Popular History and Myth-Making: The Role and Responsibility of First World War Historians in the Centenary Commemorations, 2014-2018

In Britain there is a specific national perception of the First World War. This is evident from a number of sources—observation of the media, an analysis of the First World War as it appears in the National Curriculum (the post-1988 nationwide curriculum for primary and secondary state schools in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland), and discussion with colleagues and students. At the start of each academic year, I ask those students who have opted to study my First World War history module to write down the words and phrases they most associate with the First World War. This year (2011-2012) the majority chose "trenches" (42%), closely followed by "death" (23%). While unscientific, my survey provides a certain impression of how these undergraduates understand the First World War. Their ideas about the war reflect the views of the wider British public. It is perceived by many as a tragic disaster, fought mainly in the muddied, rat-filled, and lice-ridden trenches of the Western Front by young, innocent "Tommies" led by imbecile generals who willfully sacrificed their men for a cause that would, with the outbreak of the Second World War, prove to be utterly pointless. Overall, there is a general awareness that the war was a uniquely terrible experience. This angry, emotional response to the First World War was captured by the Guardian journalist George Monbiot on November 11, 2008, when he described the war as "an act of social cannibalism, in which statesmen and generals on both sides murdered their own offspring."¹ Of all the images, it is perhaps "the trenches" that is most often used as shorthand by modern Britons for stupidity, blind obedience, failures of leadership, appalling physical conditions, and deadlock.²

This image of the war did not appear from nowhere. For those who study the history of the First World War, it has become a matter of orthodoxy to pinpoint the 1960s as the key moment for the formation of the modern myth of the war. Fifty years after the war, it is suggested, Britons recast it to fit a set of contemporary concerns ranging from nuclear war to cultural radicalism. However, research by Dan Todman has illustrated that myths about the war developed in a far more gradual process. The war was represented from the moment it broke out—and in a variety of ways. Yet by the 1970s many of the different views had died out or been hushed, as a set of myths that depict the First World War in purely negative terms achieved universal dominance.³ That the war continues to play a part in British culture is not surprising. It was a unique event in British history: the mass mobilization of the population to fight a land war against a great power opponent on the European mainland. The effort required affected the life of every Briton at the time, most traumatically through the deaths of 750,000 men. Even if in 2012 no veterans or witnesses exist who experienced it firsthand, many people have grown up with its echoes resounding in their ears.⁴ The approaching centenaries will serve to make such echoes more audible.

The portrayal of the war in this narrow way is perhaps most evident in books, television shows, and movies set against the backdrop of the First World War. Recent examples in British and American media include: the television series Downton Abbey (first broadcast in the UK in September 2010, January 2011 in the U.S.); Steven Spielberg's War Horse (released in 2011 and based on the 1982 children's novel by Michael Morpurgo), and, of course, Blackadder Goes Forth (the BBC comedy series first broadcast in 1989, but still incredibly popular, being voted in 2000 as number nine in the 100 Great Television Moments broadcast on UK television). In literature, Pat Barker's trilogy Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995) essentially recreated for a modern readership the story of the breakdowns of the war poets Sassoon and...