The Unquiet Western Front: Britain's Role in Literature and History (review)

Since 1980, Brian Bond has worked to reshape scholarly and popular views of Britain's role during the First World War. His Lees-Knowles lectures at Cambridge of 2000 reflected on that experience and those views. These lectures, presented in this volume, aimed to assess all of the literature and history on the topic, a great ambition for a short work. Still, Bond's synthesis is suggestive. His main themes are the intersections, or the collisions, between the lived experience and the constructed recollection of the war, and the literature and the history about it. Bond analyses the attitudes of people who lived through the experience, ranging from the war poets to a host of forgotten writers with different views, perhaps more representative of their times. He emphasises the complex relationship between the intention and the effects of attempts at reconstruction. Thus, the best "antiwar" writers often had been good killers, while the author of Journey's End slew his characters to commemorate their devotion to duty, not to attack the war. Bond argues that contemporary views about the Great War emerged only during the 1960s, when a generation born after 1939 formed an opinion of events it had not known. This memory was shaped by popular historical and artistic works, like Alan Clark's The Donkeys and Joan Littlewood's Oh, What a Lovely War, which drew from older authors with peculiar biases, especially Basil Liddell Hart and David Lloyd George, and focused on the incompetence of generals and the horrors of the trenches. This memory was shaped by current attitudes toward nuclear weapons, the establishment and war. The generation of '68 saw Vietnam and called it the First World War. Since then, scholars with access to primary documents increasingly have demolished such ideas and gone on to controversies of their own, but in the popular sphere, the views of the 1960s reign supreme, repeated most recently and significantly in Blackadder Goes Forth. Bond's survey produces depressing conclusions. With the Great War, as with Shakespeare, literature has become history. Bond hopes that archivally based scholarship will defeat myth, but his view seems overly optimistic. It is far easier to see the terrible means and costs of this war, than the ideals and interests which motivated it. Conversely, though a botched Union attack in 1864 has figured in a recent popular book and two films, (The Crater,The Last Samurai, and Cold Mountain), this image of the American Civil War is balanced easily by others connoting heroism and meaning; so too, the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan. For the British experience of the Great War, as with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, when history conflicts with myth, the myth will be printed. Little will change until people cease to remember the First World War—in which case, success may matter little more than it did at Passchendaele.