The Great War in Perspective
Henri Barbusse's novel Le Feu was given a rapturous reception when it was published in January 1916. It takes the form of a memoir written by a French poilu soldier, much of it in dialogue. It offered a moral condemnation of war as a radical evil, and in its first year sold 200,000 copies in French. It has been called by Jay Winter ‘the first in a long line of war novels which told the world about the war from the inside’. It expresses, he declares, a kind of moral witness which lives on after publication in the midst of war, because Barbusse was a ‘truth-teller, with a story to tell and re-tell’.
Barbusse had served as a stretcher-bearer on the Western Front for seventeen months, was cited twice for bravery, contracted a lung condition and was invalided out of the front line. One of the book's first French readers told Henri Barbusse in March 1917 that he had written ‘a masterpiece: it is perfectly observed … it is a document which will remain as a witness to this war, a war unique in the history of humanity’. The first English translation of the book, Under Fire, offering the story told by the peasants of the French squad in an Edwardian high diction that now seems dated, was reviewed with acclamation in the Manchester Guardian in November 1917.1 ‘I had long been wanting to buy it,’ Reggie Trench told Clare that month, ‘I saw it reviewed in some paper.’ He found a copy while on his short leave in Paris. He consumed it avidly, reading it in two days from cover to cover.
In two letters on 5 November, to his wife and to his mother, Reggie was full of the book he had found. He knew it was ‘considered wonderfully true to life’. Perhaps it exaggerated the conditions under which the French poilus lived, which seemed ‘very much worse than our own soldiers’, but ‘one can see the book is written by a master writer’. Under Fire was a quite ‘wonderful book’, he assured his mother; ‘it tells the truth about the war in all its beastliness, nothing kept back, the real thing in print’. But this was not a book for any single woman to read. ‘It is dreadful in places and you will not read it my love as I would not like you to do so please,’ he warned Clare.
This stern patriarchal reaction to the possibility that his wife might read Under Fire, startlingly reveals Reggie's masculine as well as his chivalrous nature. Under Fire was to be a novel whose echoes were heard throughout the inter-war years and beyond. Penguin published a new translation in 2003. That Reggie forbade his wife to read it is a reminder that it comes from an altogether different world, one in which masculinity was a performance, which every man knew he must attempt and in which he realised he could not afford to fail. Reggie's impulsive reaction, his bid to shield Clare from the real world he understood, reminds us of how the soldiers I have written about in this book gave their utmost to the trial of their manhood, which they saw as the very essence of their patriotic duty. Never has the upper lip been so stiff as in this husband's command to his wife in November 1917.
In his account to Isabel, Reggie picked out one particular incident. It seemed to him to sum up the struggle in which he was engaged and the cause for which he would shortly give his life. ‘There is a fine story in it,’ he narrated, ‘of an aviator who before a great battle flew over the lines and saw men formed up in the front Boche trench and the front French trench … flying lower he saw that in each trench there was a church service going on. Flying lower still he heard the words at the same moment from each side “God be with us”.’ Reggie felt this scene was somewhat implausible, since it was normally too dangerous to collect many men together in that way. ‘But still,’ he reflected, ‘in parts of the line it might be done.’ ‘Anyhow,’ he concluded, ‘it shows clearly the spirit that is to be found in both nations each thinking it is striving for the right. What can be the end of it? That is the cry of the book.’2 All the patriotic enthusiasm with which, since those August days in 1914, he had taken up arms came flooding into Reggie's mind as he told his mother about the book he had been reading. And never far from the front of his mind, in that brief stretch of Paris relaxation, must have been that precept Dulce et decorum est …
Only a tiny minority of those who fought felt moved to seek publishers for their memoirs. These were often constructed from the diaries or piles of letters kept by the veterans. Moreover the spate of memoirs took time in coming. Then it was largely officers, with more access to publication than Tommies, who spoke to the world. Temporary soldiers needed some years after 1918 to assimilate their experience, to recover physically, to establish themselves in civilian life. Many of them, after all, had been incredibly young in 1914. Adulthood thrust upon them by trench warfare had hit them like a blunderbuss. They may often have felt, as Graham Greenwell and Charles Carrington certainly did, that they had been misunderstood, that people had no grasp of what they personally had endured. This was one motive for setting the personal record straight.
When memoirs did flow, between 1927 and 1938, they proved the rich variety of trench experience and of the interpretation and meaning men drew from this experience. For the difference between these works and the editions of letters used in this book is that memoirs were constructed accounts of going to war, which by the act of selection and emphasis were bound to convey an argument. Authors needed a strong egoistic streak to make a success of establishing their own significance in a junior officer role. Some of course wanted to make some money from their personal stories, others to protest and explain how the war had induced in them a pacifist stance.3
There were men who wrote to escape the overwhelming spell exerted on them by their war experience. Robert Graves was polemical in saying goodbye to ‘all that’.4 The problem of their dual identity as civilians and soldiers came back to haunt two men in particular. Charles Carrington and Guy Chapman each published a second memoir, in 1965 and 1975 respectively. Unable to escape a kind of enthralment to both their lost and their surviving colleagues, writing helped them to keep reliving the war. They recollected their past obsessively, in terms of what they believed they could never really replace, once they were back in Blighty.5
Carrington never forgot the special bond of comradeship he had enjoyed.6 In fact, he became increasingly obsessed with it, recalling his war years when in the company of other ex-soldiers as ‘their own special world and theirs alone’. Brian Bond has written that for Carrington the trenches became ‘a sort of mental internment camp or a soldiers’ home’. His reflective and elegantly written second memoir, Soldier from the Wars Returning, established a distinction that was clear to him between winning the war and the general disappointment with its political legacy. It was a distinction, he believed, that has often not been understood.7
Chapman felt the need to write soon after his long service with the 13th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers ended in 1918. It had been an overwhelming emotional experience. Once he began, he was inspired and his story told itself. The first pages of his book A Passionate Prodigality, completed in 1930, were extraordinarily candid. ‘For a long time,’ he stated, ‘I used to think of myself as part of a battalion and not as an individual. During all that time the war, the forms and colours of that experience, possessed a part of my senses. My life was involved with the lives of other men, a few living, some dead.’ Fear was at the start his dominant emotion: ‘I was loath to go … I was not eager or resigned to self-sacrifice and my heart gave back no answering throb to the thought of England. In fact I was very much afraid and … anxious lest I should show it.’
Twenty-five in 1914, Chapman trained at Berkhamsted and the Staff College. He was in the thick of the Somme and Third Ypres. By November 1917 his battalion was in shreds: even in the final advance of August 1918 its casualty figures were high. He was A Kind of Survivor, the title of his second memoir, which was published posthumously in 1975. Chapman admired and revered the senior officers and fellow subalterns he worked with. Senior NCOs in his narrative were like mythical heroes. Such men were ‘the salt of the earth, the backbone of the human race, men to whom duty is an inalienable part of their nature’. Late in life, he could read a platoon roll and conjure up faces, habits, nicknames and the men's aitch-less way of speaking. He believed passionately into old age that it was these ordinary soldiers who had won the war.
Few have written of the compelling fascination of war as Guy Chapman did in A Passionate Prodigality:
once you have lain in her arms you can admit no other mistress. You may loathe, you may execrate, but you cannot deny her … no wine gives fiercer intoxication, no drug more vivid exaltation … even those who hate her most are prisoners to her spell. They rise from her embraces, pillaged, soiled, it may be ashamed, but they are still hers.
His widow, the novelist Storm Jameson, testified to Chapman's total absorption in the identity he wrought for himself in France in 1915–1918. She had to live with it. ‘Nothing before or after that war gave him as keen a sensual and spiritual satisfaction,’ she wrote. Over the war years and the years of peace that followed, in losing the companions of the trenches, she declared, he lost ‘an integral part of himself’.8
It was possible to live with the Great War for as long as sixty years and then write about it with an intensity of feeling, freshness and vividness that can astonish the modern reader. Patrick Campbell achieved this in his two books The Ebb and Flow of Battle (1977) and In the Cannon's Mouth (1979). He was able to trace the roots of his patriotism to his love of the English countryside just as convincingly as Siegfried Sassoon or Rupert Brooke had done in 1914.9 A passage in which he describes serving behind the lines at Ypres, shortly before the Passchendaele offensive was launched in October 1917, is paradigmatic. His servant, Campbell remembered, put his letters on the table at breakfast after a night's raiding party. His fourteen-year-old sister described in one of them bicycling out of Oxford to the village of Islip. ‘I was back in England as I read,’ he recalled, ‘I could smell the reeds at the side of the river and see forget-me-nots and purple loosestrife on the banks.’
We have seen how disorientating it was for Campbell when he first went on leave in September 1917. Returning to his battalion was confusing too: ‘I did not say I was glad to be back, I did not know whether I was. But at any rate it was a relief to be only one person again, just a part of the British Expeditionary Force, no longer a mixture of two quite different people.’ He could still in the 1970s remember distinctly his feelings during a snowball fight between officers and servants at New Year's Eve in 1917. ‘For as long as the war lasted,’ Campbell knew, ‘this was where I belonged. At first I had just been an individual, now I was part of the battery, the battery was part of the Brigade and the Brigade was part of the B.E.F. All my friends were in France and all the men in France were my friends.’10
Patrick Campbell was writing on the edge of that period, in the final two decades of the twentieth century and the first years of this new century, when the Great War was becoming reduced to a single set of easily communicated myths. These were the years when the last survivors dominated the public scene. They were naturally proud of being the survivors of so momentous an historical event, but they could not really remember very much. So the dominant mythology easily affected what they spoke of in public, as they sought to fit themselves into the way the war was being talked about by those around them. These veterans were not straightforward truth tellers. It would give them no respect to pretend that they were.
The problem of the reliability of the testimony of ageing veterans had become apparent as early as the 1960s when the BBC Television series The Great War brought veterans into the foreground. In 1964, just over eight million people watched each episode of the twenty-six-part series which Michael Redgrave narrated in mellifluous but mournful style. The taped interviews collected were preserved in the Imperial War Museum's sound archive. They were used by Max Arthur in his 2002 book Forgotten Voices of the Great War. Yet these are not so much forgotten voices as the voices of men managed by their interviewers, at a particular time fifty years after the war had ended. They tell us about the concerns of these interviewers in the 1960s but their words hardly provide material useful to historians seeking to reach a balanced view of the war as a whole. There is much about mud and horror. A surprisingly high number of veterans recalled executions. The veterans were speaking to a script dominated by myths which were, by the 1960s, fully established. They appeared to have become the permanent story. At the same time, these veterans played a crucial role in perpetuating and strengthening these same myths.
It was the end of this decade, with the availability of cheap portable audio-tape recorders, which saw the development of an oral history movement bent on capturing the participation of ordinary people in great events. This chimed neatly with the growth of interest in individual experience of the past. From the 1970s onwards there were pioneers in research with veterans who did very thorough and worthwhile work, confronting the methodological problems inherent in historical study of this kind. But they may not all, it can be suggested, have thought enough about the impact of an interviewer's questions, attitudes and responses in putting together the material they gathered.11
Martin Middlebrook meticulously researched the battles he worked upon and made notes with his witnesses, instead of using a tape recorder. Middlebrook was always aware of the range in the veterans’ attitudes to what they had been through. Both his books, The First Day on the Somme and The Kaiser's Battle, describing 21 March 1918, were accurate, well written, analytical accounts which conveyed what battle had been like for those who could remember something about being there. Yet it is no coincidence that Middlebrook selected days of disaster for these studies, for he was driven by the wish to illustrate patriotism, courage and self-sacrifice. He did not question the now standard myths of mud, blood and incompetent leadership.
Lyn Macdonald was a BBC reporter and producer who took a group of veterans to the battlefields in 1972. Between 1978 and 1998 she produced a remarkable series of books which were essentially compilations of veteran testimonies set in a narrative framework.12 She identified with the veterans, arguing that her aim was always ‘to stand in their boots, to see things through their eyes, to try to understand and above all not to be judgmental’. Occasionally, Macdonald was caught out by a piece of skilful fabrication.13 But her achievement in finding so many veterans willing to talk and in stimulating popular interest in the Western Front was extraordinary. She took understanding of the Great War to a much deeper level than that achieved by the BBC in the 1960s. Between 1972 and 1998 she probably got to know more veterans better than anyone else in the field. It is interesting that, in her last book, Macdonald noted they had never spoken with her of ‘horror’, which was she said too ‘glib an appraisal’, though many had recounted experiences that were indeed horrific.14
Interpretation of the Great War has gone through many phases since 1918. I have sought to add another layer to it in this book by a precise focus on a particular kind of source material. I have, by and large, observed a self-denying ordinance about drawing upon remembered stories of life at the Front which were written down after 1918. When I have introduced material from memoirs it has been to support and fill out arguments that are based upon pieces of authentic first-hand reporting in letters to relatives. My interest is in what it felt like to be there and, in many cases, to grow up there, told in accounts written under the stress of trench service and in the immediate aftermath of battle. My stories of living and dying, of shellfire in the front line and football and concerts behind it, have sought to capture the struggle as a few men lived it. I see telling these personal stories as a contribution to the long and continuing historical project of coming to terms with four of the most momentous years in our national history.