This territory is a disputed one. Our popular notion of the war – formed largely by what was written about it by those who fought in the front line, and by later artistic reimaginings of it – is that it was indeed uniquely horrible; that it was conducted by an incompetent High Command that repeatedly sacrificed thousands of men in order to gain a few yards of churned earth; that it was characterised by ‘mud, blood and futility’. There is, however, another view of the conflict, one argued by such leading military historians as Correlli Barnett, John Terraine, Hew Strachan, Brian Bond, Nigel Cave, Gordon Corrigan, Trevor Wilson and Robin Prior, and supported by a generation of younger so-called ‘revisionist’ historians such as Gary Sheffield. These historians point out that not all the generals were callous incompetents, nor all rankers hapless and unwilling victims; they insist that some of the battles were brilliantly planned and fought; they remind us that we did after all win the war. They are exasperated by the Anglocentric attitude to the war that prevails in Britain, pointing out not only the war’s international dimensions but also the even larger losses sustained by other combatant countries. The British tendency to think of the war only in terms of the Western Front, they argue, gives us a hopelessly skewed impression both of its conduct and of its wider significance. They dismiss the War Poets as unrepresentative, complain about the way the war is taught in schools where literature is given precedence over history, and retain a particular loathing for two of the most enduringly popular representations of the war, the play Oh What a Lovely War! and the television tragicomedy Blackadder Goes Forth. In short they feel that the British are obsessed with the ‘tragedy’ of the war and are incapable of seeing the bigger picture. Their view of popular representations of the war can be summed up by the title of Gordon Corrigan’s 2003 study: Mud, Blood and Poppycock.
The impact of such books on interpreting the war in universities is considerable, and there is no doubt that many of them are meticulously researched and cogently argued. Their impact on the public at large, however, is as yet limited. As Gary Sheffield comments in the introduction to The Forgotten Victory (2001), which is one of the best, most approachable and most persuasive of these ‘revisionist’ histories: ‘For the last decade and a half I have sat in academic seminars in which historians have complained about the difficulty of shifting public opinion on these issues. It seems that every time an important new book comes out, another popular book or television programme appears repeating the same old tired myths.’ The two sides in this argument have become – to use an appropriate verb – entrenched, and it seems unlikely that either will yield in the foreseeable future.
It is no part of this book’s aim to take up this quarrel, but in tracing the way in which the First World War has been remembered and commemorated, and by looking at the way in which the experiences of those who fought in it on the front line have shaped this process, the many corrective ‘facts’ adduced by military historians are less relevant than what the majority of people in Britain have believed and continue to believe about the war. We do not define ourselves as a people by facts, but by received ideas – ideas that have a symbolic rather than a literal truth. Among the long-cherished ideas that the British have about themselves is that they believe in fair play and favour the underdog, they are phlegmatic and always see the funny side of any given situation, and they are among the most tolerant people in the world. All these notions could be ‘disproved’ by citing examples of contrary behaviour, but they persist as a generally accepted truth. As far as the war is concerned, we may no longer believe that angels appeared to protect the British at the Battle of Mons in 1914, that a Canadian serviceman was ‘crucified’ on a barn door near Ypres, or that Germans bayoneted babies and boiled down corpses in order to produce soap, but we still believe – with considerable justification – that the First World War was a great national tragedy and that an entire generation was profligately and unnecessarily sacrificed.
By giving a scholarly overview of campaigns and strategy military historians can usefully and instructively tell us what the war was about; but what really interests us is what it was like. For that we have always turned to those who were there, notably the poets and memoirists, but latterly to those more ordinary people, the diminishing band of living witnesses whose voices had yet to be stilled. As one schoolchild who met 110-year-old Henry Allingham in 2007 remarked: ‘The books tell us about the battles but they don’t tell you what people who were there thought about them.’ The gulf between military history and personal experience was demonstrated by the man who did indeed become Britain’s Last Veteran, Harry Patch, when talking about Passchendaele: ‘I’m told we attacked on 16 August, but the date doesn’t mean much to me. I know it was about six weeks before I was wounded, so I suppose the middle of August is about right. I remember the names – Pilckem Ridge was one and the other was Langemarck – but it is such a long time ago that I can’t quite connect them up in my head.’ Patch may have forgotten the exact dates and places, but he knew what a battlefield was like – not from the maps that were studied at GHQ, but because in 1917 he was stumbling over one.
For Patch, the First World War was not about military intelligence, the deployment of battalions or the plan of attack. It was about wading around in filth with no opportunity to bathe or change your lice-ridden clothes for the whole four months you were at the front. It was about discomfort and fear and exhaustion and having your best friends quite literally ‘blown to pieces’. As the last British Tommy to revisit the battlefields over which he and so many other men had fought ninety years before, Patch commented in 2007:
Some of the boys buried here are the same age as me, killed on the same day I was fighting. Any one of them could have been me. Millions of men came to fight in this war and I find it incredible that I am now the only one left. Just like them, when I went over the top, I didn’t know whether I would last longer than five minutes. We were the PBI – the Poor Bloody Infantry – and we were expendable. What a waste. What a terrible waste.
It is the living witness of the men on the front line that we have lost now that the Last Veteran has died.
The tomb and the Cenotaph bear witness to the greatest emotion this nation has ever felt. Children are brought here every year; and so the memory, without the sharpness, perhaps, felt by us who lived through it, goes on with another generation. In this way a nation keeps alive its holy places.
H.V. MORTON, The Spell of London (1926)
In the immediate post-war period a number of large, well-orchestrated public events – culminating in the funeral of the Unknown Warrior on 11 November 1920 – showed a nation drawn together in grief. It would be hard not to be moved by the sense of national unity that these occasions suggested, but they took place against a background of considerable unrest in Britain. The country had not only been involved in four long and costly years of war but had endured numerous social and economic problems on the home front. Even before the war, the long Edwardian summer of myth had in reality been disrupted by serious industrial disputes. To the increasing alarm of employers, trade unions had grown in power since the beginning of the century and Britain had begun to be dogged by strikes which were largely the result of wages failing to keep pace with