My generation did not fight in the Second World War. To many of us the First is as remote as the Crimean, its causes and its personnel obscure and disreputable.
ALAN CLARK, The Donkeys (1961)
I was born in that war . . . the story of us—the victims, the people, the unprivileged—has not been told before . . . we know about the sacrifices of the people who supported the system . . . But what about our fathers, who went as their dupes?
JOAN LITTLEWOOD ON Oh What a Lovely War (1963)1
Anniversaries matter. In private life, of course—especially those birthdays with a zero at the end—but also in the lives of nations. The tenth anniversary of the Armistice in 1928 prompted numerous reflections on the meaning of the war, many of them nuanced and sometimes overtly skeptical. The next big wave of anniversaries, a quarter century on, was overshadowed by an even greater conflict, which started just one month after the twenty-fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War and cast the meaning of 1914–18 in a totally new light. By the 1960s, however, the Second World War was receding into the past, with national narratives taking on a settled form. Most of the former belligerent countries used the fiftieth anniversary of the Great War, between 1964 and 1968, to take a long look at that half-forgotten conflict, viewing it in the light of contemporary concerns but also with keen awareness that the generation of 1914 was passing on and that the Great War was sliding from “memory” into “history.”
In recent years the concept of cultural memory has become central to historical writing; on a popular level the so-called memory boom has fed a huge and profitable heritage industry. The pioneer in this field was the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s: he argued that personal memories are not the product of solitary reflection but are formed by talk and action within the groups to which we belong—family, workplace, country, and so on. To convey this point he coined the term “collective memory.” Although Halbwachs insisted that it was “individuals as group members who remember,” the term “memory” is problematic when transposed from the individual to culture and society.2 “Collective memory” implied some kind of metaphysical group-mind, and this led other scholars to suggest terms such as “collected memories” or even “collective remembrance” in order to retain a sense of personal agency without abandoning Halbwachs’s emphasis on social context .3 “Remembrance” is the word I shall generally use in this book. A more recent influence on the field is the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, who distinguished between “communicative” and “cultural” forms of social remembrance. The former is transmitted personally through conversation and other “everyday” modes of direct communication, whereas cultural remembrance is conveyed through writings, monuments, and cultural artifacts, thereby outlasting the shift of generations.4
Why does this memory theory matter? First, because the 1960s marked a transitional moment in the remembrance of the Great War from communicative to cultural memory. The participants were beginning to die off, and this prompted vigorous efforts to “collect” their memories before it was too late—hence the vogue for oral and family history. This same awareness of being on the generational cusp also stimulated efforts at cultural remembrance, not just in print but, more influentially, through the newer media of film and television. But this memorialization of the Great War was not simply an act of “memory,” of capturing the past before it was lost forever. As Halbwachs and his successors insisted, the effort involved an act of social construction, shaped by the circumstances, perceptions, and politics of the present. That act of construction varied markedly from country to country, reflecting not just domestic changes in society and culture but also new patterns of international relations, including the escalating nuclear arms race and the efflorescence of the European Community. In Britain this social reconstruction of the Great War around its fiftieth anniversary served to drive 1914–18 firmly into the trenches and into poetry. Across the Irish Sea the 1966 commemorations of 1916—the year of the Easter Rising and the first day of the Somme—helped spark civil strife in Northern Ireland that would last thirty years. And in America, 1914–18 was revisited via the country’s engagement with the global Cold War.
In October 1962 humanity seemed to teeter on the brink of World War III. As the White House and the Kremlin squared off over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, there was a chilling sense that, if this war did break out, it would indeed be the war to end wars. John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev had stumbled ineptly into the missile crisis, but the American president desperately wanted to avoid further miscalculations and end the face-off peacefully. He was struck by a book published that spring by the American journalist and popular historian Barbara Tuchman, entitled The Guns of August. As an account of July and August 1914, Tuchman’s book left much to be desired: the assassination in Sarajevo and the Habsburg ultimatum to Serbia were written off in one page as evidence of “the bellicose frivolity of senile empires.” She focused overwhelmingly on western Europe, on the pretext that “the inexhaustible problem of the Balkans divides itself naturally from the rest of the war” and therefore could be ignored. Tuchman began with a caricature of the world before 1914 as an age of innocence, depicting the funeral of King Edward VII in London in May 1910 as a last reunion of the crowned heads of Europe: “the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.” Most of her book was devoted to the opening few weeks of battles in France and Belgium, with a brief afterword insisting that “the deadlock, fixed by the failures of the first month, determined the future course of the war, the terms of the peace, the shape of the inter-war period and the conditions of the Second Round.” By entangling “the nations of both hemispheres in a pattern of world conflict,” Tuchman declared, the whole globe was caught in a trap “from which there was, and has been, no exit.”5
Tuchman’s afterword reads like an afterthought, added to satisfy a publisher’s demand for “relevance.” The precise causal chain that took her breathlessly from 1914 to 1962, from Great War to Cold War, is obscure—to put it mildly. But President Kennedy was deeply affected by the book. In an era when the Pentagon was awash with spurious business-speak rationality, he seems to have been genuinely shocked by the concatenation of accident, misunderstanding, ego, and plain stupidity in 1914 as national leaders “somehow seemed to tumble into war” rather than embarking on it as a considered act of policy. Musing about The Guns of August during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president told his brother: “The great danger and risk in all this is a miscalculation—a mistake in judgment.” JFK instructed that all US officers should read the book and copies were duly placed in the dayroom of every military base around the world.6
Kennedy’s warnings about miscalculation now seem ironic in view of the trajectory of American foreign policy during the 1960s. In 1963 he was clearly fearful of generals once again commandeering policy as he considered his options in South Vietnam, pressed by Pentagon analysts to introduce US combat troops in order to resist communist subversion. “They say it’s necessary in order to restore confidence and maintain morale,” he told an aide wryly. But “the troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.” So he sent in more “military advisers” to take over direction of South Vietnam’s war against the guerrillas, without committing combat troops. By the time of his assassination in November 1963 there were 16,000 such advisers in South Vietnam: despite his intentions Kennedy had staked out a position in Indochina that would make it harder for his successor Lyndon Johnson to avoid escalation as the crisis deepened.7 In 1965, justifying his decision to commit US combat troops, LBJ invoked not the “lessons” of miscalculation from the First World War but those of appeasement before the Second. “If we are driven from the field in Viet-Nam, then no nation can ever again have the same confidence in American promises, or in American protection,” he declared in July 1965. “Nor would surrender in Viet-Nam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression. The battle would be renewed in one country and then another country, bringing with it perhaps even larger and crueler conflict, as we have learned from the lessons of history.”8
American foreign policy in the 1960s was dominated by Cuba, a communist outpost only ninety miles from Florida, and the deepening war in Vietnam, which, between 1964 and 1973, would cost 47,000 combat deaths. This was fewer than the 53,000 combat losses during America’s much shorter participation in the Great War in 1917–18, but Vietnam was the first war that Americans could watch nightly on TV in their own living rooms.9 Cuba and Vietnam were seen as part of the global struggle against communism and this helped push public attention back to 1917 and the primal Bolshevik revolution. Those critical of the trajectory of US Cold War diplomacy were inspired by The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) by the Wisconsin historian William Appleman Williams. A native of the small-town Midwest who had served in the US Navy at the end of the Second World War, Bill Williams took up earlier criticisms by progressive historians in the 1920s, insisting that American foreign policy had been intended not just to promote “freedom” and “self-determination” abroad but also to foster an informal American “empire” based on free trade, which would allow the innate power of the American economy to dominate global markets. At the center of his indictment was Woodrow Wilson—understood as a “capitalist” as much as a “Calvinist.” Equally central was 1917, because Williams saw the Cold War as rooted not in American fears of Soviet military power (which was demonstrably inferior to that of the United States until at least the late 1950s) but in what he called a “myopic and self-defeating preoccupation” with communist revolution and its threat to the established order, going back to the Red Scare of 1919. Williams’s book, reissued in expanded form in 1962, became a set-text for the so-called New Left historians of the 1960s, its arguments widely disseminated on campuses across the country.10
Other historians picked up the refrain. The paperback edition of Arno Mayer’s study of The Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (1959) appeared in 1964 under the catchier title Wilson vs. Lenin. Here, it seemed, were the roots of the Cold War. In Woodrow Wilson and World Politics (1968) N. Gordon Levin constructed his account of 1917–19 not as the story of a tragically unfulfilled internationalism—the theme of the Wilson revival in 1944—but around the conjunction of “America’s entrance into World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the two seminal events with whose endless consequences the foreign relations of the United States have since been largely concerned.” For Levin, Wilson was not a “liberal” but a “liberal-capitalist.” He argued that, although “losing the battle over the League of Nations,” the president “eventually triumphed in the more long-term struggle over the ultimate definition of the nature of twentieth-century American foreign policy,” establishing its “main drift toward an American liberal globalism, hostile both to traditional imperialism and to revolutionary-socialism.” Such interpretations of Wilson were much disputed but they set the parameters for Cold War debate about the meaning of America’s First World War.11
The ’60s also stimulated debate in West Germany about 1914–18, though in very different ways. After 1945, Germans faced the most demanding task of coming to terms with their past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung). Although the enormity of the Holocaust was still emerging in the 1940s, there was no denying the culpability of Nazi Germany for waging war and perpetrating atrocities on a gargantuan scale. In the east the German Democratic Republic (GDR), led by communists who had always opposed Nazism, proclaimed itself as a new and authentically anti-fascist state. It was the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the west whose leaders engaged in a massive and contorted struggle with the Nazi past. The venerable chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, had been an interwar opponent of the Nazis, but much of the FRG’s elite in postwar politics and business were complicit in some measure with Hitler’s regime. The official line was one of “public penance” but also “strictly limited liability”—acknowledging the appalling crimes of 1933–45 but blaming them on a small criminal clique while absolving the “desk perpetrators” (Schreibtischtäter) in the bureaucracy and the armed forces, who supposedly had simply been obeying orders. Adenauer’s 1951 statement of reconciliation and restitution with Israel and world Jewry made this point clearly: “The vast majority of the German people rejected the crimes which were committed against the Jews and did not participate in them,” the chancellor asserted. “But in the name of the German people unspeakable crimes were committed, which impose on us the duty of moral and material compensation.” In effect, Adenauer was saying, stuff happened, regrettably in Germany’s name, but decent Germans would make amends. And so the Nazi era was portrayed as an exception to the course of German history. To quote the ponderous formulation of the historian Friedrich Meinecke: “Singular therefore was the personality and singular the constellation of circumstances under which alone the party could succeed in coming to power and in compelling the German people for a limited period to follow a false path.”12
The idea of the Nazi era as a temporary aberration—a glitch in the works (Betriebsunfall)—also helped to preserve intact through the 1950s remembrance of 1914–18 as essentially a good war, waged for national defense.13 This position, fundamental to German self-esteem, was eventually undermined in the 1960s by Fritz Fischer, a professor at Hamburg, in his book Griff nach der Weltmacht (1961) about Germany’s grab for world power in 1914. Fischer focused on domestic pressure groups and politicians close to the policymaking elite who, he argued, had imperialist designs on eastern Europe and colonial Africa for which they were ready to risk war. Apart from rewriting 1914, he saw his book more broadly as “a contribution to the problem of continuity in German history from the First to the Second World War.” Fischer’s nine-hundred-page tome was a complex work, based on masses of new documentation from the Kaiserreich era, much of it recently returned by the Soviets to East Germany and available in Potsdam, but it was this comment about continuity that outraged the German establishment. Gerhard Ritter, dean of German historians, led the charge—attacking Fischer for manipulating evidence in order to advance “a renewal of the war guilt clause of Versailles.”14 Ritter, born in 1888 and so twenty years Fischer’s senior, was a Great War veteran, a National Conservative, and a practitioner of traditional politico-military history, whereas Fischer and acolytes such as Imanuel Geiss and Hans-Ulrich Wehler were leftists who promoted social and economic history. Ritter versus Fischer therefore represented a clash between generations, classes, and historical styles that, most unusually for an academic debate, resonated in the mass media through the pages of Die Zeit and Der Spiegel. In the process both sides became ever more extreme, with Ritter persuading the German government to block travel funds for Fischer’s lecture tour of the United States and Fischer eventually stating baldly in Krieg der Illusionen (1969) that in 1914 German leaders not merely risked a great war but wanted it and actively prepared for it.
What became known as the “Fischer Thesis” suggested that Hitlerite expansionism was no singular aberration but part of the dynamic of German history since at least Bismarck and that it was also the responsibility of the whole people rather than just a criminal few. Here was a direct assault on the basic fictions of Adenauer’s Germany and it coincided with new revelations of war crimes provided by the televised trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 and by a series of trials of lower-level Nazi functionaries in Frankfurt in 1963–65. Together these helped make Auschwitz into the global synonym for Nazi genocide. The Fischer debate also reflected the leftward lurch of West Germany during the decade, as radical students protested against the “silent generation” of their parents and the country eventually elected a Social Democrat–led government in 1969.
In France, as well, the two world wars were central to public debate during the 1960s, but in different ways from West Germany. The French had ended up on the winning side in 1945 but the country’s humiliating defeat in 1940 and the complicity of the Vichy regime with the Third Reich posed huge moral problems. When Churchill’s memoirs appeared in French, his Paris publishers faithfully translated all the titles of his six volumes except for one: volume II about 1940, entitled Their Finest Hour, became L’Heure Tragique. With nearly 850,000 anciens combattants of 1914–18 still alive in 1948, the French found it easier and more comfortable in the 1950s to commemorate la grande guerre rather than les années sombres—the dark years of 1940–44.15 Yet the two wars were painfully entangled, not least in the person of Marshal Philippe Pétain—heroic defender of Verdun in 1916, acclaimed savior of France in 1940 from total German occupation but vilified by the end of the war as leader of the Vichy government. In 1945, Pétain was tried and sentenced to death: this was commuted to life imprisonment and he died in exile in 1951, still a hugely controversial figure.
It was Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French in London during the war and president of the new Fifth Republic from 1958 to 1969, who constructed the dominant French narrative of 1939–45. In his war memoirs written during the 1950s and in his actions as head of state, de Gaulle presented a distinctive version of history with himself as the embodiment of the national will and as the defender of France against not only the German foe but also British and American allies who sought to “vassalize” the country. His monopolistic claims were contested strenuously by the communists, who had played a major role in the Resistance movement within France and who regularly won a fifth or more of the vote in postwar elections. But in 1964 de Gaulle arranged for the remains of Jean Moulin, his emissary to the Resistance who had been tortured to death by the Nazis, to be interred in the Panthéon in Paris—mausoleum for France’s grands hommes. The speech given there by culture minister André Malraux summed up the Gaullian version of the war: “The Resistance equals de Gaulle; de Gaulle equals France; hence the Resistance equals France.”16
During the 1960s de Gaulle’s rendition of history managed to paper over the ugly cracks. First, by highlighting the Resistance it sought to obscure the extent to which French people had collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. Rather like the Adenauer-era treatment of Nazism as an aberration from German history, the Vichy regime was marginalized in de Gaulle’s France as the actions of a misguided few. Second, by glossing over 1940, the Gaullian narrative linked Resistance and Liberation with the heroic deeds of 1914–18. Seeking to take ideology out of the war (Vichy had espoused a version of fascism, so the theme of an anti-fascist war would have been problematic) de Gaulle depicted the struggle against Hitler as part of a thirty years’ war dating back to 1914. As early as 1941 he insisted “the world has been at war for thirty years, for or against the universal domination of Germanism.”17
By the 1970s, however, what has been called “the glacier of official memory” in France began to break up.18 As in West Germany, student revolt posed a challenge to established authority in history as well as politics, because both the Gaullists and communists had based their legitimacy on the pedestal of wartime. And the film Le Chagrin et La Pitié (1969) contested most of the national myths about the war. This was a four-hour account of daily life in the town of Clermont-Ferrand under German occupation, an account in which de Gaulle was conspicuous by his absence. Built around extended interviews, the film suggested that many citizens collaborated or sat on the fence and also hinted at the extent of French anti-Semitism. Although shown across western Europe and America as The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophüls’s film was banned for years by French television on the grounds that it “destroys myths that the people of France still need.” It was eventually screened in a couple of Paris cinemas in 1971 and seen by some 600,000 people. Not until 1981 did French TV relent but long before that The Sorrow and the Pity—seen or heard-of—had become a cause célèbre in France, opening up the debate on Vichy’s complicity in the deportation of the Jews and underlining the extent to which the Second World War had been a civil war in France.19
And so, by the late 1960s, in West Germany both wars had become profoundly negative; in France, despite the Gaullian narrative, the dark shadows of the Second tended to obscure the continuing luster of the First. All very different from the situation in Britain, where the Second World War was seen as a heroic triumph. But France and West Germany found a way to dig themselves out of the entrenched narrative of two world wars—through a process that was denied to Britain, or more exactly the British denied to themselves. This was European integration.
As the French socialist and Resistance leader Christian Pineau observed, a couple of years in a Gestapo cell and Buchenwald concentration camp could inspire either a passion for revenge on Germany or a determination that there would be no more camps.20 Vengeance had been the fuel of the thirty years’ war—for France in 1914 the recovery of Alsace and Lorraine, lost in 1870, for Germany in the 1930s the annulment of the Diktat of Versailles and the achievement of “living space” in Europe. Although no formal peace conference was held after 1945 because of the Cold War, the Treaty of Rome that Pineau signed for France in 1957 was effectively a peace settlement for western Europe.
The idea of France and Germany as founder members of the European Economic Community (EEC) would have seemed totally incredible a decade before. In 1945, when de Gaulle headed France’s provisional government, French foreign policy seemed like a repeat of 1919. “Consider this,” the general declared at a press conference: “that we are neighbours of Germany, that we have been invaded three times by Germany in a single lifetime, and you will conclude that we want no more of the Reich.” His government blocked the creation of any central German government and, as in the 1920s, tried to hive off the Ruhr and the Rhineland. Mindful of their “betrayal” after 1919, the French placed little faith in the “Anglo-Saxons”—“You are far away and your soldiers will not stay long in Europe,” de Gaulle told the US ambassador. He considered the British to be “worn out” so that France could expect “nothing from them in the way of facing the Russo-German combination.” In fact, de Gaulle talked ominously in 1945 about being once again “between two wars.”21
In the mid-1940s de Gaulle’s successors continued the policy of war by other means, seeking to keep Germany down, but as the decade neared its end, the international situation changed dramatically. The Marshall Plan of 1947 and the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949 showed that America would, this time, be a reliable ally for western Europe, while France was unable to stop America and Britain from rebuilding West German industry and creating a new government in Bonn. So French diplomats and policymakers reached back into the alternative history of the 1920s, to the ideas of technocrats such as Jacques Seydoux for Franco-German cooperation built around the synergy of German coal and French steel. In the 1920s such cooperation had been essentially private, through cartels of key manufacturers in the two countries; a quarter century later the approach was institutionalized at the governmental level. A key mover behind the scenes was the economic planner Jean Monnet, but the public face of the new policy was France’s foreign minister Robert Schuman—whose life perfectly embodies the tangled story of Franco-German relations in the era of the two world wars.
Born in 1886, Schuman grew up in Luxembourg but was educated at German universities and practiced law in Metz, in Lorraine, then under German control. When war broke out in 1914 he was conscripted into the German Army: only medical problems ensured a desk job and saved him from having to fight against the French. After 1918, when France recovered Alsace and Lorraine, Schuman became active in French politics and he also served in the French Resistance during the next war, but his earlier life in the ever-changing Franco-German borderlands highlighted for him the pointlessness of hardline nationalism. Equally formative in Schuman’s outlook was his Catholic background and membership of the postwar Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP), which for a few critical years around 1950 acted as cornerstone of French politics. The MRP was a Christian Democratic party: its leaders like Schuman and Georges Bidault had much in common with their Christian Democrat counterparts in Germany and Italy, Konrad Adenauer and Alcide De Gasperi. Adenauer, a Rhinelander, was keenly aware of the historically shifting frontiers of France and Germany, and of the blood that had been shed every time they moved. De Gasperi had started his political life in 1911 as a deputy in the Austrian parliament: in those days his homeland, the Tyrol, was part of the Hapsburg Empire. After the Great War, however, it was transferred to Italy and De Gasperi resumed his political career in Rome, opposing first Mussolini’s fascists and then the postwar communists. Schuman, Adenauer, and De Gasperi all shared a historic sense of Catholic Europe, of a Holy Roman Empire going back to Charlemagne. It was from this perspective that Schuman approached European integration. “If one does not want to fall back [retomber] into the old errors in dealing with the German problem,” he insisted, “there is only one solution and that is the European solution.” In other words, if you can’t beat them, join them: that was essentially Schuman’s message in May 1950 when he proposed a European Coal and Steel Community as “a first step in the federation of Europe.”22
Coal and steel were double-edged—essential for industrial growth but also for waging war. Surrendering national control over these key assets seemed imperative for prosperity and for peace. As the French Foreign Ministry put it, “We have to abandon a part of our sovereignty to a democratic European organisation which would render a new Franco-German conflict economically and politically impossible.”23 The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) came into operation in 1952 with six members: France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The latter three countries, which had already formed their own Benelux customs union in 1948, constituted the vanguard of western European integration—not surprisingly, given their geopolitical position, trapped, as it were, in the jaws of the Franco-German antagonism. Whenever those jaws closed in war, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands were gobbled up.
The onward march to the Treaty of Rome and the European Economic Community was slow and erratic. The essential deals were hammered out by France and Germany, with Adenauer insisting against his economics minister, Ludwig Erhard, that forging a new relationship with France was more important than the specific details. The French were therefore able to set their own terms, not least the protectionist bias of the new Common Market and preferential treatment for agriculture (an especially important sector in France). The terms would have lasting consequences for the EEC, but what mattered in 1957 was doing a deal at all. “The era of wars by West European people against one another has finally come to an end,” Adenauer proclaimed in delight. De Gaulle became president in May 1958, five months after the EEC had come into existence, and he had to accept it as a fait accompli. But he quickly forged a close rapport with the German chancellor—somewhat against expectations, since de Gaulle had spent half of the Great War in German prisoner-of-war camps while Adenauer’s first visit to Paris had been just before the German delegation signed the Treaty of Versailles. In a richly symbolic moment in July 1962 the two leaders received the Sacrament together at the High Altar in Reims Cathedral—sacred coronation place of French kings but also the site of one of Germany’s most notorious cultural “atrocities” of 1914. Later, at the Elysée Palace, de Gaulle spoke movingly about how the long rivalry between France and Germany had led only to a cycle of victories and defeats marked by countless graves. But now, he predicted, their two countries would finally be able to realize “the dream of unity” that had “haunted the souls of our Continent for twenty centuries” back through Charlemagne to Imperial Rome. The Franco-German treaty of 1963 featured grassroots cooperation, such as town-twinning, youth exchanges, and mutual language-learning to help promote less nationalistic attitudes among the next generation.24
And so, despite the difficulties both France and West Germany faced in coming to terms with the past, they were now clearly moving on. European integration promised a new and more hopeful future, transcending the animosities of two world wars. Across the Channel, British governments of the 1950s, both Labour and Conservative, were taken aback by the speed and intensity of European integration. They stood aloof from the ECSC and EEC, convinced that Britain’s economic interests lay in its global trading networks with the United States and the Commonwealth rather than a tight, protectionist continental bloc. Indeed there was an underlying doubt that the “Europeans” would really get their act together, especially given the history of the last half century. Once the Six was up and running, however, there was a real danger of Britain being marginalized. Aside from “the economic damage which we will suffer from the consolidation of the Six,” a Whitehall committee warned, “if we try to remain aloof from them . . . we shall run the risk of losing political influence and of ceasing to be able to exercise any claim to be a world Power.”25
Two considerations gave point to this warning. First, the British Empire was contracting suddenly and sharply. Seventeen British colonies gained their independence in 1960–64, compared with only three in the period 1948–60. Secondly, the United States enthusiastically backed the process of integration, welcoming this sign that the ever-feuding Europeans were finally burying the hatchet. Britain could not afford to remain outside Europe’s new magic circle if it wanted to retain credibility in Washington. Britain’s impotence during the Cuban Missile Crisis, despite being a nuclear power, added to the sense of marginality. When former US secretary of state Dean Acheson declared in December 1962 that “Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role,” he struck a very raw nerve in London. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan issued a lofty rebuke, claiming that Acheson had “fallen into an error which has been made by quite a lot of people in the course of the last four hundred years,” from Philip II of Spain and Napoleon to the kaiser and Hitler. But this missed the point: a heroic saga of past victories cut little ice in the New Europe and the postcolonial world.26
Acheson’s warning proved apt when, in 1963 and again in 1967, de Gaulle vetoed Britain’s application to join the EEC on the grounds that the country was not truly “European” and would act as a “Trojan horse” for American influence. The French president still smarted at his position of inferiority when exiled in Britain between 1940 and 1944. He had not forgotten Churchill’s warning on the eve of D-Day that the transatlantic alliance would always be Britain’s first principle of foreign policy: “Each time we must choose between Europe and the open sea, we shall always choose the open sea.” The dramatic events of 1940 had indeed proved a great divide between Britain and France and, more generally, Britain and the Continent. By the time de Gaulle’s successor, Georges Pompidou, relented and the British were finally able to join the EEC in 1973, the community had been in operation for a decade and a half. The original deal-making among the Six had set firm, requiring Britain to accept arrangements that did not really fit its economic interests.27
As the New Europe rose and the British Empire crumbled, Britain’s heroic narrative about the Second World War began to look less compelling. “Our Finest Hour” remained sacrosanct but doubts grew about what victory had really achieved. Churchill’s death in January 1965, almost twenty years after V-E Day, was taken by many to mark the end of “the postwar era”—so powerful had been his hold on national life and thought. On his ninetieth birthday, the year before, Churchill had received 300,000 cards; a similar number of people filed past his coffin as it lay for three days in Westminster Hall. The state funeral, modeled on those of Wellington and Gladstone but watched by 25 million Britons on television and by maybe half a million around the world, was superbly choreographed and movingly elegiac. Labour politician Richard Crossman called it “a day of orgiastic self-condolence on the end of our imperial destiny.” With Churchill’s death, observed the Economist, “an era, even the memory of an era, fades into the past. We participate today in a great recessional, and at a time to start afresh.” Most sharply John Grigg, in the Guardian, commented that Churchill had won “a delusive victory for Britain” in 1945 because the country’s power was shattered in the process. His death relieved the British of “a well-loved presence” but also of “a psychological burden.” Now, said Grigg, “we can take stock . . . face contemporary facts unblinkingly and shape our policies accordingly.”28
Whether 1960s Britain faced the future unblinkingly is debatable. But Churchill’s funeral, the passing of the “postwar” era, and the apparently endless Cold War all helped the British look back beyond 1939–45 to discover a new past—the Great War.
A taste of things to come was a book entitled The Donkeys (1961) by Alan Clark about the battle of Loos in 1915, during which Britain’s “old professional army” was destroyed. Clark, the son of art historian Kenneth Clark, was a maverick on the make who had no scruples about cutting corners. He ascribed his title to an exchange between General Ludendorff and his chief of staff Max Hoffmann (whose name Clark misspelled) which was sourced to Gen. Erich von Falkenhayn’s memoirs.
Ludendorff: The English soldiers fight like lions.
Hoffman [sic]: True. But don’t we know that they are lions led by donkeys.
Years later, however, Clark admitted to having made up the exchange—adapting for his own ends a phrase used in several earlier wars. His book was a sustained indictment of Britain’s generals, notably Sir John French (“a weak-willed man” of “very secondary mental calibre”) and Sir Douglas Haig (whose progress “owed more to influential connections than to natural ability”), for remorselessly driving brave men into “hopeless offensives.” Clark was mostly reworking criticisms from the 1930s, but these were unfamiliar to a new generation and made a considerable impact. Above all, Clark saw the value of a catchy title: thanks to him and despite the efforts of later military historians, the tag “lions led by donkeys” has become the conventional shorthand for the story of the British Army in the Great War.29
To understand quite why this happened we need to explore further the revisiting of Britain’s Great War during the 1960s. From the flood of anniversary offerings a play, a book, and a TV series left indelible impressions on British attitudes.
Oh What a Lovely War, a product of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, opened in East London in March 1963 but proved such a hit that it quickly moved to the West End. Deliberately untheatrical in style, it blended the techniques of Brecht and other continental modernists with the older British traditions of the music hall—drawing the audience into the action. This was workers’ theatre, a bottom-up, lower-class view of the war. As Littlewood put it, the stories of the politicians and commanders were well known but not those of “the victims, the people, the unprivileged . . . what about our fathers, who went as their dupes?” The cast, attired as pierrots to suggest the sad clowns who were sent to war, sang soldier songs (one of which became the play’s title) and acted out scenes caricaturing the story of lions led by donkeys. Alan Clark secured damages for unacknowledged use of material from his book and the play was popularly assumed to be based on his work.30
In fact, Oh What a Lovely War drew on a potpourri of sources, often using quotations out of context to skewer the generals.
Haig: We must break through.
British General: Regardless of loss, sir?
Haig: The loss of, say, another 300,000 men may lead to really great results.31
The drama was played out in front of a screen on which were projected photographs from the war and a news panel displaying headline points about the battles. For instance: “November . . . Somme Battle Ends . . . Total Loss 1,332,000 Men . . . Gain Nil.” The camaraderie between the donkeys on both sides is depicted in a long scene about the Christmas Truce in 1914. These men, British and Germans, are the victims of a war that is without point:
British Admiral: Have you got a plan?
British General: Of course.
Slide 5: A blank
And without values:
America: My president is deeply grieved by this war . . .
Britain: I understand he’s a very sick man.
America Yes, he’s an idealist.
By the end of the play all the belligerents are predicting victory (aka Sieg) in 1918, or ’19, or ’20, or ’25, and so on—“any advance on sixty-four? Plenty more numbers where they came from.” Slides of exhausted soldiers lead into a final reprise of the title song.32
Oh What a Lovely War led from lost innocence in Act One to war without end in Act Two. Significantly, it had nothing to say about how and why the war did end in 1918, simply announcing on the news panel that “the war to end wars . . . killed ten million.” The ending became more poignant when the play was turned into a movie in 1969, directed by Richard Attenborough (now with an exclamation mark added after the “Oh”!) The cast boasted most of the luminaries of British stage and screen—from Laurence Olivier to John Mills, from Vanessa Redgrave to Maggie Smith. The lineup was as stellar as The Longest Day, except that this was a film to satirize war rather than celebrate it. The pierrots disappeared but the air of frivolity was enhanced by setting the war show on Brighton Pier. All those who pay to enter/join up come from the Smith family. At the end the last Smith is transported from the trenches via the red tape of the peace conference back to the Sussex Downs, where his dead comrades and their white-clad womenfolk gradually dissolve into an infinitude of white crosses. One reviewer described the movie as “the most pacifist statement since All Quiet on the Western Front,” and this comparison was apt. There had, in fact, been no British film directly about the trenches since 1931: the Great War films that were made concentrated instead on less sensitive themes such as spies—Hitchcock’s Secret Agent (1936) being a classic. Oh What a Lovely War was also the first British film to discuss the causes of the war, dismissing it as a family quarrel among the crowned heads of Europe.33
To some, this was all propaganda masquerading as history. Oliver Lyttelton, Viscount Chandos—an Old Etonian Guards officer from the Great War—remarked plaintively that “we, by which I mean both officers and men . . . thought we were fighting in a worthy cause, and had no idea that our efforts would one day appear to Miss Littlewood as merely absurd.” But what audiences actually made of Oh What a Lovely War is an open question. Many recognized the caricature of history but were moved by the songs, which older people often found particularly evocative. “For those of us who fought in that war and were lucky to survive it,” wrote one reviewer, “this show conjures up memories that are not all painful. To hear the songs we sang—even though the younger generation doesn’t know how to sing them—is to catch again the whiff of that wry, disillusioned resignation with which our armies faced trench life.” It was entertainment and nostalgia, rather than the potency of political theatre, that drew many people to the play and ensured its move to the West End.34 The film, perhaps, had a more subliminal effect. Its sustained satire of the military elite and its powerful ending, far more didactic than in the play, preached a clear antiwar message. Above all, the young, without any memories or knowledge of the war, were offered no explanation of what happened in 1914–18—just a sense of meandering pointlessness, teetering between tragedy and farce.
The lack of a meaningful narrative about the Great War was highlighted by the success of A. J. P. Taylor’s The First World War: An Illustrated History, published in 1963 a few months after the opening of Oh What a Lovely War. This has been described as “almost certainly the most widely read historical work on the war as a whole in the English language”—selling 250,000 copies in its first quarter century.35 The volume was originally intended as a coffee-table book, for which Alan Taylor was enlisted simply to help choose two hundred unusual photographs and add some accompanying text. But Taylor, then in his mid-fifties, was at the height of his powers as both a historian and a controversialist—renowned for his opinionated newspaper columns and for his virtuoso television lectures, delivered live, to time, and without a note. His iconoclastic book The Origins of the Second World War had caused a storm in 1961 and he was keen to turn his fire onto the Great War. The particular impact of his Illustrated History stemmed from two distinctive features. First, its breezy, ironic tone, totally lacking in deference and often verging on farce (revealingly, Taylor dedicated the book to Joan Littlewood). The captions were particularly impish. Sir John French, scurrying through London in top hat and tails, is described as being “in training for the retreat from Mons.” As for Field Marshal Haig: “He relied on the divine help, became an earl and received £100,000 a year from parliament.” Another picture is captioned: “President Wilson and his Cabinet prepare to rule the world,” while a photo of the British prime minister, a notorious womanizer, carries the legend “Lloyd George casts an expert eye over munitions girls.” Taylor’s “palpable lack of deference” marked “a departure from previous historical representations of the war.”36
In another way, too, Taylor broke new ground: his book was the first short and incisive overview of the whole conflict, offering a clear and compelling argument. The instant histories that had appeared after 1918 were mostly long, plodding chronologies of battles, lacking interpretative power. The most famous, published by the novelist John Buchan in 1922, was a four-volume reworking of his magazine articles during the war—heavy on narrative, light on analysis, and necessarily striking a cautiously positive note about the future. No one struggling through these volumes would gain much sense of what the war had been about. They might have done so from Basil Liddell Hart’s The Real War (1930), but he offered a very partial and partisan view of the conflict. Liddell Hart focused on strategy and operations with little discussion of diplomacy or (despite the book’s title) the experience of soldiers. He was preoccupied with the Western Front and also deliberately raced over the climactic battles in France in 1918 to ram home his idée fixe that the naval blockade, not Haig’s army, had been “the decisive agency” in winning the war. A History of the Great War (1934) by the Oxford historian and war veteran Charles Cruttwell was less openly opinionated and had more to say on soldierly experience, but it was even more narrowly a history of military operations than Liddell Hart’s volume.37
In other words, by the time the Great War was overtaken by instant histories of the Second World War, there existed no clear and compelling popular narrative of 1914–18. Certainly nothing compared to Churchill’s sound bites during the war and book titles from his war memoirs which were already inscribing the British narrative of 1939–45. This was the gap that Taylor triumphantly filled almost fifty years on with his succinct, barbed, and highly readable illustrated history.
From start to finish Taylor depicted the war as a succession of accidents, the product of human error. Contrary to the assumption that great events have great causes, he found it hard to discover any “profound forces” at work behind the outbreak of the conflict: quite simply, “statesmen miscalculated” in July 1914. “The deterrent on which they relied failed to deter,” Taylor wrote pointedly, just a few months after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Once mobilization began, the process developed a momentum of its own because of the need to get troops to the right places before it was too late. War, declared Taylor tendentiously, was “imposed on the statesmen of Europe by railway timetables. It was an unexpected climax to the railway age.” Picking up Alan Clark’s epigraph he claimed that the “lions led by donkeys” were not merely British: “all the peoples were in the same boat. The war was beyond the capacity of generals and statesmen alike.” This theme ran right through his book—from Gallipoli in 1915 to the equally bumbling German and Allied offensives in 1918. “No one asked what the war was about” and “there were no clear war aims.” General Joffre’s calm confidence, asserted Taylor, was based on the belief that “one of these days all the Germans would be killed, even if far more British and Frenchmen were killed in the process.” The war eventually ended, as it had begun, with miscalculation. Ludendorff’s “rather childish cunning” in asking for an armistice that he intended to manage actually set in motion a complete collapse of the German home front and a revolution in Berlin. Taylor rounded things off by implying that “there was nothing to choose between the two sides and that the only fault of the Germans was to have lost.”38
Here was a very different account of the war’s origins and meaning from the revisionism being developed by Fritz Fischer in Germany. Instead of overriding German responsibility, which Taylor himself had emphasized only a few years before in The Struggle for Mastery of Europe, he was now pushing to almost perverse extremes the 1930s idea that the nations had “slithered” into war and then bumbled their way through it.39 His irreverent tone added to the feeling of utter irrationality. “Verdun was the most senseless episode in a war not distinguished for sense anywhere.” Passchendaele was “the blindest slaughter of a blind war . . . Even the generals at last realized that something had gone wrong.” Taylor reserved his harshest words for the first days of the Somme in July 1916, glossing over the rest of the battle. “Idealism perished on the Somme . . . The war ceased to have a purpose. It went on for its own sake, as a contest in endurance . . . The Somme set a picture by which future generations saw the First World War: brave helpless soldiers; blundering obstinate generals; nothing achieved. After the Somme men decided that the war would go on for ever.”40 Previously Passchendaele had featured in British memory as the archetype of tragic sacrifice, but Taylor helped set the Somme on its own as a spectacle of futility—further strengthening the contrast (noted in chapter 7) with Alamein as the triumphant turning point of Britain’s Second World War.41
Writing from the depths of the Cold War, Taylor also placed 1914–18 within a new narrative of the twentieth century. Although addressing some of the familiar legacies of Versailles, his main interest was not in the German question or the linkages between 1919 and 1939. “The great failure of the peacemakers,” Taylor asserted, “was that their work stopped short in eastern Europe, at the frontiers of Soviet Russia.” Although most of the world eventually extended diplomatic recognition to the Bolshevik regime, “in a deeper sense,” he wrote, “the non-Communist world has not ‘recognized’ Soviet Russia to the present day. This was the most important legacy of 1919 . . . Two worlds had come into existence. Hence all our troubles at the present day.” In the early 1960s Taylor was an outspoken supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and his version of the Great War was in part a tract for the times. Out of the mindless slaughter of European war, he was saying, there emerged an ideological divide that, fifty years on, had trapped the whole world on the brink of possible nuclear annihilation.42
The third distinctive British reinterpretation of 1914–18, apart from Littlewood’s play and Taylor’s book, was the BBC television series The Great War. This aired in twenty-six episodes from May 30 to November 22, 1964, as the centerpiece of the BBC’s commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, and it also served to launch the new BBC2 channel. Replayed on BBC1 over the autumn and winter of 1964–65, it reached on average around eight million people, almost one-fifth of the total viewing population, which put it on a par with the some of the most popular contemporary television shows such as the police series Z Cars and The Dick Emery Show. But the audience reaction index averaged about 20 points higher than these household favorites, at well over 80, which was comparable to a football Cup Final or a royal wedding. How to explain such impact remains a matter of debate. In part it is attributable to the scope and novelty of the series—masses of unknown silent archive film enhanced with sound effects, interviews with veterans, and specially composed music, plus the voices of some of the greatest British actors of the era headed by Sir Michael Redgrave as the sonorous narrator. The footage also looked extremely realistic, having been “stretch-printed” at considerable expense from the original sixteen frames a second to the modern twenty-four frames, thereby eliminating the intrinsic jerkiness of old films. Seeing and hearing 1914–18 as a real war came as a revelation to a generation reared on movies of 1939–45. Many viewers approached the series with personal and familial interests: here was a chance to find out what Dad or Granddad had done in the war. And many veterans, now in their seventies, found the series a cathartic opportunity to excavate a buried past, as if the BBC had created “a safe space in which memories could be retold.”43
The Great War was intended to offer a robust defense of the British Army and its generals against the likes of Alan Clark and A. J. P. Taylor. This was particularly the aim of military historian John Terraine, the principal scriptwriter, who had recently published a highly commendatory study of Haig as commander-in-chief subtitled The Educated Soldier, and Tony Essex, the lead producer of the series. “The Second World War was won by vast battles of attrition on the Eastern Front,” Essex noted: “is it not true that in the First World War the same type of battles were fought on the Western Front and that there, in the last analysis, Germany was defeated?” His core idea for the series was that “there is no cheap, easy or quick way to win any war.” This was also Terraine’s view, developed most of all in his script for the Battle of the Somme, episode thirteen and therefore exactly at the midpoint of the series. Terraine did not flinch from the enormity of the First of July: “Night fell on a disaster never equalled in the British Army’s history . . . This was mere massacre.” But he moved on to the rest of the five-month battle, stressing how the raw soldiers of Kitchener’s New Army were beginning to “learn”—a recurrent word—as they grew “old and wise in battle.” Terraine highlighted the damage they were inflicting on the German Army, which was gradually “bleeding to death” on the Somme under the “mighty material superiority” of the Allies. In the nightmare artillery barrage on the German trenches “even the rats became hysterical.”44
Here was a powerful and sustained reading of the Somme as a successful war of attrition—prefiguring, as we shall see, a whole school of revisionist military historians. But it was also a selective reading, glossing over evidence of Haig’s persistent belief that he was on the verge of a war-winning victory: hence his repeated orders for just one more push. Liddell Hart’s anger at Terraine’s “wearing out” thesis and at the implication it was only the soldiers, not the High Command, who needed to learn, prompted his highly publicized resignation from The Great War’s team of historians. In any case, for much of the audience, the visuals overcame the words: what lingered in the mind was not Terraine’s script but the images of mud and destruction, and also fragments from some of the interviews: according to one Australian veteran, “we were living like wild animals and in fact we became wild animals.” Although Terraine aimed to show that the cost had a purpose, millions of viewers came away with a sense of futility and waste. The episode’s very title, “The Devil Is Coming,” seemed to evoke the ubiquitous descent into hell—yet it was revealed near the end as a German soldier’s comment about the first British tanks. This “disjunction between intention and reaction” was much like the story of the writing and reception of R. C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End in 1928–29.45
Tony Essex’s own agenda was in fact somewhat schizophrenic. Although keen to educate viewers about there being no cheap victories, he also yearned to make a tragic epic. This is evident in the striking opening title sequence, which has been described as both “an elegy and an overture,” built around a montage of three different photos from the Western Front. First a helmeted soldier stands silhouetted against the sky, gazing down at a rough wooden cross inscribed “In Memory.” Then, in Essex’s directions, “as the music is sizzling and growing in stridency and volume,” the camera begins to slide ever faster into a trench—“tilting down into almost blackness (like Alice falling down the rabbit-hole to wonderland—only this time it’s to horror).” At the bottom of the trench the camera lingers on the second key image—“a ghastly uniformed shattered skeleton”—hollow eyes leering out, left hand clutching at its throat. Then, with the music “strong, melodic, passionate, tragic,” Essex instructed, “pan across derelict trench to another part where two dead bodies lie. Over them tired, exhausted, with uncomprehending eyes a British soldier leans against the trench wall. He looks at camera with a strange tired appeal” as the lens tracks slowly into his face.46
Of the three stark images in this remarkable opening sequence, it was the staring soldier who captured the nation’s imagination. He became such a cult figure that the BBC, breaking its rule about not providing prints of film footage because it did not hold the copyright, sent out hundreds of postcards. By April 1965 the Radio Times could reasonably claim him as “the most famous unknown soldier in the world.” At first the Tommy was identified as Pvt. Joseph Bailey of the 12th Yorkshire and Lancashire Regiment, who was killed on the Somme a few hours later. Subsequent research suggests that this was not his name and that the man probably served in an Irish regiment, but the Bailey story added to the poignancy of the image—a doomed, romantic hero who became a pinup for many teenagers. One wrote: “I am 13 and agree entirely with the girl who said ‘he means more to me than the Beatles.’” In fact the image in the film was a fabrication: the original photograph showed the soldier not in a dark hole with corpses in the background but in an open trench surrounded by comrades. Essex had deliberately “designed the titles as a montage of images that resonated with ideas about the war already embedded in British modern memory” (plates 20–23).47
It is instructive at this point to go back to the showing of the 1916 film Battle of the Somme in British cinemas in August and September of that year. In the Great War era the cinema held a place in popular culture that television had acquired by the mid-1960s. Twenty million cinema tickets were sold each week overwhelmingly to people who wanted entertainment. “All that changed, however, and changed dramatically with the release of Battle of the Somme in August 1916.” A black-and-white silent movie, shot in five sections with inter-titles as brief explanation, this seventy-five-minute film seems extraordinarily crude to modern eyes. Yet it had formidable impact when first screened, playing to packed houses across the country: some twenty million people saw it in the first six weeks. Shown again and again during 1916, it was probably eventually seen by a majority of the British population. Reviews and comments repeatedly noted the film’s realism—“the real thing at last,” commented the Manchester Guardian. “Crowded audiences,” the Times reported, “were interested and thrilled to have the realities of war brought so vividly before them, and if women had sometimes to shut their eyes to escape for a moment from the tragedy of the toll of battle which the film presents, opinion seemed to be general that it was wise that the people at home should have this glimpse of what our soldiers are doing and daring and suffering in Picardy.” When the dean of Durham University protested against “an entertainment which wounds the heart and violates the very sanctities of bereavement,” he aroused passionate letters to the press. “I have lost two near relatives,” one person wrote, “yet I never understood their sacrifice until I had seen this film.” The brother of Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George’s secretary, had been killed on the Western Front. “I have often tried to imagine myself what he went through,” she wrote in her diary after seeing the film, “but now I know, and I shall never forget.”48
This “realism” was somewhat contrived: the only footage of battle, as soldiers climbed out of the trench into no-man’s-land, was probably filmed afterward behind the lines, yet the image of a wounded man slipping back into the trench was recalled endlessly by viewers as one of the most graphic moments in the film. Other scenes, such as the (silent) artillery barrage, the explosion of a massive mine, the recovery of wounded soldiers, and shots of ruined villages all conveyed destruction on a scale apparently far beyond people’s imagination hitherto. What, in a larger sense, they made of it is less clear. For some reviewers, echoing the government’s object in showing the film, it was expected to galvanize civilian support for the war effort. James Douglas, in the Star, claimed that Battle of the Somme was “the only substitute for invasion,” demonstrating “the power of the moving picture to carry the war to British soil.” James Cooper in the Times drew a different lesson, arguing that “no better means could be found of making English men and women determined to stop the repetition of such a war.” Yet the frightful images did not prompt demands for an immediate negotiated peace. Fairly typical were lines from the London Evening News used in many advertisements: “In this picture the world will obtain some idea of what it costs in human suffering to put down the devil’s domination.”49
In 1916, whatever people’s private doubts, the devil was the enemy, not the war itself. The fighting was still going on and, as during any conflict, criticism was widely felt to be unpatriotic and unsupportive of “our lads.” But fifty years on, The Great War evoked very different reactions, with the negative suppressing the positive. By the 1960s the war was ancient history and the bereaved were dying off—removing the constraints of propriety. What’s more, the Second World War had cast the First in a new light. Tony Essex captured and yet missed the point when he noted that Germany had to be defeated by massive battles of attrition on the Eastern Front in 1941–45, so we should acknowledge the same process at work on the Western Front in 1914–18. Crucially, he had reversed the chronological sequence. It was precisely because of the costly attrition in the west against the kaiser that this way of war could not be repeated against Hitler. In the wake of 1914–18, Monty could not be a Haig; it would have needed a Stalin rather than a Churchill to make the British fight another Somme or Passchendaele. The Soviet leader’s promiscuous disregard for human life and ruthless control over Russian society were essential for sustaining attritional warfare 1940s-style. To reprise the Somme for a ’60s TV audience was bound to evoke different reactions from those of cinemagoers in 1916.
Not least because of the war poets. Even Tony Essex, despite his robust revisionism, was in their thrall. Wilfred Owen and other war writers figure in most episodes of The Great War and lines of poetry provided titles for many of the episodes. Essex even thought of asking Siegfried Sassoon to write a special poem for the opening title sequence.50
The 1960s was, in fact, the decade when the Great War poets became iconic, which is rather ironic when one considers that the most extensive bibliography of poetry from both world wars identifies 2,225 “English poets” from 1914–18 and 2,679 from 1939–45.51 So, in terms of output, the Second World War was no less “poetic” than the First, yet with a few exceptions such as Keith Douglas and Sidney Keyes, its “anti-war” poets are little celebrated. This was partly because, between Dunkirk and D-Day, “patriotic poetry was not seen as a contradiction in terms,” while the war’s near incomprehensible ending—Belsen and the Bomb—seemed to defy poetic expression.52 But many writers also found the literary burden of the Great War too heavy. “Almost all that a modern poet on active service is inspired to write, would be tautological,” Douglas argued in 1943: “hell cannot be let loose twice.”53
Although a few poets of the Great War were published in individual volumes, much of the legacy of 1914–18 was handed down in anthologies—rather like the Romantic corpus of pastoral poetry in which writers like Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas were steeped had been transmitted to their generation via canonical collections such as The Oxford Book of English Verse. Anthologies of poems about the Great War started to appear in the autumn of 1914. Most were collated by older men of a literary background who were overage for fighting but wanted to contribute to the cause. The tone of these collections was highly patriotic: it would have been almost unthinkable in 1914 and 1915 to include antiwar poems. But the introduction of conscription in 1916 “put an end to recruiting verse and helped to silence the ‘old men.’” Fewer anthologies were published but, in those that did appear, the bulk of the poems now came from serving soldiers, mostly junior officers. In July 1918, Bertram Lloyd’s Poems Written during the Great War represented the first anthology to target “the cant and idealization and false glamour” with which the war had been marketed. Although patriotic collections still appeared in the early 1920s, the public quickly lost its appetite for war poetry of any sort and in the flurry of “war books” around the tenth anniversary of the Armistice there was only one anthology of verse.54
This volume was, however, of considerable significance. Frederick Brereton’s Anthology of War Poems (1930) was eclectic in range, including civilians such as Hardy and Kipling, but soldiers critical of the war predominated—with seven offerings by Sassoon, five from Owen, and three by Robert Graves. Although the poems were printed in the alphabetical order of their authors’ names, the anthology was defined by a twelve-page preface by Edmund Blunden. He was a war poet and veteran, winner of the Military Cross, who had survived the Somme and Passchendaele remarkably unscathed in body, if not in mind. Small, birdlike, and modest—passionate mostly about cricket and the Kent countryside—Blunden did not make a huge impact as a person and his poetry is much less celebrated than that of Owen, Sassoon, or Graves. But “as critic, editor and academic,” the literary scholar Dominic Hibberd has observed, Blunden “probably had more influence than anyone on the modern view of 1914–18 verse.”55
In 1928 Blunden published a little volume, Undertones of War, a reminiscence of 1914–18 with a selection of his own war poems. This quickly established itself as one of the classic war memoirs, along with those of Sassoon and Graves. It also revealed an obsession with his war experience that, as we have seen, was not true of all veterans. “I must go over the ground again,” Blunden wrote in the preface. “A voice, perhaps not my own, answers within me. You will be going over the ground again, it says, until that hour when agony’s clawed face softens into the smilingness of a young spring day.” The “voice” was right: more, perhaps, than any of the poetic survivors of Britain’s Great War—even than his increasingly self-absorbed friend Sassoon—Blunden trod the Menin Road and the Ancre Valley for the rest of his life, leaving an indelible mark on our understanding of what constitutes “war poetry.”56*
Blunden’s preface to Brereton’s 1930 Anthology of War Poems was tellingly entitled “The Soldier Poets of 1914–18.” Of the 2,225 poets of 1914–18, fewer than one-fifth saw active service—the rest being civilians—and nearly a quarter of the total were female. But as Blunden’s title suggests, he privileged the “soldier poets” above the rest. More particularly his “soldiers” were junior officers, mostly from prep (“public”) schools and homosexually inclined. Five of these young men were given special mention in Blunden’s essay, arranged chronologically to create a narrative arc. First came Rupert Brooke, the poet of “chivalrous obligation,” who “perfected” the patriotic theme of 1914. Then Charles Sorley, who, like Brooke, died early but nevertheless “began to feel the futility of the argument, the doom of the best of men” before his demise at Loos in 1915. By 1916, amid the “relentless crowding of men into the Golgotha,” the war had become “a recognized error”–captured by Robert Graves. In 1917–18 it was Sassoon who mounted “the attack on war” on “a large scale” in his collections The Old Huntsman and Counter-Attack. Finally there was Owen, his creativity catalyzed by Sassoon, who was “probably the greatest of the poets that were killed.” Blunden enjoined readers not to “blame too earnestly” the young soldier poets of 1914–15 whose “delicate and unreflecting stanzas failed to present war as it is”—they were “not experienced” and at that time “the country needed their sweetness.” What mattered was that amid the “prehistoric” horrors of the Somme and Passchendaele there “arose two poets of unshakable resolution, whose protests will not be surpassed for poetic intensity and plan or for selflessness in fighting this world’s battles.” No reference here to 1918, to the war’s end, or to victory because the idea of “victory” in such a war was meaningless. For Blunden the task of war poetry was to make “effectual and eager complaints against the survival of that false gross idol, War.” In his view the best men for that “crusade” were those who had fought.57
Blunden’s short introduction traced what might be called a kind of poetic “learning curve”—one that the soldier poets of 1914–18 had painfully followed in order to gain their literary victory. His edition, The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1931), was largely responsible for keeping Owen’s poetry alive during the 1930s. Blunden’s long biographical essay in that volume also “created what Owen had never had—a poetic character of his own”58 as the self-sacrificial victim of a war whose immoral nature he abhorred but whose moral demands he could not escape. In 1954 another collection prepared by Blunden rescued from oblivion the verse of the poet-composer Ivor Gurney. Here were markers for the future. During the Second World War a few selections of patriotic verse from 1914–18 were published as a patriotic venture, but it was not until the fiftieth anniversary of 1914–18 that Great War anthologies became fashionable again, and now Blunden’s interpretative framework came into its own.
He was asked to provide the foreword to the most durable of those anthologies, Brian Gardner’s Up the Line to Death (1964). In this Blunden described how the poetic voice of “idealism” in 1914 had turned into “a cry” by 1917 and he praised Gardner for bringing the writings of “the Brooke, Sassoon, Owen generation” to a “new generation,” fifty years on. Gardner, a popular historian rather than a literary scholar, penned his own Blundenesque introduction, insisting that the “experiences, and thus many of the emotions, of the poets were no different from those of the rest of the generation” and laying particular emphasis on the first day of the Somme: “After July, 1916, the poets differed only in that they were more articulate than their comrades.” Gardner divided up the poems into thematic sections, among them “To Unknown Lands” and “Home Front,” but most of his sections focused on the trench experience which was traced along a narrative arc from innocence (“Happy Is England Now”) via agony (“O, Jesus, Make It Stop”) to the “dirge of victory” (“At Last, At Last!”). The book title itself comes from “Base Details,” one of Sassoon’s most savage satires on staff officers, whose duty was to “speed glum heroes up the line to death.” 59
Gardner’s volume was the best known of the fiftieth-anniversary anthologies—a staple of the British school curriculum that is still in print today—but others were equally didactic. A year later I. M. Parsons published a collection entitled Men Who March Away (1965). Like Gardner, he arranged the poems into sections, “each representative of a mood or a subject connected with the war.” Again Blunden’s schema shines through. After “Visions of Glory” (evoking “the mood of optimistic exhilaration” in 1914), we move “from the vision to the reality” (a section entitled “The Bitter Truth”). Then follow “No More Jokes” and “The Pity of War” (titles taken from Sassoon and Owen respectively) before sections on “The Wounded,” “The Dead,” and “The Aftermath” round off the anthology. Going even further, Maurice Hussey, in his collection Poetry of the First World War (1967), asserted that the poems he had chosen, though “the work of many hands, may for a moment be approached as that of one composite writer, the English war poet.” His “mind,” Hussey argued, “can be seen developing as the conduct of the war makes certain ideas less and less tenable.” Thus the war poet moves from a mood of “patriotic prompting” to “a more meditative position” and then, in 1916 or 1917, either to angry protest against both the conflict and romantic poetry or else to an acceptance of war as “the inevitable condition against which the individual’s struggle is fruitless.” These three phases were expressed in sections entitled “Before Marching” (a title from Ivor Gurney), “Marching” (containing the bulk of the poems), and finally “After Marching”—each with a short introduction aimed at a secondary school audience. These anthologies by Gardner, Parsons, and Hussey were bought in large quantities by schools and then recycled year after year by teachers to justify the original investment.60
The fiftieth-anniversary anthologies sanctified Blunden’s canon of Great War poetry: the verse of junior officers steeped in Romantic literature who moved from patriotic innocence to horrified candor and eventually a recognition, in Owen’s now clichéd words, of “the pity of War” rather than its glory. It was in the 1960s that Owen became the preeminent symbol of war poetry for British popular culture. This status was partly thanks to the efforts of Sassoon and Blunden in keeping Owen’s verse in print: a fuller edition of The Collected Poems appeared in 1963, incorporating Blunden’s 1931 memoir. Owen’s war story also had a moving simplicity, dying at the head of his men in one of the last battles of the war so that the news reached his parents in Shrewsbury just as church bells announced the Armistice. And many of his poems were not rooted in the trenches, giving them a ubiquitous relevance to war in general. In 1962 Benjamin Britten used Owen’s poetry in his War Requiem, composed for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, twenty-two years after the original church had been destroyed by the Luftwaffe. Britten, a pacifist in 1939–45, had originally conceived the piece after the incineration of Hiroshima; in 1962 his setting of poems such as “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and “Strange Meeting” was intended to convey the universal enormity of war. Because Owen’s poems spoke so much of suffering and victimhood, they fit the British experience of the Second World War and 1960s attitudes toward war in general better than poetry that focused on the moral ambiguities of fighting and killing. Thus Owen became what historian Daniel Todman aptly calls the “Known Poet” to set alongside the “Unknown Warrior.”61
But the canon of war poetry had become increasingly detached from the trajectory of English poetry as a whole—a divergence already prefigured in the 1920s (see chapter 5) with the emergence of modernist writers such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. As Eliot became lauded as “the greatest living English poet,” recipient of the Order of Merit, Blunden remarked (to Sassoon’s approval) that “if we are to have Tom as our bard we may as well hand over the Empire to the U.S.A.—for my feeling is that to this day T.S.E. is an American and his verse is not part of our natural production.”62 For Blunden that “natural production” was rooted in a romanticized English landscape, celebrated by Wordsworth, Keats, and other nineteenth-century pastoralists, and then savagely inverted by the war poets in their depictions of the trenches of Flanders and Picardy. Yet as the war poets became isolated from the broad flow of English and American literature, so they became for many people the true chroniclers of Great War history.
The afterlife of war art from 1914–18 (chapter 5) followed a rather different course from that of war poetry. During the Second World War the government again sponsored an official scheme of war art—larger and more centralized than in the Great War. The War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC) commissioned or purchased more than 5,000 works of art, of which more than half ended up in the Imperial War Museum. More than 400 artists were involved, including 52 women. Yet this vast effort had relatively little cultural impact: even Kenneth Clark, chairman of the WAAC, admitted that much of the work was rather tame.63
Part of the reason was stylistic. Whereas the official program in the Great War had caught artists such as Richard Nevinson and Paul Nash just as they discovered continental modernism, thereby combining the shock of a new war with the shock of a new style, the art of 1939–45 was doubly familiar. Its style was firmly rooted in the English landscape tradition—nostalgically Romantic in the work of John Piper, darkly Gothic as rendered by Graham Sutherland. In the 1940s this was a style that seemed appropriate to depict the ravages of wartime, especially bombed and ruined cities, and many war artists adopted it, but the result was hardly innovative art. In any case, modern industrialized warfare, for artists as for poets, was no longer surprising, as it had been for the artists of 1914–18. The most vividly depicted human beings in the war art of 1939–45 were civilians, not soldiers, continental rather than British—revealed in all their pathos as the camps were opened in 1945. Both visually and morally, rather as Hannah Arendt had predicted, mere death had lost its sting for this generation. It had real impact only when bedeviled by evil.64
The “Englishness” of much of this war art was self-conscious. It seemed appropriate at a time when the country was celebrating its separation from the horrors on the Continent and seeking cultural roots for its own sense of distinctive identity and values. As supremo, Clark certainly pushed the idea, inveighing against theoretical approaches to art as “essentially German” and arguing that “the influence of international ‘French’ painting, for twenty years a necessary tonic, is now declining, and national virtues are free to reassert themselves.” Clark felt that “English painting cannot be grand and external as the Latin schools can; it must grow out of deep intimacy”—intimacy, for instance, with “the countryside and the weather.”65
But the national mood, like the English weather, soon changed. When a thousand examples of the WAAC’s war art went on display at the Royal Academy in October 1945, critical reaction was muted. “This has been a war of many phases,” observed the Times, in contrast with “the long period of static trench warfare” that “came to typify for the public the war of 1914–18.” And artists were no exception. “No single phase has burnt deep enough into their minds and emotions to impress itself upon their work as the mud and blasted trees of no-man’s-land impressed themselves on the work of the brothers NASH, of MR. ERIC KENNINGTON and MR. C.R.W. NEVINSON thirty years ago. It is perhaps for this reason that the current war pictures, admirable as many of them are, seem to lack something in depth of feeling.” Ironically Paul Nash was again an official artist, likewise the veteran Muirhead Bone, but neither had much new to say. One of the few war artists singled out by the Times for “strong penetrating emotion” was Henry Moore, for his “half sculptural, half mummified” sleepers in the London Underground during the Blitz. Here was a modernist rendering of war, abstract yet recognizable, reminiscent of the best work of Nevinson and Nash during the Great War: something that moved beyond mere representation to hint at the universal.66
This autumn of British war art was eclipsed by a winter of Picasso and Matisse. Over ten weeks at the Victoria and Albert Museum this exhibition, largely funded by the French government, attracted 220,000 visitors, plus another 150,000 when on tour in Glasgow and Manchester in early 1946—far outstripping the 20,000 in six weeks who paid to see British war art. The Picasso and Matisse exhibit “effectively put an end to the inward-looking melancholy and nostalgia that had characterised neo-romanticism” during the war.67 Although Picasso’s work remained controversial—Winston Churchill and the president of the Royal Academy being in rare agreement in 1949 that he needed a kick up the backside—a major solo exhibition in the summer of 1960 proved a definitive turning point. Over ten weeks it was seen by nearly half a million people in a ferment of what the press called “Picasso-mania.” Some reviewers even presented the artist as a closet anglophile, citing as evidence his predilection for bowler hats.68
The 1960 exhibition was staged at the Tate Gallery, which was now fully independent of the National Gallery and had become a major collector of modernist art since the Second World War. The Tate presented these works in a cosmopolitan way, narrating modernism as a progressive history of art’s “emancipation into the universal,” the redemption of culture from narrow nationalism. After 1965 the Tate also stopped hanging “Modern British Art” separately from “Modern Foreign Art” because “the art of the present is indivisible and it is no service to British artists to consider them in isolation.”69
As modernist British art was swept into the continental mainstream, much of the representational and landscape art from the two wars seemed increasingly marginal. By contrast, the best realist-modernist art of the Great War assumed a new stature, fulfilling the criteria of what was now deemed to constitute the artistic canon, while being recognizable and also English. This apotheosis was slower and less dramatic than the consecration of the war poets, not really evident until the 1980s. The Imperial War Museum only featured its major pieces of Great War art in a separate gallery after a big renovation in the early 1990s. But gradually the paintings of Nevinson, Nash, Sargent, and Wyndham Lewis achieved public recognition, often as apt images to complement the words of Owen and his fellow war poets about lost souls, gassed soldiers, and tortured landscapes. This was done systematically in a major five-month exhibition at the IWM in 2002–03, “Anthem for Doomed Youth: Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War” (plate 23). And so, in an ironic symbiosis, modernist war art became the illuminator of war poetry that was anything but modernist—another very British construction.70
And so from the 1960s the British rediscovered the Great War with a vengeance. More exactly, they reconstructed it, in forms that accorded with contemporary social attitudes and with perceptions of how 1914–18 and 1939–45 fit into the trajectory of modern British history. Across the Irish Sea, however, the Great War had never been forgotten—the Easter Rising and the first day of the Somme had been the founding myths of the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland—but the fiftieth anniversary of 1916 provided an opportunity to reinvent them for a new generation, with grave consequences for peace and civil harmony. For many American intellectuals the thirty years of “Troubles” in Northern Ireland became a classic of civil rights but few understood the history lurking behind the headlines.
The 1960s were a time of profound change in the Irish Republic. Ever since he became Irish premier (taoiseach) in 1932, Éamon de Valera had towered both literally and metaphorically over the country’s politics—in power continuously until 1948 and then back for two more spells in the 1950s. De Valera’s sense of Irish values remained rooted in the precarious early days of independence: a rural economy, as self-sufficient as possible, directed by the Catholic Church and smothered in Gaelic language and culture to insulate itself from Protestant, modernizing England. By the 1950s, however, such policies had become a recipe for economic suicide: during this baby-boom decade across Europe the Irish population actually fell by 400,000, many of them moving to Britain, where per capita income was almost double the Irish average. In 1957 de Valera, now seventy-seven and virtually blind, was finally persuaded to move out, or at least sideways: in 1959 he became Ireland’s elected president.71
His successor as taoiseach, Seán Lemass, though also a veteran of the Easter Rising, was much more attuned to the mood of the ’60s and he threw himself into the modernization program. Lemass wanted to wrest the saga of 1916 away from the old guard of the IRA, mired in nostalgia and still bitter about Partition. Quoting the dictum of Pádraig Pearse, leader of the original rebels, that “every generation has its task,” Lemass claimed that the men of 1916 would now “accept that the historic task of this generation is to consolidate the economic foundations which support our political institutions.” He envisaged April 1966 as not just an opportunity to reflect on the “historical significance” of 1916 but also “a time of national stocktaking . . . for trying to look ahead into the mists of the future.” True to that spirit, he announced his own retirement later in the year: “The 1916 celebrations marked the ending of a chapter in our history and a new chapter has now to begin. As one of the 1916 generation this marked the end of the road for me also.”72
But instead of moving Ireland out of its past, the week of what were indeed “celebrations” brought Easter 1916 alive for a new generation. Not so much through the traditional marches, parades, and commemorative services, though some were very moving—notably the dedication of a Garden of Remembrance by a now blind de Valera surrounded by aged veterans, a few even on stretchers. Much more influential was the new medium of television, little more than four years old in Ireland. The state broadcaster RTE devoted more than fifty hours to coverage of the week’s events. Particularly potent was the historical epic Insurrection. Unlike the BBC’s Great War, this was not a documentary but a historical drama, imagining how the events of the Rising would have been covered as hot news if television had been around in 1916. So the series mixed archive footage (the opening was newsreel of Verdun) with invented reportage from news crews and a studio anchorman (including a studio “interview” with the commander of the British forces) and reenactments of the fighting in the center of Dublin. Insurrection was a hugely expensive enterprise, involving ninety-three speaking roles and two hundred extras, plus the services of three hundred members of the Irish defense forces. “Before it is all over,” quipped one journalist, “I swear there’ll be more people involved in re-creating 1916 than there were in the original affair.” The series aired nightly at 9:15 p.m. in eight half-hour episodes in April 1966, drawing some of the highest viewing figures of the week. It was shown again in its entirety the following month, as well as being broadcast in Britain by the BBC.73
Although some found Insurrection contrived and overhyped, the series did have a powerful impact. One member of the IRA later recalled seeing it as a child of eight in his grandmother’s border farmhouse: “Each evening we would be sitting riveted to granny’s television watching what was going on. Then we were straight out the following morning and, instead of playing Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers, we would immediately engage in our own version of Easter Week, which entailed storming our grandmother’s hay shed and taking it over. It represented the GPO and here we were, a glorious little band of Irish rebels, holding out against the British Imperial hordes, armed with stick rifles and tin-can grenades.”74 Of course, many children indulge in such fantasies without going on to a career of homicidal crime. But Insurrection did grab the imagination of the young and not-so-young. It turned the heroes of 1916 from fading icons on living-room walls into “real people” on the TV. It also transformed an ancient saga into a living drama whose outcome was both known to viewers yet also in doubt on the screen. And although the intention was to show how 1916 had paved the way for modern progressive Ireland, images of which brought the series to an end, Insurrection raised many unresolved questions from the past. The BBC’s Great War had also brought to life events fifty years before, especially the experience of the Tommies, yet without rekindling Anglo-German animosities. But Insurrection was a drama of “goodies” and “baddies” and, to hardline nationalists, the “baddies” were still winning because Ireland remained divided.
Nowhere was this message from 1916 more important than for Catholics in Northern Ireland, whose second-class status was quietly ignored by the Lemass government in its efforts to move Ireland on from the past. So in Ulster nationalists and republicans were determined to make maximum political capital out of the 1916 commemoration, and this posed a real problem for the Unionist government led by Terence O’Neill. His aim was similar to that of Lemass, namely to shift Ireland, north and south, out of the entrenched mind-sets of 1916. Most of O’Neill’s “reforms” were symbolic rather than substantial—he did nothing to reduce discrimination against the Catholic minority in jobs and housing or to erode Protestant domination of the police—and therefore gained little support among Catholics. But his token gestures, such as visiting Catholic schools and meeting with Lemass, were played up by hardline Protestants, notably Rev. Ian Paisley, the outspoken founder of a breakaway evangelical church, as betrayals of the faith and of the Union.
The most significant commemorative event in Belfast in April 1966 was a parade along the mostly Catholic and Nationalist Falls Road said to be two miles long and involving 70,000 people. Its form was deliberately provocative: a color party carried the Irish tricolor, followed by large banners with etchings of the executed leaders of 1916. Paisley responded with a counter-march of some 5,000 people and what he called a “thanksgiving” service in the Ulster Hall for the defeat of the 1916 “Papal plot to stab England in the back.” Denouncing O’Neill’s “appeasement,” he declared that “Ulster people are definitely not going to bow to IRA thugs.” Paisley was skillfully using the confrontation to question the Unionist credentials of O’Neill, Eton-educated scion of a landed Anglo-Irish family, by mobilizing the growing disenchantment of the Protestant working class. O’Neill, for his part, likened Paisley’s movement to the threat posed by fascism in the 1930s, seeing both Paisleyism and republicanism as bent on destroying Northern Ireland’s new prospects by stirring up community strife. O’Neill asked Ulster Protestants to make a “positive” display of loyalty on July 1, when, he said, Northern Ireland would engage in “a great national festival of remembrance for the men of the Ulster Division who fell at the Somme.” Despite his reformist agenda, O’Neill made no effort to include Catholic veterans in this commemoration, which therefore served to confirm Unionist entrenchment in their own blood sacrifice of 1916. But none of this helped head off the emboldened Paisley, who took his supporters out onto the streets in July. Clashes flared with Catholics and nationalists and by the end of the month Paisley was in jail, having refused to pay fines for public-order offenses. A martyr’s imprisonment proved the perfect way to attract publicity and gain support. In the period 1951 to 1966 Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church had formed only thirteen congregations; in just eighteen months after July 1966 it added twelve more.75
Officially, the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland are dated from October 1968, when police and civil rights marchers clashed in Derry, but O’Neill later claimed: “It was 1966 which made 1968 inevitable.” Similar views were expressed in the Republic. During the “great commemorative year” of 1966, declared Conor Cruise O’Brien, “ghosts were bound to walk, both North and South.”76 To be more precise, the ghosts were summoned and dressed up in new clothes by politicians who had their own agenda—Lemass to assist his modernization campaign, nationalists in the north to remind him of their existence, O’Neill to demonstrate “positive” loyalism, and Paisley as a way to undermine O’Neill. All of them had used and abused “history” for their own ends.
The Troubles, of course, had many causes, especially the systemic discrimination against Catholics in Ulster. The protestors also drew on many models, not least the Civil Rights Movement in 1960s America. But the competing reenactments of 1916 for new generations, north and south, in the television age were significant catalysts. By the 1970s Ireland seemed almost to be back in the 1916 era, with the British Army on the streets and a tit-for-tat cycle of violence. Over the next thirty years some 3,500 people would be killed. When the Troubles ended, 1916 would be revisited anew but this time very differently.
No other country commemorated the Great War with such passion on its fiftieth anniversary. The Soviet regime’s obsession with the twentieth anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany ensured that 1914–17 remained in the shadows, except as an “imperialist war” that triggered the Revolution. It was only in the troubled border republics of the USSR that Great War anniversaries had resonance. In April 1965 the fiftieth anniversary of the Armenian genocide by the Turks brought thousands onto the streets of the Armenian capital, Yerevan. Two years later a monument to the victims was unveiled by the Armenian communist leadership in an effort to appease popular feeling.77
The French experience of Great War remembrance in the 1960s was somewhat closer to that of Britain. There too a second state TV channel was launched in 1964 and the government invited three historians to present long programs on the Great War, the interwar period, and the Second World War. The one about 1914–18 was produced by Marc Ferro, distinguished both as a historian and a filmmaker, and it proved a landmark in its own way, being a joint Franco-German production that was aired simultaneously in both countries and later distributed by Pathé to cinemas. Eschewing interviews with survivors or with scholars, Ferro concentrated on hitherto unseen footage from film archives all over Europe, much of it extremely compelling. Yet one 150-minute film did not compare in sustained impact with the twenty-six hours of The Great War on the BBC. And Ferro’s subsequent book, La Grande Guerre (1969), enjoyed nothing like the attention and sales of Taylor’s Illustrated History, which became “a fundamental point of departure for all subsequent studies in the Anglo-Saxon world.”78
Nor did the British cult of the antiwar officer poets have any parallel on the Continent. In France, only the war poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire has been taken really seriously, and few general verse anthologies were published. In the 1960s the limited interest in Great War poetry centered on the Unanimistes circle around Jules Romains, including Georges Duhamel and René Arcos. Interwar Germany saw more anthologies but, as befitted the mood of national resentment against Versailles, these were mostly collections of patriotic verse. After the demise of the Third Reich it was not until the 1980s that interest in German poetry of 1914–18 began to revive, and then mostly for Expressionist writers.79
This peculiar British preoccupation with the Great War via poetry rather than history became dominant during the 1960s. It reinforced another contemporary trend, emphasizing the experiences of individual soldiers rather than the big-picture issues of strategy and diplomacy, finance and production. This trend was evident elsewhere in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, but as we shall see in the next chapter, once again the British pattern was unusual.
* One of his wartime nightmares was being sentenced by an angel for a petty misdemeanor. The order read: “Menin Road; Front Line; For All Eternity.”