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| Great Britain's Great War by Jeremy Paxman: A Sympathetic History of Our Gravest Folly – review | |
| (about 2 hours later) | |
| Until the early 1960s the events of the first world war were barely known to those of us born long after it ended. Most homes must have had their memorabilia – cigarette lighters madefrom cartridge casing, postcards bearing bad news from the War Office, quiet grandfathers who had done their bit – but at school English teachers never mentioned Wilfred Owen, and history lessons stopped well before the Somme. As to the kind of history we might have consumed of our own free will in comics, "true story" books and films, it stuck almost entirely to military adventures played out between 1939 and 1945 (the exception being Biggles's early career in a Sopwith Camel). | Until the early 1960s the events of the first world war were barely known to those of us born long after it ended. Most homes must have had their memorabilia – cigarette lighters madefrom cartridge casing, postcards bearing bad news from the War Office, quiet grandfathers who had done their bit – but at school English teachers never mentioned Wilfred Owen, and history lessons stopped well before the Somme. As to the kind of history we might have consumed of our own free will in comics, "true story" books and films, it stuck almost entirely to military adventures played out between 1939 and 1945 (the exception being Biggles's early career in a Sopwith Camel). |
| The change began with the publication in 1961 of Alan Clark's The Donkeys, which by ridiculing the military leadership of the British Expeditionary Force offered a satirical perspective that Joan Littlewood and her company took full advantage of in the musical Oh, What a Lovely War! at Stratford East in 1963. A more general enlightenment had to wait until the the war's 50th anniversary in 1964, when the BBC showed its now celebrated 26-part documentary The Great War, which every week for half a year returned us to the trenches, the field guns and the great naval fleets via flickering scraps of silent film interwoven with interviews of survivors, many of whom were then aged well under 70. It was a superb, eloquent achievement: prompted by Wilfred Josephs's sombre music, a suppressed national memory took shape and rose weeping from the mud. | The change began with the publication in 1961 of Alan Clark's The Donkeys, which by ridiculing the military leadership of the British Expeditionary Force offered a satirical perspective that Joan Littlewood and her company took full advantage of in the musical Oh, What a Lovely War! at Stratford East in 1963. A more general enlightenment had to wait until the the war's 50th anniversary in 1964, when the BBC showed its now celebrated 26-part documentary The Great War, which every week for half a year returned us to the trenches, the field guns and the great naval fleets via flickering scraps of silent film interwoven with interviews of survivors, many of whom were then aged well under 70. It was a superb, eloquent achievement: prompted by Wilfred Josephs's sombre music, a suppressed national memory took shape and rose weeping from the mud. |
| To mark the war's 100th anniversary the BBC has more modest ambitions, with Jeremy Paxman presenting a five‑part series called Great Britain's Great War from which this book is a spin-off – sent out in advance of the main event like a wire-cutting party in no-man's land, presumably to take advantage of the Christmas book-buying season. A history book written by a celebrity TV presenter rather than a historian starts at a disadvantage among critics, who might remember that Paxman has also published similar TV-inspired books on Victorian painters and the British empire. Are there no limits to the man's expertise? Then there is the annoying subtitle: what would an unsympathetic history look like – on whose memories would it dance, and who are the "our" in our gravest folly? And above these trivial questions hangs the larger one: given all we've come to know in the past 50 years, do we need another popular history of the British experience of the war, especially one that turns out be so conventional in its approach? | To mark the war's 100th anniversary the BBC has more modest ambitions, with Jeremy Paxman presenting a five‑part series called Great Britain's Great War from which this book is a spin-off – sent out in advance of the main event like a wire-cutting party in no-man's land, presumably to take advantage of the Christmas book-buying season. A history book written by a celebrity TV presenter rather than a historian starts at a disadvantage among critics, who might remember that Paxman has also published similar TV-inspired books on Victorian painters and the British empire. Are there no limits to the man's expertise? Then there is the annoying subtitle: what would an unsympathetic history look like – on whose memories would it dance, and who are the "our" in our gravest folly? And above these trivial questions hangs the larger one: given all we've come to know in the past 50 years, do we need another popular history of the British experience of the war, especially one that turns out be so conventional in its approach? |
| All the usual suspects are here. Edward Grey thinks we won't see the lamps of Europe lit again in our lifetime. A truce breaks out at Christmas. Admiral Beatty says there's something wrong with our bloody ships at Jutland. Lytton Strachey tells a conscientious objectors tribunal that he would "interpose my own body" if a German soldier tried to rape his sister. Sassoon meets Owen at Craiglockhart. This is the kind of history that Alan Bennett skewered long ago in Forty Years On ("Then in 1914 it begins to rain and all through the war and after it never stops"), but that doesn't matter. Episodes like these can hardly be excluded because of their familiarity and Paxman tells them crisply and believably, and though the book is compiled mainly – perhaps entirely – from secondary sources, not all the facts or events are predictable and well‑worn. | All the usual suspects are here. Edward Grey thinks we won't see the lamps of Europe lit again in our lifetime. A truce breaks out at Christmas. Admiral Beatty says there's something wrong with our bloody ships at Jutland. Lytton Strachey tells a conscientious objectors tribunal that he would "interpose my own body" if a German soldier tried to rape his sister. Sassoon meets Owen at Craiglockhart. This is the kind of history that Alan Bennett skewered long ago in Forty Years On ("Then in 1914 it begins to rain and all through the war and after it never stops"), but that doesn't matter. Episodes like these can hardly be excluded because of their familiarity and Paxman tells them crisply and believably, and though the book is compiled mainly – perhaps entirely – from secondary sources, not all the facts or events are predictable and well‑worn. |
| A few are contestable: can as many as 1,800 troop trains really have reached Southampton over five days in August 1914? Perhaps not – that figure representing a train every four minutes day and night – but then so many aspects of the first world war now look impossible. In the early days, the army had been ordered not to make trenches too comfortable "to prevent soldiers thinking of anything other than attack". Later, garden-minded troops grew flowers on support trenches and tended allotments that freshened up their diet of biscuits and bully beef with the occasional cabbage and potato. "Will you please send as soon as possible two packets of candytuft and two packets of nasturtium seeds," one officer writes to his family, while another reports in a letter home that "my daffodils and hyacinths are topping". And all around the excreta piles up to defeat the "shit-wallahs" who have been deputed to carry it away in old biscuit tins, while the corpses of former comrades rot within spitting distance and rats crawl over the living who are sheltering from machine-gun fire and high explosives. Paxman writes that it would be no overstatement to say that relationships were "at times loving" among men who in these dreadful surroundings ate, slept, fought and tried to control their fear together, and at nights snuggled up together to keep warm. "What must it have been like not only to lose a friend, but then have to watch him decompose?" | A few are contestable: can as many as 1,800 troop trains really have reached Southampton over five days in August 1914? Perhaps not – that figure representing a train every four minutes day and night – but then so many aspects of the first world war now look impossible. In the early days, the army had been ordered not to make trenches too comfortable "to prevent soldiers thinking of anything other than attack". Later, garden-minded troops grew flowers on support trenches and tended allotments that freshened up their diet of biscuits and bully beef with the occasional cabbage and potato. "Will you please send as soon as possible two packets of candytuft and two packets of nasturtium seeds," one officer writes to his family, while another reports in a letter home that "my daffodils and hyacinths are topping". And all around the excreta piles up to defeat the "shit-wallahs" who have been deputed to carry it away in old biscuit tins, while the corpses of former comrades rot within spitting distance and rats crawl over the living who are sheltering from machine-gun fire and high explosives. Paxman writes that it would be no overstatement to say that relationships were "at times loving" among men who in these dreadful surroundings ate, slept, fought and tried to control their fear together, and at nights snuggled up together to keep warm. "What must it have been like not only to lose a friend, but then have to watch him decompose?" |
| What made them carry on is just as hard to imagine. As Paxman says, the discipline – or biddability – of the British soldier was remarkable. Of course, they had been taught to love their country and hate the enemy; according to the bishop of London it was their duty to kill Germans "not for the sake of killing but to save the world". But this kind of hatred was easier to keep alive among the civilian population, ready to be outraged by the Daily Mail's continuing revelations (the "Hun body-boilers" was an especially good one), than in trenches where the enemy's only moral defect was his mission to kill you. The British grumbled, sometimes ran away and sometimes lost their minds, but unlike other armies in the conflict they never mutinied. | What made them carry on is just as hard to imagine. As Paxman says, the discipline – or biddability – of the British soldier was remarkable. Of course, they had been taught to love their country and hate the enemy; according to the bishop of London it was their duty to kill Germans "not for the sake of killing but to save the world". But this kind of hatred was easier to keep alive among the civilian population, ready to be outraged by the Daily Mail's continuing revelations (the "Hun body-boilers" was an especially good one), than in trenches where the enemy's only moral defect was his mission to kill you. The British grumbled, sometimes ran away and sometimes lost their minds, but unlike other armies in the conflict they never mutinied. |
| Paxman would not be the first writer to attribute their obedience partly to the way they were led: from the front – rather than prodded from behind – by young officers whose chances of survival were even more dismal than their own. As late as 1917 officers of the Household Cavalry advanced on Arras singing the "Eton Boating Song" – behaviour "so far beyond the compass of the 21st-century mind that it is much easier to snigger than to wonder". At the time it crossed few minds that the army's organisation reflected an antique social order. When the supply of public school boys began to run out and lieutenants had to be promoted from the ranks, they were known as "temporary gentlemen". Still, through some alchemical compound of fear, stoicism, deference and paternalism the British Expeditionary Force held together until November 1918, though during the German advance earlier that year it had come close to breaking point. | Paxman would not be the first writer to attribute their obedience partly to the way they were led: from the front – rather than prodded from behind – by young officers whose chances of survival were even more dismal than their own. As late as 1917 officers of the Household Cavalry advanced on Arras singing the "Eton Boating Song" – behaviour "so far beyond the compass of the 21st-century mind that it is much easier to snigger than to wonder". At the time it crossed few minds that the army's organisation reflected an antique social order. When the supply of public school boys began to run out and lieutenants had to be promoted from the ranks, they were known as "temporary gentlemen". Still, through some alchemical compound of fear, stoicism, deference and paternalism the British Expeditionary Force held together until November 1918, though during the German advance earlier that year it had come close to breaking point. |
| Memorials tell us of the dead. Less regarded are the disfigured, the men who lost noses, mouths, jaws and sometimes almost whole faces and who lived on, in Paxman's phrase, as "walking gargoyles". Primitive plastic surgery made crude repairs on some them, but many others were a lost cause. "It is not so hard to see man die as to break the news to him that he will be blind and dumb for the rest of his life," wrote a nurse on one of the mirror-less wards known in hospitals as "chambers of horrors" where the war's victims pleaded to be killed. The army refused to allow any fit enough to return to duty on the grounds their appearance would damage morale. After the war some found jobs – work offering dark and privacy such as a cinema projectionist's booth was most favoured – but others hid themselves away, fearing public revulsion. Artists such as Kathleen Scott, widow of the polar explorer, made metal masks for the most hopelessly disfigured, but they were "weird to look at and horrible to wear" – clipped to the side of the head by false spectacles that were soldered on to the bridge of the false nose. | Memorials tell us of the dead. Less regarded are the disfigured, the men who lost noses, mouths, jaws and sometimes almost whole faces and who lived on, in Paxman's phrase, as "walking gargoyles". Primitive plastic surgery made crude repairs on some them, but many others were a lost cause. "It is not so hard to see man die as to break the news to him that he will be blind and dumb for the rest of his life," wrote a nurse on one of the mirror-less wards known in hospitals as "chambers of horrors" where the war's victims pleaded to be killed. The army refused to allow any fit enough to return to duty on the grounds their appearance would damage morale. After the war some found jobs – work offering dark and privacy such as a cinema projectionist's booth was most favoured – but others hid themselves away, fearing public revulsion. Artists such as Kathleen Scott, widow of the polar explorer, made metal masks for the most hopelessly disfigured, but they were "weird to look at and horrible to wear" – clipped to the side of the head by false spectacles that were soldered on to the bridge of the false nose. |
| What had it all been for? In his introduction, Paxman proclaims sternly that "it won't do" to think of the first world war as a pointless waste of life, with Wilfred Owen's poetry providing "the urtext of the conviction that all war is futile". But these are two different points. All war may not be futile; some wars certainly are. Naturally it helps our understanding of this or any war if we recognise "why so many people at the time believed it to be not only unavoidable but even necessary", which he says is his book's purpose. But we can understand this and still believe the war to be futile. The case against futility is that the good defeated the bad, but even if that case were made by this book, which it isn't, it can hardly be said that the bad were defeated for long. | What had it all been for? In his introduction, Paxman proclaims sternly that "it won't do" to think of the first world war as a pointless waste of life, with Wilfred Owen's poetry providing "the urtext of the conviction that all war is futile". But these are two different points. All war may not be futile; some wars certainly are. Naturally it helps our understanding of this or any war if we recognise "why so many people at the time believed it to be not only unavoidable but even necessary", which he says is his book's purpose. But we can understand this and still believe the war to be futile. The case against futility is that the good defeated the bad, but even if that case were made by this book, which it isn't, it can hardly be said that the bad were defeated for long. |
| That argument aside, this is a fine introduction to the part Britain played in the first of the worst two wars in history. The writing is lively and the detail often surprising and memorable; the analogy (not the author's) likening Rupert Brooke's death from a mosquito bite to "Sir Lancelot dying from dandruff" is genius. And who would disagree when Paxman says in his concluding sentences that the war marked the point "when the British decided that what lay ahead of them would never be as grand as their past; the point at which they began to walk backward into the future". | That argument aside, this is a fine introduction to the part Britain played in the first of the worst two wars in history. The writing is lively and the detail often surprising and memorable; the analogy (not the author's) likening Rupert Brooke's death from a mosquito bite to "Sir Lancelot dying from dandruff" is genius. And who would disagree when Paxman says in his concluding sentences that the war marked the point "when the British decided that what lay ahead of them would never be as grand as their past; the point at which they began to walk backward into the future". |
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