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Adrian Gregory’s The Last Great War
The first two books we discussed were both trying to tell the global history of the war. This book is doing something different. Adrian Gregory is one of the best historians of the British Home Front that we have. What he’s been able to do is to pull together the social history of the First World War—with a very good understanding of the dynamics of the war itself as well—and put it all into a package. This book is, I think, the best single volume book on the British Home Front in the First World War.
The way that the book pulls together social history and cultural history, in particular, is the most distinctive thing about it. So when he’s talking, for instance, about what motivated people to go to war, he’s actually asking a question that French historians have asked themselves a lot, but no one in Britain had really bothered to ask until he did. His explanation is partly the political factors we were talking about earlier, but it’s also about cultural determinants, such as the role of religion, for example. He’s able to look a bit sideways at some of these questions and think of them in non-traditional ways, which I think adds a lot of richness to the story.
There were people who literally thought that God was on Britain’s side, and that by fighting for Britain, they were doing God’s work. It was an extreme view, but there were people who thought that. There were others, for instance, who when the churchmen stood up on a Sunday and gave their sermons and said we should fight the Hun because he represents everything that is ungodly believed that too. A lot of the tropes that were used were suggesting—maybe sometimes very subtly—that this was a sacrifice not only for Britain but also to God.
It’s striking that all the memorials of the First World War have religious overtones. There’s a cross in every Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery, for instance. There’s the stone of sacrifice, which looks just like an altar. A lot of modern historians, because of who we are and the relatively secular society that most of us have been brought up in, tend to underestimate how much religion was part of the warp and weft of everyday life 100 years ago. It must, therefore, have played a much greater role in explaining how people acted.
World War II looks like a straightforward crusade against the Nazis. World War I can look futile and hard to explain in comparison. Now, of course, that’s not quite true in either case. The Second World War wasn’t fought to save the Jews; people didn’t know what would happen to the Jews in 1939. The nature of the Second World War changed a lot as it went on. But, with hindsight, it looks very black and white. With the First World War it’s just not that straightforward.
There’s another side to this as well, which he touches on, which is that the Second World War is seen as being a progressive war, in Britain anyway. What are the results of the Second World War? In 1945 you get peace, you get the Attlee government, you get the National Health Service. There’s the nationalisation of the industries and the birth of the welfare state. From very early on, people like George Orwell, and others, like William Beveridge, were saying, ‘Look. We can’t repeat the mistakes of the First World War. We have to make a better world at the end of this one.’ And so there is this social mission, if you like, that runs through World War II, at least in the popular perception.
Learning to Fight by Aimee Fox
Thinking purely about the military history of the war, a lot of it has been caught up with debates about the ability or otherwise of the armies, particularly the British Army, to learn how to fight this new kind of war. The traditional trope, if you watch Oh! What a Lovely War or read C. S. Forester, is that it’s lions led by donkeys: brave Tommies let down by these butchers and bunglers who are their generals.
In the last 30-odd years, there’s been a bit of a fight back against that popular view amongst professional historians. They’ve pointed out, ‘Well, considering the problems they faced, the British Army did a remarkable job of learning and improving such that by 1918 they were capable of going toe to toe with the German army—the best in the world—and beating them consistently.’ And therefore there must have been some learning process that was going on and the idea of butchers and bunglers is not as true as popular opinion would have it.
This argument has been going back and forth for a generation or so. It probably more or less represents the academic consensus that there was a ‘learning curve’ (the shorthand that’s used).
The British were a lot more ad hoc. Sometimes that can be a bad thing. Sometimes you need uniformity and systematization, and the British couldn’t always manage that. But the real point—and the same is true for any organisation—is that change is easier to effect if you go with the cultural grain of the organisation rather than cutting across it. The British Army with all this ad hocery looks terribly haphazard, but actually it suits the way the British Army works.
Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins.
Essentially, he says the world changes—or begins to change—with the performance of The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky in Paris in 1913. It’s an interesting thesis, but it’s wrong. You don’t have to be much of a cultural historian to know that modernism is often seen to pre-date that by quite a long way. People like Debussy and Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde are often seen as modernists in some sense. He also conflates modernism and modernity in a way that is not terribly helpful. He talks about this tiny coterie of avant-garde artists as if that’s what everyone in the country thought. That’s inevitably not true.
But the questions that the book is asking, about the connection between these literally earth-shaking events and the impact they have on individuals, and how that feeds through into the way that people perceive the world around them and interact with it—whether that’s artistically or just in terms of their everyday life—I think are really, really interesting.
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