And when they ask us, how dangerous it was,
Oh, we’ll never tell them, no, we’ll never tell them …
First World War song
On 11 November 1945, after its six-year suspension during the Second World War, Armistice Day was reinstated. It happened that year to fall on a Sunday – which meant that it coincided with Remembrance Sunday, the day suggested by the recently enthroned Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, for wartime observance – and it was initially announced as ‘Remembrance Day’. ‘The change of title enriches the Day with a wider scope and a heightened significance,’ The Times decided. ‘Tomorrow and through years to come all who fell whether between 1914 and 1918 or 1939 and 1945 will be united by a single commemoration, as in life they were united by a single aim. Remembrance Day is to have a fixed place in the national calendar, with the hope that it may be observed throughout the Commonwealth and Empire, and possibly in the United States
also.’ That place in the calendar had not, however, been settled. In fact no final decision had yet been taken about the name either, or indeed whether the dead of the two wars should be remembered on the same or different days.
Everyone agreed that the massive losses recently suffered – many of them civilian losses – should be commemorated in the way the losses of the previous war had been. Some argued that an entirely separate day should be designated, but choosing one proved complicated. Because the Second World War had been fought on many more fronts and in many more countries than the First World War, there was no exact equivalent of 1918’s Armistice Day, a day on which it could be said that the war conclusively ended and hostilities ceased around the world. Instead there was VE Day marking the Victory in Europe on 8 May 1945 and VJ Day marking Victory over Japan on 15 August 1945. Neither of these seemed satisfactory for what it was hoped would be international observance in the Commonwealth and Empire. The Times further noted that VJ Day was ‘inconvenient and unsuitable, occurring as it does in the middle of August holidays’; VE Day was a better choice, ‘though its possible if very infrequent coincidence with Ascension Day has to be remembered’. Equally pragmatic objections were raised by the paper over continuing with 11 November, which carried with it the ‘risk of weather unfavourable to outdoor ceremonies’, a factor that also ‘may be thought to rule out All Souls’ Day, November 2, which otherwise seems an excellent choice’ – excellent because the Church’s designation for the day is Commemoratio omnium Fidelium Defunctorum, the Commemoration of all the Faithful Departed.
Even given these difficulties, the paper still felt that the ‘union of commemorations is well advised. Personal memories of the late war are vivid and poignant for all, while those of the earlier belong now to older folk alone.’ To categorise those who had lost husbands and fiancés in that war, and might still be in their forties, let alone those younger people who as children had lost fathers, as ‘older folk’ seems wide of the mark. In spite of what Britain had been through during the past six years, there would almost certainly have been considerable resistance to changing the date of national commemoration among those who had fought in or been directly affected by the First World War. The lessons for the future may not have been learned, as had been piously hoped, but this did not mean the sacrifices of the generation of 1914–18 should be forgotten or even superseded by those of the generation of 1939–45. The Times did at least agree this point: ‘What is owed to those who fought and died in 1914–18 must never be forgotten. In a real sense, indeed, the two wars were but separate parts of one, being waged against the same enemy in defence of the same principles and ennobled by the same spirit of self-sacrifice.’ This may have been historically and politically questionable, but was also the view in France, where, as The Times itself had earlier reported, the two conflicts were generally regarded ‘as one war interrupted by an armed and uneasy truce’.
France was at that very moment arranging a particularly sombre commemoration of Armistice Day in which the bodies of three members of the Resistance (two men and a woman), two presumably Jewish ‘deportees’, a prisoner of war who had died in a German camp, and ‘nine soldiers from France and her territories overseas killed in the military campaigns’ would be brought to Paris on the evening of 10 November. Entering through the three city gates, they would be taken in a torchlit procession to Les Invalides, where they would spend the night. The following morning the coffins would be conducted to the Arc de Triomphe, where, beneath an eternally burning flame, France’s Unknown Warrior was buried. This would allow crowds to file past to pay their respects to the representative dead of both wars. In the evening, the coffins would be escorted on gun carriages to the fortress of Mont Valérian, where 4,500 French men and women had been executed by Germans during the war. There they would wait until they could be laid in a special shrine being built for them.
Unlike Britain, France had been a battleground in both wars, and it had suffered even greater casualties. Its losses in the First World War outstripped even those of Germany, while its occupation by the Nazis during the Second World War and subsequent questions about the extent to which its citizens had collaborated with the enemy were a national trauma Britain was fortunate enough not to have had to confront. There appears to have been no move in France to commemorate these national catastrophes separately, and the Armistice Day ceremony there in 1945 seemed designed to emphasise a sense of continuity. It was certainly a very different occasion to the somewhat muted and business-as-usual one planned at the Cenotaph. Whatever the politicians and The Times may have thought, the continuity of sacrifice would be emphasised in Britain when communities planned how they were to commemorate the new casualties of war. In general, sculptors lost out to letterers since, rather than commissioning new war memorials, most towns and villages merely added the later dates and a further, though almost always shorter, list of names to existing memorials. A similar decision would be taken about the Cenotaph. Lutyens had died on 1 January 1944, but he would no doubt have been pleased that the only alteration made to his elegant pylon would be the addition of dates: ‘MCMXXXIX’ and ‘MCMXLV’.
On the first Remembrance Sunday after the war, 11 November 1945, huge crowds gathered in Whitehall just as they had between the wars, though conspicuous by his absence from the proceedings was the new Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. Perhaps appropriately, given the role America had played in the recently concluded war, Attlee was visiting President Truman for talks in Washington. It was announced that he would attend a ceremony held in Arlington National Cemetery, where America’s Unknown Soldier had been buried on 11 November 1921. Meanwhile, James Chuter-Ede, who had been appointed Home Secretary and was spending Remembrance Sunday in Epsom, chose the day to announce that this would probably be the last year in which the commemoration would take place in November.
The debate continued throughout the remainder of the year and well into 1946. Elements of both the British Legion and the Federation of Townswomen’s Guilds (the latter representing the bereaved women who had traditionally been a focus of Armistice Day) wanted to retain 11 November, but on 19 June the Prime Minister told Parliament that from now on Armistice Day would be replaced permanently in the calendar by Remembrance Sunday, held on the second Sunday of November. This was something of a triumph for the Church, which had always been concerned that insufficient religious emphasis had been placed on Armistice Day. Given that the Second World War had broken out less than twenty-one years after ‘the war to end wars’ had concluded, and was characterised by the indiscriminate bombings of civilians by both sides, the brutalities of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, the genocidal policies conducted by the Nazis, and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by nuclear weapons, it might be thought that the Church had little reason to want to appropriate the day. God’s infinite mercy had, after all, seemed in short supply recently. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, nevertheless proclaimed: ‘Remembrance of all those who died in the two wars and of all that was done and suffered; thanksgiving for deliverance and for the good hand of God upon us; dedication in the strength of God to all true purposes – these will be uppermost in hearts and prayers on that day.’ He and the Archbishop of York, Cyril Forster Garbett, had approved orders of service for the new day, copies of which, it was announced, were available from the SPCK (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge).
Apparently forgetting that it had originally advised against a November date, The Times now decided nothing could be more appropriate:
Some of the world’s greatest poets – HOMER, VIRGIL, DANTE MITON – have seen in the falling of autumnal leaves the image of fleeting generations of men; and from before the dawn of history our ancestors seem to have dedicated the month of November to thoughts of the beloved dead. In their proud festival of All Saints, as well as the more sombre commemoration of All Souls, the Christian church has made this immemorial cult its own, giving it richer, nobler, and in a deep sense happier significance. So in the quiet of the falling year we shall remember the valour and the sacrifice, and continue to give thanks.
The two minutes’ silence was retained as part of the Remembrance Sunday ceremonies, but its impact was massively reduced. This was chiefly because the whole idea of the Silence was to bring the country to a stop, whatever it was doing, and on a Sunday morning the country was usually doing very little. Shops, offices and factories were closed and a considerable percentage of the population was either in church, or at home preparing Sunday lunch or relaxing over the Sunday papers. Those who had televisions could, if they wished, watch a live broadcast of the ceremony at the Cenotaph, which took place in lovely autumnal weather that year. ‘The setting, architectural and human, of the service was as it has always been, but with Whitehall looking its most beautiful,’ The Times reported.
No accident of weather marred the ceremony; there cannot have been a finer late autumn morning in London. Certainly it was cold, but it was also exhilarating while the sun shone, and that was till half an hour or more after the Silence. All through the service the Cenotaph, like the gnomon of a giant sundial, threw a long, deep shadow that moved slowly eastward across the roadway north of the monument, where the King and Princess Elizabeth had their posts.
The future Queen, who had served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) during the war, was there in her khaki uniform to represent future generations, and her father wore the uniform of the Admiral of the Fleet. The remainder of the Royal Family, dressed in black and sporting scarlet poppies, looked down upon the ceremony from a first-floor window of the Home Office building.
Part of that ceremony was the unveiling of the two new dates carved on the east and west faces of the Cenotaph to match MCMXIV and MCMXIX on the north and south ones. Just before 11 a.m., the King stepped forward and ‘pulled a gold-tasselled cord, so drawing apart two pairs of small shutters, apparently made of close-packed laurel leaves, which had hidden the two halves of the new inscription’. He then stepped back as Big Ben began sounding the hour and a gun went off to mark the beginning of the Silence. The crowd heard the ‘dull explosions of belated maroons in the distance. After that a quiet all but complete, chiefly disturbed by the noise of heavy aircraft somewhere to the west. As the throb of engines swelled and died away some who heard may have felt the sounds to be not wholly irrelevant.’ The Times drew a comparison with this day and the unveiling of the original, temporary Cenotaph by the King’s father, George V. ‘Looking back to 1919, it was surely still possible then to feel with something like certainty, however mistakenly, that the world must and could determine that the catastrophe should never recur. But to-day? There seemed plenty of time in the Silence for some not very satisfactory thoughts, mixed with private memories that rustled with the last leaves on the Whitehall plane trees.’
Wreaths were laid by the King and Princess Elizabeth, and on behalf of Queen Mary, the Queen Mother. Then came the Prime Minister, characteristically upstaged by the Leader of the Opposition, Winston Churchill, ‘with many medals pinned on his overcoat’. The massed bands of the Brigade of Guards and the choir of the Chapel Royal sang the hymn ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’, and the Archbishop of Canterbury said a short prayer before leading the crowd in the Lord’s Prayer. It may have been Remembrance Sunday, but the Church’s role at the Cenotaph remained small. ‘As the white-helmeted buglers of the Royal Marines sounded a gay and lovely Reveille the Cenotaph flags were stilled again as if listening.’ There followed a march-past led by 2,000 men and women of the British Legion and representatives of what were now the four services, civil defence joining the army, navy and air force. The police then moved into position and members of the public were ‘marshalled into endless moving streams along Whitehall’: ‘The civilian pilgrimage past the Cenotaph went on for many hours. Many tributes, from wreaths to single poppies, were left at its base by men and women, themselves wearing poppies and often medals, who had also brought with them many memories.’ After a service at Westminster Abbey, the congregation, mainly made up of ‘ordinary men and women in sombre dress’, filed past the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, where they laid ‘wreaths and bunches of poppies in memory of those who had fallen in old campaigns as well as the two world wars’. The commemoration of the dead of earlier military campaigns suggests that Remembrance Sunday would take on a broader historical significance than Armistice Day: as the blood-soaked twentieth century moved into its second half, the dead of all wars would be remembered.
Although newspaper reports in the later 1940s and 1950s suggest that Remembrance Sunday had indeed replaced Armistice Day in the national calendar and was marked much as 11 November had been, there remained those who felt that the whole observance had been downgraded now that it no longer had a fixed date. At the British Legion’s conference in Great Yarmouth in June 1949, a call was made for the reinstatement of Armistice Day on 11 November, with Remembrance Sunday maintained as a subsidiary occasion held on the first Sunday after the main event. Four years later, by which time Britain also had casualties from the Korean War to remember, there were still arguments going on about changing the date. A correspondent wrote to The Times to propose that Remembrance Sunday be moved to the second Sunday in May, ‘an approximate date for the end of the 1939–45 war’: ‘The weather in November is often cold and wet, and a great physical strain is imposed on the older men as they stand bare-headed for a period of nearly five minutes during the service of remembrance.’ (Indeed, it was widely rumoured that the death of George V in January 1936 had been the result of his standing bare-headed at the Cenotaph in what Time magazine called Britain’s ‘murderous November damp’.) Those about whom this correspondent was so concerned were in fact the last people to want a change of date. The vice-chair of the Kent branch of the British Legion replied that the notion of changing Remembrance Sunday to what he referred to scathingly as ‘a more convenient date in early summer’ had been ‘fully debated’ at his local conference and ‘heavily defeated’. ‘The older members were adamant that whatever the weather they would continue to pay their homage in November. The younger generation of war veterans felt that they had been steeped in the November tradition since childhood and that in view of the discrepancy between VE and VJ days, they would prefer the present arrangement to stand.’ And stand it did.
Nevertheless, by the 1960s people began to question whether Remembrance Sunday should be observed at all. Once again, the Church weighed in, this time in the shape of a clergyman who was keen to appear attuned to the modern world. In November 1963, Archdeacon Edward Carpenter, Canon in Residence at Westminster Abbey, called for a new approach to Remembrance Sunday, ‘hinged somehow to the hopes of people throughout the world’. He proposed that it might ‘become a day of dedication to idealism’ and expressed the hope for ‘some bold, imaginative move, which would give it a new name’. Meanwhile, at St Paul’s the controversial precentor, Canon John Collins (an active opponent of apartheid and a sponsor of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), complained: ‘We tend always to look backwards to think too much of our finest hour and too little of the purpose for which the sacrifices were made.’ This ‘interference from clerical busybodies’, as one correspondent in The Times put it, gained support in a Hampshire vicarage, from where G.A. Potter wrote that Remembrance Sunday was indeed becoming meaningless: ‘All through the “Silence” yesterday cars were roaring past our church. Parades were attended mostly by local officials, The British Legion (mostly 1914–18 vintage), and uniformed youth organizations who are under orders to attend.’ He suggested that the day should be moved to become part of All Souls’ Day, which he said was kept by Christians the whole world over and on which prayers for the souls of the dead were offered. By contrast, ‘the parades, poppies and platitudes of the present observance can only help the living’.
This was to misunderstand the whole meaning of Remembrance Sunday, which from the very start (as Armistice Day) may have commemorated the dead but was organised for the living. Armistice Day had also commemorated the dead whatever their religion may have been. It was bad enough to move the day to the Christian Sabbath; to align it with All Souls’ Day, recognised only in the Christian calendar, would have been a further step towards appropriating this supposedly inclusive and secular national occasion and marginalising those grieving for the dead of other faiths. The bereaved had always been a focus of the ceremonies, augmented by those veterans who cared to take part. To suggest that the members of the British Legion designated as ‘1914–18 vintage’ were somehow irrelevant was insultingly dismissive, while poppies served a practical purpose, having always been made by severely disabled veterans and sold in order to help those left physically or financially in need because of war service.
The debate continued the following year, when the Reverend N.D. Stacey, rector of Woolwich, declared that Remembrance Sunday ‘should be discontinued before it becomes an empty and meaningless event’. This comment introduced the report of the day’s ceremony at the Cenotaph in The Times under the headline: ‘Memorial Service Losing Grip?’ The paper also reported that a British Legion spokesman had announced that ‘early Poppy Day returns [for 1964] showed a considerable decrease over last year’s figures’. Where once the annual coverage of this event would have been extensive, taking up several columns, it was now reduced to a few inches tucked away inconspicuously among other home news. The following year the report appeared in only one of the paper’s eight editions.
By 1965 even the anonymous correspondent (or correspondents) who every November, year in, year out, contributed a meditation to The Times on the meaning of Remembrance Sunday and what was being remembered began to express doubts about its continuation in the present form. A particularly unenticing headline to this column, which one imagines even in a good year attracted few readers, ran ‘Remembrancetide: Adjusting Observance to Changed Needs’ – an adjustment in which, the correspondent felt, the Church should be leading the way. The intention was to find a way of altering Remembrance Sunday in a way that would ‘be true to the insights of the Gospel, adjusted to the contemporary world-consciousness of mankind’s fundamental unity while still preserving the solemn meaning of a colossal sacrifice of human life on both sides of the conflict in two world wars’. Once again, the ‘traditionalism of the British Legion and the various old comrades’ associations’ was accused of standing in the way of progress, ‘hold[ing] back the proper movement of this solemn remembrance towards a new annual expression of the nation’s resolve to give itself to the task of reconciliation’.
In a 1965 edition of Theology, Britain’s leading journal of religious debate, the Reverend Ronald Coppin suggested that Remembrance Sunday should be quietly dropped from the calendar. ‘Since the passing of the 1914–18 war generation the public desire to remember has slowly withered, and the very different character of the 1939–45 war means that for very many, perhaps the majority, there is no desire to remember,’ he observed.
Perhaps most important of all is the fact that for anyone under the age of thirty Remembrance Day has no meaning and, as it has been conceived, can have no meaning. The observance is in decline and should be allowed gradually to fall away until it becomes as significant or insignificant as Trafalgar Day or November 5th. Any attempt to rescue it or to change it into an occasion for edification on the evils of war or the cause of peace would be doomed to failure, as is shown by the general indifference to United Nations Day, Shakespeare’s birthday, etc.
In the meantime, he felt, ‘it would be quite wrong for us as a Church to pull out of the existing observance’. Indeed, the Church should take an active part in altering the character of Remembrance Sunday, ensuring that while it continued it became ‘much more international in ethos, and much more realistic about the [presumably fallen] nature of man’. Many Church members, he felt, disliked such ‘pseudo-Christian details’ of the observance as ‘the equating of the valiant dead with saints [and] the paralleling of the soldiers’ deaths with Christ’s’ – two notions that had popular currency during the First World War itself, as numerous religiose postcards depicting military calvaries testified. He listed some ‘practical suggestions in changing the form of observance’:
1. In every major city at the Cathedral, parish church or Cenotaph there should be an ex-enemy national taking an official part in the ceremonies. If this were too great a pill to swallow in one go, then at least a national from a non-Commonwealth allied country.
2. The hymns and prayers, especially at church services, should be carefully chosen, and certainly they should not draw uneasy parallels between servicemen’s deaths and the cross, as in, e.g., ‘O valiant hearts’, nor assume that death in battle is a martyr’s death.
3. The lessons chosen should have more bite: the Beatitudes would be a good New Testament lesson; for they set forth the ideals for which we were supposedly fighting and they remind us how both the servicemen and ourselves fail to measure up to Jesus’s demands.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is no longer an acceptable motto; perhaps decorum est pro orbe terrarum mori more accurately expresses the feelings and needs of our age. We can only then both expect and welcome the gradual disappearance of Remembrance Sunday; but while it is still with us let us redeem it as far as we may.
This attempted act of redemption would in part take place three years later, when the traditional church service for Remembrance Sunday was picked over by a small committee of churchmen and a single representative of the British Legion. The idea was to bring the service ‘into line with modern thinking now that 50 years have passed since the first Armistice’. The Reverend Coppin’s ambitious notion of inviting ex-enemy nationals to participate in Remembrance Sunday in every church in the land was not adopted, but his advice about hymns was taken up. No specific directions were given to bin John Arkwright’s touchingly chivalric ‘O Valiant Hearts’, written in 1917 to a beautiful mid-Victorian tune by Edward J. Hopkins, but Cecil Spring-Rice’s hugely popular ‘I Vow to Thee, My Country’, set to music by Gustav Holst in 1921, was banished. The original meaning of Armistice Day was once more diluted, and while the act of remembrance was retained, it was augmented by ‘an act of commitment to serve God and all mankind in the cause of peace and for the relief of want and suffering’. This widening of the brief to include more general social ills that had nothing whatever to do with warfare was approved in 1968 not only by the Church of England but also by the Free Churches and the Roman Catholic Church. ‘It comes in response to criticism that the older form of service was too patriotic and warlike in tone, and too narrow and retrospective in its import to engage the interest of any but the elderly,’ The Times reported. ‘In general the emphasis is much less on remembrance and much more forward looking with its specific acts of penitence and commitment’. In other words, the interests of the people for whom Armistice Day was inaugurated, the generation of 1914, were once again being ignored in the Church’s attempts to seem youthful and up to date. Some veterans protested in particular at that part of the new service concerning penitence: ‘Having spent four years in the mud and blood of Flanders, they said, not unreasonably, they did not entirely see what they had to be penitent about.’
Rather than a period of reflection and remembrance, the days surrounding Remembrance Sunday during the 1960s had become a time for debates about the nature and future of a date in the calendar that had once been compared with Good Friday. The abolition of National Service at the beginning of the 1960s certainly played a part in shifting attitudes. Conscription, reintroduced at the beginning of the Second World War, had persisted beyond the end of the hostilities in 1945 and was still referred to as ‘war service’. The National Service Act of 1948 obliged all young men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one, unless they were working in farming, coal mining or the merchant navy, to serve in one of the armed forces for a period of eighteen months. The length of service had been extended to two years at the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, and this remained the term until National Service officially ended on 31 December 1960. For many diehards, the abolition of National Service was when the rot set in and long-haired youths no longer obliged to sport a military short-back-and-sides set out to undermine British society with their amoral views and behaviour – a notion that conveniently overlooks the often violent Teddy boy culture of the 1950s. At the same time as abandoning compulsory military service, Britain also abandoned its policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. The decision by the government to manufacture a hydrogen bomb as a nuclear deterrent was widely criticised and led to the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958. The inaugural meeting of the CND was attended by 5,000 people and it soon attracted a rapidly growing band of supporters. It became the most prominent and vocal protest group of the period, numbering many leading figures in politics, the Church, education and the arts among its members.
The nuclear threat was given additional force after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union had momentarily teetered on the brink of all-out war. Some idea of what a nuclear strike on Britain might look like was given by Peter Watkins in The War Game (1965). This film was commissioned by the BBC, for whom Watkins had earlier made Culloden (1964), about the notorious Scottish battle of 1746 in which a well-armed English force led by the Duke of Cumberland defeated and subsequently massacred the makeshift Jacobite army of Bonnie Prince Charlie, largely made up of sword-wielding Highlanders. An assistant producer for BBC2, Watkins had been given the opportunity to direct a film by the Corporation’s Head of Documentary Film, Huw Wheldon. This highly original drama, made in Scotland using local non-professional actors, was shot as if it were a news documentary, complete with commentary. Few who saw the film would forget the scenes in which the narrator described various sorts of weapons and showed in graphic detail what they did to human beings. If this determination to look war in the face and to show its lethal effects upon individuals seemed reminiscent of prevailing attitudes to the First World War, this is hardly surprising. While a drama student in the 1950s Watkins had acted in a production of R.C. Sherriff’s often-revived Western Front play Journey’s End. He had subsequently and reluctantly done National Service, and after his release had made a seventeen-minute amateur film, Diary of an Unknown Soldier (1959). Set in the trenches of the Western Front, it opened with the diarist stating in voice-over ‘Last day of my life’, and showed this day from the doomed soldier’s point of view.
Although Culloden was highly praised, The War Game proved too harrowing and contentious even for the innovative and often controversial Wednesday Play slot, and the BBC refused to broadcast it. Watkins’ film was unashamedly propagandist, once again showing graphically the effects of warfare upon suffering individuals, but also highly critical of the government’s nuclear policy and the utterly inadequate contingency plans the Home Office had in place in the event of what seemed at the time a not altogether unlikely catastrophe. The BBC always denied that any political pressure had been put upon it to ban the film but had in fact arranged a private screening for senior government and military figures before coming to its decision. Instead the Corporation announced that the film had been shelved because it was an ‘artistic failure’ – a statement that was both untrue and looked pretty silly when, after a cinema release in 1966, The War Game went on to win an Oscar for best documentary, a BAFTA for best short film, a Special Prize at the Venice Film Festival, and a UN Award.
It is no coincidence that these films appeared in the same decade as the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. A revival of interest in the war had already been apparent at the beginning of the 1960s, but that interest was now more critical. One of the best-known works to emerge from this period was Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, commissioned for the dedication in May 1962 of the new cathedral at Coventry, replacing the one that had been destroyed by the Luftwaffe during the devastating air raids of November 1940. In spite of the occasion for which the Requiem was commissioned, and the fact that it was dedicated to the memory of four men who had served in the Second World War, the piece looked back to the earlier conflict. Britten decided to set war poetry alongside the Latin mass for the dead, and although there were many fine poems of the Second World War from which he could have chosen, he went back to Wilfred Owen. A lifelong pacifist, Britten evidently felt that Owen was the principal voice raised against the horror of warfare, as well as the principal elegist for the youth who died as cattle, and so a natural choice for a War Requiem. The origins of the work are often forgotten and any illustrations for recordings or performance programmes tend to take their iconography from the trenches of 1914–18 rather than the ruined British cities of 1940.
Britten’s work is not so much an attack upon the war as a lament for its consequences. Some idea of how images of the First World War could be used to subversive effect is given by Ken Russell’s film about another British composer, Edward Elgar, made that same year for the BBC’s flagship arts series, Monitor. Elgar was a celebration of a man not only regarded as Britain’s greatest composer, but one who (whatever his own views may have been) was seen as representing both Englishness and Empire. Such works as the Enigma Variations and the Introduction and Allegro for Strings (played here at the very opening of the film as a small boy galloped across the Malvern Hills on horseback) seemed to sum up a distinctively English strain of rural lyricism, while the Pomp and Circumstance marches had become associated with Britain’s imperial might. It was appropriate, therefore, that Russell’s film should be the 100th edition of Monitor. Even more significant was the date of its broadcast: 11 November.
Although a patriot who believed in composing stirring tunes for stirring times, Elgar was also a man who had many friends in Germany, a country in which his reputation as a composer stood very high. It was, for example, a German, Hans Richter, who had conducted the first performance of the quintessentially English Enigma Variations in 1899. Elgar’s feelings about the First World War were, therefore, equivocal, and he grew very much to dislike the fact that ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ (the major tune in his Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 with words added, to the composer’s dissatisfaction, by A.C. Benson) became Britain’s ‘second national anthem’. Russell developed this notion by using the march to represent the First World War in his film. Although a commentary outlined Elgar’s unhappiness about the way the piece had been appropriated, for the most part the march is played without comment over archive footage from the First World War, starting with jubilant crowds greeting the outbreak of war in London and ending, inevitably, in the war cemeteries. As the first notes of the piece are heard, we see film of a recruitment rally in Trafalgar Square, followed by footage of men marching through the streets. In a scene in which new recruits in civilian clothes march over one of the city’s bridges, a boy watches them and keeps turning to look at the camera. It is perhaps a mark of the way people by now thought about the war that it is impossible to look at this boy without wondering what became of him, a plausible supposition being that he was killed in the trenches. As the music progresses, the action moves to the Western Front, with footage of men going over the top and the injured being carried along the trenches. As the ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ tune swells on the soundtrack, Russell uses footage of a long procession of soldiers, blinded victims of gas attacks. There is also footage of the temporary cemeteries, row upon row of crosses stretching to the horizon, with a close-up of a single marker for the grave of an unidentified body. The sequence ends with a panning shot of the permanent gravestones in a war cemetery, the pan quickening in pace until stone after stone rushes past in almost unimaginable profusion. The overall effect of this sequence, as Elgar’s biographer Michael Kennedy put it to Russell many years later, was that it was almost as if ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ was being blamed for the First World War. It is a highly skilful, and highly manipulative, piece of film-making.
The real blame for the First World War, however, had been laid firmly at the door of the politicians who started it and the generals who conducted it, known collectively and unaffectionately as the Frock-coats and Brass-hats. Just as in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when public opinion was influenced by Churchill’s The World Crisis, Liddell Hart’s The Real War and Lloyd George’s War Memoirs, three seminal accounts of the war published in the 1960s attacked the reputations of those who had conducted the First World War. The first and most controversial book to put this case in the run-up to the fiftieth anniversary of the war was Alan Clark’s The Donkeys: A History of the B.E.F. in 1915, published in 1961. The title was taken from an observation attributed to the German commander and strategist General Hoffman, who described the British troops in the First World War as ‘lions led by donkeys’. Unlike the War Poets, the lions in Clark’s book were not civilian volunteers and conscripts but professional soldiers. They were members of the regular army, whose service and traditions stretched back over the centuries but who, according to Clark, were betrayed by their commanders in 1915, most seriously at the costly Battle of Loos. Aptly described by The Economist as ‘a shell-burst of a book’, it opened: ‘This is the story of the destruction of an army – the old professional army of the United Kingdom that always won the last battle, whose regiments had fought at Quebec, Corunna, in the Indies, were trained in musketry at Hythe, drilled on the parched earth of Chuddapore, and were machine-gunned, gassed and finally buried in 1915.’ As a prelude to this dismal story, Clark argued that in September 1914, in the wake of the German defeat at the First Battle of the Marne, a chance had arisen for the British cavalry to break through the enemy lines, but this had been frittered away by overcautious and indecisive commanders, thus condemning the army to the four years of attritional trench warfare that followed. ‘A resolute thrust, pressed with even a semblance of the disregard for casualties that characterized later operations under the same commanders,’ Clark insisted, would have isolated the tired and hungry German First Army of General von Kluck, which had been separated from the Second Army led by General von Bülow, and would have resulted in ‘wholesale surrenders.’
Clark’s main narrative begins with an unflattering account of relationships within the British High Command as background to the events of 1915, in which ‘considerations of personal vanity and prestige led to much bloodshed that might have been avoided by a dispassionate consideration of the military principles involved’. His book is anything but dispassionate, repeatedly accusing the generals of being ill prepared, ‘ignoring […] the repeated warnings of the Intelligence Section and, indeed, the evidence that presented itself to the naked eye of any observer in the front line’. The text is enlivened by such asides as: ‘The battle – if the afternoon’s massacre may be dignified by such a term – lasted three hours.’ Just as in the book’s plates section Clark juxtaposes a photograph of Joffre, Poincaré, Foch, Haig and George V standing smartly uniformed on the steps of a chateau (and captioned: ‘Polished boots’) with one of the devastated landscape around the village of Loos, so the bickering and infighting that took place among the High Command (sarcastically referred to as a ‘Band of Brothers’) is contrasted with the stoicism of front-line soldiers holed up in winter trenches. Clark vividly evokes the cold and sodden conditions in which troops ‘starved of the equipment necessary in trench warfare, with little pretence even of artillery support and seriously short of trained junior officers and N.C.O.s’ endured these conditions, before noting that: ‘In the warmth and comfort of the Allied Headquarters, however, the mood was one of optimism.’
That such optimism was unjustified, and was supported neither by clear strategy or a proper consideration of what was happening in the front line, is a principal theme of the book. Even before the main narrative of the battles of 1915 begins, Clark undermines Haig’s reputation, gleefully outlining the general’s inglorious early career. His conclusion is that Haig’s ascension to high command ‘owed more to influential connections than to natural ability’, an unfortunate result of which was that ‘the Army seemed to contain many people who had tried to thwart [him] or who had, on account of superior quality, excelled him’. The whole of the High Command is portrayed as petty, scheming and rivalrous, but Clark retains his strongest criticism for Haig, frequently and damningly quoting from official papers in order to bolster his attack.
An example of Clark’s method is the chapter dealing with the Battle of Aubers Ridge in May 1915. It is prefaced by an epigraph reproducing an exchange taken from the Rifle Brigade Official History:
GENERAL RAWLINSON: This is most unsatisfactory. Where are the Sherwood Foresters? Where are the East Lancashires on the right?
BRIGADIER-GENERAL OXLEY: They are lying out in No-Man’s-Land, sir, and most of them will never stand again.
In the wake of the partially successful first attack, Clark reports, men from the Irish Rifles attempting to return to their own trenches with a large party of Germans they had taken prisoner were being fired upon not only by the enemy but also by the British, who imagined that a counter-attack was taking place. Losses had been considerable and the communication trenches, which were known to have been insufficiently deep, were now clogged with stretcher-bearers and the walking wounded. Back at HQ, Haig nevertheless gave orders to renew the attack. By the time these orders were received, ‘it was plain to all the commanders on the spot that it was physically impossible to mount an attack with the shattered remnants of the assaulting battalions that remained in the front trenches, while the acute congestion in the immediate rear made the task of relieving them with fresh troops, and that of evacuating the large number of wounded that impeded free circulation, laborious and costly’. The orders for an immediate attack were, therefore, ignored: ‘It was plainly impossible to achieve a state of readiness before the afternoon.’ This did not, however, deter the ‘impatient’ Haig, who shortly before noon ‘issued further orders insisting that the attack should be pressed “immediately”’. Desperate attempts were made to follow these orders, but the Germans were firing on the assembly trenches: ‘The majority of men never even climbed out into No-Man’s-Land, although many companies were reduced by more than half as they huddled in the shallow, crowded forming-up places waiting for the whistle. By two o’clock the position had changed not at all, except that the 8th Division had suffered a further 2,000 casualties.’
In a characteristic shift of perspective, Clark moves immediately from this account to the operational centre for the attack at Lestrem to find Haig attending a luncheon where ‘the talk was mainly of horses and hunting’. Clark quotes from an unidentified diary of someone there who reported that when news was brought of the failure of this attack, ‘launched as a result of Haig’s insistent orders’ and ‘attended by serious losses’: ‘the Chief took it very hard. We had been getting reports all morning of how well the French had been doing and he must have felt that they would be laughing at our efforts.’ The clear implication is that Haig was more concerned about being laughed at by the French than about the massive casualties among his own men that were a direct result of his stubbornness.
Returning his narrative to the front, Clark once again juxtaposes the circumstances of the generals and their troops: ‘While Haig was motoring from Lestrem to Aire, the position of the 2nd London, the Munsters and the Northants, still holding on inside the enemy lines, was becoming hourly more desperate.’ Haig was in fact merely returning to his own headquarters, but Clark’s deliberate use of the verb ‘motoring’ makes the journey sound like a jaunt. In spite of receiving a report from General Gough, commander of the 7th Division, who had made a ‘personal reconnaissance’ of the front line and was convinced that no renewed assault during daylight had any hope of succeeding, Haig ordered another attack for 4 p.m. The bombardment that preceded this killed all but three of the hapless Munsters, who had managed to break through the German line. The attack itself was a costly failure and the day’s British losses were 458 officers and 11,161 men: ‘It had been a disastrous fifteen hours of squandered heroism, unredeemed by the faintest glimmer of success.’
Clark’s account of the Battle of Loos is equally dispiriting, leaving readers with the indelible impression that in the First World War gallant troops were repeatedly and pointlessly sacrificed by pig-headed generals. It was a version of history that reinforced the one handed down by the War Poets – and the historical accounts of Churchill, Liddell Hart and Lloyd George. Liddell Hart was still a hugely influential figure in First World War studies, and it comes as no surprise to find in Clark’s book a fulsome acknowledgement to ‘that acknowledged master of military history, Captain B.H. Liddell Hart, who has allowed me access to his private files on the period and has been of the greatest help at every stage in the development of the book’. The Donkeys was Clark’s first work of non-fiction and it won him few friends among professional military historians, who challenged its reliability and disliked its anti-authoritarian tone. It was perhaps made worse by the fact that Clark was not a tiresome young pacifist lefty from a redbrick university, from whom little better could be expected. He had been educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford (where he studied under leading historians Robert Blake, who would edit Haig’s diaries, and Hugh Trevor-Roper, who would become Haig’s son-in-law); had briefly been in training with the cavalry during the Second World War and been a member of the Royal Auxiliary Air Force in the 1950s; and had trained for the bar. The leading military historian Michael Howard, however, was unimpressed by these credentials, writing in The Listener that:
Military history, more than any other branch of historical studies, lends itself to the journalist and the populariser. This is not to belittle the work of either, for journalism and literary entertainment are respectable professions calling for great skills and hard work. But what these practitioners write is not history […] Mr Clark is not a historian. Neither the tuition of Professor Trevor-Roper nor the access to the files of Captain Liddell Hart of which his publishers boast have made him one.
While acknowledging that Clark was ‘a vivid writer with considerable gifts both of description and narrative’, Howard also accused him of bias and poor scholarship: ‘Like other contemporary works on the first world war, [the book] accepts unquestioningly a popular stereotype of brave British lives being squandered by stupid generals and fills out the picture by selective quotation from a very limited number of sources used without any sort of critical acumen.’ He conceded that the book was ‘good value’ as ‘entertainment’, but added: ‘As history it is worthless.’
The Donkeys nevertheless remains an important historical document – if not of 1915, then certainly of the 1960s. It was very popular with the general reader, and its ferocious attack on the leadership of the generals and its portrayal of the front-line soldiers as courageous men sent heedlessly to their inevitable doom set the tone of debate for the entire decade. It fixed even more firmly in the public mind the mud-blood-and-futility view of the war.
Clark was a fledgling historian, easy for those who regarded themselves as his elders and betters to dismiss; but equally popular, even more influential and almost as controversial as The Donkeys was A.J.P. Taylor’s The First World War: An Illustrated History (1963). Frowned upon by many of his peers for his outspoken and occasionally eccentric views and manner, and challenged by his successors over his reliability, Taylor was a genuinely populist historian and an excellent communicator, who had a long career both on television and as a newspaper columnist. With his heavy-framed spectacles and jauntily askew bow tie, he was perhaps the one historian most people would have recognised, and his book on the First World War was written for the general rather than the specialist reader. It was produced by the ‘packager’ George Rainbird, who took advantage of the advances in printing technology that had resulted in the colour supplements to Sunday newspapers to produce at affordable prices beautifully designed and lavishly illustrated books for mainstream publishers – in this instance Hamish Hamilton. The democratic aim of these books was to popularise such subjects as history by leavening serious and well-researched texts, usually by well-known authors, with contemporary illustrations, often in full colour. In Taylor’s case, the illustrations were all black and white, in keeping with the subject matter, and were used by the author with subversive wit. Even without reading the full text, one would have a pretty clear idea of Taylor’s general thesis just by looking at the illustrations and the captions he provided to highlight his arguments – or, some would argue, score cheap points.
Although most captions to photographs of the war zones were reasonably neutral, Taylor sometimes uses them as an offensive weapon to blast wartime clichés: ‘The wicked Hun’ beneath a picture of one of the Kaiser’s less terrifying conscripts, a bespectacled and exhausted soldier who looks like a mild-mannered clerk; ‘Civilization triumphs again’ beneath a now famous photograph of a long line of shuffling men blinded in a gas attack. Taylor reserves his biggest guns, however, for the Frock-coats and Brass-hats. A photograph of French in morning dress, complete with glossy top hat and cane, presumably late for some appointment since he is running past a crowd of onlookers, is captioned: ‘Sir John French, commander of the B.E.F., in training for the retreat from Mons’; a portrait photograph of Haig posing in his uniform, his cap under one arm, is tagged: ‘He relied upon divine help, became an earl and received £100,000 from parliament’. ‘He could have lost the war in an afternoon’ accompanies a photo of Admiral Jellicoe aboard his flagship; a picture of the French High Command, their embonpoint barely contained by their uniforms, is labelled: ‘French generals suffering from undernourishment’. Politicians fare no better than the military: Lloyd George being conducted along a line of munitions workers – as well he might be since he was after all Minister of Munitions – is captioned: ‘Lloyd George casts an expert eye over munitions girls’; ‘Lloyd George and Churchill on the march to the top’ runs another caption – that march being along a London street in formal wear rather than the one through a shattered landscape to the front endured by the soldiers carrying out their bidding.
These figures are treated with equal disrespect in the text, a text which – it by now seems almost inevitably – had been submitted in draft to the doyen of First World War studies, B.H. Liddell Hart. The disasters on the Western Front are duly itemised and blame apportioned. The Battle of Loos was fought largely because Kitchener thought that ‘unless the British gave full support [to the French], Joffre would be overthrown and the French politicians would then make peace. Hence, British soldiers died so that France could be kept in the war.’ At the end of the battle, the Allies had ‘made no gain strategically or even on the most limited scale; there had simply been useless slaughter’. The Battle of Verdun was ‘the most senseless episode in a war not distinguished for sense anywhere’, but the Battle of the Somme was not much better: ‘Nothing had been learnt from previous failures except how to repeat them on a large scale.’ Taylor itemises the casualties (420,000 British, 200,000 French) and throws doubt upon the Official History:
The Germans probably lost about 450,000; and would have lost less if it had not been for the order of [the German commander] Falkenhayn, rivalling Haig in obstinacy, that every yard of lost trench must be taken in counter-attacks. Many years later, the editor of the British official history performed a conjuring trick on the German figures, and blew them up to 650,000, thus making out against all experience that the attackers suffered less than the defence. There is no need to take those figures seriously.
Taylor was right: the generally agreed figure for German losses is 465,000.
Passchendaele comes at a period when ‘British strategy, if such it can be called, reached its lowest level. Haig had come through three years of war still in high command and having learnt little from experience.’ Taylor dismisses most of the strategical thinking that led to Passchendaele, listing the ‘excuses’ that Haig subsequently ‘manufactured’ as to ‘why the Ypres offensive had to be made’. These are described as simply ‘untrue’. ‘The truth was simple: Haig had resolved blindly that this was the place where he could win the war. He never inspected the front line. He disregarded the warnings of his own Intelligence Staff against the mud. No one else shared his confidence.’ In sum, Haig ‘preferred an unsuccessful offensive under his own command to a successful one under someone else’. This account of Haig preparing to send his troops, among whom was Private Harry Patch, into the mud and misery of Passchendaele is accompanied by a photograph of the general standing on the steps of a country house being offered an overcoat by a chauffeur, captioned: ‘Sir Douglas Haig feels the cold’.
Many writers critical of the conduct of the First World War have been accused by revisionist historians of not dealing with the war beyond the Western Front. Taylor covers all theatres of war, including Italy, the Balkans, the Middle East and Turkey, but his account of these campaigns is often quite as critical as it is of those conducted by Haig. General Sir Ian Hamilton, entrusted by Kitchener with the Gallipoli campaign, sets off for the Dardanelles in 1915 ‘without a staff, with no proper maps, and with no information later than 1906 about Turkish defences’. Apart from one division from the regular army, the troops allotted to Hamilton were ‘colonials and territorials, with no previous experience’. Furthermore, ‘The British army had never rehearsed landing on a hostile coast and had no equipment for this purpose […] The attack on the Dardanelles was a brilliant idea in theory. But even the best idea brings disaster when it is carried out hastily and inadequately.’
Later military historians would argue that (in the words of Gary Sheffield) the Allied counter-offensive of 1918 rates as ‘one of the greatest series of victories in British history’, partly secured through enormous improvements in strategy; but in Taylor’s view ‘Foch and Haig stumbled unwillingly on a newer and wiser method – to attack at weak points, not strong ones; they quickly took credit for it’. No one reading Taylor’s book could be left in any doubt as to who was to ‘blame’ for the First World War. The fact that, like Clark’s The Donkeys, it was strongly criticised by later historians has done little to diminish its popularity among the reading public. Over forty years and many editions later, it almost certainly remains the most widely read book ever written about the war.
In his preface, Taylor declared: ‘The unknown soldier was the hero of the First World War. He has vanished, except as a cipher, from the written records. He lives again in these photographs.’ He was also about to live again on the stage. Taylor’s book was dedicated to Joan Littlewood, whose Theatre Workshop production of Oh What a Lovely War! received its premiere that same year at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, in London’s East End. Like Taylor, Littlewood was left-wing and populist, and she had founded her company to bring theatre to the masses. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that Oh What a Lovely War! turned out to be a savage satire in which idiotic upper-class generals sent stoical and cheerily singing working-class rankers to certain death.* It transferred from Stratford to the West End, later played on Broadway and in Paris, and remains perhaps the best-known play ever written about the war. Essentially an ensemble piece staged as ‘a pierrot show of fifty years ago’, it was created as the result of extensive research by the writer-producer Charles Chilton (whose father had been killed in the First World War at the age of nineteen) and members of the cast. The title is taken from one of the characteristically ironic and fatalistic soldiers’ songs of the period, and further examples of these songs are used throughout the play, often to devastating effect. The production also made use of archive photographs and newspaper headlines giving casualty figures. In one scene, representative of the whole play, a burial party is seen at work in front of a news panel stating: ‘BY NOV 1916 … TWO AND A HALF MILLION MEN KILLED ON WESTERN FRONT’. They are watched from a balcony by Haig, who makes a speech beginning, ‘I thank you, God; the attack is a great success.’ As the soldiers work, they sing ‘The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling’, which Haig, donning a pierrot’s cap, begins to conduct as another news panel appears: ‘APRIL 17 … AISNE … ALLIED LOSS 180,000 MEN … GAIN NIL’.
This may not have been particularly subtle, but it was agitprop theatre of the most effective kind, lent authority not only by the use of genuine songs and documents of the period, but also by the fact that it boasted in its programme and in the published text a ‘military adviser’ and a long list of source material, which included official publications and the diaries of General Haig alongside The Donkeys and the works of Sassoon, Graves and Blunden. It was tuneful, it was funny and at times extremely moving. It made no attempt to be even handed, but it caught the public imagination and further reinforced the way people thought about the war. ‘Oh What a Lovely War! awakened race memory in our audiences,’ Littlewood recalled of the Stratford run. ‘At the end of each performance people would come on stage, bringing memories and mementoes, even lines of dialogue which sometimes turned up in the show.’ One local woman brought along one of Princess Mary’s tins, embossed brass boxes variously containing cigarettes, sweets, pencils and chocolates which had been given to every serving soldier as ‘a gift from the nation’ at Christmas 1914. ‘I’ve had this on my mantelpiece forty-five years,’ she said. ‘It was Dad’s, for ’is Woodbines, he carried it with ’im wherever ’e went till ’e got killed. You can keep it.’ One of the actors carried it in his pocket throughout the run.
Not everyone was impressed. The military historian John Terraine wrote to The Spectator to complain that the claim in the programme that every word uttered by Haig in the play was taken from his diaries was misleading since the quotations were highly selective: no doubt Mein Kampf ‘could provide impeccable “evidence” that the late A. Hitler was a misjudged saint’, he concluded. Terraine was on dangerous ground here, since a year earlier in the same magazine he had himself been accused by the historian and journalist Robert Kee of quoting selectively from Haig’s diaries in his admiring and controversial biography of the general. Terraine also protested about one of the ‘scoreboards’ used in the play. He admitted he had not in fact seen the production, but had read reports of one scoreboard that stated that on the first day of the Battle of Passchendaele, British losses were 135,000 for a gain of 100 yards. This, he objected, was grossly inaccurate: the British losses for that day were not known, but those for the first three days of the battle did not exceed 31,850. It seems, however, that Terraine may have been misled: certainly, no statistics for Passchendaele are given in the published text of the play. His dim view of Oh What a Lovely War! would nevertheless be echoed by many military historians over the years. Correlli Barnett described it as ‘a highly partisan, and often grossly unfair, presentation of the war from an extreme anti-Brasshat point of view’, while in The Unquiet Western Front (2002) Brian Bond concurred, complaining of the play’s ‘blatant anti-military bias and historical distortions’. This view, he suggested, was supported by ‘a distinguished general and military historian’ (named in the notes as General Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley, author of many books, including a 1966 account of The Somme), who in a private letter to Bond opined that ‘taken as history, the play is not even serious enough to be called a travesty’. Bond acknowledged that Liddell Hart, something of a bête noire in his book, believed that ‘there was more of the real war in the play than in recent “whitewash history”; it did faithfully reflect what his generation thought of the war’, but Bond’s own generation of military historians begged to differ. When it was later revealed that the Theatre Workshop’s ‘military adviser’, Raymond Fletcher, had been recruited to the KGB the previous year, this merely confirmed many historians’ suspicion that the play, though admittedly entertaining, was little more than Marxist propaganda. Not that any of this had much effect on its enduring popularity with theatregoers.
By the time the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the war arrived, the ground had been laid for a distinctly 1960s anti-Establishment approach to the proceedings. The anniversary was widely marked, but the most notable event was BBC television’s epic documentary series, The Great War, which was both scholarly and sober but nevertheless attracted audiences averaging eight million for each of its twenty-six episodes. This figure is even more remarkable, since the series was being shown on the recently launched ‘highbrow’ channel BBC2; such was its success that it started being repeated on BBC1 even before it had finished broadcasting on the new sister channel. The series was hugely ambitious, covering every aspect and theatre of the war. For some historians, it appeared to provide an opportunity to redress the balance and present a more even-handed account of the war than the lions-and-donkeys approach of Clark, Taylor and Littlewood. Indeed, among those who wrote the scripts were John Terraine and Correlli Barnett, neither of whom was inclined to this supposedly simplistic view of the war. Terraine’s attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of General Haig has already been mentioned, while Barnett (author of The Swordbearers: Supreme Command in the First World War, published the previous year) would become a scourge of what he saw as the ‘whingeing’ school of First World War studies. Between them they were credited with writing or co-writing twenty of the twenty-six episodes, and both served as ‘historical and research consultants’, while Terraine was also appointed as associate producer. Liddell Hart had agreed to act as ‘military adviser’, but resigned over Terraine’s episode on the Somme and eventually had his name removed from the credits for the entire series. He explained his reasons for doing so publicly, writing a letter to The Times in which he explained that when he read the script for the Somme episode, he ‘immediately pointed out that it was wrongly slanted – for it repeatedly emphasised the supposed inexperience and unskilfulness of the British troops while not making any mention of the indisputable faults of the High Command’s planning and conduct of the offensive’. The programme was, however, broadcast ‘without any adequate correction of the commentary’. He was told that he would be sent Terraine’s script for the episode on Third Ypres, but since he would receive it only a few days ahead of the broadcast, it would be impossible for him to offer any advice that could be implemented. He wrote that he regretted having to explain publicly his reasons for asking to have his name removed from the series ‘because many of the earlier programmes were good, as well as graphic, examples of how history could be treated on television’.
In spite of the best efforts of the principal scriptwriters, however, the overwhelming impression left by the series with viewers was one of waste and futility. Never before had people seen so much archive footage, most of which vividly depicted the conditions in which men had fought and died. What is surprising is that even those episodes scripted by Terraine seem to reinforce the impression of the war he was supposedly attempting to dispel. The episode dealing with Ypres in 1917, for example, was given the title ‘Surely we have perished’, a line from Wilfred Owen. Extensive footage of troops slogging along waterlogged trenches and mules floundering helplessly in the Ypres quagmire was accompanied by such observations as ‘the miseries of the war multiplied and heaped upon the soldiers’ and ‘this was the slough of despond’. Some scenes were accompanied on the soundtrack by extracts from such poems as Owen’s ‘Dulce et decorum est …’ and Sassoon’s ‘Attack’ with its final plea, ‘O Jesus, make it stop!’ Although the programme went on to describe how the Canadians eventually took Passchendaele, it concluded by recording that at the end of Third Ypres, the British had suffered almost a quarter of a million casualties without their reaching even their first objective. A journalist was quoted as saying that for the first time the British army had lost its spirit of optimism and saw no future except ‘continuous slaughter’. This was followed by more images of corpses, and the episode’s final words were given to Sassoon, an extract from his poem ‘To Any Dead Officer’, which ends with the regretful line ‘I wish they’d killed you in a decent show’.
The use of poems, beautifully read, now looks like something of an own goal by Terraine, and it is hardly surprising he failed to confound people’s notion that the war was almost uniquely squalid and tragic, given that the abiding memory of this particular episode was a montage of photos all too vividly illustrating lines from Sassoon’s poem ‘Counter-Attack’ in which he describes in repulsive detail an area of the front ‘rotten with dead’. The images are shocking even today, when we are more inured than people in the 1960s to death and destruction as a staple of television news reporting and documentary.
The most striking thing about The Great War, however, was that this footage was intercut with the stark testimonies of veterans of these campaigns, by now mostly in their late sixties and beyond and wearing the standard 1960s mufti of jackets and ties. Filmed in a studio in front of blown-up photos of the trenches, they spoke calmly but frankly of the dreadful conditions at the front, of shell craters brimming with corpses that were gradually decomposing into the surrounding slime, of the wounded slipping off duckboards to drown in the mud, and of the bitterness such deaths caused. Here were perfectly ordinary-looking men, who (to use a metaphor endorsed by the programme) had seen and survived hell. They looked just like the people at home watching their testimonies, providing a tangible link between the present and the horrendous cavalcade of images from what by 1964 must have seemed to most viewers a distant, almost unimaginable world. They were evidence that what we were seeing was not something that could simply be consigned to history; they had been there and could recall it as if it were indeed yesterday rather than half a century ago. It was perhaps the first time for many years that some of these veterans had spoken publicly (or even privately) of their experiences, and it marked the beginning of a more general public interest in them as living witnesses to an event that had shaped the century and seared the collective consciousness. Harry Patch did not take part, nor did any of those who would some forty years later be fêted as the ‘last veterans’. In spite of this widespread revival of interest in the war, many of those who had fought in it maintained the long silence they had already kept for half a century.
The marking of the fiftieth anniversary of the First World War coincided with the birth of a new, post-Austerity youth culture in Britain, and there are surprising parallels between these two events. In the 1960s Britain could once again consider itself a world leader, as it had in 1914, though this time it was not as an imperial power but as a cultural force. The pop culture of the period drew heavily upon Britain’s imperial past, and enjoyed a similar sense of national self-confidence. The Union Jack was adopted as the symbol of what became known as the Swinging Sixties, but rather than fluttering dutifully from flagpoles, it lent its distinctive red, white and blue to T-shirts and other fashion items, posters and postcards, lapel pins, and decals to stick on cars and motorbikes. Alexander Issigonis’s Mini, launched in 1959, became the classic 1960s vehicle, and during this period these cars often boasted Union Jack decorations on their roofs or even on their headlights. The eccentric and pseudonymous pop singer Screaming Lord Sutch, later to become a colourful figure in British general elections as leader of the Monster Raving Loony Party, drove around in a Rolls-Royce painted in Union Jack stripes. Some older people were affronted that a national symbol should become a fashion accessory among the disrespectful young, and perhaps its most symbolic appropriation was that of Pete Townshend, who sported a Union Jack jacket on the sleeve of the Who’s assertively titled 1965 album My Generation.
One of the most familiar images of Swinging London was a First World War recruiting poster. On 6 August 1914, two days after the outbreak of war, the recently ennobled military hero Earl Kitchener of Khartoum had joined the cabinet. Appointed Secretary of State for War, he became the face of recruitment when a poster was produced depicting his sternly mustachioed likeness in military uniform pointing a huge accusing finger at the viewer with the reminder ‘Your Country Needs You’. It became perhaps the best-known image of the war, and sixty years later was subversively appropriated by Britain’s thriving pop culture. One of London’s most celebrated and fashionable shops in the mid-1960s was called I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet and sold second-hand and antique military clothing at 293 Portobello Road. Describing itself as ‘London’s First Second Hand Boutique’, specialising in ‘Kinky, Period & Military Gear’, the shop adopted and adapted the 1914 recruiting poster as its trademark. The earl was seen pointing at passers-by from a sign hanging outside the shop, and some of the world’s leading pop groups bought their clothes here. Perhaps its most iconic moment was the day Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones took Jimi Hendrix to the shop to kit him out in the braided, frogged and colourful military jackets that became his trademark. Such was the success of the shop that it subsequently opened branches in the other two streets that epitomised Swinging London, Carnaby Street and the King’s Road in Chelsea. On their 1966 album, Winchester Cathedral, the New Vaudeville Band, who wrote and played songs that were mostly pastiches of the music of the 1920s and 1930s, included a number called ‘I was Lord Kitchener’s Valet’, imagining what his lordship would make of this cheeky appropriation of his image and wardrobe.
The taste for fanciful military gear, most famously adopted by the Beatles for their seminal 1967 album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, arose directly from the renewed, if largely satirical or critical, interest in the First World War. This reached its apogee at the end of the decade when, as Oh! What a Lovely War, Littlewood and Chilton’s celebrated play reached an even wider audience when it was adapted for the cinema.* Directed by Richard Attenborough, the film boasted a cast that included some of Britain’s most distinguished and popular actors (Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave, John Mills, Kenneth More, Jack Hawkins, Dirk Bogarde, Phyllis Calvert, Maggie Smith), two of whom had already lent their resonant voices to the BBC’s The Great War. The script by Len Deighton differs markedly from that of the play, although the central idea of a pierrot show is maintained by setting much of the film on Brighton Pier. It opens with crowds milling on the promenade on that famously sunny August Bank Holiday in 1914. Among them is the Smith family, emblems of the ordinary people of Britain whose lives would be shattered by the actions of the politicians and generals. The gulf that separated these two groups is suggested in the title sequence, with the names of those actors playing the Smiths appearing above the title, while the theatrical luminaries who play the political and military grandees are listed as ‘guest stars’ at the end of a cast list, culminating in ‘and John Mills as Sir Douglas Haig’. The film’s essential theatricality is emphasised by the image of Haig selling tickets for the war from a kiosk. All the male members of the Smith family enlist and are duly killed – though this must be the only war film in which not a single death is actually shown: people die off-screen or, like old soldiers, they simply fade away.
In spite of the deliberate artificiality of its conception, the film is prefaced with a carefully worded announcement suggesting historical authenticity: ‘The principal statements made by the historical characters in this film are based on documentary evidence and the words of the songs are those sung by the troops during the First World War.’ An early sequence depicts the uniformed representatives of the main combatant countries more or less blundering into war, propelled by the scheming Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Count von Berchtold (played by a gleeful John Gielgud), who dupes the silent and it seems senile Emperor Franz-Josef into declaring war on Serbia. This is a version of events that few professional historians would endorse, and indeed neither the crucial role allotted here to von Berchtold, nor even his name, features in such modern histories as Michael Howard’s The First World War (2002) or Norman Stone’s World War One: A Short History (2007). As in Clark’s The Donkeys, the generals are depicted as rivalrous, snobbish and backstabbing, and the casualties of both the Somme and Passchendaele are recorded on cricket scoreboards at Haig’s headquarters. The conversation between Rawlinson and Oxley used by Clark as the epigraph to his chapter on Aubers Ridge is reproduced accurately but ascribed to Haig and one of his ADCs. The film also made use of a notorious passage from Clark’s book in which, as one dissenting historian puts it, the author ‘maliciously suggests […] that Haig was more upset by King George V being thrown from his (Haig’s) horse than by the tragedy of the battle of Loos’. What many people remember as the movie’s most memorable shot did not in fact appear in the film but gained widespread distribution as a publicity photograph. It depicted Mills as Haig standing in front of the row upon row of white crosses, which (lined up on the Sussex Downs and without Haig) supplied the film’s final and enduring image.
Another successful anti-war play that transferred to the screen was John Wilson’s Hamp, about a private serving in the trenches who is court-martialled and shot for desertion. It opened in Edinburgh in 1964 and was filmed that same year by Joseph Losey under the fiercely ironic title King and Country. A concern with the lives of ‘ordinary’ people that characterised the ‘new wave’ of British cinema in the late 1950s and 1960s was very similar to the growing interest in the ‘ordinary’ soldiers of the First World War, which is to say those serving in the ranks rather than the officer class. Directors such as Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger, Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz were keen to portray the working classes as complicated individuals rather than the cheerful Cockneys and chippy Northerners who had traditionally populated British films. In King and Country Private Hamp is just such an individual, at first suspected by the captain called upon to defend him of being a typical product of his lowly background, feckless and unreliable. It turns out, however, that Hamp is suffering from shell shock. He is nevertheless condemned to death as an example to others, and both he and the captain are seen as victims of not only the British class system but also the impersonal and implacable military machine. It is not without significance that Losey was an American who had come to work in Britain after being blacklisted in Hollywood in the wake of the McCarthy hearings. Equally significant was the casting of Tom Courtenay, a contemporary icon of rebellious youth after his roles in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Billy Liar (1963), as the hapless victim of military justice.
Renewed interest in the war continued to influence cinema throughout the decade. Although set in the Second World War, Richard Lester’s How I Won the War (1967) is about a group of soldiers suffering at the hands of an inept commander and owes much to common perceptions about the earlier conflict. Its release in the so-called Summer of Love, in which hippies and flower children demanded people make love not war, was timely, and the casting in a leading role of John Lennon when the Beatles were at the height of their popularity ensured enthusiastic and youthful audiences. Equally, Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) – which had the same scriptwriter, Charles Wood – may have been set in the Crimean War, but its account of heroic British cavalrymen sent by incompetent commanders to their certain deaths against a lethally armed enemy had distinct echoes of the Battle of the Somme. As in Oh! What a Lovely War, the older generation of distinguished actors (Richardson, Gielgud, Trevor Howard, Harry Andrews) took the roles of the generals and commanders, while David Hemmings – another youth icon of the period, who had made his reputation playing a photographer in Swinging London in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966) – was cast as the doomed young Captain Nolan.
Widespread concern about the Vietnam War was also a contributing factor to people’s views of wars. America’s involvement in this costly debacle caused protests not only in the United States but also in Britain. Such prominent public figures as Vanessa Redgrave, when not appearing alongside her father as the pacifist feminist Sylvia Pankhurst in Oh! What a Lovely War, could be found leading protests against America’s involvement in Vietnam outside the country’s embassy in Grosvenor Square. Peter Watkins’ Culloden had drawn upon Vietnam as well as the First World War, since the director saw parallels between what the English did in the Highlands in the eighteenth century and what the Americans were now doing in Vietnam. As in the First World War, young men were being conscripted and there was a sense that another generation was being sacrificed by politicians for no very good reason. One of the great anti-war anthems of the period, Country Joe and the Fish’s ‘I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag’, which everyone sang along to at Woodstock, asked the same questions about Vietnam that people were asking about the First World War and had some of the ironic fatality of soldiers’ songs from that earlier conflict:
And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam.
And it’s five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates.
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.
To some extent, then, revisionist military historians such as Brian Bond and Gary Sheffield are correct in complaining that attitudes to the First World War in the 1960s were anachronistic, more a reflection of the period than of 1914–18. Robert Kee, reviewing the American historian Barbara Tuchman’s August 1914 in 1962, wrote about the various generations and their attitude towards the First World War: ‘First there are the elderly who suffered in it and who in spite of many fine attempts to “work it out of themselves” in the years afterwards are still indelibly marked by it’; next came the middle aged, brought up after 1918, like Kee himself: ‘Later one read Sassoon, Blunden, Owen, Graves, Aldington, turned pacifist for a week, fought in a new war, voted Labour, anti-Labour, but always “The Great War” remained at the back of one’s mind, obscurely unfathomed.’ Finally came the new generation, for whom
it is probably simpler. They are the first generation since the old order foundered in the Flanders mud for whom it has been relatively easy to grow up not taking anything that comes from ‘higher authority’ for granted. The history of the First World War (very much more than the Second) is a marvellous example of the inadvisability of doing so and it is close enough to be breathing down their necks. To the extent that the very young today automatically use their own minds more than their fathers and grandfathers did at their age, they are particularly sane and the madness of the First World War must seem to them particularly incredible.
In Tuchman’s book, which concentrated on the political background to the outbreak of war and the first few weeks of the conflict, ‘the First World War mentality is out in the open: the complacency, the high morale and astonishing courage, the stupidity, the lack of imagination amounting in the context of so much lack of imagination all round to a dogged military virtue, the fantastic refusal to recognize reality when it clashed with preconceived notions of what really ought to be’.
At the end of the decade, the historian Michael Howard wrote a leading article for the Times Literary Supplement on ‘The Demand for Military History’, particularly the history of the First World War, which appeared to have grown throughout the 1960s. Readers of military history, he felt, used to fall into two categories: ‘nostalgic senior citizens and bellicose children of all ages’. A new audience for military history, comprising people between the ages of eighteen and forty (that is, born between 1929 and 1951), was of course welcome to those who wrote military history for their living, but he questioned the interest of such readers in this subject. It was, he felt,
compounded of fascination and disgust with values and habits of the past from which succeeding generations feel it necessary, at fairly regular intervals, to make prolonged and emphatic declarations of independence. As the generation of the 1920s felt it necessary to make clear by their literature and their habits their emancipation from the Victorian Age, so that of the 1960s feels, apparently, compelled to dance on the grave of the era of military imperialism which effectively ended with the Second World War: a dance inspired not by a joyful sentiment of liberation but by a determination to stamp the earth down as hard as possible on the coffin underneath.
Like Oh! What a Lovely War and The Charge of the Light Brigade, ‘numerous instant histories of the First World War seem designed neither to provide the colourful excitement of popular military history nor a careful and sympathetic reconstruction of a bygone historical period. Their object is primarily iconoclastic.’ This was undoubtedly true, as was Howard’s assertion that the motive was not specifically pacifist: ‘Lord Raglan, Lord Kitchener and Lord Haig are held up as figures of fun not because they were soldiers but because they are seen as representatives of a particular social system.’
As well as ‘instant histories’ of the sort Howard disparaged, the 1960s were also marked by numerous memoirs, biographies, anthologies and volumes of poetry concerned with the war. A new edition of Wilfred Owen’s poems, edited by C. Day Lewis, appeared in 1963, along with the first volume of his brother Harold’s trilogy of memoirs, Journey from Obscurity. That same year saw the publication of The Contrary Experience, an autobiographical volume by the poet and art critic Herbert Read, which included extracts from the diary he kept in the trenches and the letters he sent home. The second and third volumes of Harold Owen’s trilogy were published in 1964 and 1965, while Wilfred Owen’s Collected Letters appeared in 1967. There was also a major biography of Rupert Brooke by Christopher Hassall, published in 1964, followed by a huge volume of his letters in 1968. Michael Thorpe’s critical study of Siegfried Sassoon appeared in 1966, a year before the poet’s death. Two of the best-known anthologies of war poetry, Brian Gardner’s Up the Line to Death and I.M. Parsons’ Men Who March Away, appeared in 1964 and 1965 respectively, alongside John H. Johnston’s English Poetry of the First World War: A study in the evolution of narrative form (1964) and Bernard Bergonzi’s Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War (1965). Those who wanted poetry of a rather less elevated kind could turn to John Brophy and Eric Partridge’s The Long Trail (1965), which collected soldiers’ songs, many of which had become familiar from Oh What a Lovely War!, alongside an extensive dictionary of soldiers’ slang.
The surge of interest in the War Poets would continue throughout the following decade, which saw books on David Jones and Julian Grenfell; the collected poems and biographies of both Ivor Gurney and Edward Thomas; the Collected Works and three biographies of Isaac Rosenberg; Jon Silkin’s critical study Out of Battle and his Penguin Book of First World War Poetry; and various other books on the literature of the First World War, most notably Paul Fussell’s seminal The Great War and Modern Memory (1975). It was also during this period that the testimony of veterans began to be regarded as invaluable sources for understanding or studying the 1914–18 conflict. As we have seen, the 1960s were marked by an increasing interest in the lives and history of ordinary people. History no longer belonged to the well educated and the articulate, those who could write and publish their own versions of events. In the preface to his History of the Germanic People (1824) the German historian Leopold von Ranke (a forebear of the soldier-poet Robert Graves) wrote: ‘You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell you how it really was.’ Since the world had apparently ignored the warnings of history provided by the First World War, those who had taken part in it were increasingly called upon to tell later generations how it really was. Oral history became popular as a way of preserving people’s experiences, and the spoken rather than the written word was seen as adding a new layer of authenticity to the way we reconstructed the past. Unprepared and unmediated, words spoken into a tape recorder were felt to have an urgency no written text could match. Furthermore, the testimonies of those without either the education or inclination to put down their memories on paper could now be preserved, so that the database was becoming socially much broader, rankers beginning to contribute as much as the officers had previously done. Recordings also preserved the different ways in which people of different classes and from different parts of the country expressed themselves, which again made the rapidly accumulating data seem wider in its scope.
Given that the generation of 1914 was now ageing fast, institutions and individuals began amassing material for dedicated archives. The Imperial War Museum had been collecting written testimonies and other artefacts ever since it was founded, but it was in the early 1970s that it began building a sound archive in which veterans of the First World War recorded their experiences for posterity. Although the recordings now in the museum’s collections span a considerable period, there was a large surge in acquisitions between 1973 and 1975, when these veterans would on average be in their seventies and eighties. The largest private archive of material about the war was established in 1967 by the historian and academic Peter H. Liddle, specifically ‘to preserve permanently evidence of personal experience in the 1914–1918 war in order that this important aspect of British, Commonwealth and European heritage shall never be lost’. Since it became a national archive (now housed at the University of Leeds), this collection has amassed the written and spoken recollections of well over 3,500 veterans. Liddle himself has published numerous books drawing upon his archive, which is now used by scholars from all over the world.
One of the first books to make extensive use of the testimony of veterans was Martin Middlebrook’s The First Day on the Somme (1971). In order to trace men who had been present on 1 July 1916, Middlebrook placed advertisements in ninety national and local newspapers and journals. As a result he managed to track down 526 British survivors, but many of them died while he was carrying out his research: ‘I failed to get replies to an increasing proportion of the letters written during the three years it took to prepare the book for publication.’ Even forty years ago, then, these living witnesses were beginning to thin out. Although Middlebrook outlined the military strategy of the battle and provided detailed maps, the sense that this was history from the bottom up, as it were, was indicated by the book’s emphatic and empathetic dedication to the ‘front-line soldiers of all nations, 1914–1918’. Of the ten soldiers Middlebrook chose as the principal representatives of the British army on 1 July 1916, there was one lieutenant colonel, two lieutenants, one lance corporal, one RSM, four privates and a bugler.
Middlebrook’s approach was shared by several other historians, notably Lyn Macdonald, who has written a series of books about the First World War, starting in 1978 with They Called It Passchendaele. Subsequent titles include The Roses of No Man’s Land (1980), dealing with nursing at the front, Somme (1983), 1914: The Days of Hope (1988), 1915: The Death of Innocence (1993), To the Last Man: Spring 1918 (1998). These are all compiled from the reminiscences of veterans, linked by Macdonald’s own commentary, while her 1914–1918: Voices and Images of the Great War (1988) combined personal testimony with haunting photographs, contemporary cartoons, advertisements and newspaper clippings, and even the death certificate of a soldier ‘Shot by sentence of FGCM [court martial] for “Desertion”’. Denis Winter’s resonantly titled Death’s Men (1978) is an account of ‘the infantryman’s war […] made up of small details and large emotions’. Winter emphasised that in this book the war would be ‘described by men who had little idea of time, place or importance’ – just as Harry Patch had little idea of the ‘bigger picture’ during the Battle of Passchendaele. It is significant than none of these three authors started out as professional or academic historians. Middlebrook was a Lincolnshire farmer who was inspired to write his book (and several others subsequently) after visiting the war cemeteries in France and Belgium. Lyn Macdonald was a BBC producer who first became interested in the oral testimony of veterans while making a radio documentary, and Denis Winter was a schoolmaster who, as his author note in Death’s Men puts it, ‘still attempts to teach history’. Naturally, professional military historians remain suspicious of such ‘amateurs’ and indeed of any kind of oral history, but such books have enormous public appeal. It was Winter who provided the most eloquent defence of the kind of history he wrote in the epigraph to Death’s Men, which was taken from Aron du Picq, a ‘pioneer writer on the behaviour of men in war and Crimean war veteran who died in battle in the Franco-Prussian war’, who compared his own method with that of two well-known historians of the Napoleonic era:
The smallest detail taken from an actual incident in war is more instructive to me, as a soldier, than all the Thiers and Jominis in the world. They speak for the heads of states and armies, but they never show me what I wish to know – a battalion, company or platoon in action. The man is the first weapon of battle. Let us study the soldier for it is he who brings reality to it.
It was this sense of the ‘reality’ of war which caught the public imagination. It gave veterans of the First World War, most of whom had kept their experiences to themselves, their voice – and, increasingly, their status.