that the destruction of railways in the Hejaz made the teacups rattle in Berlin, but no matter. What had really brought Germany down, he argued, was naval blockade and internal collapse. I must not trivialise Liddell Hart, for he remains a commentator of rare insight, was helpful to students and, even late in life, was capable of surprising generosity to Haig. But he is the archpriest of the argument that there must have been a better way: his liturgy, after all these years, still has the power to inspire.
The historical debate – not really the right word, for there was never much debate about it – was rejuvenated in the 1960s. Events such as the Cuban missile crisis, the Aldermaston marches, the Vietnam War and the burgeoning of an independent youth culture encouraged an iconoclasm, in which the generals of the First World War received unprecedented critical attention. Despite the reduction in the release period of public records from fifty to thirty years, meaning that most documents on the war became available in 1968, there was no immediate rush to reinterpret the war based on this evidence. Indeed, perhaps the most influential book ever written on the war, A. J. P. Taylor’s The First World War: An Illustrated History, was little more than a triumphant flambéeing (with the blowtorch lit by Liddell Hart) of the leftovers of the historiography of the 1930s.
On re-reading Taylor’s book I am stunned by its brilliant, incisive juxtaposition of bons mots, real insights and excruciating errors. ‘Failure [at Third Ypres in 1917] was obvious by the end of the first day to everyone except Haig and his immediate circle,’ it declares. Obvious, that is, to everyone except the German high command, which grew gloomier as the battle wore on, and thousands of British participants, whose letters and diaries often testify to a confidence not shared by those writing in the foreknowledge of failure. Even the Australian Official History speaks approvingly of 2nd Army’s attacks up the Menin Road in September, almost two months after everyone was meant to have lost confidence in the battle.
Leon Wolf’s In Flanders Fields, whose publication actually predated that of A. J. P. Taylor’s book, was in many respects a more reliable work. A study of the 1917 campaign around Ypres, it is well written, and makes good use of memoirs and interwar histories. But it too confirmed the primacy of a school of historiography which seemed more interested in expounding a priori assumptions than looking at the facts. It contains no real sense of the campaign’s strategic purpose, nor is there any feel at all for the British army’s vast improvements in tactical method. And lastly, Alan Clark’s The Donkeys, for all its verve and amusing narrative, added a streak of pure deception to writings on the First World War. Its title is based on the ‘Lions led by Donkeys’ conversation that apparently took place between Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Sadly for historical accuracy, there is no evidence whatever for this: none. Not a jot or scintilla. The real problem is that such histories have sold well and continue to do so. They reinforce historical myth by delivering to the reader exactly what they expect to read.
But help is at hand. The scrabble of feet on duckboards announces the arrival of supports. First there was John Terraine’s Douglas Haig: The Educated Soldier, published in 1963, and really a brave and remarkably impartial piece for its day. Terraine held his ground alone for some time, assailed by pastiches like Oh What a Lovely War, but by the mid-1970s revisionism with some real scholarly weight behind it crashed into the argument. Historians such as Tim Travers, Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson worked with the newly-released official documents to look at the British high command, Peter Simpkins examined the New Armies, Paddy Griffith charted the improvement of British tactics, and John Bourne, of the admirable Centre for First World War Studies at Birmingham University, initiated a mass of work on the background of British generals. It is a cruel reflection on book-buying that some of the most important work was not the most widely read: J. G. Fuller’s Troop Morale and Popular Culture and Gary Sheffield’s Leadership in the Trenches have never enjoyed quite the sales of Alan Clark’s The Donkeys.
I do not applaud the appearance of these works just because some of them are revisionist – as it happens I find myself in the uncomfortable No Man’s Land of historiography, collecting salvoes from both extremes – but because they are serious and scholarly in a way that an awful lot of earlier work simply was not. The war had already attracted too many historians who were determined to bend its events to fit their own analytical framework, jamming their pastry-cutters onto the evidence, and either discarding anything that lay outside their intriguing shape, or rolling it extra thin if there was not quite enough. Last year’s publication of the first volume of Hew Strachan’s magisterial First World War does, in a way, mark a turning point in the whole process: here we have scholarship blended with emotion, and a successful attempt to look at the conflict as a world war, not just as the Western Front with attached sideshows.
However, there is still a trend for many of the war’s historians to be overly preoccupied with the big political, strategic and operational issues. Was the war avoidable? Had Britain any other course of action in 1914? Were British generals actually geniuses rather than donkeys? Was the Treaty of Versailles too hard or too soft? How well understood was the post-Somme doctrine for divisions in the attack? In the process they often lose sight of the men who actually fought the war. True, combatants get anthologised, and we have lots of examples – some of them actually very good – of the historian as copytypist. And there is an ever-widening use of oral history, so that the words of this fast-disappearing generation can reach out to help us understand what this war was really like.
Or can they? I make this point as gently as I can, for it is no mere conventional politeness to say how much I admire the men who fought on the Western Front. But the interviewing of veterans in the 1970s and beyond concentrated, as it had to, on those who had survived. Like accounts written long after the events they describe, interviews with survivors inevitably reflect the past through the prism of the present. Although A. J. P. Taylor was unduly harsh to write them off as ‘old men drooling over their lost youth’, they do require at least some degree of caution. Sometimes survivors played their roles too well: they became Veterans, General Issue, neatly packed with what we wanted to hear, exploding at the touch of a tape-recorder button or the snap of a TV documentarist’s clapper-board. Up to my neck in muck and bullets; rats as big as footballs; the sergeant major was a right bastard; all my mates were killed. And sometimes, just sometimes, they tell us this because they have heard it themselves.
So we should be extra cautious about how we use and interpret oral history and other non-contemporary evidence. It is often far too late-recorded oral history: occasionally forgotten voices tell us about imaginary incidents. Much better to go back to what people thought at the time. And in the case of the First World War there is really no excuse for not doing so. Both the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum and the Liddle Collection in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds are bursting with letters, diaries and an assortment of ephemera. And when I say bursting, I mean just that: new material is arriving faster than a single diligent historian can keep up with. However gloomy I get about being an historian, I am always excited by opening one of those big brown archive boxes, and tipping out letters on YMCA notepaper from the infantry base depots at Etaples, a leather-bound Jermyn Street diary, or a field message book with its flimsy, carboned paper and waterproofed cover. There is something unutterably poignant about a diary entry written by somebody who didn’t know whether he would be alive to eat his supper that day. I am not suggesting that we ought not to read Sassoon and Graves, Campbell and Carrington, all published after the war, but the closer we get to events the better our chance of finding out how people really felt.
The army of 1918, warts and all, represented the greatest collective endeavour of the whole of British history: over 4 million men went to France and nearly three quarters of a million stayed there forever. As the war went on they drifted apart from the land that had raised them, and lived in a world with its own rules, values, beliefs and language. They celebrated the armistice in silence, not with wild rejoicing. And then they went back to pick up their lives. For most of them the war was not, pace Paul Fussell, a break, a sundering. It was, as Private David Jones termed it, in parenthesis, bracketed into a busy life.6
