The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (review)

This fascinating, deeply revisionist study sets quite a few received opinions on their heads with its imagination, verve, and extensive use of sources, most of which come, by dint of availability, from the middle class—correspondence, diaries, newspapers, and local records. Though not always totally convincing, Gregory's revisions achieve that primary historical task of making readers reconsider how the past has been interpreted before. Gregory moves the enterprise forward through his discussion of different ways of understanding Britain's part in World War I. He even revises himself, remarking in an endnote about his The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1919–1946 (Oxford, 1994): "I always assumed someone would legitimately challenge some of my arguments. It might as well be me" (334).

Gregory begins by questioning, as others have done, the standard view that great enthusiasm greeted the outbreak of the war. People gathered in London and elsewhere but more to observe a significant event than to greet it with overwhelming and riotous approval. Once the war started, there was a sense of commitment to see it through to a successful conclusion. Young men flocked to the colors, more from the middle class than the working class, but not in a jingoist way—many of them, in fact, betraying a sense of reluctance. With the intelligent use of a variety of sources, Gregory also refutes the generally held belief of a great divide between the war front and the home front. There was considerable awareness of what the soldiers were experiencing in France.

Despite the brilliance of Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (New York, 1975), its emphasis on the great writers of the war does not necessarily lead to an accurate historical picture. Again, contrary to received opinion, Gregory demonstrates that most people realized that the war was not likely to end quickly. He describes recruitment as being more limited than usually thought; tribunals excused many men from service on the basis of their employment or family situations. The tribunals are generally known not for such leniency but for their brutal treatment of conscientious objectors, a small proportion of their cases.

Gregory points out that, even after acknowledging the exaggerations, the Germans undoubtedly behaved badly in Belgium, presenting, in his view, a more legitimate casus belli than the instigations in Poland before World War II. He discusses war profiteers but points out that farmers profited far more from the war than merchants and manufacturers did. He even argues convincingly that the poor were likely to have a better quality of life in the army than in the slums; those from the coalmining communities might even have been in less mortal danger in the army. Though he is not the first to make these observations, Gregory reports that food controls during the war improved the poor's diet, contributing to a significant decline in infant mortality.

In his conclusion, rather than summing up the book, Gregory argues that the Treaty of Versailles might well have prevented World War II if it had been enforced and that Germany was treated much more brutally after World War II than after World War I. He reminds us, in the tradition of A. J. P. Taylor, that Britain went to war a second time for traditional reasons and not because of the murderous activities of the Nazis, which were not fully known until late in the war. He refutes the standard notion that World War I was unnecessary: German aggression was real and dangerous.

This is an important and exciting book, though powerful arguments can certainly be made to modify or refute the views that Gregory advances in it. Thus does the debate continue, allowing us better to understand the past.