Oh! What an Ambiguous War. The Contested Memory of the First World War in Britain

Oh! What an Ambiguous War. The Contested

 

Memory of the First World War in Britain

 

William Philpott

 

In 1933, the English author and war veteran J. B. Priestley attended a reunion of the

10th Battalion The Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, in Bradford, an English manufacturing

town in the grip of the Great Depression. His reunion with his long lost comrades was

euphoric: Priestley felt that he was returning to “a whole vanished epoch […] we were

happy, no doubt about that […] lines of feasting warriors”1. Priestley was one among

the many thousands of young Englishmen who had answered the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener’s famous call for volunteers for Britain’s “New Armies” in 1914. He

himself had been among the early wave of volunteers, joining up as a private soldier on

7 of September2: less out of any patriotic or moral impulse to save Belgium but more from

a manly impulse to adventure he later claimed3.

Although volunteering was not a uniquely British phenomenon, the “rush to the

colours” of August and September 1914 remains one of the defining elements of British

wartime experience and cultural memory. Unlike continental states, Britain did not have

military conscription (which was only introduced in 1916) and the patriotic response

to Germany’s invasion of Belgium and France (with its concomitant threat to imperial

security) was a new phenomenon. For the first time, Britain would raise a mass citizen

army to fight a continental war of attrition. This some historians and commentators later

suggested was an aberration. As a world power Britain had fought prolonged wars in and

 

1. Priestley 2009, p. 158. Priestley had been wounded in June 1916 (thereby avoiding the impending and

costly Somme offensive) and had been commissioned and posted to another battalion after his recovery. Hence he was meeting with men with whom he had served after volunteering in 1914 and from whom he was violently and abruptly separated by an act of war.

2. Van Emden, Piuk 2008, p. 299-311.

3. Gray 2000, p. 11-12.

 

59

CENT ANS APRÈS / ONE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER

 

beyond Europe before, but with seapower and limited expeditionary warfare rather than

by taking on the principal enemy in the main land theatre4. The resulting casualties would

weigh heavily on the British people ever after: the “fallen”, nearly 1 million in Britain

and the empire, were the lasting legacy of this continental strategy. Whether this was a

necessary sacrifice, or might have been avoided with a more traditional strategy (or even

by staying out of the war), still provokes argument one hundred years later. This is the root

cause of the ambiguity in British historical and popular memory of the First World War.

More than any group of British society, those enthusiastic young men who leapt to their

nation’s defence represent Britain’s Great War, because they bore disproportionately the

burden of blood-sacrifice. The sailors and merchant seamen who ensured that Britannia

continued to rule the waves, the home front war workers who produced the wherewithal

to fight and the conscripts who sustained Britain’s military effort for most of the war,

while perhaps more significant for the development and outcome of the conflict than these

early-war volunteers, are not central to British war memory. This is often explained by the

suggestion that it was these young men who fashioned the later memory of their war in

postwar memoirs. A certain archetype of combatant –the young, educated, middle-class

officer– commented on his war as it was taking place (as often as not in verse) and later as

his literary career developed. Alongside Priestley (who never wrote a specific war memoir),

Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon, to name just the most famous

of many, bombarded society with wartime memoirs in the late 1920s and early 1930s5. These memoirs, like Priestley’s recollections, were very much products of their time6. But

their publication coincided with a more general shift in representations and perceptions

of the war, symbolized by Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 book All Quiet on the Western

Front and by Lewis Milestone’s 1930 Hollywood film of the novel7. These literary works

were to become what the literary scholar Paul Fussell would later define in a seminal

examination of the cultural legacy of Britain’s war as the “modern memory” of the war8.

By the time Fussell was writing in the 1970s, the memory of the war had shifted further

from that which Priestley was presenting: there had been a Second World War and a

younger generation, the grandchildren of the Great War generation, had started to

challenge the values and actions of their forebears in a rising counter-culture movement.

 

4. See French 1990. His title borrows from the concept developed by the leading inter-war critic of British

continental strategy, Basil Liddell Hart. For a review of the strategic background, see Howard 1972.

5. Blunden 1928; Graves 1929; Sassoon 1930 –in fact a heavily autobiographical novelisation, part of a

trilogy covering the life of the fictional George Sherston. Bond 2008 discusses these literary works and others in the context of their authors’ actual war experience.

6. They were only one strand of war literature produced between the wars, with more traditional forms

being the “best sellers” in the 1920s. See Bracco 1993.

7. Remarque 1929; Milestone 1930.

8. Fussell 1975.

 

60

THE CONTESTED MEMORY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR IN BRITAIN

 

The essential ambiguity of Britain’s cultural memory of the First World War can be

found in the contrast between this iconic literature of war experience with its limited

perspective (focused as it is on the trenches of France and Flanders) and the war’s

actual historical range and impact. One hundred years later, perceptions of “futility

and slaughter”, largely derived from this literary representation of a stalemated trench

war that wasted young life and achieved nothing, persist. Meanwhile, scholarly history

has spent decades examining the reality of the war, both its military campaigns and

human experience, in an attempt to establish the origins, nature and validity of such

cultural remembrance myths9. There is a certain degree of right-wing reaction against

this so-called “poets’ war” in the ongoing centenary commemorations10, suggesting that

historical scholarship is starting to influence public memory; and also that the memory

of the war remains a cultural battleground. It remains to be seen whether the passing

centenaries establish an alternative cultural memory, with a broader perspective based

on more solid historical foundations.

Britain’s ambiguous war memory is more complex than a mere contrast between the

literary memory of military service and a historical narrative of military events. The young

men who sat down to write their war memoirs were not only trying to narrate and to come

to terms with their own war experience, but were also representing the shifting memory of

the war that had started to form in its aftermath. Their own memories were intertwined

with the earliest “histories” of the war, which were to be found in the contrasting memoirs

of the war’s statesmen and soldiers11. These presented them with a bigger picture of the conflict, one that they had lacked as participants, but one which had been refracted

through wartime civil-military rivalry and postwar experience.

Priestley’s voice will have to represent the perspective of the war generation as it

attempted to come to terms with its experience. When setting down his recollections

fifteen years afterwards, his memory of the war was conflicted, as evidenced in his lament

for his fallen friends: “they were slaughtered in youth; and the parents of them have grown

lonely, the girls they would have married have grown grey in spinsterhood, and the work

they would have done remained undone”. Priestley was elaborating one of the prevailing

perceptions of the war, that it resulted in “a lost generation” of talented men sacrificed for

 

9. See Winter 2006, for a discussion of the phenomenon of historical remembrance in general and that of

the First World War in particular. See Todman 2005, for a discussion of certain military myths versus historical reality. Parker 2009 offers an accessible introduction to how memory has developed down the years.

10. For example by the then Conservative education minister, Michael Gove, at the start of the centenary year,

Gove 2014; and by the journalist and popular historian Max Hastings in Hastings 2013, p. xvii-xix.

11. The juxtaposition of perspective and differences in interpretation were already apparent in such works as

the former Chief of the Imperial General Staff ’s memoirs, Robertson 1926, and the former First Lord of the Admiralty’s memoir-history, Churchill 1923-1931.

 

61

CENT ANS APRÈS / ONE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER

 

no purpose. In going on to proclaim why that was so, Priestley neatly encapsulated all the

negative socio-political tropes of British war memory12:

They were killed by greed and muddle and monstrous cross-purposes, by old

men gobbling and roaring in clubs, by diplomats working underground like monocled moles, by journalists wanting a good story, by hysterical women

waving flags, by grumbling debenture-holders, by strong silent be-ribboned

asses, by fear or apathy or downright lack of imagination.

 

By this time the memory of his war had become bitter, although the memory of being

at war remained powerful; and like so many between the wars Priestley evoked the unifying

spirit of the trenches as an antidote to the class divisions and economic hardships that had

dashed his generation’s hopes for a better tomorrow: “they had known [the] endearing

quality of affectionate leadership in war but not in peace […]. Are such emotions

impossible except when we are slaughtering one another?13” By the 1930s Britain’s willing

volunteers had recast their war as a crime against its combatants by its directors. There

had been no winners in this global trauma which produced a postwar world of poverty

and social conflict: “it is not war that is right […] but peace that is wrong, the civilian life

to which they returned”, Priestley judged, implying thereby that the effort made in the

war was wasted14.

The negative perspective of the war that had developed by the 1930s is not a unique

British phenomenon. Priestley’s musing followed the internationalist anti-war timbre of

the times. It is no coincidence that inter-war pacifism peaked in these years. Perhaps

they represent less a rejection of the war in which he had fought, more a realisation that

it had been neither the “war to end war” or the wellspring of a better world. It is the

contemporary poverty of his former comrades that angers Priestley –Britain like the rest

of the world was gripped by the Great Depression at this point– more than the nature of the war that brought the world there15.

Although these were particular issues and ambiguities of the inter-war years, this bitter

memory of the First World War became fixed in Britain’s cultural landscape long before

professional historians were able to engage with and explain its events and outcomes. To

understand why it is necessary to engage with the process by which memory and history

have changed from generation to generation. Jay Winter and Antoine Prost’s survey of the

evolving historiography of the war, The Great War in History, posited three broad generational

“configurations” of history: “military and diplomatic” between the wars; “social history”

 

12. Priestley 2009, p. 158.

13. Ibid., p. 160.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., p. 161-162.

 

62

THE CONTESTED MEMORY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR IN BRITAIN

 

after the Second World War; and “cultural and social” analysis around the turn of the

xxith century16. This is a useful framework within which to analyse British war memory,

although it should be acknowledged that the appearance of new configurations of history

does not supplant or gainsay the debates generated by earlier configurations that rumble on

in studies by modern historians, if not in the mass media’s representation of the war.

 

* * *

 

Priestley’s judgements on his experience of the war must be identified as an unconscious

product of the first configuration of Great War history formed before 1939. The virulent

“battle of the memoirs” between statesmen and soldiers had set out the context for

understanding the war in the 1920s and early 1930s: in essence, was it well managed by

statesmen and badly fought by generals, or was it fought as best as it could be by generals

given the constant interference of “amateur strategists”17?

Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis, published and widely serialised in Britain and

abroad during the 1920s, was the most influential memoir, written by a statesman who

was also a veteran and who therefore sympathised with the ordinary soldier18. His lengthy

critique of the Western front attritional strategy conducted by the military high command,

his so-called “blood test”, with its climactic dramatic set-piece, the costly British offensive

on 1st of July 1916, lies at the root of future critiques of British strategy19. Of course his “memoir-history” was also at heart a post-facto argument for strategic alternatives which he

had suggested but which had been rejected or had proved equally disastrous. In effect, this

readable and powerful indictment was a personal reaction to the horrific reality of modern

industrialised war (as were many memoirs) wrapped up in a polemical evaluation of what

had happened and why. “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it”, Churchill

famously quipped, although in laying the foundation for many British myths and debates

about the First World War Churchill has not been kind to history.

Moreover, lacking archives, early historians took such material, that did have privileged

insight into policy making, as the source for their own widely read yet judgemental histories.

The most influential inter-war historian (and veteran), Basil Liddell Hart, essentially sided

with the statesmen in The Real War (1930) and popularised their perspective owing to his

 

16. Winter, Prost 2005, p. 6-33. See Jay Winter’s article infra, p. 23-45. 17. Discussed in Beckett “Frocks and Brasshats”, in Bond 1991, p. 89-112. 18. Churchill 1923-1931. Churchill commanded an infantry battalion on the Western front for four

months in 1915-1916. The historical basis of his memoir is assessed in Prior 1983.

19. One day of a 140-day battle has become symbolic both of the Somme offensive and of the war as a

whole. Attention returns again and again to this deterministic event, which has become a shorthand metaphor for the war devoid of context or appropriate comparison. For an up-to-date assessment, see Philpott 2009.

 

63

CENT ANS APRÈS / ONE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER

 

own disagreements with the inter-war British army establishment20. For Liddell Hart, the

war was a strategic aberration: raising a mass army for continental war with its concomitant

sacrifice was inappropriate for a maritime imperial power. This perspective endeared him

to wartime Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who turned to Liddell Hart for historical

guidance when writing his own war memoirs. It is no coincidence that the first volume

of Lloyd George’s scathing War Memoirs appeared (and was serialised widely) in 1933,

the year in which Priestley was writing: incompetent generals stonewalling imaginative

statesmen was becoming the leitmotif of Britain’s war in its first historical configuration,

and the lengthy casualty lists were the consequence21.

The opening of Britain’s 1914-1918 archives in the 1960s and subsequent historical

revisionism suggests that the generals actually understood and conducted the war better

than Britain’s politicians. Readers still reach for their memoirs rather than modern histories,

however. No doubt Priestley and others would have read such military and political memoirs

and these would have helped to shape the opinions on the broader nature of the war that were

forming among its participants by the early 1930s. Priestley’s summary assessment would

suggest that the statesmen had got the better of this debate in the public’s eyes. Yet while

Priestley censured the “strong, silent be-ribboned asses” of the military command, he was

equally scathing of the groups in modern liberal society that sustained their war.

Winter and Prost identify that ordinary soldiers were omitted from this early history

which followed established parameters of diplomatic and military history22. But the common soldier’s war was recorded in war memoirs and novels which became historical

documents in their own right. By the 1930s, “the voice of the trenches” was heavily

refracted through postwar experience and reflection. But the influential and supposedly

“anti-war” memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden and others

are, if read carefully, all ambiguous about the war and being a soldier23. As with Priestley,

the positives of wartime are occluded by the negatives of peacetime and undermined by

the repressed grief of societal loss24. By the 1930s, Tommy’s voice had become one of

disillusionment. This might be contrasted with disenchantment which is a product of

painful war experience, disillusionment being a product of postwar disappointment with

the world the war made and the looming prospect of another war25. Now that it was clear

that the war had not ended war, what meaning if any could be found in the war? The war

 

20. Liddell Hart 1930. The book is analysed critically in Strachan 1991, p. 45-53. 21. Lloyd George 1933-1936. For a critical discussion see Suttie 2005. 22. Winter, Prost 2005, p. 83-85.

23. There is no equivalent for British writers of the masterful analysis of the changing literary voice of France’s

First World War combatants in Smith 2007.

24. Becker, Audoin-Rouzeau 2002 recognize individual and collective “mourning” as one of the central

elements of the experience and memory of the war.

25. Philpott 2011, p. 14.

 

64

THE CONTESTED MEMORY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR IN BRITAIN

 

which was represented as a necessary sacrifice in the early 1920s had been reshaped by

the mid-1930s into a badly managed slaughter. The persistent ambiguities in British war

memory were established early on.

 

* * *

 

The second configuration of history would follow and be shaped by another world war,

while remaining rooted in inter-war writing and interpretations. A second world war had

a profound effect in two ways. First, it became very difficult not to view and judge the

First World War through World War Two’s distorting lens; and second, everyone forgot

temporarily about the first war because there was another war to historicize. Then there

was a sudden resurgence of interest in the First World War in Britain around the time of

its fiftieth anniversary in 1964, to be represented (it would be wrong to say reinterpreted)

to a new generation in a new wave of popular histories, through a second outpouring of

soldiers’ memoirs and in the mass media. The First World War history at this point had three

elements. First, a number of popularizing summarizers (journalists or popular historical

authors) retold tales of the war in lively, readable narratives26. Second, sensationalists

repackaged the controversies and critiques of the inter-war years into populist critiques:

Liddell Hart had a strong influence over such works27. The most influential and long-

lived, television historian A. J. P. Taylor’s The First World War: An Illustrated History, was

an anti-war book of the 1960s written by a pacifist intellectual rather than a thoughtful scholarly re-examination of the war28. But the first historical interpretations freed from

the constraints imposed by personal experience also appeared. These attempted to strike

a balance between the “grand narrative” of soldiers and statesmen and the experience

of the ordinary soldiers29. This three-way distinction has continued in First World War

historiography ever since.

 

26. For example, Gardner 1961, on the Battle of the Somme and Pitt 1962, on the final campaigns. Most

influential perhaps was Tuchman 1962, a Pulitzer Prize winning study of the start of the war by an American journalist.

27. Bond 1991, p. 6-7.

28. Taylor 1963 and Clark 1961, are the most notorious of these works. That such books remain in print

fifty years later, their tone being imitated by many other authors, that they sell steadily and are still taken as authoritative judgments on the war indicate how entrenched such perceptions are in British national memory. See Danchev, “‘Bunking’ and Debunking: The Controversies of the 1960s”, in Bond 1991, p. 263-288.

29. For example, Horne 1962; Farrar-Hockley 1964 and 1967; Terraine 1960 and 1963. John Terraine

was the most enduring and influential of these non-university historians. More balanced than other works of the time, these remain classics of military history, although historical knowledge and understanding have developed in the last half-century and their judgments are now dated.

 

65

CENT ANS APRÈS / ONE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER

 

These histories had a Western front focus and were particularly concerned with the

more notorious attritional battles that had imprinted themselves on national memory.

Wider dimensions of the war as conducted at sea, in other military theatres and on the

home front, received rather less attention, a bias which it would take some decades to

address. While these studies were intelligent and influential, what they had in common

was a reliance on published sources, since national archives were only just starting to open

to professional historians.

Around the same time in Britain the mass media discovered the war, particularly

television. The broadcast by the newly launched channel BBC2 of the twenty-six part

documentary series The Great War in 1964 was ground-breaking30: both in its contribution

to the art of television documentary through its extensive use of contemporary source

quotations and “talking head” veterans, and also because it popularized the history of

the war. The stage and cinema also played a role. The left-wing Theatre Workshop’s

successful anti-war play and director Richard Attenborough’s later film Oh! What a

Lovely War popularized Liddell Hart and A. J. P. Taylor’s anti-high command perspective

at a time of a rising counter-culture and growing anti-establishment feeling associated

with the baby boom generation. A. J. P. Taylor’s Illustrated History31 was dedicated to Joan

Littlewood, the director of the play. That the play says more about class politics in Britain

in the 1960s than it does about the First World War has not detracted from its popularity

or longevity. Inevitably, it was revived in the war’s centenary year, suggesting cultural

myths have a life of their own, independent of historical judgment. The war as slaughter perspective predominated among a younger generation detached from the war itself but

living in a conservative society whose values were those of the war generation that had

led and governed Britain in the 1940s and 1950s –Prime Ministers Winston Churchill,

Clement Attlee, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan were all Great War veterans. The

war’s fiftieth anniversary coincided with a step change in government and society as power

passed to the children of the war generation, whose opinions and values were shaped by

the Second World War. Meanwhile their own children were coming of age and seeking to

distance themselves from the values of their forebears. The popular and highly influential

Cambridge Footlights satirical review Beyond the Fringe included a powerful sketch in which

one Second World War RAF officer called upon another to sacrifice his life: “We need a

futile gesture […]. It will raise the whole tone of the war32.” Although the setting was the

later war, the irony clearly harked back to the first. The values of military leadership were

being mocked and the question was being asked of a new generation, whether they would

 

30. The Great War 1964.

31. Taylor 1963.

32. “Aftermath of War”, in Bennett et al. 1963, p. 26-31: 29.

 

66

THE CONTESTED MEMORY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR IN BRITAIN

 

be prepared to sacrifice themselves for their country as their parents and grandparents

had done?

Watching the BBC’s documentary series The Great War, Oliver Lyttelton (a Guards

officer in the war and now a retired conservative Cabinet minister and peer, one of the

generation being lampooned)33:

had many times to exclaim, “No, it wasn’t like that”. We, by which I mean

both officers and men, did not feel so doom-laden, so utterly disenchanted.

We thought we were fighting in a worthy cause and had no idea that our efforts

would one day appear… as merely absurd. No one who has not experienced it

can know the heart-beat of a battalion, or its discipline and corporate spirit,

and how they sustain the individual man, and how the whole greatly exceeds

the sum of its parts.

 

The fiftieth anniversary reinterpretation and belittling of their war by younger

generations juxtaposed with some veterans’ deeply held sentiment that the war had been

right and, whatever the world that came afterwards, there was much that was positive in

their war experience. To that extent, Lyttelton echoed Priestley in his judgement.

 

* * *

 

The fiftieth anniversary reengagement with the war was informed and shaped by inter-war

controversies and Second World War experience. It also provided a broad canvas to which

professional historians could add details over the following decades. In time they would

start to paint new pictures. As they developed from the 1960s, the second and third

configurations of the war’s history were formed by two parallel developments. First, official

archives were opened and university historians began to study the war. Second, social and

cultural studies were developed alongside the political and military history of earlier years.

Central to this new historiography were themes of war experience and representation;

although old controversies about conduct and command were re-examined from a more detached, scholarly perspective.

The debate on how the war was fought and won has been drawn out and productive.

British strategy has been re-examined both as a national enterprise and a coalition effort34.

But most attention has been focused on the battlefield. The long-lived perception of

poor military leadership and badly managed battles has been challenged in a systematic

re-examination of the commanders and the methods employed on the battlefield35. The

concept of a “learning curve” appeared early on in this reassessment –the appreciation

 

33. Chandos 1968, p. 83-84.

34. French 1986 and 1995; Philpott 1996. 35. For a scholarly evaluation of this perspective, see Travers 1987.

 

67

CENT ANS APRÈS / ONE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER

 

that the army faced difficult challenges on the entrenched, industrialised battlefield,

that early battles were traumatic, but that from this experience emerged modern and

effective military methods that underpinned victory on the Western front in 191836. As the

“learning curve” thesis developed it was informed by contemporary social science theories

of military learning and the transformation of armed forces. The idea of the British army

of 1914-1918 as a learning organisation now predominates (and British historians are

applying this model to other armies) and its many component substructures have been

investigated to explain how it worked and adapted to the challenges of modern war37. This

re-examination has kept military historians busy for twenty-five years and shows no sign

of reaching an end. It remains to be seen whether it impacts on public perceptions of the

military conduct of the war over the passing centenaries.

Meanwhile, war experience has become a staple of popular historiography. What the war

was like has almost completely eclipsed what it was about in the mass media’s engagement

with the war. To some extent this has provoked the public controversies associated with the

centenaries38. Also, the focus remains firmly towards the Western front and the period of

trench warfare from 1915 to 1917, which has become a representational motif of the war,

devoid of historical context or nuance39. It is hoped that the centenaries will encourage the

exploration of the war’s other military fronts and experiences at sea and on the homefront.

Examination of the memory of the war –how the war was remembered by its participants,

how war myths evolved, and their basis in historical events– has been a flourishing subgenre

of historiography40. Such studies are an element of the third configuration of historiography that was starting as the negative perception of the war was firmly set. Fussell’s defining text

The Great War and Modern Memory (a work of literary scholarship that has profoundly

influenced historical approaches and controversies) suggested that “irony” was the defining

motif of British war experience and memory as reflected in its literature and poetry41. This

central juxtaposition between the “poets’” representation of the war and the historical war

as experienced characterised this configuration, although its tropes come from the early

memoir history as much as postwar literature. The teaching of such war poetry on the

British school curriculum with little historical counterpoint has served to widen the gulf

between popular perception and historical understanding. In fact, such ironic war poetry

was read much less by the war generation than by their grandchildren. Recent examination

 

36. Seminal texts supporting this thesis are Prior, Wilson 1992, Griffith 1994 and Sheffield 2001.

37. For example Boff 2012 and Beach 2013. Much of this work is at the level of the doctoral thesis, now

being published in scholarly monograph series.

38. See note 10.

39. The trench memoir remains a publishing staple, although soldiers’ diaries and antiquated veterans’

memoirs add little to understanding of the phenomenon.

40. Bond 2002 and 2008; Todman 2005.

41. Fussell 1975.

 

68

THE CONTESTED MEMORY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR IN BRITAIN

 

of the conception of “heroic sacrifice” strongly held by the war generation and its cultural

legacy have started to redress this imbalance42.

 

In the third configuration, the tripartite distinction in history identified above

persists. For example, in the debate on the British high command, which remains lively

and shows no sign of reaching a definitive verdict. Popularizing summarizes attempt to

sway public perceptions43. Sensationalists persist in immoderate and methodologically

weak condemnations: such books sell well and are widely read because they pander to

the prevailing perception of the war44. Scholars revisit long-running controversies and

restate the case for or against command and commanders with archive-based assessments45.

Although their assessments are more nuanced and balanced, their subject matter precludes

simple, definitive judgments.

 

* * *

 

Undoubtedly it will be some time before the balance in modern historiography is reflected

in public understanding of the conflict, but it is to be hoped that as its centenaries pass

sustained reengagement with the war will furnish such an opportunity. The long-standing

ambiguities persist, but historical scholarship has moved on.

The cultural representation of the war became detached from its history long ago and

certain tropes of the war (viewed through the distorting lens of the Second World War)

have supplanted the real war story. The pity of war overshadows the purpose. In the most

influential representation of the war of the last twenty-five years, the 1989 BBC comedy

series Blackadder Goes Forth, in the memorable and poignant final scene the heroes go

“over the top” as machine-gun fire rattles round them. It is an iconic image evoking the

cultural myth associated with 1st of July 1916. The scene then fades to a field of poppies,

symbolic of the losses of the Western front, echoing the ending of the film version of

Oh! What a Lovely War that climaxes on endless crosses representing the dead. Military

historians will tell you that in 1917, the year in which Blackadder is set, a British offensive

was likely to take most of its objectives with relatively limited casualties –three out of four

of Blackadder’s heroes would most likely have lived to fight another day, but such prosaic

detail does not suit the sentimentality with which we choose to endow our war memory.

“Certain death” was the lot of the First World War soldier, even though 89% of those who put on a British military uniform returned home at the end of the war. The difficulty has

 

42. Bracco 1993; Watson 2004.

43. Neillands 1998; Corrigan 2004.

44. Laffin 1989; Winter 1991.

45. For example, the reputation of British Commander-in-chief Sir Douglas Haig. See Harris 2008 and

Sheffield 2012.

 

69

CENT ANS APRÈS / ONE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER

 

perhaps been to establish a sense of perspective on the war. Certainly it had its horrific

aspects, and the three-year stalemate on the Western front was unique. Still, war and

warfare between 1914 and 1918 was an element on a longer continuum of conflict and

war experience and should be judged as such46.

Reflecting on the eightieth anniversary of the war, Annette Becker and Stéphane

Audoin-Rouzeau highlighted the xxth century cult of the victim and “the weight of the

dead on the living” as the factors which have entrenched this memory of the First World

War47. This was perpetuated into a new century by the cult of the war veteran associated

with the war’s ninetieth anniversaries. This in itself revealed the confusion in memory and

the ambiguities that veterans themselves had had to live with thereafter.

Harry Patch, one of the last surviving British veterans, “remembered” that when he

fired his machine gun he aimed it low at the enemy soldiers’ legs48. One wonders if this

is a vivid memory ninety years later, or a latter day attempt to reconcile Patch’s doing his

duty as a soldier with modern sensibilities about “humanity” in war and sensitivity about

killing. In a Sunday Times interview in November 2004 Patch stated: “To me, it’s a licence

to go out and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me out

to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn’t speak? All those

lives lost for a war finished over a table. Now what is the sense in that?”49 Patch eventually

perceived his war in terms of the national war memory. Since veterans signed up to their

grandchildren’s view of the war rather than challenged it, “false” memory has taken hold.

 

* * *

 

While the history of the war has changed from generation to generation as participants

and historians have explored and argued over its purpose, nature, impact and meaning,

essential ambiguities persist. The fact that it has been interpreted and reinterpreted by

participants as they aged alongside evolving history contributed greatly to such ambiguity.

The war generation’s great grandchildren have the opportunity to construct a fourth

configuration of history as the war’s centenaries pass, moving beyond the ambiguities of

the earlier history and transcending the false memories of survivors, shaped as they are by

later events. It is doubtful that such a configuration will establish a consensus about the

history and significance of the war, although it is certain that professional historians will,

in the absence of veterans, be key figures in shaping such a configuration.

 

46. See for example Philpott 2009, which attempts to situate the events of 1916 in their wider domestic,

international and historical context.

47. Becker, Audoin-Rouzeau 2002, p. 1-2. 48. Parker 2009, p. 55.

49. The Sunday Times 2004.

 

70

THE CONTESTED MEMORY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR IN BRITAIN

 

Jay Winter and Antoine Prost emphasise the need to move from narrow national

histories of the war into a shared history. “It may be refreshing for English readers to

recognize how unusual their own thinking is on the Great War, when placed alongside

that of readers who bring to this subject entirely different assumptions”, they state50.

Above all perhaps, the English perspective needs to emerge from the trenches to form an

appreciation of the wider and multi-faceted war at home and abroad.

The wartime sacrifice still hangs heavily in Great Britain, while flawed understanding

of the events that precipitated it misconstrues the effort and achievements of Britain’s

victorious armies and the people who sustained them in their struggle to defeat German

militarism. Because this had to be done a second time the first encounter became imbued

with a sense of “futility” in popular memory, grounded in inter-war arguments about

the conduct and purpose of the war, but solidified by ironic post-Second World War

representations of the war established as the values of a youthful generation clashed with

those of authority figures formed by the war. Through this process, a false memory of the

war, detached from history, had solidified by the 1980s. Professional historians have been

challenging it for the past twenty-five years, although with limited success.

As the war’s centenary has come, the ambiguity in modern Britons’ relationship to the

war and memory of it is becoming apparent: renewed arguments about the meaning of the

war are breaking out. The old division persists however: “By giving a scholarly overview of

campaigns and strategy military historians can usefully and instructively tell us what the

war was about; but what really interests us is what it was 51 like ” . Potentially, however, the country is passing through national reengagement with the war while there is now nobody

left alive to tell people what it was like –increasingly people were being told it was like what

postwar commentators and later generations had told veterans it was like! It remains to be

seen whether historians can seize this opportunity to reconcile the ambiguity in national

memory and historical understanding of Britain’s war experience, and to finally shape an

informed understanding of the war’s place in British history. They will still be contesting

against the summarizers and sensationalists, and it will be a long struggle to reverse deeply

entrenched perspectives.

In Great Britain today the Second World War is remembered more positively that it

should be –it was A. J. P. Taylor’s “good war” against fascism– and the First World War

more negatively than it ought to be. The Second World War has become a prism through

which the first is viewed: what was an unfamiliar, difficult but essentially positive and

nation-shaping war experience between 1914 and 1918 is now dismissed as the fount

from which the xxth century’s traumas sprang. The British government’s centenary plans

 

50. Winter, Prost 2005, p. vii.

51. Parker 2009, p. 21-22, author’s emphasis.

 

71

CENT ANS APRÈS / ONE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER

 

to reflect this, but these have also caused their own controversies52. There are arguments

about whether this horrific war should be marked at all –and if so, what should be the

tone of the commemoration? Should we acknowledge effort and outcome rather than

dwell on trauma and disaster: mourn for the losses of the Somme and Passchendaele

once more, but also recognize the success of 1918? What is clear is that if we are to

reconcile such ambiguities historians must offer dispassionate, informed judgment on

the events and outcomes of the war, to rebalance national memory. It remains to be seen

if they have been.

 

Bibliographic abbreviations

 

Beach 2013 = Beach Jim, Haig’s Intelligence: GHQ and the German Army, 1916-1918, Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press, 2013.

 

Becker, Audoin-Rouzeau 2002 = Becker Annette, Audoin-Rouzeau Stéphane, 1914-1918:

Understanding the Great War, London, Profile Books, 2002.

 

Bennett et al. 1963 = Bennett Alan et al., Beyond the Fringe: A Revue, London, Samuel French

Ltd, 1963.

 

Blunden 1928 = Blunden Edmund, Undertones of War, London, Richard Cobden-Sanderson,

1928.

 

Boff 2012 = Boff Jonathan, Winning and Losing on the Western Front: The British Third Army and

the Defeat of Germany, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012.

 

Bond 1991 = Bond Brian, The First World War and British Military History, Oxford, Clarendon

Press, 1991.

 

Bond 2002 = Bond Brian, The Unquiet Western Front, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,

2002.

 

Bond 2008 = Bond Brian, Survivors of a Kind: Memoirs of the Western Front, London, Continuum,

2008.

 

Bracco 1993 = Bracco Rosa Maria, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First

World War, 1919-1939, Oxford, Berg, 1993.

 

Chandos 1968 = Chandos Lyttelton Oliver, From Peace to War: A Study in Contrast, 1857-1918,

London, Bodley Head, 1968.

 

Churchill 1923-1931 = Churchill Winston, The World Crisis, 6 vols., London, Thornton

Butterworth, 1923-1931.

 

52. Gov.Uk 2014.

 

72

THE CONTESTED MEMORY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR IN BRITAIN

 

Clark 1961 = Clark Alan, The Donkeys, London, Hutchinson, 1961.

 

Corrigan 2004 = Corrigan Gordon, Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the First World War,

London, Cassell Military, 2004.

 

Farrar-Hockley 1964 = Farrar-Hockley Anthony, The Somme, London, B. T. Batsford Ltd,

1964.

 

Farrar-Hockley 1967 = Farrar-Hockley Anthony, Death of an Army, London, Arthur Baker,

1967.

 

French 1986 = French David, British Strategy and War Aims, 1914-16, London, Allen & Unwin,

1986.

 

French 1990 = French David, The British Way in Warfare, 1688-2000, London, Unwin Hyman,

1990.

 

French 1995 = French David, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, Oxford, Clarendon

Press, 1995.

 

Fussell 1975 = Fussell Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford, Oxford University

Press, 1975.

 

Gardner 1961 = Gardner Brian, The Big Push: A Portrait of the Battle of the Somme, London,

Cassell, 1961.

 

Gove 2014 = Gove Michael, “Why Does the Left Insist on Belittling True British Heroes?”, The

Daily Mail, 2 January 2014.

 

Graves 1929 = Graves Robert, Goodbye to All That, London, Jonathan Cape, 1929.

 

Gray 2000 = Gray Dulcie, J. B. Priestley, Stroud, Sutton Publishing Ltd, 2000.

 

Griffith 1994 = Griffith Paddy, Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army’s Art of Attack,

1916-18, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1994.

 

Harris 2008 = Harris John Paul, Douglas Haig and the First World War, Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 2008.

 

Hastings 2013 = Hastings Max, Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914, London, William Collins,

2013.

 

Horne 1962 = Horne Alistair, The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916, London, Macmillan & Co, 1962.

 

Howard 1972 = Howard Michael, The Continental Commitment: The Dilemma of British Defence

Policy in the Era of Two World Wars, London, Temple Smith, 1972.

 

Laffin 1989 = Laffin John, British Butchers and Bunglers of the First World War, Melbourne,

Macmillan, 1989.

 

Liddell Hart 1930 = Liddell Hart Basil, The Real War, London, Faber & Faber, 1930.

 

73

CENT ANS APRÈS / ONE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER

 

Lloyd George 1933-1936 = Lloyd George David, War Memoirs, London, Ivor Nicholson &

Watson, 1933-1936.

 

Neillands 1998 = Neillands Robin, The Great War Generals on the Western Front, London,

Robinson, 1998.

 

Parker 2009 = Parker Peter, The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War, London, Fourth

Estate, 2009.

 

Philpott 1996 = Philpott William, Anglo-French Relations and Strategy on the Western Front,

1914-18, London, Macmillan, 1996.

 

Philpott 2009 = Philpott William, Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme and the Making of

the Twentieth Century, London, Little, Brown, 2009.

 

Philpott 2011 = Philpott William, “Irony and All That: The Representation of War in First World

War Soldiers’ Writings”, Mars & Clio: The Journal of the British Commission for Military History 30

(Spring 2011), p. 10-18, [online]. URL: http://www.bcmh.wildapricot.org/Resources/

Documents/BCMH%20Research%20Notes/BCMH_Research_Note_Philpott.pdf.

 

Pitt 1962 = Pitt Barrie, 1918: The Last Act, London, Cassell, 1962.

 

Priestley 2009 = Priestley John Boynton, English Journey, Ilkley, Great Northern Books, 2009

(reprint of London, William Heinemann, 1934 original).

 

Prior 1983 = Prior Robin, Churchill’s World Crisis as History, London, Croom Helm, 1983.

 

Prior, Wilson 1992 = Prior Robin, Wilson Trevor, Command on the Western Front: The Military

Career of Sir Henry Rawlinson, 1914-18, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992.

 

Remarque 1929 = Remarque Erich Maria, All Quiet on the Western Front, London, G. P. Putnam’s

Sons, 1929.

 

Robertson 1926 = Robertson William, Soldiers and Statesmen, 1914-1918, 2 vols., London,

Cassell, 1926.

 

Sassoon 1930 = Sassoon Siegfried, Memoirs of an Infantry-Officer, London, Faber & Faber, 1930.

 

Sheffield 2001 = Sheffield Gary, Forgotten Victory: The First World War, Myths and Realities,

London, Review, 2001.

 

Sheffield 2012 = Sheffield Gary, The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army, London, Aurum,

2012.

 

Smith 2007 = Smith Leonard, The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War, Ithaca,

Cornell University Press, 2007.

 

Strachan 1991 = Strachan Hew, “ ‘The Real War’: Liddell Hart, Cruttwell and Falls” in

Bond Brian, The First World War and British Military History, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991,

p. 41-68.

 

74

THE CONTESTED MEMORY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR IN BRITAIN

 

Suttie 2005 = Suttie Andrew, Rewriting the First World War: Lloyd George, Politics and Strategy,

1914-1918, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

 

Taylor 1963 = Taylor Alan John Percival, The First World War: An Illustrated History, London,

Hamish Hamilton, 1963.

 

Terraine 1960 = Terraine John, Mons: The Retreat to Victory, London, Batsford, 1960.

 

Terraine 1963 = Terraine John, Douglas Haig: The Educated Soldier, London, Hutchinson, 1963.

 

Todman 2005 = Todman Dan, The Great War: Myth and Memory, London, Continuum, 2005.

 

Travers 1987 = Travers Tim, The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front and the

Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900-1918, London, Unwin Hyman, 1987.

 

Tuchman 1962 = Tuchman Barbara, August 1914, London, Constable & Co., 1962.

 

Van Emden, Piuk 2008 = “J. B. Priestley”, in Van Emden Richard, Piuk Victor, Famous, 1914-

1918, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2008, p. 299-312.

 

Watson 2004 = Watson Janet, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War

in Britain, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

 

Winter 1991 = Winter Denis, Haig’s Command: A Reassessment, London, Viking, 1991.

 

Winter 2006 = Winter Jay, Remembering War: The Great War and Historical Memory in the

Twentieth Century, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006.

 

Winter, Prost 2005 = Winter Jay, Prost Antoine, The Great War in History: Debates and Contro-

versies, 1914 to the Present, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

 

* * *

 

Attenborough Richard, Oh! What a Lovely War, 1969.

 

Blackadder Goes Forth, BBC, 1989.

 

Gov.Uk 2014 = “First World War Centenary”, [online]. URL: https://www.gov.uk/government/

topical-events/first-world-war-centenary.

 

Littlewood Joan, Oh! What a Lovely War, 1963.

 

Milestone 1930 = Milestone Lewis, All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930.

 

The Great War 1964 = The Great War, BBC, 1964.

 

The Sunday Times 2004 = The Sunday Times, interview with Ria Higgins, the 7th of November 2004.

 

75