Investigations of a Dog

I’ve just read two of the most important recent books on the First World War: Gary Sheffield’s Forgotten Victory (ISBN: 0747264600), and Dan Todman’s The Great War: Myth and Memory (ISBN: 1852855126). This post is somewhere between a review and a collection of random thoughts on these books and the First World War in general. It will also allow me to use the word “metanarrative”, which I seem to have been neglecting lately.

I’ll start with Forgotten Victory. It’s so self-evidently good that I’m not sure what I can say about it that hasn’t already been said. Gary Sheffield summarises the “revisionist” military history of the Great War which has been gaining ground (a strangely appropriate metaphor, even though I didn’t consciously think about it beforehand) since the 1980s. I first encountered it during my MA in 1996, by which time it was already widely accepted by academic military historians, so the arguments were already mostly familiar to me. Forgotten Victory pulls all this work together and summarises is it an accessible form, providing a strong and coherent argument against popular misinterpretations of the war. It has to be stressed that this isn’t the bad kind of revisionism — just disagreeing with what everyone else thinks in order to generate publicity, with controversy being used as an integral part of the marketing strategy. Gary Sheffield instead offers a reasonable and balanced assessment of the war, showing that when original sources are examined using empirical methodology they do not generally support the Blackadder Goes Forth view of the Great War.

Sheffield explains that the war needed to be fought because it was in Britain’s interest to stop German aggression, and that the war can be seen as a clash of ideologies. The difference between militaristic authoritarian Germany and (more or less, by the standards of the time) liberal democratic Britain is crucial for explaining the conduct as well as the causes of the war. Having never had universal conscription, Britain had few reserves to call on in 1914 and no generals with experience of commanding large formations. What followed was the “learning curve”: the British Army adapted to new conditions of warfare and overcame its own limitations. There were costly failures along the way, but by 1918 the British Army had become the most effective fighting force in the war, epitomised by the spectacular achievement of breaking through the Hindenburg Line in September 1918.

This kind of success was achieved by developing new technology and tactics, and combining them in an all arms approach to fighting. Improvements in artillery were the key development from which everything else flowed. Industry in Britain and North America was geared up to produce artillery pieces and ammunition in sufficient quantities and of sufficient quality, allowing staggering amounts of firepower to be concentrated on key areas of the Western Front. Guns were carefully calibrated in order to predict more accurately where the shells would fall; new fuses allowed more efficient destruction of barbed wire; sound ranging and flash spotting techniques allowed devastating counter-battery fire. Perhaps even more important was a change in the way artillery was used to support attacks. Week-long bombardments destroyed the element of surprise far more effectively than they destroyed German positions. By 1918, they had been replaced by short, intense bombardments designed to suppress the enemy while the infantry advanced. Therefore a recognition of artillery’s inherent limitations allowed it to play to its strengths in combined arms attacks.

The increased effectiveness of artillery forced a reduction in the force to space ratio, with defence in depth replacing the more linear trenches and redoubts of earlier years. This in turn made more flexible infantry tactics possible, fixing and flanking the enemy rather than massed head on assaults. I think Sheffield is right to be sceptical about tanks. Although they were useful for breaking into first line trenches, they were simply not capable of the kind of mobile warfare later advocated by Fuller and Liddell-Hart.

I do have a couple of criticisms. The first is that, while convincingly demolishing just about every myth associated with the First World War, he perpetuates one from the Second World War by frequently referring to something called “Blitzkrieg”. As I said in my post about Mobile Warfare, this is something that went out of fashion among academic military historians around the same time as the old view of the Great War. At the same time as learning about the revisionist reassessment of the First World War, I was also learning that the Germans did not have a coherent or radically new operational doctrine in the early years of the Second World War, and that they rarely used the word “Blitzkrieg” themselves. The other problem is that he is too dismissive of cultural history, contrasting empirical historians who scientifically examine archival sources to get at the facts (looks like I’m not the only one who can unconsciously channel Geoffrey Elton!) with literary critics who study fiction. If you want to get at Paul Fussell you can easily condemn him for privileging the canon, or for using outdated formalist methodology (it’s funny how many betes noires of traditionalists turn out to be followers of the innocuous Herman Northrop Frye rather than Lyotard or Derrida), but to condemn him for studying something which isn’t “true” makes no sense.

Dan Todman doesn’t make either of these mistakes. He consistently points out that what happened in May 1940 was an aberration, and that the German gamble could easily have failed. But more important, he effortlessly bridges the gap between empirical military history and cultural history, recognising that what people believe is just as important as what is actually true. If there is a big difference between what people believe and what the empirical evidence suggests to be true, that raises a very interesting question. Rather than dismiss it, Dan Todman sets out to investigate. Therefore his use of the word “myth” is very different from Gary Sheffield’s, acknowledging that while myths can distort the truth they aren’t necessarily all lies, and that myths are an important part of individual and group identity.

Todman shows that the development of the myths of mud, blood, donkeys, and futility which had completely obscured the forgotten victory by the 1980s had a long and complicated genesis, and that their hegemony was not necessarily inevitable. Even putting it down to 1960s counter-culture now looks anachronistic and over simplified. Instead he shows how the meaning of the war was contested during the inter-war period, with the need to avoid offending grieving parents putting limits on what could be said. Living memory is placed at the centre of the analysis, with the demography of the survivors playing a key role in how the war was remembered. The deaths of the majority of the parents, and later the deaths of the majority of the veterans, changed the ways in which the war was perceived and discussed.

There is no privileging of the canon here, with a very wide range of sources being used to try to get a more representative view than one based solely on Wilfred Owen. Although I knew all too well that basing your whole view of a historical event on one person’s poems is a recipe for disaster, I hadn’t previously realised what an atypical alienated loner Owen was (hello, trolls!). That he is somehow reminiscent of a Camus anti-hero, and perhaps even a prototype for Morrissey, might suggest why he is held in much higher regard now than he was then.

I hate it when reviewers criticise a book for something it didn’t include, but I have to say that I was left wanting more. I would have liked to see a whole chapter on executions, which have arguably become one of the most powerful parts of the myth. That the amount of attention they get is out of all proportion to how many there actually were is exactly the kind of thing this book sets out to investigate and explain. Gas is another thing which metonymically stands for the Great War in the popular imagination, but maybe the fact that its use was genuinely widespread and its effects were genuinely terrible disqualifies it from being enough of a myth to get a chapter of its own. I would also have liked to see more explanation of the cognitive science which was hinted at in the text but not fully brought out into the open. On the other hand, I can see how many readers would be put off by that sort of thing.

Both of these books made me think that popular perceptions of the First World War turn a lot of critical theory on its head. In the popular myth we can certainly identify a hegemonic metanarrative which determines which stories can and can’t be told, contains and silences dissent, privileges some views and delegitimates others. But it’s the opposite of what you’d expect. Far from serving the interests of the state or the elite, it excludes patriotism and militarism, placing the horror and futility of war at the centre. The other ranks are celebrated, or at least pitied, while the generals are condemned. The (admittedly large) minority of 1 million men who died are privileged over the 5 million or so who fought and survived. Perhaps the most privileged group is the 300 executed men who might be expected to be the most marginalised. Feminist and queer expectations are confounded as well. Another popular myth of the Great War is that it dramatically improved the rights of British women. Popular perceptions have been far more heavily influenced by homoerotic poetry than by the Official History. There’s still room for postcolonial criticism to lament the lack of attention paid to Indian, African, and West Indian contributions to the British war effort, but even here it’s worth noting that the Australian contribution can seem to be more highly valued than the British (even Gary Sheffield doesn’t dare to challenge the consensus that Australian divisions were elite!).

Dan Todman points out that in some ways the myth does serve the interests of governments which want to start wars, because they can portray their wars as good wars which can’t possibly be as bad as the Great War. Nevertheless it’s interesting that many soldiers’ stories which have been excluded from the dominant metanarrative are being recovered by amateur historians who are either unaware of, or actively hostile to, “postmodernist” theory. This relates to my last post about the relative strengths and weaknesses of academics and amateurs. I hate to be pedantic here, but it seems that Dan Todman, his editor, and everyone else who read the manuscript all agree that CWGC and “Soldiers Died” are the same thing. To most of the regulars at the Great War Forum, this would be a schoolboy error. They’re actually two different sources, which don’t always agree with each other. On the other hand, I doubt that any of the badge collectors or service number experts could have thought of writing a book as ambitious as Myth and Memory, let alone written it as well as Dan Todman has.

Bibliography

1. Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory (Headline Review, June 2002).
2. Dan Todman, The Great War (Hambledon Continuum, January 2007).