Back to the trenches

Why can't British historians be less insular about the First World War?
Hew Strachan "It would be good if, in future, the British public, which is taking an increasing interest in war memorials, could be less insular, less exclusively concerned with the British experience. Gavin Stamps plea, in his chapter in A Part of History, does not apply only to memorials, and needs to be heard not just by the British public, but by most of the contributors to this book. Of twenty-two authors, Michael Burleigh, who writes on religion, is the only one apart from Stamp who makes a sustained attempt to set the British experience in the First World War in any sort of comparative context. Why do the British continue to take the debate about the British Army and its command personally, to engage with so much special pleading, when the Germans and the French (who have at least as much reason to get hot under the collar) dont do the same with Hindenburg and Ludendorff, or with Joffre, Foch and Ptain? Douglas Haig never hijacked the domestic administration of the country in the way that Hindenburg and Ludendorff did, and he cannot carry the can for the rise of Fascism as they do. The charges against Haig are lack of tactical imagination, not executing a coup dtat on the sly. And that may be why the British military history of the First World War remains mired in the trenches: it is a comparatively safe place. Ptain provides a counter-point. In 191718 he played a far more cautious tactical hand, and brought the French Army back from mutiny and imminent collapse. The French, together with the Americans (not the British), then staged the counter-attack on the Marne on July 18, 1918 which marked the turning point on the Western Front. This is not the version favoured by British historians. They falsely accuse Ptain of failing to support Haig after the German attack on March 21, 1918, and say that Haig, not Ptain, inflicted the decisive blow against the German army, at Amiens on August 8, 1918. In 1940 Ptain divided France and the French far more literally and with far worse long-term consequences than Haig ever did Britain. Ironically, at least one of his motivations for doing so was to avoid the losses, the futility, of which his British confrre is so often accused. If Haig is charged with treason, it is hyperbole, a rhetorical device which reflects the passions that the memory of the First World War still generates in Britain, and which shows how even now, in contradistinction to the claim of this books title, it is still not a part of history. If it were, or rather if this book were, it would not only illuminate how aspects of the British experience of the First World War (to use its subtitle) compare and contrast with those of other belligerents, it would also discuss where the war fits in the history of Britain itself. Was the collapse of the Liberal Party a direct consequence of

the war? Or was liberalism already dead? Did the militancy of pre-war trades unionism ensure that successive British ministers, not least Lloyd George himself, sought accommodation rather than confrontation with the unions during the war? And is this why socialism in Britain remained weak? These admittedly old questions are not ones to which this book seeks answers. But it does not attempt to address new ones, either. Scottish nationalists have now got it firmly fixed in their heads that Scottish losses in the war were heavier pro rata than for any other part of the United Kingdom. The evidence is not categorical, and in particular rests on the voluntary recruiting surge of 191416, when Scottish enlistment was indeed marginally higher than elsewhere, rather than on the period of conscription in 191618, when the dependence of the war economy on Scottish heavy industry kept it low. The implicit argument, that the Scots suffered disproportionately in Britains futile war, has become conscripted for the purposes of independence: it is seen as a forerunner for todays wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where, some sectors of the Scottish press argue, Scots lives are being lost in disproportionate numbers in wars which are creatures of the Union. Regional responses in Britain to the First World War differed, as Stephen Badsey in one of the books more substantive chapters, on the press and propaganda, acknowledges. A Part of History fails to rise to this challenge, just as it fails to respond sufficiently to the idea of empire. Peter Hart not unreasonably tells us that we need to re-examine the Gallipoli campaign without Anzac-tinted spectacles, but then seems to think that the New Zealander William Malone was an Australian, and renames Sir Charles Monro, the commander who oversaw the withdrawal from the peninsula, Munro. Santanu Das provides a mouth-watering taste of his work on India and First World War writing, but needs a firmer grasp of the Mesopotamian campaign than he shows here, and Gary Sheffield gets in the now customary side-swipe of the British revisionist historians at the achievements of the Canadian Corps (essentially along the reasonable lines that they were really British anyway). As far as the Empire goes (and the war beyond the Western Front), that is about it. The tone of the volume is set by Michael Howards introductory survey and by Sheffields opening chapter. Sheffield is the heir of John Terraine, who memorably and provocatively subtitled his 1963 biography of Haig the educated soldier. Terraine did not use the National Archives, not least because the then fifty-year closure rule meant that the papers even for 1914 were not opened until 1964 (Sheffield seems to have got a bit muddled on this point: none of the obviously dated and bad histories of the war written in that era, Leon Wolff on Passchendaele or Alan Clark on Loos, could have used the official papers, even if the authors had wanted to). Sheffield and others, including Paddy Griffith, John Bourne, Peter Simkins and Andy Simpson, styled revisionists in this book, have exploited them to show that the British Army underwent a learning curve. They treat this experience as though it were unique, when it was not (the other armies involved in this war also learnt lessons from their experiences), and so imply as Terraine himself more explicitly contended that the British Army won the war in its final hundred days by becoming the main Army to defeat the German Army on the Western Front. Apart from the insularity (to use Stamps word) of its position, this

interpretation also neglects the exploitation of those same archives by Dominick Graham, Tim Travers, Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson to produce a much more critical view of the British Army and its command. Of the latter, only Wilson is represented in A Part of History, providing a summary of his interpretation of the Battle of the Somme. No other battle on the Western Front, not even Passchendaele, is accorded separate treatment. This makes one wonder whom the book is for. Few of the chapters attempt a survey of the field for the uninitiated, as Wilson does. Most of them (some no more than four or five pages long, and only two more than eleven) are bibliographical reflections, generalized remarks appropriate as the introductions to conference papers. As a result they fall between two stools. They do not serve as introductions to the non-specialist anxious to be made familiar with the contours of current debates, and they do not tell the specialist much that he or she did not know before. Julian Putkowski, in an angry account of the campaign to secure posthumous pardons for those executed for desertion, takes aim at Sheffield and others, but fails to make clear his own argument or even to tell the reader what the Shot at dawn campaign, to which he makes frequent reference, was, or how it organized its case. The book has no identifiable editor. The lack of a firm hand presumably explains not only the errors, from minor slips in bibliographical details and German grammar to significant misinformation (Leeds University, not Leeds Metropolitan University, is home to First World War archives), but also the unresolved contradictions between authors. Stamp declares in typically forthright fashion that the Lutyens memorial to the missing at Thiepval is the finest work of British architecture of the twentieth century. Terry Castle, whose piece is singular both in its telling (it is largely autobiographical) and in its length (it is three times longer than even the longer chapters in the book), holds a contrary view: the memorial is a massively ugly parody-arch. Malcolm Brown, writing on the British Tommy, tells us that the common British soldier was not honoured in the war itself. Nicholas Reeves disagrees, describing the hugely successful film of the Battle of the Somme, which opened on August 21, 1916, as having the ordinary soldier at its heart. British propaganda made much of the hundreds and thousands of ordinary working men who fought the war, as the panegyric to them at the end of John Buchans multi-volume wartime account, Nelson's History of the War, makes clear. There are insights here. Castles witty journey through her own sexuality and the need for male courage leads to a re-reading of Vera Brittain, and Max Saunders explains how Brittain, in life-writing about the war, was not the only participant who tried fiction but found fact easier. Brian Bond provides a thoughtful counterbalancing of C. E. Montagues Disenchantment with Charles Carringtons A Subalterns War. Badsey intriguingly suggests that British war enthusiasm may have peaked not in 1914, but in the last months of 1918. And Tony Pollard rightly suggests that the challenge for the growing field of First World War battlefield archaeology is to ensure that its tools are applied as part of a meaningful research framework. The fundamental questions that a mixed bag like this raises (but does not answer) concern military history. In the study of the First World War in particular, the divide between

professionals and amateurs has never been firmly fixed. Sheffield welcomes the large number of non-traditional students among the revisionists, those who have migrated to doctoral work from studying the war as a hobby. And yet, as Putkowski points out, it is the amateurs particularly in the media to whom the revisionists take such strong exception. Stamp, in his own assault on the revisionists, may go closer to the heart of the matter when he bemoans a new generation of military historians who seem as callous and jingoistic as he sees Haig himself to have been. Those schooled in and after the 1960s reacted against the ill-informed diatribes of Wolff and Clark, but they also were part of the generation of 1968, to whom the anti-war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon appealed. Now it is that generation which sets the agenda in guiding doctoral pupils and in drawing up school curricula. Both approaches the advocacy of the learning curve and the deference to the war poets tap into the same root. It is time to move on.

Michael Howard et al A PART OF HISTORY Aspects of the British experience of the First World War 238pp. Continuum. 18.99 (US $34.95). 978 0 8264 9813 7 Hew Strachan is Professor of Military History at the University of Oxford. His books include The First World War: Volume One, 2001 (reissued 2003), and The First World War in Africa (reissued in paperback in 2004).