Writing the Great War: Sir James Edmonds and the Official Histories, 1915-1948 (review)

The Great War casts an enduring shadow over British society and culture: seventy years after his death, a London daily demanded that the statue of Sir Douglas Haig in Whitehall be torn down because it presented an affront to the memory of Britain's war dead. The war remains a lively subject of publication and debate, as the success of Gary Sheffield's recent re-revisionist account, Forgotten Victory, demonstrates. The controversies are not new, but date from the publication of the official history of the war produced between 1922 and 1948 under the editorship of Brigadier Sir James Edmonds.

Official history is a much-misunderstood genre that excites scepticism and suspicion through concern over its official provenance, and Edmonds's history—or rather, the reception accorded it—explains subsequent attitudes. For all the criticism that official history attracts, the fact remains that very little work has been done on it as a form of historical writing. Not the least of Andrew Green's achievements in this book is to lay before the reader a clear and detailed analysis of Edmonds's working methods, assumptions, and views on the nature of his task. He locates the history in the tradition of general staff histories that emerged in the nineteenth century, but shows that Edmonds clearly recognised that this approach was insufficient to meet the expectations of a wider reading public. Critics of his work have charged that he presented an uncritical and defensive narrative designed to deflect criticism from senior officers, and from Haig in particular. Green shows, to the contrary, that Edmonds's work contains real and sustained criticism of the high command, and of Haig, but expressed without resort to ad hominem attacks. Edmonds avoided the strident tone of contemporaries like Liddell Hart or Lloyd George, and his history retains its value for students of the war.

Green is careful not to claim too much for his subject, and especially in recounting the stormy relationship between Edmonds and the author of the two volumes dealing with Gallipoli, Aspinall-Oglander, reveals some of his shortcomings and faults. Nor is his account a simple whitewash of the series. Rather, Green asks to us to understand what Edmonds set out to do, what difficulties he faced, and what he accomplished before evaluating the final work. The carefully argued and fully documented result requires us to think again about Edmonds and his history, and by extension to rethink much of the more recent scholarship on the Great War that takes denigration of Edmonds's official history as its starting point.