. . . there is something Treblinka-like about almost all accounts of 1 July, about those long docile lines of young men . . . numbered about their necks, plodding forward across a featureless landscape to their own extermination inside the barbed wire.
JOHN KEEGAN, 1976
Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park . . .
PHILIP LARKIN, 19641
In his poem quoted above, Philip Larkin was responding to a photograph of young men in August 1914 waiting to volunteer for Kitchener’s New Armies, almost as if they were queuing to watch a game of cricket or football (plate 25). Some 2.5 million volunteers enlisted in 1914–15, making up nearly half the total of 5.7 million soldiers who served in the British Army during the Great War. Larkin’s response to the photograph was wistfully romantic, investing it with images that were becoming fashionable in the 1960s about the innocent prewar Edwardian era. A bygone age of “moustached archaic faces” and “farthings and sovereigns,” of “dark-clothed children” and “pubs / Wide open all day,” and of “differently dressed servants / With tiny rooms in huge houses.” (Not surprisingly Larkin was one of the few modern poets admired by Blunden and Sassoon.) At the end he could only sigh:
Never such innocence,
Never before or since . . .
Never such innocence again.2
Larkin’s evocation of August 1914 fifty years on was entitled, with deliberate archaism, “MCMXIV.” Here was one generation seeing another through its own eyes and imaginings. What made those “long uneven lines” of men so poignant was what was coming to them—as we know but they did not. During the 1970s a new kind of military history sought to bring alive their war story, through books composed around the recollections of ordinary soldiers rather than the papers of generals and politicians. The object of this new history was to convey the mud, blood, and trauma of battle. In the process the meaning of Britain’s Great War was gradually whittled down to one sacred day, the First of July 1916—understood as a holocaust moment.
The 1960s had seen several books about the battle of the Somme. Brian Gardner, compiler of the Up the Line to Death anthology of war poetry, published a short, skeptical account of the battle in 1961. He prefaced it with a deadpan quotation from the semi-official history of Haig’s Command: “The battle of the Somme was a great triumph for the genius of British military leadership.” For the fiftieth anniversary in 1966 the novelist John Harris brought out The Somme: Death of a Generation, which characterized the five-month struggle as “a wanton pointless carnage” but also “an epic of heroism.” Harris claimed that no battle affected the history of the world more than the Somme “because of its far-reaching effect on the political history of the next generation,” especially fostering an “obsession with peace at any price” that paved the way to another world war.3
The most authoritative and balanced 1960s volume on the Somme was authored by Anthony Farrar-Hockley, a serving officer, decorated in the Second World War and Korea, but also a military historian. At the end of his book, evaluating the various controversies, he stated that “two facts are incontrovertible”: first, Haig “did not succeed in breaking out” but, secondly, “he weakened the German army in the west in much the same way as the Russian Army weakened Hitler’s at Stalingrad.” Farrar-Hockley estimated the casualties on each side at 600,000. “Decades later,” he reflected, “the sum of anguish which these figures represent horrifies us, as once it horrified Lloyd George.” But he ducked the question of blame, arguing that “the Somme battle, as indeed the whole of the Great War, was ultimately the responsibility of the peoples of Europe and the United States, who permitted conditions to come to such a pass.”4
Each of these volumes dealt with the whole battle of the Somme, mostly using official histories and the memoirs of officers and politicians. Martin Middlebrook’s The First Day of the Somme, published on July 1, 1971, was very different, and the reasons for this are worth a moment’s attention. In 1966 the British government, operating what was then a Fifty-Year Rule for the closure of official archives, opened the bulk of its documentation about the 1914–18 war. Middlebrook was an early beneficiary of this mass of material in the Public Record Office. And he was also the first to talk extensively to ordinary soldiers from the Great War, most now in their seventies—recently retired from work, with time on their hands and an inclination to ponder anew those traumatic days of their youth. Middlebrook interwove the evidence from unit records with the recollections of ex-soldiers—526 British and 20 Germans—interviewed directly or via questionnaires. This was a very personal quest for understanding by a man who was not a professional historian. Middlebrook, born in 1932, had been fascinated by the Great War since youth, not least because two soldier uncles had been among its victims, and he was deeply affected by touring the Somme in 1967—especially the sight of so many gravestones bearing the date July 1, 1916. He told his wife: “I’m going to write a book about the Somme, through the eyes of the ordinary soldiers.”5
On his own admission, Middlebrook had “written nothing longer than a business letter” for over twenty years since leaving school at age seventeen. But the publisher Penguin recognized the merits of his sample chapters and gave him a contract. Gradually a distinctive style evolved. Instead of laboriously turning each soldier’s recollections into dry third-person prose, Middlebrook decided, “Why not let him speak directly to the reader?” Henceforth quotations were worked into the narrative, with author and unit identified in brackets. To “keep alive the spirit” of Kitchener’s New Army, Middlebrook also retained the original “Pals” titles of the volunteer battalions rather than using the official names bestowed on them by the Army. Thus he referred to the 15th West Yorkshire Regiment as “The Leeds Pals,” the 14th Royal Irish Rifles were “The Belfast Young Citizens,” and so on. In fact, dozens of regular and territorial battalions also fought on July 1, many of whom were also decimated but, by highlighting the poignant stories of these local units, Middlebrook helped foster what became an enduring cult of the “Pals.”6
The resultant book reads like a Greek tragedy. We know the outcome but can only watch as the men move inexorably toward their fate. Middlebrook follows various units as they march up to the front line on June 30, deafened by the thunderous barrage of the British guns. After the soldiers go over the top at 7:30, Middlebrook takes us along the front, following the battalions in turn through a narrative constructed from official war diaries and the recollections of survivors. By chapter 8 (“review at 8.30 A.M.”) the denouement is not in doubt: “probably half of the 66,000 British soldiers who had attacked were already casualties—30,000 infantrymen killed or wounded in just sixty minutes!” But still the attacks go on as Middlebrook narrates what he calls “the holocaust” through to the fall of that midsummer night.7
His final chapters are more reflective and analytical. With regret Middlebrook saw no alternative to mounting the attack, because of the need to support the French at Verdun, but he was severely critical of the battle plan. The principal target, following John Terraine’s biography of Haig, was the 4th Army commander, Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson, especially his confidence that the artillery barrage would destroy the Germans and his related refusal to follow standard infantry tactics and send in “bombing parties” as quickly as possible to seize the enemy trenches. Instead the long lines of Tommies, often walking slowly across no-man’s-land, became sitting ducks for German machine-gunners. For Middlebrook, July 1, 1916, was, therefore, both a necessary operation and also an avoidable tragedy. He acknowledged briefly that the Battle of the Somme continued through the autumn and that it was there that “the Germans lost the core of their battle-hardened army.” Yet his focus remained on the first of July as “a separate battle in its own right.” Its final casualty list (19,240 dead and 35,493 wounded) represented the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army, with losses far exceeding those in the Crimea, the Boer War, and Korea combined. Middlebrook also suggested that, “for the British at least, it was the turning point of the First World War.” Eighty percent of the country’s 2.7 million war casualties occurred after July 1, 1916, mostly on the Western Front. Having “invested so much prestige and blood on this one day,” Middlebrook asserted, Britain “could not pull out without getting what she considered the only just return for that investment—a total victory.”8
In 1976 another book illuminated the British experience of July 1, 1916, with comparable intensity though in a very different way. Like Middlebrook, John Keegan was a child of the interwar (born in 1934) and therefore fought in neither of the world wars. But as a teacher of military history at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, he became increasingly dissatisfied with the “de-sensitized treatment of war” that he and his colleagues disseminated in its “studiedly unmilitary” setting—an “English ducal mansion” amid serene parkland—which helped to foster a “country-house illusion” of warfare, shaped by thought not action, words rather than blood, maps instead of mud. “The compilers of the British Official History of the First World War,” he observed dryly, “have achieved the remarkable feat of writing an exhaustive account of one of the world’s greatest tragedies without the display of any emotion at all.” Keegan’s question, as a classroom warrior, was “How would I behave in battle?” and he set out to answer it through case studies of three great English battles—Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme—each from a very different era of military technology. By looking at how soldiers “control their fears, staunch their wounds, go to their death,” he hoped to “catch a glimpse of the face of battle.”9
In his case study of 1916, Keegan discussed only the first day of the Somme. He paid tribute to Middlebrook’s “remarkable achievement,” likening his book to William Siborne’s classic history of the battle of Waterloo, also constructed from soldiers’ recollections. Keegan did not undertake new research, either through interviews or in archives: he used the existing sources to analyze the technological encounters, especially in this case between infantry and machine guns. Like Middlebrook he mourned the Pals—“perhaps no story of the First World War is as poignant”—but was less fulsome about their skill as soldiers, arguing that the “stark simplicity” of the tactics (shelling and walking) were the 4th Army staff’s understandable response to the volunteers’ “lack of experience.” The first day of the Somme, he admitted, was not “a complete military failure,” but “it had been a human tragedy,” which, like Middlebrook, he described in the language of the Holocaust, asserting that there was “something Treblinka-like” about most accounts of the first of July—“those long docile lines of young men, shoddily uniformed, heavily burdened, numbered about their necks, plodding forward across a featureless landscape to their own extermination inside the barbed wire.” Again like Middlebrook, he saw July 1, 1916, as “the opening of a crucial phase” of the Western Front experience, as industrialized warfare really hit home. Keegan ended his account of the Somme with the protest literature of Blunden, Graves, Sassoon, and their ilk, contrasting what he called the “eternal quality” of the best writing of the First World War with the paucity of such offerings from the Second. By way of explanation he discerned a recognition after 1914–18 that “some limit of what human beings could and could not stand on the battlefield had at last been reached,” so that “the voice from the trenches spoke for every soldier of the industrial age.”10
The efforts of Middlebrook and Keegan to evoke the experience of the Great War were frowned on by traditional military historians. Correlli Barnett wrote a damning report for Penguin on Middlebrook’s sample chapters, complaining that the interviewees were spouting “pretty familiar stuff,” reminiscent of Sassoon, that Middlebrook tended to “repeat all the old bromides about the high command” and that the writing itself was “flat and boring.” Barnett never changed his view of the book, which was also condemned by Haig’s champion, Terraine.11 Other historians complained that Middlebrook and Keegan had strengthened “the tyrannical hold which July 1916 is now beginning to exert on British First World War studies”: by focusing on the British Army’s “worst day of the whole war” they fortified “the myth of incompetence and pointless slaughter which is all too often applied to the whole Somme campaign, and indeed to Western Front operations throughout.”12
A divide was now opening up between orthodox military historians who still focused on strategy, command, and operations and a new breed of writers, fascinated by the soldier’s experience of war. This “new” military history was often written by self-trained amateurs like Middlebrook, building on the growing vogue for family history. The Great War proved particularly fertile terrain for family historians because otherwise shadowy ancestors left a brief but clear paper trail in the official archives while serving in the armed forces. Although many documents were destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, service records for 2.75 million soldiers survived and became one of the main attractions at Britain’s National Archives when the files were gradually opened in 1996.13
It was the new military history, rooted in this growing passion with ancestors, that attracted readers. Middlebrook’s First Day on the Somme sold 40,000 copies in its first five years and topped 130,000 by 2005.14 In 1986, following a series of articles in a Yorkshire newspaper, the Barnsley Chronicle, local author Jon Cooksey published Pals—the saga of the two volunteer battalions that were raised by the town and fought on the Somme in July 1916—relying heavily on stories from survivors. This spawned a series of books on various Pals battalions, at least a dozen to date, from Accrington and Durham to Liverpool and Swansea. Most concentrate on 1914–16, especially the first days of the Somme, and say relatively little about the units during the rest of the war. In other words, they conform to a now familiar narrative, established by Harris and Middlebrook, about how local history became national tragedy. It is worth noting that most of the books published during and after the Great War about Kitchener’s volunteer “New Armies” did not single out the “Pals.” Their identification, almost consecration, has been a legacy of the 1970s.15
Like Middlebrook, Lyn Macdonald, a BBC radio producer, was drawn to the Great War after visiting the battlefields in 1972 with a group of veterans. She went freelance and began interviewing ex-soldiers for a book about the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917, They Called It Passchendaele, which was published in 1978. “If this book reads like a novel, or even a horror story, please do not blame me,” she told readers. “It is all true, or rather it is compiled from more than 600 true stories and eyewitness accounts of men and women who were in the blood-bath of Ypres.” The writing, she explained, “was a straightforward task of compiling and interpreting their experiences in the light of the events that took place as the campaign unrolled.” Over the next two decades Macdonald accumulated a huge database of interviews and produced six more bestselling books on various phases of the war, including Gallipoli, the Somme, and the spring of 1918, but their format remained essentially the same—built around lengthy quotations from interviews with veterans so that we can “stand in their boots” and “see things through their eyes.” Her narrative was essentially a framework in which to lay out, almost reverentially, the testimony of veterans.16
This is, however, a problematic approach to the writing of history. Although the recollections of ordinary participants can often provide fascinating and important historical detail that is not recorded in official archives, scholars cannot treat such “testimony” as intrinsically more reliable than any other source. Consider an example from Lyn Macdonald’s book about the battle of the Somme—the recollections of Lieutenant F. W. Beadle, an artillery officer, about a British cavalry charge on July 14, 1916:
It was an incredible sight, an unbelievable sight, they galloped up with their lances and with pennants flying, up the slope to High Wood and straight into it. Of course they were falling all the way . . . horses and men dropping on the ground, with no hope against the machine-guns, because the Germans up on the ridge were firing down into the valley where the soldiers were. It was an absolute rout. A magnificent sight. Tragic.17
Military historian Richard Holmes has dealt clinically with this vivid piece of apparently eyewitness testimony. First, as photographic evidence from 1916 makes clear, British cavalry units had dispensed with frills such as pennants. Second, a cavalry charge right into a wood that was full of summer foliage and had been heavily shelled would have been virtually impossible: High Wood on July 14 was hard enough for the infantry to get through. Finally, the war diaries of the units in question show they incurred very light casualties on that day, while inflicting considerable damage on German machine-gunners. The cavalry had been used, in effect, as mounted infantry, rapidly moving against German emplacements before dismounting and digging in. In short, High Wood was “not the Charge of the Light Brigade,” even though that was how, half a century later, Lieutenant Beadle saw it in his mind’s eye.* In Holmes’s words, Beadle “tells us precisely what we expect to hear,” given our assumptions about the archaic futility of the Somme, but “it is something that did not actually take place.”18
“Memory” is therefore not a quasi-photographic record of the past, more or less sharp, but rather, for all of us, an ever-changing process of construction involving past and present. Shakespeare’s King Henry V captured the point beautifully in his oration before the battle of Agincourt:
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day . . . 19
“Remembering with advantages”—in other words, gilding the lily, embroidering the story. This theme has been explored by historian Alistair Thomson in Anzac Memories (1987), a subtle analysis of how Australian veterans of the Great War spoke about their experiences at various points in the 1980s. To describe this process he preferred the term “composure,” using it in two senses: we compose memories “using the public languages or meanings of our culture” and we also do so in ways that “help us feel relatively comfortable with our lives and identities, that give us a feeling of composure.” Thomson’s extended interviews showed one soldier, a natural raconteur, had an oft-used repertoire of personal anecdotes that actually mirrored almost exactly passages from his battalion’s official history. Another veteran, who experienced a difficult postwar transition both psychologically and economically, took on the full “Digger” identity—boozy, matey, and irreverent—to make himself acceptable as an embodiment of Australian masculinity. A third veteran, whose nerves disintegrated under shellfire at Fromelles in 1916, was driven into silent alienation from the cult of Anzac Day on April 25: his later conversion into a labor activist gave him a new and articulate identity as a working-class victim of imperialist folly. Yet, in retirement in the 1970s, he was finally able to address his war experiences, talking about them publicly and positively without sacrificing his antiwar principles.20
Reflecting on these three contrasting examples, Thomson noted that oral history—in origin a justified reaction to academic fetishism about documents being the only proper source—needed to be self-critical about its own methods. What soldiers said fifty years on was not automatically “the truth”: historians had to reflect sensitively about the way such testimony was “articulated in relation to public narratives and personal identities,” both of which were in constant flux.21
Thomson’s criticisms, applicable to the general cult of soldier “voices” from the Great War, had particular relevance in Australia because it was in the 1970s and 1980s that the saga of the Anzacs—the Australian and New Zealand Corps of 1914–18—took a real hold on the public imagination there. In 1965 the fiftieth anniversary of the Gallipoli landings had been a somewhat muted event in Australia. Its ceremonies were dominated by ex-servicemen of the Returned and Services League (RSL), against a background of left-wing sniping that the morning service served to glorify war and excuse an afternoon of booze and gambling. For many schoolchildren Anzac Day rituals were “solemn occasions marked by puzzling words intoned with an earnestness we could only dimly understand . . . We were forever warned lest we forget. But it was far from clear what we might forget.” Some newspapers wondered whether the whole thing would simply fade away: the Sydney Mirror asked, “Will Anzac Day be as meaningless to future generations as Trafalgar and Waterloo?”22
Over the subsequent quarter century from 1965, however, the saga of the Diggers entrenched itself in Australian public life even more deeply than that of the Tommies in Britain. Along lines that Alistair Thomson described, this reflected changing patterns of engagement between present and past.
Although Australia’s 1915 baptism by fire at Gallipoli on April 25 became established during the 1920s as Australia’s national day, the commemoration still featured what one celebrant called the “crimson thread of kinship” with the “British race.” The city of Melbourne’s great Shrine of Remembrance, completed in 1934, declares on the east wall that it honors “the men and women of Victoria who served the Empire in the war of 1914–1918.” When Australia went to war a second time in 1939, its soldiers took on the mantle of their revered predecessors as the “2nd Australian Imperial Force.”23 Although there was a temptation in Australia during the Second World War, as in the First, to blame wartime setbacks on London’s ineptitude, especially the surrender of Singapore in early 1942, it is too simple to suggest that this was the moment when Australia suddenly turned away from Britain toward America or to a policy of independent self-assertion. “First and foremost, Australia is a Pacific power,” declared Foreign Minister Percy Spender in 1944, but, he insisted, that did not “in the slightest degree lessen her ties of kinship with Great Britain.” A continued sense of being part of a British world was particularly intense for Robert Menzies and the Liberals during their long tenure in office from 1949 to 1972, but it was also true of their Labor opponents such as Arthur Calwell and Ben Chifley.24
Postwar Australia was certainly strengthening its ties with America and its interactions with the countries of the Pacific—as became dramatically evident during the country’s deep and controversial involvement from 1965 in America’s Vietnam War, from which Britain stood aloof. But the catalyst for clear-cut policy change was not so much burgeoning Australian nationalism as declining British imperialism. Britain’s decision in 1961 to apply for membership in the European Community highlighted in stark symbolic terms a fundamental shift of British attention from the empire to Europe. This forced Australians, both politicians and public, to address explicitly the readjustments in the country’s position that had been going on gradually for some years. Australia then moved rapidly to assert much greater independence—pushed on by Labor leaders eager to attack Menzies and his Conservative colleagues for their “forelock-tugging” toward London. In the blunt words of Paul Keating, Britain had simply “walked out on us and joined the Common Market.”25
At this time when Australia’s present and future seemed uncertain, a few writers aroused new interest in the country’s Great War past. Ken Inglis drew attention to the now-neglected war histories of C.E.W. Bean, leading popularizer of the Anzac myth. Charles Bean had been the Australian official historian for the Great War but his output was very different from the emotionless, top-down British tomes castigated by John Keegan. Bean practiced bottom-up history long before it was developed in Britain by Martin Middlebrook, making extensive use in the 1920s of personal diaries, soldiers’ letters, and oral history. From all this he distilled the image of the Australian soldier (or Digger) as a uniquely outstanding fighter because he was a rugged product of the “bush” and of a classless society defined above all by a deep loyalty to one’s “mates.” This latent identity was made real in war: at Gallipoli, declared Bean in 1924, nothing less than “the consciousness of Australian nationhood was born.”26
Bean’s definition of Australian identity, resurrected by Inglis and others around the fiftieth anniversary of Gallipoli, became the template for new studies of the Diggers of the Great War. Bill Gammage’s emotionally charged The Broken Years (1974) drew inspiration from Bean, whose work he described as “among the greatest contributions yet made to the history of Australia.” His book was based on extensive quotation from the diaries and letters of roughly a thousand soldiers, including 272 with whom he personally talked and corresponded. Gammage’s stated aim was simply to show “what some Australian soldiers thought and felt during the war” but, in consequence, he conveyed little sense of strategy or tactics: soldiers were essentially victims of the High Command. In fact Gammage, unlike Bean, saw the Digger’s war as irredeemably tragic. “There never was a greater tragedy than World War I,” he insisted. “It engulfed an age, and conditions the times that followed. It contaminated every ideal for which it was waged, it threw up waste and horror worse than all the evils it sought to avert.” Gammage featured “nationhood, brotherhood and sacrifice” at Gallipoli, but he also emphasized the far greater losses experienced by Australian soldiers on the Somme—more than 5,000 casualties in a supposed “feint” attack at Fromelles on July 19–20 (“Australians had never experienced a more calamitous or tragic night”) and another 23,000 at Pozières—“a monstrous sacrifice” over several weeks in July and August to “win a few yards of ground.”27
His Diggers were ordinary men caught up in this “maelstrom,” yet their “spirits were rarely broken” and Gammage celebrated many acts of courage and tenacity. What broke, he argued, was the old pre-1914 worldview. This was not simply because “an upsurge of Australian nationalism,” glorified by Anzac heroes, displaced the old Imperial sentiment: there was also a political rupture. Writing from the left in the early 1970s when the Australian Labor Party (ALP) was finally back in power, Gammage asserted that “Australians in 1914 had wanted a paradise for the majority,” cleansed from “Old World evils” and characterized by democracy and egalitarianism. But the strident war nationalism and the bitter 1916 debate over conscription sundered the ALP, so that “the general majority which in 1914 had sought to create a social paradise in Australia was both split and made leaderless by the war,” while “the conservatives had joined with those who had fought in the war to take firm possession of the spirit of Anzac, and to maintain an influence in Australian life which is only now diminishing.” Gammage’s depiction of the Digger’s war had much in common with the saga of the Tommy’s hellish journey out of Edwardian innocence. Although “the boundless eagerness of August 1914 is a world removed from our time,” he concluded, “what began to happen on Gallipoli nine months later is with us yet.”28
Building on Gammage, the popular author Patsy Adam-Smith produced The Anzacs (1978), a heavily illustrated book in short and readable chapters, based on the testimony from an even larger number of veterans. “War is hell,” Adam-Smith declared in the preface. “But in our attempts to denigrate it, to outlaw it, we must not castigate the victims of war—and every man who fights is a victim.” Although victims, the soldiers chronicled were no saints. She addressed taboo subjects such as brothels and venereal disease and also demythologized John Simpson, the fabled Australian hero of Gallipoli, who carried the wounded down “Shrapnel Valley” to the beach on a donkey from morning till night for three weeks until he was finally killed on May 18, 1915. Simpson, she reminded readers, was born and raised in Britain, on Tyneside, until he set off around the world as a merchant-seaman at age seventeen. He was also “a boozer, a brawler” who “enjoyed a good punch-up” rather than “the delicate, aesthetic visionary the artists and eulogists have recorded.” Adam-Smith deliberately did not write about strategy or generals. Playing war games miles from the battlefields, she said, commanders “could sacrifice as many men as they liked without the sight of the gobbets of flesh on tangled barbed wire to trouble them.” Her heroes, warts and all, were the Diggers, to whom she effusively dedicated her book. “When time has removed this age to a distance, our descendants will speak of you as we now speak of the three hundred at Thermopylae—but I have had the rare, and peerless, privilege of knowing you.”29
Gammage and Adam-Smith stimulated a new wave of interest in the Aussies of 1914–18. By 1981 The Broken Years had sold 17,000 copies and The Anzacs 30,000, even before it went into paperback that year.30 Also important was the rejuvenation of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. The AWM was another of Bean’s creations—an internationally unique mixture of shrine, museum and archive that opened in 1941. By the early 1970s it had a “rather fusty image,” to quote Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam, with conservative staff, dated exhibits, and poor facilities, but then substantial government investment, especially in education and outreach, transformed its profile. The number of visitors doubled between 1965 and 1982 to more than one million a year, most of whom were under forty with no personal knowledge of the Great War.31
As in Britain, it was above all on the screen that the Anzac saga was conveyed to new generations. In Australia, the equivalent of Oh What a Lovely War was Peter Weir’s 1981 feature film Gallipoli, for which Gammage acted as historical adviser. The film’s publicity poster—“From a place you have never heard of . . . A story you’ll never forget”—said a lot about where the Anzac saga had been in the 1970s and equally where it would be going. A vivid story of two young Aussies, Gallipoli did a huge amount to revive popular interest in 1915, bringing to life the soldiers as youthful adventurers rather than grizzled veterans, and spawning several imitative TV series. The movie has been described as “pure Bean, complete with traditional stereotypes of the bushman-digger and incompetent British commanders.”32
Australia’s obsession with their Great War heroes was also promoted officially, after the country’s acrimonious bicentennial celebrations in 1988. Aboriginal groups and their supporters dubbed Australia Day on January 26 (which commemorated the arrival of the “First Fleet” of British settler ships in Botany Bay) as “Invasion Day,” protesting that “White Australia has a Black History.” With this debate rumbling on, Anzac Day seemed to offer a more consensual focus for national identity. In 1990, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Anzac landings, Bob Hawke became the first Australian prime minister to attend the dawn service at Gallipoli. His successor, Paul Keating, presided over the campaign to have Australia’s own Unknown Soldier finally interred in the memorial in Canberra on November 11, 1993, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of the Great War. The grave in Westminster Abbey, intended in 1920 to symbolize the missing from all the British Empire, was no longer acceptable. As the country’s ties with Britain loosened, the Anzac legend “could now be refashioned as the Bastille Day or Fourth of July Australia never had, the day which cut Australia adrift from its Imperial past.”33
Although New Zealand was Australia’s full partner in the original Anzac corps, the Kiwis never achieved the cult status of the Diggers. This is ironic, given New Zealand’s losses in 1914–18—its 18,000 dead represented 8 percent of men of military age, a higher proportion than for any country in the empire except Britain. And the culture of Kiwi soldiers was similar to that of the Diggers—boozy and matey, contemptuous of officers and especially of the English. But there was no New Zealand equivalent of Charles Bean to turn folk culture into national myth, and New Zealand remained a particularly Anglophile part of the Commonwealth. There was no Australian-style revisiting of Gallipoli for the fiftieth anniversary and it was only after Christopher Pugsley’s pioneering account of the New Zealanders at Gallipoli in 1984, a decade after Bill Gammage, that interest in the men of 1914–18 began to revive. Not until 2004 was an Unknown Warrior disinterred from the Western Front and reburied in front of the National War Memorial in Wellington. New Zealand rediscovered its Great War soldiers more slowly and less stridently than its Anzac partner.34
So it was the British and the Australians who pioneered this new and passionate interest in the soldiers of the Great War. But there were also revealing national contrasts. First, Australians made the anniversary of a botched battle into virtually the country’s national day. In Britain, by contrast, Remembrance Sunday in November—though far more esteemed than the Queen’s Official Birthday, let alone St. George’s Day—never made any connection with national identity. Here is another sign, I think, of how the world wars, while emotionally important in Britain, have been detached from any clear narrative structure of meaning.
This contrast raises a second point: Remembrance Sunday in Britain recalls the end of hostilities, whereas Anzac Day marks their start for Australia, both as the AIF’s baptism by fire, and, in a larger sense, Australia’s birth as a nation. So the act of commemoration is coupled with a celebration of Australian virtues. For the British, on the other hand, Remembrance Day is entirely a moment to honor the war dead, somber in tone and tapping into a rich vein of poetry with Wilfred Owen at its heart.
This raises a third and fundamental difference between the two countries. Australian literature about the Great War, both during it and afterward, was “based on one fundamental premise: that the Australians excel, even revel, in battle.” Nor was this a passing phase: throughout the twentieth century “every mode of Australian war prose” has functioned “either overtly or covertly as publicity for the Australian soldier and twentieth-century embodiment of classical heroic virtue.”35 In short, there was nothing comparable to the corpus of antiwar poetry and prose so evident in Britain. And in the 1970s that writing was revivified and sanctified for a new generation by the American academic Paul Fussell.
Born in 1924, so roughly a decade older than Middlebrook and Keegan, Fussell fought in France and Germany at the end of the Second World War and then became a university professor. His early work explored eighteenth-century English literature, but it was The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) that made his name. “This book is about the British experience on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918,” he explained, and also about “some of the literary means by which it has been remembered, conventionalized, and mythologized.” Fussell selected features of what he took to be a standardized trench experience, illustrating each with reference to a classic antiwar poet or memoirist—for instance, Edmund Blunden’s use of pastoral imagery to indict with quiet irony the gross destructiveness of modern war. This analysis was not of mere antiquarian interest: Fussell argued “that there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.” Irony, he stated, “is the attendant of hope, and the fuel of hope is innocence.” Using Larkin’s line about “never such innocence again” and the photo of volunteers in August 1914 that inspired it, he summoned up “those sweet, generous people who pressed forward and all but solicited their own destruction.” He claimed that “the innocent army fully attained the knowledge of good and evil at the Somme on July 1, 1916.”36
As these quotations suggest, Fussell did not believe in understatement. His book is full of tendentious generalizations and its mode of argument is highly selective. Most chapters posit a theme and then develop this with reference to a Great War writer, whose vision is validated as typical by a few snippets from soldiers’ letters and diaries, before Fussell fast-forwards to some extracts from war literature later in the twentieth century, usually by Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, or Thomas Pynchon. So, for example, the “binary vision” of Siegfried Sassoon is used to illuminate the “gross dichotomizing”—“us” and “them,” friend and foe—which Fussell asserted to be “a persisting imaginative habit of modern times, traceable, it would seem, to the actualities of the Great War . . . Paranoid trench warfare, whether enacted or remembered, fosters paranoid melodrama, which I take to be a primary mode in modern writing.”37
Central for Fussell was his belief in the primacy of experience. He brought to bear on the writings of Britain’s 1914–18 generation his own time as a bloodied American veteran from 1944–45. The Great War and Modern Memory is dedicated to the memory of a fellow GI “killed beside me in France, March 15, 1945.” To be more explicit, as he admitted later, his buddy was blown to bits all over him by German shellfire. Anger at such war experiences festered beneath the surface of Fussell’s postwar academic life—resentment about how ordinary soldiers were manipulated by the men at the top and about the lofty ideas and sly euphemisms with which they justified mass killing. What brought all this into the open was his anger at the same pattern being repeated once again. “In 1975,” he reflected later, “my American readers had also experienced in Vietnam their own terrible and apparently pointless war of attrition, which made body counts a household phrase.” Here was yet another war “dichotomized” between good and evil. Fussell hoped that his book might persuade American readers “that even Gooks had feelings, that even they hated to die, and like us called for help or God or Mother when their agony became unbearable.”38
Fussell’s Great War was set entirely in the “troglodyte world” of the Western Front. “Correctly or not,” he explained, “the current idea of ‘the Great War’ derives primarily from images of the trenches in France and Belgium. I have thus stayed there with the British infantry, largely disregarding events in Mesopotamia, Turkey, Africa, and Ireland, and largely ignoring air and naval warfare.” Of the massive war effort on Britain’s home front, there was virtually no mention. Yet, as historians critical of Fussell pointed out, “these major aspects of the war are not tragic or ironic or self-evidently futile. Even more, they rescued the Western Front from being these things, if only after an abysmal three years of waiting and enduring.” In other words, Fussell presents the Great War with 1918 left out—apart from a cursory half page in chapter 1—because, he insists, the war “still goes on,” pervading the rest of the century, especially in Britain: “The whole texture of British daily life could be said to commemorate the war still,” from pub-closing hours to “the current economic bankruptcy of Britain” and the “Americanization of Europe.” Even when depicting the Western Front, Fussell was on shaky ground: men usually spent only three weeks in the forward trenches before being rotated back to rest and training areas and then working their way through the rear trenches to the front line once again. So, even for combat soldiers, much of the Great War was uneventful: “the war’s atrociousness” lay not so much in its longevity but in the horrors that “could be compressed into a few hours or days” at the front.39
Twenty-five years later in 2000, Fussell, a famously combative figure, was unusually defensive about The Great War and Modern Memory, admitting many of its limitations with plaintive excuses: “After all, I was writing not a history, only an elegiac commentary . . . a book in which historical data was called on to enhance the elegiac effect . . . the work of an essayist, not, at the time, that of a scholar.” This was, perhaps, a natural response after being savaged by military historians, but it also reflected the fate of any book that attracts voracious attention and in the process has been picked to the bone. Whatever Fussell claimed to have been his intentions, the book has been taken as history—its account of the front experience through the eyes of antiwar poets and memoirists reinforcing the 1970s fascination with ordinary soldiers. Like Middlebrook and Keegan, Fussell felt a deeply emotional reaction to evidence he discussed—derived, in contrast to them, from his own experience of combat—and this gave his writing at times a passionate intensity. On specific authors he could be strikingly innovative—about the homoerotic element in Owen’s poetry, for instance, or on the “caricature” theatricality of Graves’s Good-bye to All That. But rather than breaking new historical ground, one might say that his book dug up the old mud in a provocative way, telling readers “a great deal that at some level they already knew about very well-established characteristics of war writing in general and the Great War in particular.”40
Fussell gave canonical form to the story of soldiers as victims, immured in the trenches, their tragic experience interpreted by poets. By 2012 his book had sold more than 100,000 copies, exerting a powerful influence on academic thinking across the English-speaking world. Fussell saw 1914–18 as the defining event of Britain’s twentieth century. Across the Atlantic, his picture of a civilization coming to terms with a disaster for which it was totally unprepared appealed to intellectuals struggling with America’s own supposed loss of idealistic innocence in Vietnam. And the burgeoning interest in the experience of ordinary “grunts” in Indochina—depicted in memoirs, novels and movies—was in some ways the American equivalent of Britain’s cult of the Tommy.41
It should be admitted that this rediscovery of the ordinary soldier was not exclusively a British or even Anglophone phenomenon. In fact, it was pioneered in France. Yet the story there and also in West Germany both serve to underscore the peculiarities of Britain.
The poilu—France’s equivalent of the Tommy or the Doughboy—had been written out of interwar histories of the Great War. There had been a few attempted counterattacks, such as Jean Norton Cru’s Temoins (1929)—a critical analysis of soldiers’ novels, memoirs, and letters—and Jacques Péricard’s Verdun (1933), based, rather like Middlebrook’s work, on soldiers’ accounts that he solicited through the newspapers. But these were very much the exceptions. The accepted form for Great War history in France was set in 1934 by La crise européenne et la Grande Guerre (1904–1918) by Pierre Renouvin, professor at the Sorbonne for thirty years, who dominated French history-writing about 1914–18 in a way that has no equivalent in Britain or Germany. Renouvin’s classic text went through five editions, two of them published during the 1960s. This was a vast study of diplomatic, political, and military history, with virtually no reference to the home front, workers’ strikes, or even soldiers’ mutinies, let alone what Renouvin dismissed as “the atmosphere of battle.” His strict definition of war history is all the more striking because Renouvin was a gravely wounded veteran of la grande guerre (losing his left arm and the use of his right hand on the Chemin des Dames in 1917), but in his scholarly writing he never mentioned the war he had personally endured. For Renouvin, history required objectivity, the exclusion of self, whereas Cru believed that personal experience was central.42
It was not until the twilight of Renouvin’s career that his grip on French historiography began to weaken. The year 1959 saw publication of Vie et mort des français 1914–1918—an account of the conflict built around extracts from the writings of ordinary people: soldiers but also civilians, women as well as men. The three authors—André Ducasse, Jacques Meyer, and Gabriel Perreux—were not scholars but they had written works of popular history and were all veterans of 1914–18. Indeed, Ducasse had published an anthology of writings from the front in 1932. Following the success of Vie et mort des français, which was republished with extensive illustrations in 1963 (the same year as A. J. P. Taylor’s illustrated history of the Great War), in 1966 Mayer and Perreux brought out parallel volumes looking in more detail at the daily life of, respectively, soldiers and civilians, again composed largely from contemporary writings. Although Mayer spent about half his book in the trenches, he was at pains to stress the variety of the war experience, getting away from the familiar set-piece battles. Verdun, for instance, took up only thirty-three of his 370 pages; the ninety-page chapter entitled “Sensations et Sentiments” explored courage and fear, faith and fatalism, attitudes toward allies and the enemy. Throughout Mayer emphasized the varieties of soldiering (artillerymen lived different lives from riflemen), the profound contrasts between the front line, the rear trenches and the leave areas, and the vast diversity of place and time along a front that extended for “eight hundred kilometres” during a war that lasted “nearly sixteen hundred days.” All very different from the narrowing British gaze into the abyss of July 1, 1916.43
Perreux’s counterpart volume on daily civilian life was equally capacious, including sections about “women without men,” restrictions (rationing, health, and food shortages), and changing social fortunes (the new poor and the new rich). Like Mayer, its tone was descriptive and unsentimental, stressing the fundamental social changes wrought by the war, whether recognized or not: “in four years, one had quite frankly changed centuries.”44 There were similarities here in intent, if not style, with Arthur Marwick’s The Deluge (1965), which gained a wide readership as a textbook for Britain’s new Open University. This book was a breezy, broad-brush study of how British society (though not the state) was transformed during the war and many of Marwick’s conclusions have been modified by later research, for instance on the transformed position of women or the irresistible rise of “collectivist” economics. But The Deluge was significant as a determined assault on the Western Front and its hold on the British conception of the Great War. Fifty years on, argued Marwick, “without denying the validity of the bitterness, or forgetting the futile horror which gave rise to it,” one should recognize that “on the whole Britain in the inter-war years was a better place to live in than it had been in 1914”—which did not imply, he hastened to add, that the war itself had been “a good thing.”45
Marwick was, however, a relatively lone voice amid the British dirge about the trenches. There was nothing comparable in 1970s Britain to the major works of archive-based scholarship that started to appear in France, such as Jean-Jacques Becker’s critique of the myth of war enthusiasm in August 1914 or Antoine Prost’s exhaustive examination of the role of veterans in postwar French social and political life—both published in 1977. Conversely, there has never been a French edition of Fussell’s book, and none of the poetry of which he wrote was translated into French until late in the twentieth century—Sassoon in 1987 and Owen in 1995.46 The stated aim of the Association Wilfred Owen France (founded in 2005) is to “make radiant” (faire rayonner) the life and work of a man who is the most studied author in Britain after Shakespeare, while being “almost totally unknown to the public outside the borders of his native land.”47
In West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s, where historical and national debate still revolved around the Nazi era, there was even less interest in the social history of Great War soldiers. The Fritz Fischer controversy rumbled on, fanning the flames of the old debate about “war guilt,” and although there was some significant research about the German home front, notably by Jürgen Kocka, this concentrated on explaining the 1918 revolution. Kocka and other leading historians from the so-called Bielefeld school formulated a highly ideological approach to social history based on Weberian sociology and “modernization” theory, which privileged socioeconomic structures over the ideas and actions of individuals. The 1980s did see a reaction against such “structuralist” social history in the form of the history of daily life (Alltagsgeschichte). This featured the experiences of ordinary people using unconventional sources such as photographs and oral history, but its main foci were labor history and the Nazi era, where it proved revealing on the complex personal and local accommodations “ordinary” Germans made with the Third Reich. Attempts to apply Alltagsgeschichte to 1914–18 had limited success until after the end of the Cold War.48
Yet in one important albeit circuitous way Germany did help reinforce this new preoccupation with men at the front. George Mosse’s book Fallen Soldiers, published in 1990 but the result of research he began in the late 1970s, reworked the discourse about the “front-experience” (Fronterlebnis) that was central to right-wing German writing in the 1920s and 1930s, not least Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Mosse had been born in 1918 into a wealthy Berlin Jewish family but after 1933 he was educated first in Britain and then America, where he spent his professional academic life. He was particularly concerned with the part played by what he called “the Myth of the War Experience”—celebrating aggressive, comradely masculinity and “an acceptance of war”—in the “brutalization” of post-1918 politics in Germany. But, Mosse insisted, “no nation after the war could completely escape the process of brutalization . . . To many all over Europe it seemed as if the First World War had never ended but was being continued during the interwar years.” His argument was garnished with a few examples from England, a country that, he argued, “also underwent such a process of brutalization, even if the more courteous and respectful prewar political discourse remained intact.” The “myth” was in part political fabrication but, Mosse insisted, it was “not entirely fictitious,” being distilled from “the reality of the war experience” in “the little world of the trenches.” In his view “trench warfare determined not only the perception of war of those who passed through it, but also how the war was understood by future generations.” Mosse’s book proved very influential among historians, especially its “brutalization” thesis, and his postulate that there was a uniform “front experience” defined by the trenches helped to confirm the image of the Great War conveyed by Middlebrook, Keegan, and Fussell.49
Fallen Soldiers was subtitled Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. Its discussion of the “cult of the fallen soldier” and its examination of the design of war memorials reflected a growing interest in the processes of war remembrance.
* It is probably not irrelevant that The Charge of the Light Brigade, Tony Richardson’s movie about the notorious Crimean fiasco of 1854, had appeared in 1968—another product of the antiwar mood of the Vietnam era.