Talking of books
Blighty
Benny Green
To anybody whose brain works in a reasonably logical fashion, there is almost nothing about the running of the First World War which makes the slightest sense. I am not thinking now about its causes, or its avoidability, or its ethical justification, but merely about its execution, which appears to have been inept and ridiculous from first shot to last. The Great War was the first set-piece to suggest to Homo 'sapiens the useful idea that it should clear off and leave the planet to the devices of some Other evolutionary type, one with less clotted cerebral responses.
In examining the minutiae* of daily life on both sides during the Great War to End Civilisation two dominant emotions spring into the forefront of the reader's mind, contempt for the hypocrisy, and compassion for the incompetence. Indeed, the great problem facing Posterity when making its judgements is to try to work out where the hypocrisy ended and the incompetence started. Was the Bishop of Southwark, for instance, being hypocritical or incompetent when advising girls to send their men off to war so that "no one of them shall Carry away with him as his last remembrance of England anything but f,,N4fat is pure and gentle and straight and true"? Was Kitchener in advising combatants, "while treating all women with perfect courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy,compromising his immortal soul or only his brainbox? Perhaps both, for the advice was not only unnatural, but should have been passed on to the Minister of Munitions Who, in the light of subsequent disclosures, was in sore need of it.
Then there is the daft syntactical flummery of the King's 1917 proclamation about food consumption:
We being persuaded that the abstention from all unnecessary consumption of grain will furnish the surest and most effectual means of defeating the devices of our enemies and thereby of bringing the war to a successful and speedy conclusion, and out Of our resolve to leave nothing undone which can contribute to those ends or to the welfare of our people in these times of grave stress and anxiety, have thought fit by and with the advice of our Privy Council to issue this our Royal Proclamation most earnestly exhorting and charging all those of our loving subjects the men and women of our realm who have the means of procuring articles of food.
Studying that text against the counterpoint of the photograph showing General Joffre's belly straining at the confines of his trousers, an observer from a later age is inclined to ask why everyone did not, as Sassoon nearly put it, suddenly burst out laughing, The same contradictions appear at every turn, and it is easy to see why. The Great War was the first industrialised conflict, which made it the first to call on the efforts of the entire population.
*The First World War: Ephemera. Mementoes, Documents Rickards and Moody, (Jupiter Books £3.95) Mud Songs and Blighty:Scrapbook of the First World War Colin Walsh (Hutchinson £3.50) which meant in turn that its propaganda had to find the lowest common denominator to arrive at the highest common factor. To put it another way, the broader the lie the more efficacious its effect on recruiting. But there were hopeless contradictions, as divines like the Bishop of Southwark soon found. It is madness telling a man to stick his bayonet into an enemy's throat with one breath, and then asking him to exercise social restraint with the next. And it was positively comical watching Mr Asquith talking of the patriotism of those very munition makers who a few years before had been the beneficiaries of his Cat-and-Mouse Act. Total war means total warriors, and those who expected millions of killers with built-in social docility were baying for the moon. The remarkable thing is that occasionally they got it.
The most illustrious of them appears to have been Douglas Haig, the prototype of those men who will modestly admit that every night they have a little chat with the Architect of the Universe. On the eve of one of his bloody masterpieces, the Commander in Chief self-effacingly confessed: You must know that I feel every step in my plan has been taken with Divine help, and I ask daily for aid, not merely in making the plan, but in carrying it out, and this I hope I shall continue to do until the end of all things.
Hypocrite or fool, hero or humbug? Perhaps only the shade of the late lamented Bishop of Southwark is competent to answer.
Meanwhile, back on the Home Front, Haigs proliferated. Commercial interests from corset makers to cocoa-peddlers used the small incident of the war to win the real battle, the one for profits. The Kaiser cleverly abolished Sunday and General Pershing tried to drum up business for the US Post Office. Elderly gentlemen stumped the cities looking for cannon fodder, and gormless ladies shamed men into joining the colours, embarrassing the authorities so much that when volunteers poured in, the War Office, preoccupied with its study of the Boer War, was obliged to fob off the young patriots with dummy rifles. It is no wonder that the best novel about the war turned out to be Hasek'S The Good Soldier Schweik, in which the genial cynicism of the hero elevates the art of skiving to an ethical ideal.
Of the two volumes which have prompted these irreverent thoughts on the Great War, the one with the introductory essay by Maurice Rickards is by far the more thoughtful, besides having the added advantage of noting German, Italian French, American and Russian inanities as fulsomely as our own. Rickards rightly defines the 'mediaevalism' of the leaders as "one of the most costly errors of assessment in the whole of history," reminds us that centralisation began with that war, and comes up with a good phrase to describe the cooking of the casualty lists when he says that "the generals were their own adcountants." Colin Walsh's compilation is more of a potboiler, but has a few big guns of its own, in the form of some popular songs, which turn out to be even more potent evokers of sadness and anger than official documents. As for those who think that that awful war is past history, I recall that only five years ago, while idling with the Births and Deaths columns of the Times, I happened to notice an item from a lady asking for information of the whereabouts of her husband. He had been posted Missing after the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
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