The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War

Abstract

For most of the twentieth century, the First World War has been painted a particular way in Britain. The image of that war, sketched first in the disillusioned 1930s and finished and coloured in the 1960s, has been one of futility, of ‘lions led by donkeys’, in the mud of Flanders. Alan Clark's The Donkeys (1961) is one of the clearest purveyors of this depiction, as is Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (1975). On a popular level, a similar vision is put forward by Blackadder Goes Forth. The dominant image is of incompetent generals sentencing their soldiers to futile deaths in a storm of machine-guns and artillery, a conflict ended only by exhaustion. Adrian Gregory points out that the British believed that the First World War ‘was stupid, tragic, and futile’ (p. 3). This picture, unfortunately, has distorted our perceptions of the war and left critical aspects of that conflict grievously neglected. For example, despite reams of works on such battles as the Somme and Passchendaele, we remain without a similarly authoritative collection of studies of the battles of the summer and the autumn of 1918, when the war was actually won and lost. More directly for this review, there are many more studies of pacifist or anti-war groups at home in Britain than there are of those who supported the war. This despite the fact that the latter were by far the majority and the former were, at most, a tiny minority. It is only over the last decades that the historiography of the First World War has begun to break away from this image and recover long neglected topics. This growing body of work (still sorely in need of a comprehensive historiographical article to encompass it) now includes Gregory's present book. This fits nicely into the resurgent re-imagining of the First World War and replaces Arthur Marwick's The Deluge (1965) as the standard study of British society during this war.

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