), when it is remarked in passing that they have been routed at Caporetto. Who would guess that the Italians lost in three years of belligerency 460,000 dead, as against 512,000 United Kingdom dead on the Western Front over four years?

Britannocentricity is also conveyed by the prominence given to the brave but whingeing poet Siegfried Sassoon and his troubled conscience. But then the series as a whole is content uncritically to trot out yet again the downbeat view about the war cherished by the 'progressive' intelligentsia ever since the 1920s.

Thus the consistently lugubrious com- mentary is read by Judi Dench in schoolmistressy style and at a slow march in time to funereal background music. Casualties, grief and hardship are empha- sised at the expense of patriotic enthusi- asm, belief in a righteous cause, and popular resilience and humour. Even film of British soldiers in high spirits behind the lines enjoying sport or amateur dramatics is turned by the commentary into a glum story of men seeking relief from intolerable strain. Only in the final programme are we told by the Australian historian Trevor Wilson, over film of groups of cheerful Tommies:

Horrible as the war was, it was an experience that many people found positive, productive and worthwhile. They came out very attached to their experience of the war, thinking that this was the best time of their lives; that they had experienced comradeship with other men that they had never even thought possi- ble before . . .

Well!

In the original Great War series the only talking heads were surviving eye-witnesses of the events. In the new series the talk- ing heads are multinational pundits. With rare exceptions — such as Michael Howard on the political origins of the war and on the Versailles peace treaty, Trevor Wilson, John Terraine and Peter Simp- kins on the campaigns — their contribu- tions could have been better incorporated in the commentary over film or stills. As it is, they pontificate away in dreariest seminar style, most of them affecting that irritating academic mannerism of the 'his- toric present'. I was surprised that John Keegan should commit (in regard to the Somme offensive) the elementary sole- cism of calling the preliminary bombard- ment a 'barrage', and astonished that he should accuse Haig of 'emotional deficien- cy'. Even if true, what would be its rele- vance to Haig's professional competence? The apparent anchor man of these talking heads is a Dr Jay Winter of Pem- broke College, Cambridge, honking away in academic's American. I have to say that by the end of the series I was so maddened by the cocksureness of his expression and pronouncements that I longed to hang one on his hooter. Dr Winter is credited as the 'series histori- an'. Is this pompous-speak for 'scriptwrit- er'? Who, for example, was guilty of writing (I ran the videotape through twice to make sure), over film of one of Sere de Rivieres's post-1871 forts, that Verdun's fortresses above and below ground were the work of Vauban?

Who, if not Dr Winter, was responsible for the plodding and cliché-ridden language of the script? In the very first programme (on pre-war Europe) we learn, to our utter amazement, that 'electricity turned night into day', that 'aircraft defied gravity' and that there was a 'technological explosion'. Similar felicities abound in later pro- grammes. We are told that 'to enter the trenches was to enter an alien world', a world which soldiers 'found almost impossi- ble to describe'. This is immediately fol- lowed by a vivid description by the German artist in uniform, Otto Dix.

But there are more deep-seated weak- nesses in the narrative. I have already mentioned the broad neglect of the East- ern, Italian and Balkan battle fronts. In the programme on 1915, there is no cov- erage of the repeated French mass offen- sives on the Western Front, nor of the British army's modest debuts at Loos and Neuve Chapelle, while the Turkish mas- sacre of the Armenians (`the 20th centu- ry's first genocide') gets a sequence, even though utterly irrelevant to the course of the war. The third battle of Ypres (launched on 31 July 1917) is dealt with in the programme that comes before the one dealing with the Nivelle offensive (launched on 17 April) and the French mutinies (in May and June). This is dou- bly nonsensical because the fate of the French army (and also of the Russian) was a major factor in Haig's mind in planning his own offensive.

This brings me to the basic shortcoming of the series — the absence of any attempt to explain the political and strategic dynamics of the war, or even of individual campaigns, which alone can give meaning to the human experiences so glumly harped on here. For instance, why did the French and British launch those Western Front offensives of 1914-17? Because the partial success of the Schlieffen Plan in 1914 left the Germans in occupation of a great swathe of northern France, and it was politically unthinkable for the French and their British ally not to try to turf them out. Yet the series fails to explain this. Then again, the battle of the Somme is narrated as if this were an isolated and foredoomed British offensive, whereas in fact it formed part of an allied strategy of concentric offensives against Germany and Austria on all fronts, Eastern and Italian as well as Western. So desperately was Germany pressed that in August 1916 she turned to Hindenburg and Ludendorff as saviours. Yet these two only appear in this series 11 minutes into the programme on 1918! Moreover, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, turned to as saviours by Britain and France in 1916 and 1917, don't appear on the screen until the last pro- gramme, on the Paris Peace Conference and the Versailles Treaty of 1919; and Foch, the Allied generalissimo in 1918, does not feature at all. Aren't their politi- cal and strategic roles in the war worth examining? Extraordinarily enough, there is no coverage of the central strategic debate of the war between the 'Western- ers' and the 'Easterners'.

I do indeed wonder how well the authors of this series understand strategy and military operations. For instance, the British army is first portrayed as being led repeatedly, with dire moral consequences, into futile slaughter. But then it turns up in the programme on 1918 under the same C-in-C to launch, on 8 August, according to Trevor Wilson, 'an extraordinary exam- ple of a well-planned, well-conducted mili- tary operation on the Western Front', soon followed by the swift breakthrough of the formidable Hindenburg Line. Could it be that there might have been a connection between these successes and the earlier gutting of the German army in the attrition battles of 1916-17?

True to form, the armistice in Novem- ber 1918 serves as a pretext to harp yet again on 'the Lost Generation', rather than to summarise the achievement of the Allied victory in liquidating the pre-war menace of German power. And the last programme, having narrated how the politicians threw away the fruits of the soldiers' victory by botching the peace treaty, ends by returning to Sassoon at his gloomiest; to film of shellshock cases, war graves and the Cenotaph; to Conan Doyle and spiritualist attempts to get in touch with the dead; and to Sassoon yet again, for a final long quote from this entirely unrepresentative member of the British army in France.

The awful thing is that 1914-1918 was produced by the BBC Education Depart- ment. We must assume, therefore, that this politically correct telly tract will be fed to our young in schools and universities as `history'.

The author's latest book is The Lost Victory: British Dreams, British Realities 1945-50 (Pan, £8.99).