The Legacy of the Great War: Ninety Years On

Foreword

vii foreword Sir John Keegan The Great War continues to tantalize and fascinate Europeans. Recently too, Americans have begun to take an interest in a conflict that harmed their country little, though their involvement in it inaugurated their involvement in world affairs that now dominates their politics. America’s generation-long forgetfulness of the war derives from its involvement in the Second World War, in which it played a larger part than any of the European powers, except Russia, but also from the abiding memory of its Civil War of 1861–1865, with which the Great War so readily bears comparison in terms of scale, intensity, duration and loss of life. Commemoration of family involvement in the Civil War and the Great War is a concern that Americans share with Europeans, greatly aided on the European side of the Atlantic by the work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which builds and maintains the magnificent cemeteries of both world wars. Visiting the cemeteries that lie shoulder-to-shoulder in parts of Belgium and northern France is a familiar experience for the British, not only by those who are searching for the resting place of a family member. The cemeteries cast a powerful spell on those who visit, as Americans as well as British often do, the effect not only of the events they commemorate and the sheer, almost unimaginable number of deaths viii Sir John Keegan commemorated, but also by the manner of commemoration. Because they are the work of three outstanding twentieth-century British artists —Edwin Lutyens, the architect; Gertrude Jekyll, the gardener; and Rudyard Kipling, the poet—they achieve a powerful cultural effect. They are, in fact, unique statements of the national culture, literary and visual. The decisions taken by the original members of the commission —that each of the dead should have a separate grave and headstone , that the headstone should record age, date, and place of death, regiment, and rank, but that ranks should be intermingled at the burial place and that each headstone should allow space for an inscription by the bereaved—ensures that the cemeteries are powerful expressions of both national and personal grief. Even had the official histories not been written the cemeteries would serve as a collective memorialization of the war, from which its chronology and topography could be pieced together. Indeed the cemeteries today are much more visited than the official histories are read. That reflects both the supremely successful role of the commissioners and the rather less successful role of official historians. The historians decided upon a strictly, indeed coldly impersonal objective top-down treatment of what is described, containing no criticism of commanders , or orders, or management of operations, so that a great national, continental tragedy is narrated entirely emotionlessly. It is not surprising that, as a result, the histories failed to satisfy the urge to know and to understand felt by the war’s survivors and that they are left increasingly unread, except by experts and professionals. The deliberate coldness of the Official Histories naturally stimulated an alternative approach, at first of protest and denial by survivors, such as Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, whose work succeeded in giving the Great War an even worse reputation than it deserved, but eventually a growingly imaginative and creative memorialization by a generation of often young historians , who had no personal acquaintance with the reality of the war, often of any war, except through family memory. Such history writing stirred controversy, and perhaps inevitably sides were taken. Schools of opinion formed, particularly among those who objected to the narration of the war in terms of the capability of generals, indeed of their demonization. In the 1950s bitter quarrels arose between denouncers of Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief, and the surprising number of his defenders led by John Terraine. There was no outcome to Foreword ix this dispute, except that Haig’s attackers were gradually obliged to proceed more cautiously. In time, the argument over the tactics and strategy of the Western Front, for that was the essence of the Haig argument, became less a question of personality and more over collective failings. Why was the British army apparently so much less good than the German at adapting to stalemate? The leadership of the dispute devolved upon Professor Gary Sheffield, who proposed the idea of a “learning curve.”Yes, he concluded, the British were slow to adapt but...