Neil Hanson
THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER
The story of the missing of the Great War
543pp. Doubleday. £20.
0 385 60453 X
US: Knopf. $28.95. 0 307 26370 3
Richard van Emden
BRITAIN’S LAST TOMMIES
Final memories from soldiers of the 1914–18 war in their own words
333pp. Barnsley: Pen and Sword. £19.99.
1 84415 315 0
Neil Oliver
NOT FORGOTTEN
306pp. Hodder and Stoughton. £20.
0 340 89872 0
Charles Messenger
CALL TO ARMS
The British Army, 1914–18
574pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £30 (US $49.95).
0 297 84695 7
Michael S. Neiberg
FIGHTING THE GREAT WAR
A global history
395pp. Harvard University Press. £18.95 (US $27.95).
0 674 01696 3
Dan Todman
THE GREAT WAR
Myth and memory
299pp. Hambledon and London. £19.99 (US $39.95).
1 85285 459 6
In France, each November is charged with acts of remembrance of the First World War. On the weekend of November 11, 2005, two such events showed how fractured in France the history of this period is. First at Péronne, on the Somme, at the Historial de la Grande Guerre, the only international museum of the Great War in France, a colloquium was held on the subject of the explosion of extreme violence in 1914–15, marking a kind of degeneration of war into slaughter on a scale the world had never seen before.
On the same weekend, just an hour’s drive to the south, a book fair of recent publications on the war was held in the town hall of the small town of Craonne in the east of France. This was an occasion when authors sat behind tables and signed copies of their books for a modest but respectable and very interested public. On my right was Antoine Prost, one of the most distinguished First World War historians, who, like myself, had attended the conference at Péronne that morning. Prost did a brisk business signing his book La Grande Guerre racontée à mon petit fils. Lots of youngsters lined up for this book, many more than sought signatures for heavier tomes backed by battalions of footnotes.
Between the signatures and the galettes came public discussion in the rooms upstairs. And there the atmosphere changed notably. There was a whiff of hostility in the air. To my surprise, we were the enemy. To understand why, we need to consider the place where this book fair was held. Craonne is not neutral territory. There, eighty-eight years ago, in the spring of 1917, along the ridge separating the French and German armies, French infantrymen tried to break through heavily fortified German positions, failed to do so, and then mutinied, not against the war but against the murderous way it was being fought. Units refused to go back up the line, and discontent spread so widely that the French commander, Robert Nivelle, was relieved of his post.
His replacement, Philippe Pétain, restored order, initiated reforms, executed twoscore troublemakers out of 500,000 mutineers, and gave up the now discredited notion of winning the war through a frontal assault on the German lines. The Germans apparently never had any idea that all of this was happening, just a few miles from their front line in Champagne.
There is a popular song about Craonne, well known throughout France, an elegiac ballad in which a soldier says farewell to women, to wine, to life. It ends bitterly with the stoical acceptance of meaningless slaughter – “Nous sommes les sacrifiés”. It made it into the British classic film Oh! What a Lovely War! sung by a French chanteuse to men about to go up the line.
Craonne is synonymous with anti-war sentiment in general and with pacifism in particular. On November 5, 1998, the then Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, spoke there of the way the First World War created a wound that would not heal in the soil of France. “Craonne”, he said,
is the place where an elite army, which had already fought hard and gloriously, an army distinguished for its bravery, was thrown against an impregnable obstacle – 200 metres of mounds and ridges, swept by the deadly wind of the artillery and machine-guns. Some of those soldiers, exhausted by attacks doomed to failure, slithering in blood-soaked mud, plunged into bottomless despair, refused to be sacrificed. May these soldiers, “shot as an example” in the name of a discipline whose severity was equalled only by the ferocity of the fighting, today be restored to their full place in our collective national memory.
Those shot for desertion or cowardice had already received posthumous pardons in the 1930s; they were citizens, and they had been denied due process of appeal before their execution.
The inclusion of the 343 British men, shot for various offences, in the list of those to be honoured as victims of the First World War is something that has not yet happened in Britain. Despite repeated calls for posthumous pardons, the ranks of the fallen in Britain are still divided between those who died honourably and those who died dishonourably.
Clearly French and British modes of marking the catastrophe of the First World War differ. How different became apparent in the same town of Craonne a few months later. In February 2006, a group of historians created there an organization known by its acronym CRID, or The Collective for International Research and Debate on the 1914–1918 War. Its aim was to challenge what it took to be the cabal which put right-wing interpretations of the First World War at the centre of the historical curriculum at schools and universities. CRID offered to open the door to a new kind of history, one not fettered by political prejudices.
At whom were their attacks aimed? At us, in part; thus the coldness of a damp Saturday afternoon book fair in Craonne. Prost, whose book on the war as told to his grandson sold so well, and I myself, are founding members of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, but we are only minor players in this very French imbroglio. The real targets are two historians who are co-directors of the research centre of the Historial, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and Annette Becker, Professor at the University of Paris X at Nanterre. They wrote a book entitled Retrouver la Grande Guerre (published in English as Understanding the Great War), which developed an interpretation of the war as having been governed not by the coercion of the population, but by popular consent. What they term a “war culture” was evident from very early on in the conflict, and this war culture drew on all forms of associative life. Thus the war became a kind of crusade, a morality play in which good and evil were so evidently divided that those who cried “enough” were deemed either deluded or dangerous. Hatred of the enemy was palpable, and so was the brutalization, a term invented by the late historian George L. Mosse, of the norms of French society and culture.
These two young scholars helped shape the reading lists students need to master in order to pass the Agrégation, the entrance exam to a career in university teaching in France. They also occupy posts in two of Paris’s most distinguished academies of learning. And they have access to research funding through the Conseil Général of the Department of the Somme, which pays for the Historial and its research centre.
CRID is an altogether different group of people. Historians at various universities, many in the south of France, writers without university posts, they see the Péronne historians as Parisian, privileged, and politically committed to right-wing views of the war. The fact that the Historial was created as an international museum with an international research centre was of no consequence. The fact that some members of the board of directors of the research centre (like myself) do not share the views of Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker on many points is irrelevant. The war within the war is between French historians; the rest of us were simply advised to take cover.
In typical French fashion, this clash entered the public domain through a long two-page article in Le Monde. On March 11, 2006, the lines were drawn publicly between the Peronnistas and the Gauchistes, between those who believe that the war went on and on through the mobilization of consent, and those who believe that, from start to finish, war was possible only through coercion. Patriots versus neo-pacifists, elitists versus populists, aficionados of violence on the one hand and of protest on the other; in sum, Péronne versus Craonne. Here is the stuff of which newspaper history is made. The fact that this article is a gross distortion of what the debate really is about is neither here nor there.
When you touch the First World War in France, you are playing with fire. In Britain, to write about the Great War is an entirely different matter. Elegy displaces anger; touches of the sacred are always at hand, even when the author’s purpose is to show the terrible waste of life and hope in the war. When irony dominates the account, it provides a natural distancing device, a way of looking at the war with detached sadness.
There are points of contact between writing on the First World War in the two countries. As the Gauchistes of CRID insist, the war is a subject to which many people have something important to contribute. Professional historians certainly do not have a monopoly on writing on the war, and as Antoine Prost remarked at the book fair at Craonne, the books that are read most widely are not the ones that took years of scholarly effort, but rather the ones that allow families to see the way the war invaded every household and left traces and wounds palpable to this day. This is the register of The Unknown Soldier, Neil Hanson’s account of British and German families trying to cope with the loss of sons who had no known grave, and of Richard van Emden’s collection of very old soldiers’ words about the war in Britain’s Last Tommies. Neil Oliver’s Not Forgotten is an even more personal account of his own deep encounter with the war his grandfather survived. Oliver’s book, accompanying a Channel 4 television series on the war, is essentially a book about families, and about the way they make remembrance happen. But what will be left, he muses, when families fade? Can remembrance survive the passage of time? Can books and television and the internet keep the story alive? Perhaps.
Alongside these popular writers, professional historians keep digging into the vast archival deposits created during and after the war.
Charles Messenger is a professional soldier turned historian, and his book Call to Arms is a fine study of how the British Army worked, and how it melded together a very mixed population of people who served as regular soldiers, territorials, volunteers and conscripts. His book is particularly good on labour: manpower behind the lines as well as at the front, doing bloody hard work for fifty months. Michael S. Neiberg’s military history Fighting the Great War is a good companion to Messenger’s, in that it shows the global reach of the war machine. Neiberg refuses to conclude that the war was futile or pointless, though he provides lots of evidence of strategic and tactical failure on both sides of the line.
The Great War: Myth and memory by Dan Todman addresses the overlap between what historians think about the war and what the public believes. He shows how the stories told by different generations sustain family narratives and are adapted to provide a framework within which to tell the story of Britain in the twentieth century as a whole. Public “myths” (meaning widely disseminated stories, not lies) about the war are by and large negative, he argues, since such an account fits into a broader sense of modern Britain as a declining power, a place of slightly shabby dignity. Thus whatever went wrong in the past century could be traced back to the war, that catastrophic moment when the “rot” (defined variously) set in.
Not so in France. To be sure, one reason why such a set of narratives about the futility of the war does not suit French audiences is that the war was fought on French soil, and several million uninvited German guests were finally and after enormous effort thrown out of the country. The death toll in France was twice that of Britain’s, though the proportion of those killed to those who served was not very different. One in six Frenchmen who served was killed; the figure is one in eight for the British Army. But people do not die proportionately; together Britain and France lost over 2 million men between 1914 and 1918, four times the number of men who died in these two countries in the Second World War. For France, the First World War was not seen as futile, in part because of the defeat of 1940. As Georges Brassens, the great French troubadour, put it: “Qu’est-ce que c’est la guerre que je préfère, c’est la guerre de 14–18”.
There are many other reasons why narratives about the First World War provoke rhetorical violence in France and less politicized and heated ruminations in Britain. The divide between the “school of consent” at Péronne and the “school of coercion” at Craonne is clearly a false one. Both were in abundance during the war. What French historians are fighting over is what de Gaulle and others liked to term “une certaine idée de la France”. Is it a place of Revolutionary fervour or of narrow patriotism? Is it a country of people who are very adept at saying no, as in their rejection of the proposed European Constitution? Is France a country of revolt or of conformity to whatever the State wants? The obvious answer to these questions is both. And yet the war within the war goes on.
Perhaps it is wiser to ask why the Anglo-Saxon debate is so relatively mild. The Left-Right divide enters the conversation at times, but only indirectly. To be sure, there have been heated words exchanged over the nature of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig’s strategy and his sanity. But without a long and unbroken military tradition, without conscription as a badge of citizenship, without a Jacobin legacy to invoke or despise, and without a culture of rhetorical violence of (at times) absurd intensity, British arguments take on a different, less strident, form.
There is another reason why arguments about the 1914–18 war have been more heated in France than in Britain. The sacred character of the First World War was safeguarded in France by a robust veterans’ movement, in which roughly 4 million men, or half those who served, found company and consolation after the Armistice. These were overwhelmingly pacifist associations, determined to make war unthinkable. That they failed in their primary objective is evident, but their hatred of war and what it does to those who wage it left a deep mark on French political culture. They hated politicians, those self-serving evildoers who sent men to war, but never paid the price for their policies. Their voices were angry. They had a cause and defended it as fiercely after the war as they had defended their part of the front during it.
Every schoolboy or girl has an image of the poilu, the French infantryman. He is a bearded, good-humoured man of the people, who took up arms because he had to, and because he wanted to spare his children from the horrors of war. He is a man of honour, an icon of what it means to be French. He defended his country, but also defended vigorously the right to a decent pension of those wounded or for the families of the dead.
Tommy Atkins carries some of this cultural baggage (without the beard), but his legacy has been markedly less political than that of his French brothers-in arms. The British veterans’ movement was tiny in comparison to its French equivalent. It did not have the same outlook or the same significance in inter-war social and political life as did its French counterpart. British veterans’ calls and later appeals for posthumous pardons fell (and still fall) on deaf ears in Parliament; thus the 343 British men shot for various offences during the war remain in their pariah state.
Who speaks for their inclusion in the remembrance of the war? Not Tony Blair in the midst of the war in Iraq. But no organized group ever had the standing to push him or any previous Prime Minister to act. Let history judge is Blair’s response, in this as in other matters.
After the Armistice, most of the men who served in British forces faded back into their families and their lives. Politics was elsewhere. Many received state pensions, to be sure, but what has mattered more for their welfare were the contributions of the British Legion, that central emblem of civil society. The reminiscences of soldiers of the Great War, inscribed in a number of the books reviewed, are moving, occasionally lyrical, but rarely political. These men fought for their people, not for the State or the Empire. And it is above all their people, their families, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who remember them still.
