Comments on: Grand Narratives of the Great War

By: Investigations of a Dog » Everyone knows you can't make a World War I game

Investigations of a Dog » Everyone knows you can't make a World War I game — Fri, 25 May 2007 13:43:51 +0000

[...] of static WWI and fluid WWII is completely false, as I’ve discussed in more detail here and here. The tactics used in the great advance on the Western Front in 1918 were not so very different from [...]

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 19:10:47 +0000

Hmm. The difficulty here is that the prevalent view is that there was no purpose to the war. It can be hard - particularly if you’re trying to enthuse an audience - to get across that there did seem to be a purpose at the time without yourself identifying with it. That said, I’ve always been more comfortable with a bitterly cynical, geopolitical rationale for fighting in 1914 than with a political one.
That’s incoherent, but hopefully my meaning is clear. I’m not sure it’s just about a retrospective liberal view of the ruling class. I don’t think we’ve ever wanted to face up to the moral issues of a total war pursued by popular consensus.

By: Gavin Robinson

Gavin Robinson — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 15:54:19 +0000

Yes, I’d prefer it if he hadn’t gone into that. I don’t like it when historians pass moral judgements on the past (although the Holocaust complicates things here). Saying that the war was right is just as dubious as saying that it was wrong. I don’t even like it when historians try to judge the competence of generals. I think there’s some justification for trying to redress the balance on Haig, because he’s bee unfairly criticised by so many people for so long, but ultimately we don’t know enough about how war works to be able to work out what the best course of action would have been in any situation.

By: Chris Williams

Chris Williams — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 15:05:21 +0000

I hope that TWFTR doesn’t help advance Sheffield’s political justification for the war, which I think is very dubious. In fact, its dubiousness provides one explanation for the hegemony of the traditionial view: most liberals would rather think that the ruling class is stupid than think that it’s evil.

By: Gavin Robinson

Gavin Robinson — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 12:00:07 +0000

I’m sure winning the approval of unemployed bloggers will make all the difference. Considering the kind of Google hits I get, it should at least raise your profile among people who are interested in having sex with animals!

I got the impression that Gary Sheffield was playing up to the Telegraph readers with the justification for the war, and even more with the Eltonian scientific examination of archival sources and rejection of cultural history. I’d be surprised if he actually believes all that stuff.

I don’t know how far one book will change things, especially if lazy journalists keep on using the same old cliches, but the revisionist view does seem to be slowly filtering through to the mainstream, and maybe Things We Forgot To Remember will have helped. But I’d suggest that acceptance of a more nuanced view could be a bottom up rather than top down process. There seems to be a lot of interest in researching ancestors who were involved in the war, and once you start finding out about them expectations generated by the myths are likely to be confounded.

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 20:03:55 +0000

Only just found this - cheers for the positive review Gavin, and I will add the CWGC/Soldiers Died error to my list of things to correct when/if the book ever gets a republication (alongside giving all battalions the designation 1/whatever, rather than just a number, and the misplaced apostrophe in Sebastian Faulks which still makes me wake up sweating at night, and the 1960s song names, and the difference between references and bibliography I noticed yesterday.
Glad that you were left wanting more, but I felt the executed soldiers bit had been done elsewhere - Corns and Hughes Wilson’s book and Nicolas Offenstadt’s Les Fusiles de la Grande Guerre - and there was of course an issue of space. Perhaps, if I’m honest, there was also a bit of emotional cowardice, in the sense that it’s a difficult issue to write about sensitively and well.
A year ago, I asked students on my Great War course to review Gary Sheffield’s book, and several of them pointed out that whilst it’s good on the military aspects, the opening chapters on diplomacy and morality are less convincing (I’m sure Gary wouldn’t mind me pointing that out, and he might even agree with it). I wonder how much effect it has had/will have in converting a broader audience to a more nuanced view of the war.

By: China Law Blog

China Law Blog — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 15:08:51 +0000

How To Handle China Rising: Why Can’t We Be Friends Or And Oregon Shall Lead Us…

Post over at the Dave Porter Blog (whose tagline is Connecting State Educational Policy to Foreign Policy - Expanding Mandarin programs and sending students to study in China) consisting of a letter to Oregon’s State Senate calling on Oregon to expand…