The Unquiet Western Front Britain’s Role in Literature and History by Brian Bond Cambridge University Press, 120 pp., $25 THE FIRST WORLD WAR was an unnecessary war. In it, brave working-class lions were slaughtered in their tens of thousands by stupid, insensate, upper-class, monocled donkeys who didn’t know their arses from an artillery barrage. An entire generation was sacrificed in the trenches for no reason at all. That is the received wisdom about the war–and it is known to be utterly wrong by nearly every professional military historian, writes Brian Bond in “The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History.” Such history as is known in Britain seems to come primarily from television. As Bond points out, comedian Rowan Atkinson’s “Blackadder Goes Forth” not only captures popular myths about the war, it is on British school syllabi, hammering home the myths as fact. “The Unquiet Western Front” brings together the author’s lectures on “Britain and the First World War: The Challenge to Historians.” Bond sketches a provocative view, largely unknown by the general public. It is a view, it must be said, that neglects the possible justice of Germany’s cause against the Serbs and their Russian allies. But it is also a view that rejects recent revisionist voices of British isolationism, who say that Britain could and should have stayed aloof from the Continental slaughter pens. While it is tempting to wish that Germany could have been, through deft diplomacy, convinced to focus its energies to the east, ham-fisted German militarism was unlikely to be swayed. Nor could Britain have long maintained its independence with the Continent subdued to the kaiser. Germany had amassed its enormous fleet for one reason only: to challenge Britain. Indeed, Britain’s entry was motivated by self-defense and by idealism. Liberal opinion thoroughly supported the principle that aggression against the sovereign states of Europe (in this case, Belgium and France) was intolerable and must be defeated. That idealism was not betrayed by the war, whatever sort of botch came out of the peace. As Bond points out, the German navy was obliterated, the kaiser fell, German militarism was defeated, and Britain’s beneficent empire, which spread liberal ideals, reached its apogee with its post-war territorial gains. For the first time in history, Britain had borne the major brunt of a European continental war, and she emerged not only victorious but able to show potential aggressors that she had the economic, military, and moral wherewithal to bear the enormous costs of such a war. Britain’s victory could have been a great instrument of deterrence to ensure the peace. That it wasn’t is largely because of the myth that the war had been futile, uniquely horrible, even unjust and wrong. That myth developed within the despair that set in afterwards. Immediately following the war, the devastating Spanish flu claimed even more victims globally than the war had. A decade later would come the Great Depression. And then there were the writers. If one looks at British fiction and military memoirs in the postwar years, one finds that the vast majority of the books–particularly those that sold well–were not antiwar. Certainly the thrillers of John Buchan were not. Certainly “Bulldog Drummond” was not. Nor, really, was “Journey’s End,” the popular play that was never intended to be an antiwar statement by its author, but become an enormously celebrated one in the hands of its theatrical producer. One even has to be careful with making too much of the antiwar sentiments of such war poets as Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon. For one thing, Rupert Brooke’s poetry–which was in the dulce et decorum est pro patria mori line–remained enormously popular into the 1930s while Owen was a minority taste. Robert Graves was never anything other than proud of his military service. Siegfried Sassoon was a tremendously courageous and efficient officer. And his prose–see his trilogy, “The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston”–is not only brilliant and powerful, but much more balanced in its approach and assessments than his bitter war poems. As Bond notes, many of the antiwar poets were men whose demoralization and disillusionment came from personal issues that were compounded into their experience of the war. Many literate soldiers were appalled at what they saw as the “antiwar” writers’ disordered and exaggerated description of the Western Front as an endlessly brutal and grim experience to be met only with despair and anguish. It was, to the more level-headed, simply war, and with its purposes, compensations, and reliefs as well as the inevitable horror. Far from being donkeys, braying from the rear, the officers–including the generals–fell in greater numbers than they did in the Second World War. And with rare exceptions they led well and learned quickly; they did, after all, defeat a formidable opponent. While there were days of incredible slaughter, these, says Bond, should not be mistaken for the whole–nor should the victorious offensive of 1918 be as neglected as it usually is. But if the war was misunderstood in the decades leading up to the Second World War, its myth grew even more in the 1960s. The officers became the heartless aristocrats who represented the establishment that deserved to be overthrown. If there is one man who represented the heartless establishment more than any other it was Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig–who had already been the subject of abuse and criticism from the moment politicians began writing their postwar memoirs. Still, it is hard to gainsay what the journalist Kevin Myers wrote in the Sunday Telegraph in 1998: “Douglas Haig will always remain a demon. He above all others won the Great War; and for depriving them of a great defeat, the British will never forgive him.” But perhaps we should–and perhaps we should remember, as Bond helps us to do–that the truth of history is often not what we think it is. H.W. Crocker III writes often on military history. His comic novel about a British brigadier general, “The Old Limey,” was recently reissued in paperback.
