Trench Fever

I have moved!

2006-04-03T12:52:00.000+01:00

I've decided to move to a new site. Using Wordpress should allow me to do a lot more with the blog (and look better, which is always important). Please follow the link and update your links accordingly.

It's That Man Again!

2006-03-22T16:26:00.000Z

An edited version of this review (cut for length and minus the comments about nicknames) has just gone in
to the Journal of Military History.

Full and frank disclosure: I have co-edited and co-written with Gary Sheffield, and consider him a friend as well as a colleague. But I’d still tell him if I thought he’d written a bad book. That I know him personally made it more of a pleasure to write as I’ve done below, but it didn’t change what I wrote.

G. Sheffield and J. Bourne, eds, Douglas Haig: War Diaries and Letters 1914-1918 (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005), ISBN0 297 84702 3, pp550, £25.00

A. Wiest, Haig: The Evolution of a Commander (Washington DC, Potomac Books, 2005), 137pp, ISBN 1 57488 683 5, $19.95.

Douglas Haig stands with Neville Chamberlain as one of the two most controversial figures in British twentieth century history. Both men took difficult decisions in situations which baffled contemporaries. Both were certain they were right. Both arguably laid the groundwork for final victory in their respective world wars. Neither has ever been forgiven by their countrymen.

Throughout the war, Haig kept a detailed diary, written by hand and sent back at regular intervals to his wife to be copied up. Rather like the Bible, the Qu’ran (and countless other religious texts), excerpts from this diary have often been used to back up commentators’ existing beliefs. Either it demonstrated beyond all doubt that Haig was a far-sighted general, educated in the ways of modern war, or that he was a callous butcher, blind to technology and more concerned with kings and horses than the lives of his men. Those who wished to read the diary in context had to rely either on a version published in 1952, heavily edited by Robert Blake and reflecting his interest in political, rather than military history, or on the original diaries, held in the National Library of Scotland. Haig’s diary has itself been a subject of controversy. The keeping of manuscript and typescript versions, and differences between the two, has led some to see a conspiracy designed to advance the Field Marshal’s career or to shield his post-war reputation.

John Bourne and Gary Sheffield, two of Britain’s best historians of the Great War, have therefore rendered an enormous service to the field by publishing as full as possible an edition of this diary, together with a number of letters from Haig. Although inevitably edited for reasons of space, this volume indicates omissions and divergences between manuscript and typescript versions. Sheffield and Bourne argue powerfully (following the work of Elizabeth Greenhalgh) that Haig did not in general re-write his diary in an attempt to deceive the reader. Sheffield and Bourne would both interpret Haig’s command in a more positive light than some other historians – but they do not press their opinions on readers and their editing has been to produce a publishable volume rather than to support a particular interpretation. Douglas Haig: War Diaries and Letters is well supplied with an introduction, which narrates Haig’s life, explanatory footnotes, appendices and biographical sketches. There is great pleasure and much information to be gained from the editors’ expertise.

Sheffield and Bourne are ideal guides to this material because of their detailed knowledge of the British army in this period. The footnotes giving Haig’s subordinates’ nicknames are a work of wonder in themselves. If the derivations of ‘Fanny’ Fanshawe (99)and even ‘Stiff ‘Un’ Stephens (102) are reasonably apparent, what incidents in far off imperial hill stations led to the appellations awarded to ‘Meat’ Lowther (96) and ‘Gobby Chops’ Mullens (348)?

For those who wish to see it, there is copious evidence here for a more positive interpretation of Haig’s command. Entries in the diary clearly show Haig’s interest in his men, his recognition of the problems of command on the Western Front (even if he struggled to find solutions), his faith in technology and his acceptance of the need to bring in civilian expertise to manage the logistical efforts of the British army. By 1918 Haig had not only recognised that tactical manoeuvre in this war was possible only at the most junior level, but through the focus of his attention at inspections and training exercises, was clearly part of the BEF’s reinvention of itself as a skilled all arms modern force.

This volume will not, however, end debates about Haig’s character, nor convince those who continue to condemn him. They will find here evidence of Haig’s misreading of the confusion of war, of his self-belief obscuring any reasoned analysis of the reasons for failure, and of his appalling prejudices against Catholics in general and Italians, Frenchmen and Irishmen in particular.

It is for the scholar who is able to clear his or her mind of the detritus of previous interpretations of Haig’s life, that this volume will offer the greatest rewards. Read in full, rather than in excerpt, Haig’s diary gives a remarkable impression of a man of his age (his prejudices, religion and belief in technology were typical of his gender and class) struggling with the difficulties of the First World War. Haig was not a man given to introspection or self-doubt – no Alanbrookian worries over his own competence or the perils his troops were undertaking here – but he did leave a remarkably detailed account which can help us to reconstruct the past whilst avoiding psychological anachronism. As a source for understanding how Britain managed to fight the First World War, Douglas Haig: War Diaries and Letters is invaluable. For the history of Britain in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and for British military history, it is probably the single most important publication in the past year.

Andrew Wiest’s Haig: The Evolution of a Commander is a good guide to those new to the topic. Wiest guides his readers through the mass of writing on Haig, indicating areas of controversy and providing helpful suggestions for further reading. In a book of this length and purpose there is not room for really detailed historiographical analysis: but this means that Wiest is able to sum up both what we must still call the ‘revisionist’ case and to indicate where Haig’s command should be criticised. For undergraduates, cadets, or those unable to understand what all the fuss is about, this would be a good place to start.

The First World War in stereoscope

2006-03-20T11:53:00.000Z

(Thanks to Michelle Rhoades, via the Society for First World War Studies discussion list, apologies for cross posting).
A new set of First World War photos, from a private collection, posted on a French site. These images (some of which are pretty grisly) were originally produced in stereoscope.
You can see an original example on the site. The idea was to create a three dimensional effect. It might at first seem curious that anybody would want a 3-D picture of dead bodies, yet the images and viewers were an important means of imaginative participation in the war for non combatants at the time and after. Althought there was a vital line of separation between front line soldiers and civilians based on experience, we shouldn't believe that those who didn't fight were completely ignorant (at the time and after) of the horrors of the trenches.

Follow up to Hitting the Headlines

2006-03-17T13:02:00.000Z

Great example from David Knight's blog of hitting the (archaeological) headlines.
And this, which is obviously written by someone with little sense of chronology (or French leaders) but which is still pretty funny for anyone with experience of instant messager and online gaming.
Hat tip (or perhaps more appropriately for this site, a salute, to the latest edition of the Carnival of Bad History)

Hitting the headlines

2006-03-17T12:01:00.000Z

One of the things which can frustrate/inspire/depress historians is the way that their subject is misused by the media. We can be irritated when our - vitally important - topic areas are ignored because they aren't perceived as media-friendly. We can be driven to distraction when our topic is simplified or misrepresented (one obvious example is the lazy use of the same piece of footage or audio to represent a historical event). All of us, as practitioners of an evidence based profession, used to rigorous critical thinking, will be annoyed when we see the past being used illogically or inadequately to justify current policy (think of the resonance of 'appeasement'), or to make a quick buck without regard to the historical record (was about to link there, but might just check with my lawyer).
I've long had a pipe dream of inaugurating a historical hit squad who would scrutinise the public use of the past, and point out errors and inadequacies. The web offers obvious opportunities - and to an extent this function is already carried out by Cliopatria and the Carnival of Bad History. Both of these sites, however, rely on individual research and opinion (indeed, that is a strength). Over the weekend, I was fascinated to meet an old friend who now runs a project for the NHS on evidence based practice: 'Hitting the Headlines'. You can see daily updates in the top right hand corner here. A major problem for GPs is that news reporting of medical developments affects patient attitudes and demands - so a report of a miracle drugs will see surgeries crowded with patients demanding that treatment, whether it is useful or not. As the critically minded amongst you will know, scientific research can be presented in a multitude of different ways, and factors like sample size, blind testing, and reproducibility are all key.
What the 'Hitting the Headlines' website does is to assess all national newspaper reports in the medical arena, and provide the background story which will allow doctors to rate research and treatment. It therefore functions as a portal through which they can learn about the facts behind the headlines. Although it will judge how well papers reported the story, the site doesn't make value judgements about why stories might have been misrepresented, either by the media or by industry. As a result of the nature of scientific research, it is able to assess research on a number of criteria.
This is obviously a massive undertaking, requiring a great deal of time and effort. But it seems to me to be an extraordinarily useful idea, and a great use of the net - not least because 'Hitting the Headlines' can not only summarise relevant research, but provide links to the studies, so that readers can judge for themselves.
My instinctual reaction was that something similar would be wonderful for history. Providing an opportunity to rate the public use of history would not only be a release valve for academics - it would encourage better public understanding and use of the past. Rather than doing this on an ad hoc basis, as currrently occurs in many reputable blogs, this is an area where a central group blog could have a purpose and a mission. History is of course a matter of discussion, opinion and debate in a way that science - it could be argued - is not. But history does have methodologies and is based on the use of evidence to back up argument. These are both rate-able.
Then reality struck. Doing this properly would take a lot of time and money. An whilst the AHRC might look on this as a worthwhile project, I'm just not sure how you'd justify it in total.
So I started thinking about how else we could use this approach. And what I'm going to work on, as an idea, is a "History in the Headlines" site to which undergraduates would have to contribute as part of a first year course. This would be a way of encouraging them to think, not only about the use of evidence and about writing for different audiences, but also about how the past is used. We actually run a joint honours History and Journalism degree, whose students might find this particularly relevant. Lots of problems to address before anything could actually happen: how to integrate it with existing teaching, how to assess it, how to ensure a quality standard. But I think the idea of a wikki-approach - a self-moderating and improving website - icone that might have wings (it could also be a way of publicising the department, which is a subject much on my mind at the moment).

Coming up: Writing War updates

All together now (in No Man's Land?)

2006-03-17T11:49:00.000Z

Quick post - more coming soon, as term finishes and UCAS forms start to play less of an all consuming part in my life - to note Mark Grimsley's setting up of a group blog at civilwarriors.net. Mark - inspiration and guide for history bloggers and winner of a Cliopatria award - has organised a selection of eminent American Civil War scholars to post entries on a more or less rotational basis. Bearing in mind the lack of recent posts here, this seems a particularly attractive solution to bloguctivity. Running a blog is hard work - and as I've discussed before, it can be difficult to ensure that it becomes an academic aid rather than a hindrance or an excuse. The blogger can feel a lot of pressure - resulting either in poor posting, or no posting, or just a general increase in stress which defeats the object of the exercise. A group blog - despite the difficulties of coordination and coherence which might appear - seems to me to be one solution, combining communality of the blogosphere in a subject specific single location.
So time to think about whether it would be possible to do something similar for modern British - or specifically world war - history. The only problem I can foresee is that most of those who would be most interested in running something like this already have their own blogs, and that the quantity of instruction/re-education some of my more eminent colleagues might require could be time consuming. But actually, just writing this has made me think of a number of people who I could recruit. Term finishes in two weeks - time for more thinking then.

New stuff

2006-02-07T15:12:00.000Z

I’ve been away from the blog for some time, as a result of the pressure of other work and an almighty dose of cold, so I’ve just taken a day to add a load of new stuff in one go, on the principle that if I didn’t make the effort to restart what I still think is a valuable tool, I’d let it go completely. So here’s a guide to what’s just gone up, and some new items I’ve come across online.

Heather Jones and Sir Rodric Braithwaite's papers to the Writing War Seminar

The PhDs that never were

A living memorial

Jack McGowan’s blog – Jack is making exemplary use of his blog as a means of enhancing his PhD studies.

Brett Holman asks what my book is actually called.

Currently I'm in the middle of an enormous UCAS panic. So it'll probably be another little while before more stuff goes up. Not the ideal use of blogging technology, I know. Incidentally, while I'm here, has anybody else commented thatin terms of training citizen soldiers, the Second World War was actually harder for the British Army than the First. New troops in Britain could not be gradually introduced to the line - instead, whole formations went through the bulk of the war training, but not fighting. Just been re-reading Timothy Harrison Place's book on this, and noting how hard it was to train soldiers in certain bits of fighting without a real enemy to practise on.

A living memorial?

2006-02-07T12:53:00.000Z

Thanks to my dad for the photo of a plaque at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London. This Sessile Oak was planted from a seed collected at Verdun in 1917. Any other examples of living/growing memorials gratefully received.

Thinking about Modern War

2006-02-07T12:51:00.000Z

Sir Rodric Braithwaite spoke to the Writing War seminar on 1 February 2006 on ‘Thinking about Modern War’. Sir Rodric is a former British ambassador to Moscow, and has just written a book (out this year) on the battle for Moscow in 1941. His essential question was why, if war is so horrible, we as academics are so interested in it. He suggested five potential reasons:

1) War as a moral and legal issue – war is a location for the debate of the principles which act as guides to behaviour within human societies.

2) War as a laboratory of decision making – for those who are interested in organisations and leaders, war seems at first glance to be a useful testbed, with relatively clearly defined boundaries and apparently obvious outcomes (victory and defeat). In fact, the greater the degree of study, the clearer it becomes that war is as multivariant and confused as any other area of decision making.

3) War as a science – military practitioners in particular have been keen to render war understandable so that it is winnable. Sir Rodric went on to discuss Rupert Smith’s new book on the potential outdating of war.

4) The Boy’s Own Paper view of war – war as a (usually masculine) fantasy of individual agency, bravery and fetishised ‘kit’. This was often a potent influence on those joining up to be soldiers.

5) In comparison, Sir Rodric juxtaposed the differences between soldiering – particularly the boredom and brutalisation of training – and fighting. It is in battle that complicated issues of bravery and cowardice, responsibility and physicality come to the fore in the study of war. He highlighted the quality of Soviet writing about officership – citing the words of Bickar (?): ‘If you want to lead men in battle, the first assumption has to be that they will run away.’

6) In conclusion, Sir Rodric spoke about the difference between the civilian and the military mind – one founded on the willingness to kill and be killed, and to cause the deaths of those under command. This combination marks out soldiers from all others (for example, from the emergency services). He closed by asking the seminar to ponder why it studied war.

I’ve been meaning for some time to write a rationale for why I do what I do, and Sir Rodric’s paper led me to consider doing that again. I’ve a slight fear that this form of writing is rather self-indulgent, so I want to do it properly at a moment when I have more time than at present.

Prisoners of War

2006-02-07T12:46:00.000Z

There are few pleasures in academia like listening to someone who is just post-thesis submission discuss their work. The knowledge of the topic, the familiarity with the sources, the intellectual engagement: this is how historians should always be. In fact, that would be rather exhausting – better to say that this is a position lots of us would like to be in more frequently. It was a great pleasure, then, for the Writing War seminar to hear Heather Jones, of Trinity College Dublin, speak about PoWs in the First World War, on 18 January 2006.

Heather’s topic was the evolution of violence against prisoners in the course of the war, and the problematic nature of ‘remembering’ prisoner experience in post-war Europe. The mythology of the First World War has little space for prisoners – particularly for the use of prisoners as labour which, as Heather pointed out, was an essential resource for both sides. The focus of this paper was on these men – so violence against prisoners in this respect should be understood as something separate from that meted out around the moment of surrender. Her sources came from across Europe, including official army instructions, investigations into prisoner treatment and individual accounts.

As usual, rather than summarise the whole paper, let me remark on four things that stood out:

1) The degree to which prisoners were used as labour, particularly by the German army.

With no resources of colonial labour, the Germans had to use prisoners as a means to prosecute total war. In 1916, a quarter of a million prisoners were working for the German army behind the lines (about a sixth of those held) as opposed to about 30,000 for the French. Both sides, perhaps unsurprisingly, proved willing to bend their pre-war attitudes to prisoner treatment and definitions of ‘war-work’ when confronted by the needs of conflict. In 1918, the German army chose to make much greater use of prisoners – including larger numbers of British, French and Italian prisoners – close to the battlefront. At the same time, the use of violence by guards significantly worsened. Mistreatment of prisoners by guards was a major problem for the German army, with a tension existing between the need to make men work and the pressures on guards and commanders from their own military system and the large influx of prisoners in 1918. There was a paradox (seemingly invisible to OHL) between commanders placing prisoners in conditions of (sometimes extreme) danger, but demanding that their men treat these prisoners well.

2) Brutalisation. Some of these men suffered extreme ill treatment, either in the form of exposure to shellfire whilst engaged in warwork within the battlezone, or from their guards. To quote from Heather’s research in her thesis ‘The Enemy Disarmed. Western Front Prisoners of War and the Violence of Wartime, Britain, France and Germany, 1914-1920’ (Trinity College Dublin, 2006): ‘A British prisoner, Drummer Leslie Rudd, described his guards at Sailly, 5 miles from the firing line:

They treated us very badly and beat us with sticks and rifles all times of the day. Many of us were in a bad state and incapable to work [sic] from dirt and lack of food. It was a regular thing for us to lose our bread ration and we had a very small quantity of bread and coffee and soup given us. One day we refused to load shells and one of our men complained to a German staff officer who spoke English, telling him it was wrong to expect us to load shells for them and that we wanted to make a general complaint. His only reply was to line us up in a squad and to order that the first man who refused to work should be instantly shot.[1]’

(please cite Heather’s location of this evocative quotation if you wish to make use of it)

British and French prisoners still did better than Russian prisoners, who were bottom of the humanitarian ladder (I can’t remember, at this stage, whether Heather spoke about the small number of British and French Indian and African prisoners taken by the Germans). Allied prisoners also suffered malnutrition as the German ration system broke down at the end of the war (particularly because their employment in labour companies complicated the receipt of Red Cross parcels). Heather’s work therefore fits into a much broader historical debate about the effect of war and military society on human behaviour.

3) National differences

The different hierarchical structures of the various armies and the pre-war backgrounds of the men involved affected how they behaved as prisoner-labourers.

4) Memory.

There was little place for the memory of PoW experience in post-war Europe. Many of these men may in any case not have chosen to remember an experience which was traumatic and emasculating. When PoWs were represented (as in Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, and in some British memoirs) they were officers in prison camps inside Germany. This allowed them to be shown in terms which gave them back individual agency and which fitted pre-existing narrative models. It was perhaps surprising that, in the aftermath of the war, the Entente made so little of the mistreatment of its prisoners – although this was perhaps in response to the scale of the global catastrophe from which they were trying to recover.

Heather succeeded in opening up an area which few seminar members had even thought about before. We did however, manage to ask her some useful questions (hopefully in partial preparation for her viva) about differences in national experience, the role of regular, volunteer and conscripted soldiers, and the contribution of prisoners to the war effort. ‘Prisoner Studies’ in a broader sense is clearly a topic deserving of wider study across the century. In an era of trans-disciplinary approaches, it combines legal, military, cultural and social history to the benefit of each.

Writing War Spring Semester Programme

[1] TNA, WO 161/100, no.1785, Interview with Drummer Leslie Rudd.

Apocrypha

2006-02-06T17:06:00.000Z

My next major project is a ‘big’ book on Britain and the Second World War, combining the social, cultural and military history of the war (and much else besides). One of the great pleasures of starting a project such as this, at least for me, is the ability to range widely over a broad field, much of which is new to me. But one of the frustrations is that I’ve already encountered a number of areas which seem to deserve more study, or in which I’d like to make some speculative suggestions in the certain knowledge that I won’t have time to launch an in-depth research project. So here are the projects that, were there but world enough and time, I’d like to pursue. If anyone knows of specific material that already exists on them, then please let me know. If anyone wants to pursue one, just let me know what you find out. If anyone would like to be supervised for a PhD – just ask!

1. Gambling and the black market 1935-1945

In the interwar years, Britain developed a huge gambling industry, both legal and illegal. As Mike Huggins points out, much of this related to horse racing. Off course cash betting was illegal, but hugely popular. Working class communities in particular had to develop a version of socially sanctioned illegality – where policemen turned a blind eye to bookmakers, or bookies made sure that they were seen positively by the communities around them – in order that this entertainment could continue. The advent of the Second World War disrupted the sporting programme on which bookies depended. I wonder to what degree they therefore transformed themselves into black-marketeers – similarly a socially sanctioned form of illegality, and one occupying a similar precarious status in communities. The sources for this study would be police records, local newspaper reports, memoirs and oral history. It would be a means of exploring how pre-war society adapted itself to the needs of war. (I think you could do a similar study on the way that inter-war cigarette coupons pre-figured the experience of rationing in the Second World War).

2. The British Police and Technology 1918 to 1945

Many of the debates which military historians have with regard to British attitudes towards, and acceptance of, technological change could equally be explored through the study of different police force’s use of technology from the end of the First to the end of the Second World War.

3. The British Army’s Experience of COIN in post 1918 Europe.

Studying the Middlesex Regt recently, I was astonished (perhaps foolishly) to see that they had been involved in comparatively heavy fighting against rioting Polish miners in Silesia in 1922 (and they had Ireland in 1921 to judge against it). I am not aware of any unit-by-unit studies of the British army’s experience of COIN outside Ireland and the Empire after the First World War. But such a study might tell us a good deal about the problems of demobilisation (cultural and military) and the wide range of roles filled by the army after 1918 (which feeds into how it prepared for the Second World War). It also has a good deal of contemporary relevance – a post-conflict society, with a heavily armed, ethnically divided population, policed by a multi-national force (the Middlesex CO had Italian Grenadiers and French Chasseurs under command).

4. A good social history of allotments, grounded in local council archives (perhaps one or two case studies). Thanks to my good friend James Crabtree, desperately searching for a present for his dad, for highlighting this gap in the market to me. There are a couple of sources out there which I haven’t had a chance to read: D. J. Humphreys, The Allotment Movement in England and Wales. D. Crouch and C. Ward, ‘ “The Allotment” - Its Landscape and Culture’, Allotment and Leisure Gardener. Issue 3 1996. (thanks to www.kitchengardens.dial.pipex.com) for the material.

5. A cultural history of speedway in Britain between the wars. Again, the rapid rise of the sport could tell us a lot about attitudes towards, and familiarity with, technology. There is a least one article in the journal Sport History about speedway, but there’s got to be at least a thesis’ worth of material at the cultural level. One of the things I remember about researching the representation of the First World War in British boys’ papers in the 1920s and 1930s is the sudden appearance, in the mid 30s, of speedway as a location for heroic exploits.

I’ll add to this list as I go on. And perhaps link it from my (soon to be rewritten) departmental page, since we’re all being encouraged to say specifically what we’d like to supervise at a postgraduate level).

Happy New Year

2006-01-05T14:55:00.000Z

(Battalion HQ, 1 Worcesters, autumn 1944. Officer in centre writing up war diary. Image from Worcesters History Site)

Writing War Seminar Programme: Spring 2006

Wednesday 1800-1930

Lock Keeper’s Cottage, Mile End Campus, Queen Mary University of London

18 January: Heather Jones (TCD) - British and German Prisoners of War, 1914-18

1 February: Sir Rodric Braithwaite – Thinking about Modern War

15 February: Prof Andreas Schonle (QMUL - chair) – Panel Discussion - Representing War in Literature

1 March: Natalya Vince (QMUL) – 'Oral histories of Algerian women war veterans (War of independence 1954-1962)'

15 March: Dr Alex Argenti-Pillen (UCL) – ‘We can tell anything to the milk tree: Indigenous reports on the war in Southern Sri Lanka'

Further details of seminar aims.

Please contact the postgraduate administrator, history-postgrad@qmul.ac.uk, to express your interest

Book reviews

2005-12-30T15:19:00.000Z

First draft of review of two books on the Somme for the Society of Army Historical Research. Going to have to be some extensive cuts, so here's a place to get it all out. Another review, by Nick Lloyd at the Centre for First World War Studies in Birmingham, here.

Peter Hart, The Somme (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005); ISBN 13 978 0 297 845705 8, 589pp, £20.00; Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, The Somme (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2005), ISBN 0 300 10694 7, 358pp, £19.95.

It might seem extraordinary to suggest that there is anything new to write on the Battle of the Somme. The British have been so obsessed with their first encounter with the realities of industrialised total war that they have been discussing it compulsively since 1916. Yet that very quantity of discussion has obscured much of what actually took place in the summer and autumn of that year under a thick accretion of myth and misunderstanding. Here are two new books which attempt – in different ways – to clear away the silt of incomprehension and explain the battle afresh.

Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson have previously co-written on the career of Sir Henry Rawlinson and on the Third Ypres campaign of 1917. Their latest book, based once again on deep archival research at the National Archives, moves back to the titanic battle of the previous year. Prior and Wilson are at their best when subjecting strongly held beliefs about the battle to critical analysis. For example, they refute the idea that every – or even most – British battalions on 1 July advanced ‘as if they were on review at Aldershot’, in straight lines, shoulder to shoulder. They demonstrate that in fact, British units employed a wide range of different solutions to the tactical problem of crossing No-Man’s Land. That so few met with success was a matter of inadequate artillery preparation and support, not lack of infanteer’s skill. A fascination in the historiography with the pace and form of the British advance on 1 July has been misleading. As Prior and Wilson state, concentrating on infantry tactics obscures the basic fact that it was quantity, concentration and direction of artillery fire that was the crucial factor in deciding defeat or victory on the Western Front. This, of course, is a point they have made before. Similarly, these authors have not contented themselves with making the same assertions about length of service in the lines, based on the memoirs of Charles Carrington, as almost every other writer. Instead they have returned to the original documents and built up the data for themselves – in this case, for the experience of 1 Division. Elsewhere, they argue that just because the horrific breadth of loss on 1 July went unrepeated does not mean that the British had instantly ascended a learning curve. The success of 14 July – widely held as a counterpoint to the disaster of a fortnight before – was as much a matter of luck as judgement. Their final assessment of the performance of those in control of the British war effort at all levels is devastating: ‘The soldiers who became casualties in their hundreds of thousands fought well in a good cause. But they deserved a plan and competent leadership as well as a cause.’ (309).

All of these factors make Prior and Wilson’s The Somme a thought provoking and a useful book, particularly as a partner to more positive interpretations of the British performance on the Somme. Sometimes, however, it is unclear quite whom is the target of the authors’ fire. They are eager to dispel popular misconceptions of the Somme. But they are also writing in reaction to what they seem to perceive as a triumphalist note in recent British military histories. Triumphalist these texts may have been, but they have been far from triumphant: their impact on popular belief about the war has been limited. The reader who is familiar with newer writing is less likely to believe that every battalion marched over the top in straight lines, but is perhaps more likely to purchase this book. The result of this compromise is a volume that can feel disjointed or insufficiently directed.

One target of Prior and Wilson’s wrath is obvious: the much battered form of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig. Yet blaming Haig sometimes takes the place of understanding him and his army. Without doubt Haig took poor decisions in 1916. His command style was inadequate to the task it faced. The objectives he set his army often seem to fly in the face of any retrospective suggestion of a ‘learning curve’ or a battle of attrition. But identifying these faults is not enough. Why did he take those bad decisions or give those poor orders? What was the coincidence of intelligence, organisation, experience, military culture and personality which led to them? The authors may feel they have addressed these questions elsewhere. Here, they too often go unanswered.

Again, it is a useful corrective to be reminded of the logical incoherence of some of the orders Haig issued to his subordinates. But this reader was left wondering whether close textual analysis of selected Haig quotations is really a step on in the historical method. British military historians have been trading such quotes from each side of the No Man’s Land in which Haig sits since at least the 1960s (and arguably much earlier). Prior and Wilson supply those who wish to denigrate Haig with some new quotations. But they do not follow up their interpretation of their incoherence with a clear demonstration that his subordinates either found them so, or were confused by these orders rather than by the rapid pace of change and the tempo of battle. Was there, amongst the ranks of British generals, a better alternative? Given the utility of other parts of the book, the sections dealing with Haig are something of a disappointment.

Peter Hart’s massive The Somme sometimes abdicates historical responsibility in the same fashion, for example when Hart writes that: ‘The collective failure of generalship within the Fourth Army can never be adequately explained or excused.’ (262). Excuses or not, explanation is surely the task of the historian. But this is a different book to Prior and Wilson’s, one aimed much more clearly at the popular market. It is based predominantly on material produced by those who were there at the time. This is an approach which has been taken before – notably by Martin Middlebrook and Lyn Macdonald – but Hart’s work is superior to both these predecessors. He presents an analytical account of the battle, based on an incredibly broad range of sources and a mass of secondary scholarship, which does not shrink from dissecting command decisions. This is far more than anecdotal history. The contemporary sources Hart uses are frequently fresh and striking in their intensity. For example, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Maxwell’s accounts of the fighting for Trones Wood and Thiepval – new to this reader – give an excellent impression of the difficulties of battalion command on the Somme: a level which has too often been ignored. There is here a Rankean exploration of ‘what it was actually like’ – a feeling for the problems of those who were there at all levels – which occasionally seems absent in Prior and Wilson’s volume.

Hart sometimes employs a rather ‘Boys’ Own’ style in celebrating the achievements of VC winners and heroic leaders such as Maxwell. But he is sensitive enough to point out that most men could not reach these heights of courage, and indeed stood rather in awe or in terror of those who could. He does an excellent job of laying out the battles which made up the Somme campaign, and of recapturing the experience of a broad range of soldiers on the British side. The major criticism of his book must be that the reader is usually left to work out the vintage of the source. Hart is a discerning historian with a deep awareness of the problems posed by different sources – be they official report, contemporary diary, letter home or subsequent oral history interview. He has doubtless assessed each carefully before including it. But he owes it to readers – even to the popular audience at whom this volume is aimed – to allow them to make up their own mind about the quality and reliability of his witnesses. In the era of the dodgy dossier, full disclosure and acknowledgement of the difficulties of historical writing are a requirement even for the ‘trade’ writer. We might also wonder whether a closer edit was necessary. The purpose of an appendix describing ‘trench life’, after five hundred pages which have often described just that, is unclear. This either needed to be part of the main body of the text or excised.

Taken together – but only together – these books represent a major step forward in the study of the field. It is noticeable that Prior and Wilson rely on material in the National Archives, whereas Hart concentrates on those held in the Imperial War Museum and the National Army Museum. This separation of sources, if nothing else, demands that these books be read in combination. Neither book, it is a shame to say, is able to treat the battle as an interaction between British, German and French troops. Both would be more accurately titled The British Army and the Battle of the Somme. But they do represent important ranging shots for the barrage of books that will doubtless descend before July 2006 (let alone the follow up attack of July 2016). Perhaps most significantly, both emphasise that if we wish to lay blame for the suffering of the Somme, we have to look beyond the generals to the politicians and the people who elected them. This may be an early step away from a near-century in which the British have avoided taking responsibility for their participation in this terrible battle.

2005-12-30T14:50:00.000Z

Review of semester one

2005-12-30T14:37:00.000Z

Putting my end of semester course evaluations online - partly for comments, partly so that it's easily accessible to students and staff, partly to chart the intellectual journey.

I am course organiser for one undergraduate course (Britainin the Second World War) and one postgraduate course (Victors to Victims: Representing Total War in Britain, 1945-2000). I also supervise seven third year undergraduates undertaking research dissertations on a variety of subjects [it may surprise readers of what's meant to be a First World War historian's blog that I don't teach a WW1 course. I do some lectures on our course on The Great War, but for various departmental/admin reasons, I don't teach the seminars].

I felt that the MA course went very well this year. This was the second time that I’d taught it, so I knew what to expect. I had also reviewed and revised the course over the summer, making the seminar topics clearer and more easily achievable – or rather, it was more obvious to the students when they had achieved what I wanted. I was also stricter about making students prepare and pre-circulate questions for discussion. I was fortunate enough to teach a group of students who were highly motivated, undertook a lot of reading and who ‘gelled’ well despite the wide range of backgrounds and ages. About half the seminars were dream MA teaching, in the sense that my only role was occasionally to point discussion in the right direction or to bring my greater subject knowledge to bear, whilst the students effectively ran the class. The seminar had one student with severe visual impairment. This made it difficult to make use of all the television and film material that I would have liked. There’s enough material of other sorts that this wasn’t a problem, but if I were to encounter this situation again, I’d want to find some more specifically appropriate resources. For example, I could have taught half a seminar on radio plays about the First World War, or on Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. Aside from this, I’d like to improve the course in the following ways:

1) continue to build up QM’s library holdings of relevant texts. Particularly as term goes on, students find it hard to make time to visit libraries further afield. So I’m going to direct my book-buying on the last weeks of term.

2) encourage students to keep a log of themes and concepts – so that when we wrap up the course they are able to draw comparisons between the representations of the First and Second World Wars.

3) rejig the course structure to place more emphasis on representations of the Home Front in the Second World War. At the moment, this only gets a week, and I think to be explored in its full depth it probably needs two. I’d make space for this by incorporating the discussion of ‘Churchill’ into a broader seminar on the domestic.

I was nervous when I started this year of teaching Britain in the Second World War because this course is my baby, and this is the first occasion on which I’ve taught it with a TA. I am not good at handing over control. I’ve been pleased, however, with the way the course has run. The major problems have been in terms of resources and venue rather than with teaching or student involvement. As it was last year, this is the most popular and oversubscribed course in the history department. I allowed it to double in size last year to this. What I should have foreseen, and did not, was that doubling the student intake increased the pressure on books in the library. I managed to persuade the librarian to lay in extra stocks of the key texts, but in the future I’d want to expand the course more gradually (or get permission to indulge in a massive expansion of book provision before expanding it). There is also a major problem with space. I have to teach my seminar in a colleague’s office. The larger of my two seminar groups only just squeezes in. This may encourage student interaction (on the same basis that parties get more fun as you decrease the space in which they’re held) but it makes writing on the board, or getting people to move around, far too difficult. This is a faculty wide problem, which is hopefully going to be solved next year with the provision of more teaching space, but I will be far more assertive about demanding proper teaching rooms next time round.

Things that I think have gone well. I feel that I’ve managed to build up quite a strong sense of course spirit and cohesion. I strongly believe that students deserve to be treated like adults, but that they also need to be led and inspired. My measure of success here is that, unlike every other course I’ve taught on, there is almost no drop off in student attendance at lectures over the length of the term, and that even in the last seminar of the year (when colleagues were sometimes down to 2 or 3 students), I still had 80% attendance. The problems with my leadership style, which is based largely on enormous personal enthusiasm, are that it gets harder to enact as the course gets larger (in particular, when you’re not teaching students in seminars you don’t learn their names, which makes it harder to interact with them in lectures) and that it can be exhausting. In the weeks when the students are finding life tough, I can end my teaching day feeling wrung out. My Education and Staff Development colleagues would doubtless tell me that to become a more effective academic, I should develop a more hands-off style. I suspect I would find this much less rewarding.

The only major modification to the teaching plan this year was my introduction of a lecture on Clausewitz and the remarkable trinity. The lecture went well, in the sense that I felt that I’d got across a complex idea (less the trinity than the manner in which it is derived) effectively. There was very positive reaction from some students – particularly those at the top end of the mark scale. Others told me that they felt a bit ‘so what?’ about the whole thing. From teaching this subject previously, to army officers, I had expected a moment of revelation when the trinity was revealed in all its glory: this was not forthcoming. I suspect that the reason for this was that I spend a lot of the course emphasising that every aspect of the war is interconnected. So the idea that you have to study the domestic and the political to understand the military was not particularly original to my undergraduates. I didn’t schedule a class immediately after the lecture to discuss Clausewitz further. Instead, I’ve concentrated in subsequent lectures and seminars on returning to the trinity when discussing the nature of war. After a couple of false starts (hard for students to see the relevance of the trinity when discussing the desert war), this did work well with regard to Montgomery’s campaign in NW Europe from ’44 onwards. The trinity is a very effective way to analyse why 21^st Army Group fought in the way it did. I’ve just started to mark the term’s essays, and a couple of students have already referred to Clausewitz, so either I did get the point across, or they’ve recognised that this is a personal bugbear. Either way, they have had their horizons widened.

The reason that I didn’t have time for a seminar dedicated to Clausewitz was that the course went on a trip to the National Archives, run by my TA, the very wonderful Mr Matthew Grant. This was effective, in the sense that it got most of the course there, and got them cards, and showed them how to use the archives. But it was not, by all accounts, that much fun. It’s a long way to Kew. It was a cold, wet walk from the tube. There wasn’t time to order up documents individually to match the students’ interests. I don’t know quite what to do about this. Organising trips out, or study days, seems like it ought to be a vital part of what a London university can offer. But getting them right is really hard. It takes, in my experience, three of these trips to actually start doing them right. What I might try to do next year is to involve students more in organising them. This would give them a bit more of an investment in the visit, and adapt what we’re doing to fit their needs. It would also give them some CV points. I’m chatting to the people at the National Army Museum about involving students more: this is an ongoing project.

I’ll say more about how I’ll adapt the course next year when I’ve finished teaching it across both semesters.

Something else which I’ve been pleased with is my use of WebCT as a teaching aid. Both for my research dissertation students and for Britain in the Second World War, I’ve put a lot of the course materials, useful links, lecture powerpoints and discussion boards online. Again, this is something that takes a while to get right: I still haven’t always presented the material in the easiest way for students to access. But I’m getting there. The best bit has been the way that discussion boards can function to allow students to work together and to save my time. Very often, on both courses, I find as a teacher that I’m answering the same question repeatedly when it comes to essay format or research queries. Putting all this online, and getting students into the habit of checking and posting, means that I only have to answer the question once – or even that students answer for me. It also acts as a means of communication and encouragement for students who can become isolated whilst they’re undertaking individual research in their final year. I was going to try to persuade the department that every supervisor should use WebCT with their dissertation students. But I suspect this is a bridge too far.

Final thing that I want to think about for all the courses I teach on next year is finding new modes of assessment. I’m not quite sure what yet, but I’d like to give students a more interesting and real-world relevant task as well as traditional essays. Two things spring to mind – an assessed presentation and some form of online resource archive. Again, more on this as I work on it.

A few noted things...

2005-12-20T15:00:00.000Z

1) Utterly brilliant, not at all log-rolling review of the book, by some chap called Sheffield (never heard of him) from the Indy a couple of weeks ago. Also a very positive review in this month's History Today - but not in the free online bit of it.
2) Turns out that my defence of gallant Brits torturing evil Huns was completely misplaced, as the Guardian turns up even more information (great use of FoI) on all the nasty things some bits of the army were doing after the war. (On the other hand, at least there was an uproar at the time - more on this in a later post).
3) Wonderful carnival of teaching hosted by New Kid on the Hallway.
Upcoming posting on this term's progress, teaching Clausewitz as part of WW2, and even, would you believe it, some First World War books reviewed.

Provocation

2005-12-13T12:18:00.000Z

Well, I wrote the last post with the intention of being provocative. And look... I succeeded. My PhD student, Jack McGowan, swiftly proclaimed that what I had written 'hurt my eyes and my brain', and that he had to respond. That response is posted - unedited - below:

Reverberations? Indeed: so I'll take my academic life in my hands and join you in taking the risk of "looking like a bit of a tit" You are absolutely right that this issue should be examined in a historical light, and that it is "surprising how little you hear of such rituals in British regiments earlier in the modern period". However, given our discussions about assumed, shared, political-cultural-social norms – yours, mine, and many historians' - I would suggest that the contemporary situation must be viewed within a wider cultural context. At the very least, some contrasting light can perhaps be shed by a different 'cultural' perspective?

Coming from the notoriously violent west coast of Northern Britain, I am no stranger to ritualized, coercive, 'set-piece' male violence, often to express and cement relationships of power. Moreover, Scotland's unemployment black-spots have provided notably high per capita numbers of military recruits in recent decades (I believe???). It therefore provides a substantial proportion of those you rightly describe as coming "from backgrounds where physical violence is more present than it is in the world of the junior academic or the London reporter." "Some of them are not that bright." Absolutely correct on both counts: some of us went to school with them.

I can also well believe that "pretty much any junior infantry officer I have taught has been able to talk about having their eyes opened to the amount of low level violence that goes on amongst those they lead." However, this somewhat contradicts your Reaction 2), i.e., that "boys will be boys." Your implication, perhaps unintended, is that it is more understandable and/or acceptable that certain types of boys will be boys. Within certain social spheres it maybe indeed be "all fun until someone goes too far." Within other mileux it is never fun. It is deadly serious – and deadly. It doesn't occur within a 'clubbable', enclosed context; it happens on the streets and in the home. Is it not this latter (and often not very) "low level violence" which, at the national-cultural level in the 21^st century, is the physical and psychological raw material which must be moulded and integrated into a fighting force? This little-educated, non-enlightened, non-Fight Club school of contemporary male violence must surely, despite rigorous training, honing, refining and direction, remain the very backbone of the contemporary "army designed for war".

I am, therefore, confused as to where you draw the distinction between "boys being boys" and "soldiers being soldiers", and left wondering how many commandos from Salford or Airdrie have "been on a sports club night out" which might have ended in rituals bearing any resemblance to those reported. Which of the two apparently discrete models of male violence is harnessing the other? And who, precisely, is the 'enemy' in such a context? In other words, what – other than tacit institutional license – differentiates this from assault on the street?

Finally, none of this explains the apparently essential prerequisite of nakedness. This is the truly 'bizarre' element, which I find more than merely "puzzling". While territorial gang fights occur in many British city centres, they do not, to my knowledge, involve group male nudity. Like you, "I’ve never got involved in a fight, or stripped naked (voluntarily or otherwise)." Unlike you, however, I’ve only ever seen other people (i.e. men) do the former.

Therefore, it is your relatively mild reaction to the nakedness which I find most striking. Perhaps someone better qualified than I will continue this beyond the realms of mere "male posturing and bravado and all that" to address the elusive borderline between male homo-sociability (even when expressed through anti-sociability) and homoeroticism (even when expressed through physical domination and subjugation). I do believe, however, that this is what these 'ceremonies' must be seen, at least in part, to represent.

Perhaps we have both merely revealed that there are no objective points of view; but we can never be reminded of that too often.

Join the club...

2005-12-12T17:35:00.000Z

Still some reverberations from a story that broke in Britain on Sunday, when the News of the World obtained video images of Royal Marines engaged in a bizarre initiation ritual. The footage shows Marines from 42 Commando, at the end of their 32 week commando training, stripped naked, watching two of their comrades fight in a field. The fight was allegedly orchestrated by two junior NCOs who appear in the video, dressed as a surgeon and a schoolgirl. Initially, the two marines fighting do so with arms bound in bedding rolls. One of the NCOs then gestures for them to fight with fists: and when one refuses, appears to lay him out with a kick to the head.

Widespread denunciation of such behaviour from all and sundry, including conspicuously military rent-a-gob from Colonel Bob Stewart. Best of all, this from Patrick Mercer (a former Sherwood Foresters officer with a distinguished service record and now Tory MP): "Just imagine a young man turning up in his unit and being made to wrestle naked in a field while his non-commissioned officers are dressed up in women's frillies. I mean, it's not very dignified stuff, is it?" Only if you recognise the generations of rivalry and ribaldry between soldiers and marines will you get the full nuance of the tongue in his cheek: ‘Bloody Marines spend too much time with the Navy. Bound to rub off, eh?’

Reaction 1) Surprising how little you hear of such rituals in British regiments earlier in the modern period. I think – please correct me – that ‘milling’ in the Paras goes back to WW2, but I don’t remember encountering anything like this with regard to British regiments, even of regulars, during the First World War. I suspect that this is to do with problems of sources and evidence, rather than that it never happening. After all, many of the rituals associated with the end of apprenticeship in British working class popular culture before the 1950s (maybe later) would now be seen as harassment/sexual or physical abuse (some of them involving women as well as men). I find it hard to believe that some regiments didn’t have something similar.

Reaction 2) Boys will be boys. I think that any British man who has been on a sports club night out will have looked at that footage and only been puzzled by the Marines’ need to strip off before having a stupid fight (dressing up, on the other hand, is pretty much a given). In fact, wrapping their arms in bedding rolls looks like an excellent way to have them make fools of themselves without inflicting too much damage. And as usual, it’s all fun until someone goes too far. There’s always one. And yes, you look back at that stuff and think: ‘That was stupid and barbarous and potentially life-threatening and definitely illegal. God it was fun.’ Nobody’s shown us what happens next in the video, I note. I suspect that the footage of the appalled other soldiers dragging the NCO off the bloke he’s kicked and admonishing him is there, but won’t come out.

(DISCLAIMER: I should point out that I have always done my best to prevent real barbarity on such occasions. And I’ve been lucky enough to do my drunken misbehaviour with fairly genteel fratboys, rather than pissed-up Marines. I’ve never got involved in a fight, or stripped naked (voluntarily or otherwise), but I’ve seen other people do both. And there’s plenty of my behaviour that I’m very glad was never filmed to be played back to the general public.)

Reaction 3) Soldiers will be soldiers. Most of these men come from backgrounds where physical violence is more present than it is in the world of the junior academic or the London reporter. Some of them are not that bright. Pretty much any junior infantry officer I have taught has been able to talk about having their eyes opened to the amount of low level violence that goes on amongst those they lead. I don’t say it’s a good thing, I don’t say they it isn’t awful for those that find themselves on the receiving end. But I don’t think it’s that much of a problem for an army designed for war fighting.
When it does risk become a problem is if it become usual for power to be occasionally acted out with physical violence. If it becomes a given that those in authority may physically abuse those who are subordinate to them, that behaviour will be replicated. It’s more likely than ever before that misjudgements will be documented. Soldiers now regularly find themselves being filmed (or filming each other) in contact with people over whom they have great power. Captured Iraqis who’ve been looting supplies, for example. And if they make a mistake, even momentarily, about what is appropriate behaviour in that situation, it becomes not only a very bad thing for those involved, but for the army and its mission as a whole. That’s why the army will say that it will do its best to stamp it out – even if it will never succeed entirely.

Update:

I wrote the above offline about a week ago, and wondered about publishing it. Mainly because I thought it ran the risk of making me look like a bit of a tit – male posturing and bravado and all that. But I came back to it because I thought that the comments I made about seeing this in a historical light were worthy of the light of day.

Whilst sorting out the links, I came across this story from the Daily Mirror. They found the kickee in question – Marine Ray Simmons. He appears to be quite upset by the misuse being made of his experiences. By his account, it was all drunken misbehaviour gone wrong. Quote of the article: ‘Because of all the rushing about, games and the booze I can't recall exactly what happened.’ Hm, either that or the kick in the head, yes.

Victor ludorum

2005-12-12T16:50:00.000Z

Just searching out material for talking about 'Bravery and Cowardice' to the Writing War Seminar. Noted that an excess of bravery is recklessness, which is about what I feel now. Or would that just be stupidity? Last week of term, pick something stupidly big and complicated to talk about, in the company of brilliantly clever people. Main aim I think is going to be to raise some points for discussion - I'll post ideas up here as I put them together.

One of those talking points is going to be about how we - historians, historians of war, men - sorry, how I use/ have used narratives of bravery and of cowardice. Do they have relevance, are they just fantasy fodder, that sort of stuff. Anyway, in the process I came across this miraculous site, which holds copies of all the covers of Victor comic annuals from 1967 to 1991. I grew up with The Victor. Each week's flimsy paper edition had a different 'true' story of a soldier winning the VC as its first story. To my credit, I remember, aged about 9, writing a letter to ask them the publishers why it was always a British soldier and never a German one. Strangely it was never published....

These comic annual covers actually do a great job of charting the changing place of war in British youth culture. Note how they start to concentrate on fantasy, then move into sporting endeavour. Is that where our heroes are supposed to come from now?

2005-12-12T12:09:00.000Z

Irregular blogging at the moment due to the end of term. So it’s only now that I’ll get round to talking about Ben Shephard’s paper to the Writing War seminar on 23 November.

Ben provided exactly the sort of paper that I had hoped for in setting up this seminar – wide-ranging, entertaining and provocative of discussion. Ben began autobiographically, explaining how his career had developed from working for a military historical publisher, to researching and interviewing for The World at War, to writing on war and psychology in his brilliant A War of Nerves. Having studied extensively The Great War TV series, I was fascinated to hear Ben talk about the process of gathering eyewitnesses for its Second World War equivalent. I suspect that there was material here for a seminar in itself on war and television history – and what I forgot to ask Ben was how/if he thought television treatment of war had moved on since the 1970s, or if The World at War was the peak.

Ben then moved on to talk about the ideas he wrote about in A War of Nerves. Fortunately for this belated blogger, the two different narratives Ben discussed and analysed have been summarised by Esther at Break of Day in the Trenches. Simply put, A War of Nerves is a great book. Ben’s efforts to return to the empirical evidence, rather than to rely on contemporary discourse and assumption, made it a field-shifting work. A friend of mine who’s working on the treatment of ‘shell-shocked’ men in the First World War suggests that Ben is not completely right about the chronology of the topic – but then it’s a book about a century of war, and I think its overall analysis is persuasive.

Instead of rehashing the book, I’ll concentrate instead on the other controversial things Ben had to say. In no particular order:

1) ‘My Dad was tougher than your Dad’ – both in his paper and in subsequent discussion, Ben vigorously defended his view that the generation which fought the Second World War was tougher than his own, and that those who fought the First World War were tougher again. To a degree, I can see his point: famously, the army now has to allow recruits to wear trainers for the first couple of months of basic training, because their feet won’t cope with boots. Given the fairly poor standard of Edwardian health and safety, the lifestyle assumptions of many of the working-class men who fought the First World War were different from our own. With no real culture of compensation or trauma, neither of the two generations which fought the total wars of the 20^th century launched a series of negligence suits against the government in their aftermath (although if you look at some of those who campaigned for pensions in the 1920s, you could see some examples, I suspect). On the other hand, it is a traditional complaint of middle-aged male military historians that the younger generation doesn’t know it’s born, is a bunch of weaklings and so on. And horrible though parts of industrial Britain were at the start of the century, they weren’t the same as finding yourself under the hurricane bombardments of 21 March 1918. Does ability to withstand one equate into ability to withstand the other? As Alex Watson pointed out, purely in terms of physical size, we’re much larger and better fed as a nation than we were before 1914 or 1939. Physically, we might have become more resilient. I don’t know how Ben would answer this – but I’ve met enough small guys with something to prove to recognise that toughness is a mixture of mind and body

2) Gender and culture. Ben was rightly scathing of those who apply an overly theoretical cultural or gender studies approach to the history of war without really taking the time to understand what they’re writing about. I couldn’t agree with him more: without quoting examples, anybody who works on the history of war is well aware of the issue of historians applying a set of modern concerns to the past whilst distorting it out of all recognition. I’m not sure if that means that all these approaches are invalid in themselves. Bad history – polemical, ill-informed, reliant on theory to the exclusion of the facts – is bad history. Good history – analytical, evidence-based, nuanced and balanced, readable – is good history. What we have to work towards is a moment where it becomes an assumption that those who work on war will want to think about all its aspects – so if you work on the British army, you’ll want to think about how its soldiers constructed their own identity, but if you work on British masculinity in the twentieth century, you’ll want to actually have an accurate picture of the army and how it worked.

3) Whippersnappers. Ben argued that there was a real problem with young historians taking on big topics, like war or memory at the start of their careers. The great historians of the past, he suggested, cut their teeth on micro-studies before moving on to the grand themes. For this young historian, at the start of his career, with a book just out on war and memory, this hit home as a criticism. I am highly conscious of the difficulty of taking on these big projects with such a small amount of experience. And I am all too aware of all the things I don’t know and all the research I haven’t done. On the other hand, my ideas aren’t clouded by being the same thing I’ve proclaimed for forty years without additional thought, my brain is still agile enough to cope with new information, and the sort of nuanced history I write means that I can leave room to allow for the fact I might be wrong. So I suspect that we’re going to disagree on this one. Fortunately for Ben, since he comes from an older and therefore tougher generation, when it comes to fisticuffs, he’ll have me, no problem.

4) War and sex. Ben had a lot of very sensible stuff to say about the ways war makes servicemen obsessed by women – mostly not as oppressors or as rapists, but in a host of ways, complex, connected but sometimes contradictory. To give a couple of examples, for many of these young men, the image of ‘woman’ is still bound up with being mothered. Married soldiers become obsessed with what is happening back at the home for which they’re fighting. Ben seemed to suggest that marital infidelity was a major issue – at least for Britain in the Second World War. I was unclear about the degree to which he was looking here at discourse as opposed to reality (dread cultural terms). Was it that there was loads of infidelity going on, or was it that soldiers talked about it all the time? Or both? Catherine Merridale pointed out that, from her research into the Red Army, what often happened was that one soldier would get a Dear John letter, and that everyone else would read it or hear about it and get anxious about what was happening at home. Ben has since been in touch with me to suggest that some of the questions surrounding this issue may be resolved by Pat Thane’s upcoming project on war and illegitimacy. This will indeed be an important addition to our knowledge – but perhaps we should be just as interested in the infidelities that could have happened but didn’t. War presents young people with a host of opportunities. But my suspicion is that for most British married couples in both world wars, the most common sexual experience was abstinence and separation rather than constant infidelity. Everyone knew about those who strayed and everyone talked about them. That doesn’t mean that they all followed suit. As I point out to my WW2 students, it’s no accident that ‘Cleaning my rifle and thinking of you’ was a wartime hit.

Just as with Stefan’s paper, I’ve probably done a terrible disservice to Ben in reporting his paper in this way. For all that I disagreed with some of the things he said, I still think he’s on the side of the angels and I was hugely grateful to him for coming to speak to us. Again, those interested should try to contact him direct.

Torture

2005-11-25T12:03:00.000Z

(Image from Regiments.org)

Something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. Nearly two weeks ago, the Guardian newspaper ran a piece on Britain’s secret wartime torture camp. To summarise – newly released papers from the National Archives revealed that about 3,000 PoWs were processed through a London ‘cage’ – based in posh mansions in Kensington – at which they were exposed to systematic ill-treatment, including beatings, stress postures, sleep deprivation, threats of abuse with red hot pokers and threats of ‘unnecessary operations’. The Red Cross were never allowed to inspect the ‘Cage’, and rather than shutting down after the war, it was moved to occupied Germany, where its activities continued.

Some points:

1) Get an expert
The camp was run by

‘Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Scotland, a forceful, outspoken man deemed to have the perfect background. Although English, the colonel had served briefly in the German army in what is now Namibia shortly after the turn of the century, and was later awarded the OBE for his work interrogating German prisoners during the first world war.’

Well, indeed. If you want a brutal bastard, get a veteran of the German army in Namibia.

2) Evidence
No denying that this place existed, but it’s worth noting that much of the evidence for its nature comes from the manuscript of Scotland’s post-war memoirs (which obviously sent MI5 and the FO into a fit, with the result that the published version was heavily censored) and from a letter from a German PoW, SS Capt Fritz Knoechlein. Knoechlein’s letter of complaint details fairly appalling treatment at the hands of his guards. The article points out that Knoechlein may have been trying to save his own neck (he was under sentence of death for war crimes), but it doesn’t address whether we should take Scotland’s memoirs at face value.

3) Face? Botherered?
The very fact that I noticed this story tells you that, in part at least, I’m a pant-wetting pinko liberal Guardian reader. At the moment, I’m clean shaven for the first time in years, but I’ve been known to sport a beard, eat muesli and wear sandals. Certain human rights are inalienable, and freedom from torture (which this was, albeit not that outlandish or extreme) is one of them. Almost certainly, given the traditional competence of Military Intelligence, some innocent Germans got caught up in the Cage. And yet, I have to say that I found it pretty hard to be sympathetic to Knoechlein. It was troops under his command who massacred 124 unarmed British prisoners, well after the heat of battle, on the retreat to Dunkirk in May 1940. They included 98 men of the Norfok Regiment, whose flag appears at the top of this post. Maybe he should have thought about the consequences of his actions when he was on the winning side, rather than later. Can I condone some hulking brute stepping on this man’s testicles?... Give me a minute to change out of my sandals into my hobnailed boots and let me join the queue.

4) Did it actually work?
Depends what you mean by ‘work’, doesn’t it. It terms of gathering evidence, there’s mixed evidence for the effectiveness of coercion in assembling useful evidence: see this account (hat-tip to Cliopatria). Nearly all of this comes from counter-insurgency (COIN) operations, in which the potential ‘hearts and minds’ side effects are a key argument against (let alone all this liberal, namby-pamby human rights stuff). It’s unclear from the Guardian’s report whether the purpose of the ‘Cage’ stayed the same throughout its existence (1940-48). Was its aim to extract useful military intelligence, or to get information about war criminal escape networks after the war? Or was it essentially retributive – so being sent there was itself a punishment?

5) Contemporary History
This was a good piece of journalism and a responsible piece of writing. It is also a great example of the study of the past being influenced by contemporary concerns. For who now can read of the UK running a ‘torture camp’ in the Second World War without thinking of Camp X-Ray or Abu Ghraib?

There is, I think, a great deal to be done on the British tradition of brutality. For all our proud gloating about our successful COIN record (trumpeted each time our chaps take off their helmets and sunglasses in Iraq), a different history of Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Northern Ireland would reveal just how much time British soldiers spent brutalising their opponents and the population in which the insurgent fish swam. The real learning experience of Northern Ireland was that once the press and the lawyers were interested (a fact not unconnected with the conflict taking place amongst white Europeans, rather than Asians, Africans or Middle Easterners), you couldn’t get away with repression. The problem, of course, is that most of those who’ve approached this topic have done so from the point of view of scandal, rather than history.

New addition

2005-11-23T22:02:00.000Z

Added the blog of my very own new PhD student, Mr Jack McGowan, to the bar on the left - 'Smashing the Window'. Jack is working on the intersection between culture and politics in Britain in the late 1960s. His site will, I have assured him, rapidly take its place in the constellation of eminent history blogs.

Blitz as brand - Writing War seminar report

2005-11-22T12:54:00.000Z

The first individual speaker for our Writing War seminar was Dr Stefan Goebel, of the University of Kent. Stefan is one of the very few historians who do genuinely comparative work – by which I mean history based in a detailed understanding of both nations and cultures which are being compared. I first met him when he was completing his PhD on medievalism after the Great War. He’s now working on a study of the memorialisation of bombed cities in Britain and Germany after the Second World War. This formed the basis for his paper.

Stefan spoke to us about the post-war development of what we might call the brand of ‘Coventry as iconic bombed city’. Although the experience of bombing was terrifying and devastating for Coventry’s inhabitants, by the standards of other European cities in the course of the war as a whole they got off pretty lightly. Yet a combination of wartime events and post-war local, national and international politics meant that Coventry was able to construct itself as one of the ‘martyr towns of Europe’ – a grouping which included Leningrad and Hamburg.

The Germans coined a word ‘Coventration’ to describe what they had done to Coventry. First used in German propaganda, it was quickly appropriated by the British as an example of German barbarity, particularly useful in appealing to the US for aid. Notably, the Germans stopped using it when the tide of war turned and their own cities began to reap the whirlwind they had sown in the Midlands. But this new word – and its rapid international spread – was also adopted by the inhabitants of the city as an element in their own identity as they sought to rebuild the town during and after the war.

(As a sidelight, this backfiring of the rhetorical seems particularly relevant in light of the current controversy over the use of ‘chemical weapons’ by US forces in the assault on Fallujah. Whatever we think of the media debate, it does seem to me a clear example of how a word or phrase, once used, can be hard to put back in its box).

Coventry’s identity as a ‘bombed city’ – indeed, it could be portrayed as the bombed city – was used by local political and religious leaders in order to gain prestige, to attract attention and funding (particularly important for the rebuilding of the cathedral) and to establish the city as part of an international community. The aftermath of the Second World War saw a remarkable degree of international – or perhaps supernational – commemorative effort.

Amongst many interesting points in this part of Stefan’s paper, one element that stood out for me was the connections forged between members of Coventry city council and their counterparts in Dresden. Since Dresden was by then in East Germany, this link had its own political significance (perhaps more for the East Germans than for the Coventrarians). Indeed, this seemed a great example of the power of assumptions overtaking political realities. Coventry was happy to work with Dresden because its rulers comprehensively repudiated the Nazi past. What they omitted to understand was that the East German regime was very happy to receive legitimation for its version of Dresden – as an example of evil Western capitalist conspiracy.

Two constructive criticisms were levelled at Stefan’s paper. My own reaction was that there wasn’t quite enough on the link between personal experience and local memory. Were the councillors who used the myth of the city’s bombing in the 1950s the same people who had left Coventry in the lurch in 1940. I think it would be fair to say that this is not Stefan’s direct area of interest, however. Another – probably more useful – idea for improvement was that he might try being more cynical about the motives of local apparatchiks. To what extent did connections with ‘mourning cities’ overseas offer the opportunity for travel and personal enjoyment?

In this short post I have done no justice at all to what was a nuanced, detailed and superbly well researched paper. I was very glad that Stefan could get us off to such a positive start. If any readers are directly interested in his topic (you know who you are) I suggest you try contacting him direct.

Update to Writing War Programme

2005-11-22T12:50:00.000Z

A mix of reminder and update. Biggest change is that Tom Asbridge has dropped out, so I am going to bite the bullet and put myself in the firing line by workshopping some ideas about bravery and cowardice. I'm going to talk about these more online in the next couple of weeks, but I'd really appreciate ideas from those who can't attend but are interested.

23 November Writing about Modern War
Ben Shephard

30 November The Red Army and the Experience of War 1941-45
Catherine Merridale (QMUL)

14 December Bravery and Cowardice
Dan Todman (QMUL)

New participants please contact the Postgraduate Administrator, history-postgrad@qmul.ac.uk, to express your interest. Those who are already attending, please email me to let me know if you can stay for dinner.

Somme thoughts

2005-11-18T18:09:00.000Z

Follow up to the post below. The C4 programme on the Somme, when it arrived on Modnay night, was not as bad as I had feared. Not great on the C2 aspects, but these are very complicated and difficult to represent televisually. Few cliches repeated (so all the British troops on screen started their attack by going over the top from their own front line and walking slowly towards the enemy, whereas Prior and Wilson suggest that a huge variety of different tactics were actually used). And of course we only got 1 July, which is a bit like studying the first five minutes of Hastings and saying that the Saxons won.
On the other hand, the stated purpose of the programme was to show us what it was like to be at the Somme. And on this, I thought they didn't do a bad job - particularly through the narrative device of using a variety of 'real-life' eyewitnesses, including R.H. Tawney. And - strangely - the programme concentrated on the experiences of a unit which reached all its objectives on 1 July, the 22 Manchesters.
Does showing people 'what it was really like' on 1 July help them to understand the First World War, however? Probably not. My experience with friends and colleagues has been that responses were pretty much preconditioned. So the military historians long despaired of TV, and the lay viewers got angry at the stupidity of British generals.

First World blogs

2005-11-14T15:49:00.000Z

What more could a young author ask for? No sooner has his book come out than the massed forces of the meedja start pumping out material on the First World War. Last week, the last veterans of the war recalling (in exactly the same words they've been using for the last twenty years) the trenches, and Ben Elton's new book The First Casualty (okay, so it bumped a review of my book out of the Indy on Friday, but it's going to be in tomorrow, so I'll forgive it). This week, a Channel Four season on 'The Lost Generation'...

Now, there is much evidence around the construction of this season of the great steps that have been taken by some of those working on the First World War. The director of the programme on the Somme gives a very lucid interview in which he discusses the tensions he had to overcome to create a fresh and involving piece of programming. It looks like it might be good.

But the Channel 4 publicity department has obviously gone to town over the season's website. There's a great game of WWI bingo to be played here, as we cross off the times we read the words 'mud', 'horror', 'slaughter', 'futility'... full house!

What is remarkable is the effort that the site puts into making the First World War 'relevant'. You can enter a competition for the best 'last message home' - by text - and read some fictional blogs composed by soldiers on every side.

I recognise the difficulties that this is trying to overcome - how do you interest people in a war which can seem long ago and far away?

This effort, however, is surely utterly misguided. I am not sure to whom it is more patronising. To those who went and fought to prevent the takeover of the European mainland by a militaristic hegemon, who certainly didn't think their efforts were 'futile'? To those who wrote back from the frontline in the belief that they were going to die and who now have their efforts reduced to a txt cmptn? Or to today's youf, who it is presumed cannot empathise with the past unless it is presented in terms of contemporary technology?

What 'The Lost Generation' season is doing online is not an imaginative use of technology - far from it. It is turning the past into the eternal present, teaching people to apply an ahistoric set of standards to understanding what happened before they were born. And it is, if anything, a rejection of the real possibilities that electronic resources offer to viewers of television documentaries. Why not digitise a genuine set of soldiers' letters from the Somme? I refuse to believe that modern audiences would not be moved by reading the original documents - indeed, I regularly experience the wonder of schoolchildren and university students when they see 'the real thing' in archives.

Anyway, I'm off to compose a set of entries for the competition: 'Feelin gr8 plsre @ killin Hns! Offcrs jlly decent. Bn undrgoing lrning crve. Hpe this fnds u in pnk as lves me'

Intellectual legacy of the First World War (3)

2005-11-04T14:47:00.000Z

Just re-reading Niall Barr's excellent Pendulum of War: The Three Battles of El Alamein, and noted that he makes a point related to the discussion of British First World War experience as 'preparation' for the Second World War. Niall discusses the different British units' ability to react to the more static warfare which took place at the eastern end of the Western Desert in 1942 - a big shift from a more mobile style which had been practised - successfully or otherwise, from 1940. He notes that the British effectively reverted to a 1918 style offensive battle: close coordination of all arms beneath heavily concentrated artillery fire to achieve limited aims. Those who did this most effectively were those who had been staff officers on the Western Front twenty five years before.
Saying that Montgomery fought First World War style battles is not exactly new. But Niall has traced through the careers of a number of less senior officers to make the point more conclusively. He also has the great benefit of having been a First World War historian first - so he knows what he's talking about. The methodological problem, however, seems to be actually finding evidence of Second World War generals looking back and drawing their own lines of intellectual inheritance. Two aspects to that problem - the first is that this isn't the sort of evidence that goes into staff appreciations (although it would be interesting to conduct a literary comparison of Dorman Smith's plans for the defence of Alamein with plans for defence in depth in 1918). The other is that the reputation of their predecessors may have been so tarnished by 1942 that no Second World War general was going to compare himself. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Being published

2005-11-03T17:29:00.000Z

The book is finally out and available from Amazon or direct from the publisher. Ignore the fact that both of them still have the wrong title up on their sites. This is the first time that I've published a monograph. The mix of emotions is rather hard to describe: relief at it being done at last, tension because I want it to do well, and fear because I know that this is what I will be judged on as an academic (until the next one). There's also a strange sort of apathy - a result of the long drawn out nature of publication and the fact that I've already moved on to fresh projects. It would be fair to say that most of my friends - even my academic friends - seem more excited than me.
The other problem, of course, is that no sooner was the damn thing printed than people began to point out errors. Small things, but important ones. I pondered, for a while, writing my own review of it on this site, but I suspect that would seem too navel-gazing even for me. And provide an easy point of reference for others. No point becoming an easy target (says the man who's just insulted veterans).
But enough of the doom. It looks great, doesn't it? What's inside is even better. You really need to buy a copy. Now. Or get one for the First World War obsessive in your family.
The official launch is at the National Army Museum on Saturday. Enormous party planned, needless to say, for afterwards. I've already informed my friends that they're expected to drink vang blong or whisky, depending on class and social status, and give me some rousing choruses of 'Sister Susie'. The bully beef rissoles have been prepared, as have the army biscuit plum-pudding. Those attempting to leave early will, of course, be shot. It's the only language they understand.

Approach of Nov 11 sees 'last surviving veterans' story shocker!

2005-11-01T17:47:00.000Z

Every year. Without fail. November 11 comes round, and those veterans still compos mentis enough to be exploited by the media (and particularly by 'historian' Max Arthur) are wheeled out to remember their war. Today it was the Grauniad.
Now I like and respect those who fought for their country as much as the next man. In fact, probably more than the next man, since at least I've made an effort to learn about their lives and treat them as I'd treat any other human being. But I do feel a bit uncomfortable about the uncritical acceptance of their stories as the truth. And I feel rather more uncomfortable about their use to readers a story that they already essentially know about the First World War (and to sell books). It was horrible. We were victims. 'Veterans - General Purpose' as I think Richard Holmes calls them. I also find it irritating that any sort of critical process is completely removed when it comes to those who read (or write) this stuff.
It's fascinating, for example, that Harry Patch, one of the veterans, feels the need to emphasise that he and his number one on the Lewis gun always fired low with the aim of wounding, not killing Germans. His desire to put the point across deserves analysis. But it probably also requires somebody to point out the inconvenient facts - firing low to account for recoil or trajectory, for example, so that he actually hit the target. Or that there were quite a lot of Germans who might have chosen to operate at ground level - bit of a bugger for them, that shooting low. Or that, in the grand scale of things, shooting someone in the head might be equitable to nicking their femoral artery (let alone plugging one through their knackers). Of course, no one is about to start sounding off about this sort of thing.... oh - I just have. Let's see if that sparks some comments.
Now, if you thought that was a rant, we could start talking about the campaign to win a pardon for Harry Farr...
Or, if you really want me to become incandescent, let's turn our thoughts to World War One expert Ben Elton's new book The First Casualty. Actually, better not until I've read it. Although I am willing to make a small bet that the 'first casualty' isn't the self-respect of a so called alternative comedian when he starts getting offered vanloads of cash to write crappy rock musicals about Queen.

Cultural legacy of the First World War

2005-10-31T12:52:00.000Z

Continuing the posts below on how the First World War might have helped create a
culture that was adapted to total war. From Picture Post, April 4, 1942, an advertisement for Sunlight Soap.
Previous posts here and here.

2005-10-31T12:14:00.000Z

A few bits and bobs at the end of (another) hectic week.

1. Questions:
a) Steve Badsey writes to ask for help locating a documentary -

I have a recent memory of having seen a reference to an article (and I can’t be more definite than that) about the mythology of the First World War tank, very much from the ‘it didn’t win the war but it won the post-war literary battle’ perspective – rather like the Timewatch I appeared in some years back, but more scholarly. Have you come across this, and if so can you point me to the reference for it?

b) Astrid Erll would like to know if she's helping to perpetuate a myth:

I'm not sure if the following anecdote relates to British myth or British history: 'When Arthur Nicolson congratulated Edward Grey on his speech of 3 August 1914, Grey cried 'I hate war, I hate war''. A German editor of an article of mine inserted this as a note, and I'm not sure if with this anecdote I'm perpetuating what I was actually going to reflect upon in this article: the British memory culture.

2) Dave Budgen, a postgraduate student at the University of Kent, has asked me to post this:

Rethinking War

An Interdisciplinary Colloquium

Throughout the centuries warfare has been a dominant factor in the shaping of societies. From civil wars to the growth of empires, conflict has remained a constant presence in the history of civilisation. This colloquium aims to bring together research from across the academic spectrum, giving postgraduate and post-doctoral researchers an opportunity to present their work.

We welcome proposals from postgraduate and post-doctoral students on any aspect of warfare.

Subjects you may wish to consider include:

War and Diplomacy, Science and Technology, Justifications for War, War and Society, The Psychological Effects of War, Film and Literature, Guerrilla Warfare and Terrorism, Imperialism, Total War, War and Ethnicity, Art and Visual Representations of Warfare, Heritage and War, National Identity, Medicine and Warfare, Philosophy of War, Propaganda, War and the Media, War and Religion

3) Don't worry, there is an account of Stefan Goebel's talk on Coventration and some new thoughts of my own all upcoming. Just trying to find the time... because

4) The book is finally out!

Learning how to fight total wars

2005-10-21T17:19:00.000+01:00

I should, of course, have acknowledged my partial intellectual debt to David Edgerton in concocting the idea at the base of the last post: although what I am proposing is a more cultural approach to a topic that Edgerton deals with in terms of science, technology and industry. But I've just re-read his review of Correlli Barnett's The Audit of War ('The Prophet Militant and Industrial', 20th Century British History, 2, 3 (1991), 377-8) and highlighted:
'We might note, too , that many of the 'New Jerusalemers' did indeed have the backgrounds Barnett claims they did not have. Beveridge and Keynes were senior civil servants in the Great War. ... Major Attlee volunteered in 1914 and fought in Gallipoli, in Mesopotamia, and on the Western Front where he was wounded for the third time just before the end of the war. Stafford Cripps, who had a degree in chemistry, spent part of the Great War as assistant superintendent of the largest chemical explosives plant in Britain.'

Intellectual legacy of the First World War

2005-10-20T18:01:00.000+01:00

Just a quick one - more details coming soon on last night's Writing War seminar, once I've digested it a bit. Today: I've been doing some work on evacuation in the Second World War. Particularly in light of recent events in the States, and bearing in mind the short timescale available, British civilian evacuation just before war broke out seems a remarkable achievement. A million and a half people moved without a casualty (at least according to Titmuss). Not least, it was a magnificent conception to believe that this sort of move (and they'd planned for 4 million) was possible.

At the time of the Munich Crisis evacuation plans were pretty much non-existent, but fear of the bomber was high. As the official historian puts it:

'the London County Council had become alarmed, and pressed the government to reach certain decisions in order to allow transport planning to begin. On 5^th August, the Clerk to the Council (Sir George Gater) saw the Home Secretary and offered the services of members of the Education Officer’s staff. With political tension increased by 12^th September, Mr Herbert Morrison (leader of the council) urged upon Sir Samuel Hoare the need for immediate decisions. The Council, then drew up plans, necessarily of a primitive and faulty nature, for the removal of some 637,000 children from London.’ (Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, (London, HMSO, 1950), 29).

Even though it was never carried through, to draw up plans to shift this many people at short notice takes some doing. But what struck me as a First World War historian was George Gater's appearance. Gater was a civilian in August 1914. By 1918 he was one of the youngest brigade commanders in the BEF, successfully leading improvised combined forces in the Hundred Days campaign which finished the war on the Western Front. He is an excellent example of the 'learning curve' and of the successful incorporation of civilians into the wartime army.

Evacuation in 1938 or 1939 was dependent on railway movements and billeting. Where had British administrators learned how to use these tools? How could they deploy them, at short notice, with confidence and relative competence (evacuation didn't run perfectly, but it was, I repeat, a remarkable achievement)? Could we construct a case that some had learned these skills - or at least honed them - in the First World War? Obviously more research is needed - but let's at least float the idea that we can.

Now, we are accustomed to participants in the SEcond World War complaining that all the best men of their generation had been killed in 1914-18. Alan Brooke, for example, often remarked on the poor command resources enjoyed by the British Army in the Second World War for just this reason. But we could reverse this argument. It might have seemed like the best and brightest were killed, but what about all those who took status, achievement and newfound abilities from their wartime experience? Perhaps, what the British had been doing was to create a skill set which, twenty years later, would serve them well in the second great conflict of the twentieth century.

New blog

2005-10-12T09:35:00.000+01:00

Esther MacCallum Stewart, now back online, points me towards a new WWI literature class blog, maintained by Simon Ogden and running out of Simon Fraser University. Leaving aside the quality of the history on offer (Fussell treated as a 'truth-teller' about the First World War, rather than a man trying to exorcise his own ghosts about WW2, for example), I think it's an interesting effort to use blogging technology in a teaching context. But thus far it seems to be more about posting information than discussion: although whether or not that was what Dr Ogden intended is hard to tell. My first WWI Online Study Group goes live later in the month - more comments when I've got more experience.

Writing War - the seminars begin!

2005-10-10T15:39:00.000+01:00

The first meeting of the Writing War Seminar was held on the evening of Wednesday 5 October. As John Stone remarked to me on the way in, running a seminar is one of the most nerve-wracking experiences of an academic life, because of the difficulty of predicting who will turn up week to week. Let’s say that Catherine and I were pleased to convene a small but select group, whose expertise covered a wide range of different areas, from colonial campaigning, via the Russian steppes (1812 and 1942) to the pages of Vogue.

We kicked things off by chatting about what motivated us to initiate the seminar. To draw out three things:

1) the academic difficulty about writing about an extremity of human experience which one has not experienced oneself – and the particular dissonance between writing about combat and sitting on one’s backside pontificating about it.

2) the necessity, nonetheless, to confront and analyse war and the experience of war, given its place in history. Catherine pointed out the need to avoid being diverted into writing about the memory of war just because that was easier than writing about war itself. As someone who’s done just that, I have a slightly different take – I’d emphasise that memory/cultural/literary/theoretical studies which touch on war need to be based in an understanding of the event itself (as opposed to a set of assumptions about it which can go unchallenged because they are so widely held)

3) the difficulties of integrating the wide range of sources and styles of history into writing about war, and the particular problem of applying a narrative/analytical/coherent mode of expression to events and experiences which defy such modes by their nature.

Something which emerged from this discussion, and which would continue to exercise us over the course of the evening, was the distinction between war and combat and the blurry lines which could exist between the two.

Julian Jackson, our esteemed Head of Department, responded with a perceptive question: is there actually any difference between writing about war and writing about any other historically distant experience? Isn’t it just as hard to write about the experience of the medieval peasant as about the Second World War soldier? To an extent, of course, he’s absolutely right – and I think that’s the rationale underpinning what allows us to write about war and combat at all. We don’t have to have been there to try to understand it. But I think there are some crucial – largely cultural – differences between the two. People care, deeply and passionately, about war. They make use of beliefs about it, consciously and unconsciously, all the time. Its centrality to popular culture in particular puts an onus on us to get it right – this is something which feeds into the thread Mark Grimsley has been running on Blog Them Out of the Stone Age about military history’s tendency to promote ‘Shadow Warriors’ – subjects of fantasy rather than ‘useful’ models for historical understanding or civil society.

Veterans, of course, care more than most. And as anyone who has tried to write or talk about war in the presence of those who have seen the elephant knows, it can be difficult for an academic to respond to the criticism that we ‘are fascinated by war but don’t know much about it’. Medieval peasants being few on the ground these days, this isn’t the sort of heckling that some of our other colleague’s experience.

A second question, and one which I think we are going to have to address over the next few months, is whether we are actually talking about a historical constant at all. Although we’re talking about ‘war’, we’re really discussing a very specific subset of wars – those fought in the last 150 years between western states. Can we point to elements in war/combat and its representation which are constant across place and time?

A third issue, and one that I think Cathy is particularly eager to discuss, is what’s in it for us? What leads historians of war onto the subject? Where does their fascination come from? Why do people read what we write? Are we feeding an unhealthy obsession (in ourselves and in our audience)? What is our moral position? (I think I need more time to ponder this)

The group discussed some possible future sessions. These will largely depend on who’s available and keen. We’ve got some offers for next term, but I’d welcome more expressions of interest – mailed to my qmul address.

Topics we will definitely cover in coming months

Literature and writing
Orality
Material culture of war and the mediation of experience
The Home Front – minds/materials/participation in fighting
Journalism and the media
Philosophy

We’d like to make a particular effort to broaden our horizons by including as many different scholars as possible. We are actively looking to recruit those who work on non-European war, early modern and medieval war, religion and war – from whatever disciplinary background.

I was tremendously pleased with the way the evening went. The best bits about it, as far as I was concerned, were the informal but academically rigorous atmosphere that was established, the fact that everyone said something (the advantages of a smaller group) and the feeling of positive encouragement – that this is a project people are interested in and willing to support.

Recovering (from) the First World War

2005-10-10T15:34:00.000+01:00

Edward Madigan, one of the organisers of the FWW conference in Dublin, offers his thoughts about what went on (kind of in response to Vanda, Jessica and myself):

Two weeks on, I hope I can reflect more clearly on the Dublin conference. Yet, as someone who was involved in both organising the conference and presenting a paper, I find it difficult enough to assess it with genuine objectivity. I suppose a good way of attempting this is to look at what the organisers set out to achieve. One of the main objectives of the conference was to provide specific feedback for the scholars who presented aspects of their research. The lively and intense discussions during the sessions certainly provided some of that, but, judging from my own experience, the most valuable feedback came after the sessions, both from senior academics and fellow postgraduates. Having one’s work endorsed and encouraged by established historians and peers is an extremely valuable experience for a postgraduate scholar. Yes, some of the discussions could have been more conclusive and could certainly have involved more input from the less senior participants, but I think we should view the sessions as the beginnings of a conversation to be continued via e-mail, through the Society network, at future conferences, and on blogs like this!

The twenty postgraduate scholars who presented papers were almost certainly the primary beneficiaries of the weekend. This is not to suggest, however, that the weekend was not also designed to be relevant to the other sixty or so participants. Firstly, reading and discussing new unpublished work is a very instructive way of taking stock of where the field of First World War studies is at the moment and, importantly, where it is going. This ‘taking stock’ should be of interest to anyone working on the War. Secondly, the evening events, Isabel Hull’s keynote speech on German military culture and the round table debate in the Goethe Institute, both proved to be very rewarding intellectually – regardless of one’s role at the conference. The fact that Professor Hull’s talk gave people something to think about was clear from the way participants in various sessions kept referring back to her views and conclusions over the following two days.

‘That National History of the War is Redundant’ was chosen as the topic for the round table debate as the ‘national versus trans-national’ discourse is something that virtually everyone has an opinion on, irrespective of their particular areas of expertise. This, and the fact that the first remark from the floor was made by one of the younger scholars meant that the discussion turned out to be extremely inclusive and worthwhile. I found Alex Watson’s comment about the role of the historian and his/her duty to the public particularly relevant to us all. This, for me, was the real benefit of the round table debate. On the one hand it was an interesting intellectual exercise, on the other, it was a rare opportunity for a diverse group of historians to reflect on what history is for and what the historian does, or is supposed to do, in society.

During the Experiences of Occupation session, Jean-Jacques Becker referred to his ‘own experience of occupation’. This struck me as a timely reminder, amidst the academic theory, that few people now writing about war have personal experience of it. By opening the conference in the College’s Great War memorial and closing it in Islandbridge, the national war memorial, a link between the actual event and the modern academic interpretation of the event was drawn. The many artefacts housed at Islandbridge, including uniforms, weapons, personal items and the famous Ginchy Cross brought the experience of the war alive and provided a genuinely moving and fitting end to a really good conference.

Dublin 1 Dublin 2 Dublin 3 Dublin 4

National histories of world wars?

2005-10-06T16:57:00.000+01:00

Vanda Wilcox provides a report on those parts of the Dublin conference I missed - and challenges us to think about national histories and the First World War...

I wanted to report on the Saturday evening debate, and consider some of the most interesting points which were raised and which merit further discussion. This ‘Round Table’ session was organised as a debate on the theme ‘Are national histories of the war redundant?’ Many of the themes which were discussed (sometimes heatedly!) in this debate had already begun to emerge in earlier panels, as Dan has outlined. The evening session was a great opportunity to pull some of these ideas together, and begin to think about prospectives for the future.

John Horne, chairing the session, suggested 3 initial questions to consider: firstly, the relevance of national frameworks within a broader study of the war; secondly the type and nature of trans-national themes; and finally the role of sub-national communities of various kinds. Annette Becker spoke firmly in favour of trans-national and comparative history, asserting that the chief function of national perspectives was to enable trans-national dialectic which was the most important approach to the war. The speakers largely agreed on the need to create an integrated and comparative European framework for the war. Of course, the conference as a whole has shown how fruitful this approach is: but it is notable that comparative perspectives have been initiated and are still strongest amongst cultural & social historians. Is this simply that military historians have lagged behind (or are grumpy old nationalists?!) or rather, as Gerhard Hirschfeld pointed out, a genuine reflection of the differences between disciplines? That is, are there fewer common trans-national themes in military and political history than in the cultural and social sphere? If so, military history risks being left behind in the quest for comparative history.

The problems of comparative history are of course practical as well as intellectual. Gerd Krumeich raised the problem of linguistic isolation; my own observation was that whilst the debate flowed relatively easily from English to French to German and back, those of us working on ‘minor’ countries aren’t quite so included in this multilingual dialogue. How many people from the Anglophone world are working with materials in Russian, Turkish, Italian, Romanian or Flemish? If Jovana Knežević had wanted to discuss her sources in the original Serbian, how trans-national would everyone be feeling then? In a sense, comparative and trans-national histories are a bit of luxury for those working away from the ‘big three.’ Even the United States lags behind, as Jennifer Keene noted. And it’s not just about languages: historians are inevitably the product of their national historiographies, to some extent. These observations suggest that rather than expecting individuals to conduct comparative work alone, we should be encouraging more collaborative projects.

Another point raised in the debate was the role of public history. The recent debate on the International Society for First World War Studies’ mailing list over Adam Thorpe’s article in The Guardian was an excellent example of the differing views professional historians hold over the interaction with popular views and assumptions. Of course, as we had discussed at Dan’s colloquium in June, the (probable!) increase in public interest as the centenary approaches make these issues all the more pertinent. Alex Watson made a vigorous defence of national history on precisely these grounds: if dialogue with the public is an essential duty of the professional historian, then we must meet the public’s demand for national histories. The First World War is a part of what Dennis Showalter termed the ‘mythic identity’ of France and Britain, despite the efforts of the academic community to create a European history of the war, and the popular need to create meaning and understanding requires our participation.

Of course even the terms of this debate need interrogation. Jennifer Keene pointed out that if it is a world war, then we must write not a European history but a global one. More importantly the very idea of national history is not unproblematic in this context: the combatant states were not fully unified nations. Scottish and Welsh experiences, to say nothing of Ireland, must be included in any British national history; Germany and Italy were both newly created states; Russia, Austria-Hungary and Turkey were all Empires; even in France regional identities and divisions undermined unity (consider Brittany or the Basque country). Keith Jeffreys, in making this point, asked us to challenge the very concept of nations, especially when dealing with an event which both built and destroyed them.

One of the most interesting observations in the debate came from Heather Jones who pointed out since popular memory has operated nationally, it is the national aspects of wartime experience which have been most studied by historians also – even when working comparatively. Those dimensions of the war which are most truly international or trans-national have disappeared into historiographical black holes. These include the experiences of occupation, of prisoners of war and refugees – all, as Dan has pointed out, new areas which have recently begun to receive attention. This seems like the most convincing evidence that we are moving away from a narrow national perspective. That said, it seems unlikely that we will ever be able to dispense with national histories of the war experience.

So: the challenge for us as historians is to find ways to integrate the national and the trans-national both practically and intellectually. It would be nice to think that practical limitations don’t wholly determine academic approaches. But in considering the way forward we also have to ask ourselves the tricky question: what’s it all for?

Newcastle Conference 2006

2005-10-04T10:45:00.000+01:00

Provisional programme for 'The First World War and Popular Culture' Conference available here. Looks like it's going to be huge.

Gender agenda

2005-10-03T13:22:00.000+01:00

Dr Jessica Meyer, who works on the First World War and masculinity, offers some responses to the Dublin Conference:

Following on Dan's thoughts on things that the future organisers of this series of conferences might want to think about was something that struck me about the themes around which the conference was organised. Over the course of three conferences there has yet to be a sesson that deals directly with gender, although the first conference had a session on the war and the intimate. Which is not to say that gender wasn't discussed during this most recent conference. Indeed, it seemed to turn up in just about every session, in one form or another. Which raises the question, as indeed one of the conference organisers asked, do we actually need a special session on gender if it is already part of the discussion?

After much thought, I think the answer is yes, for three reasons. Firstly, as Dan has pointed out, there is never enough time for adequate discussion of each paper and inevitably issues get ignored. Unless it forms the focus of a theme, gender is one of those aspects of cultural history which can be swept aside as something of a given. The gender issues raised by Rebecca Gill's paper on Belgian refugees, for instance, seemed to me worth further exploration. How did the issue of citizenship that refugees raised interact with the other issues of citizenship being raised by women or disabled servicemen, two groups for whom the experience of war had radically changed gender norms? Similarly, Sonja Müller's work on children's games and literature raised issues about how gender stereotypes were received and consumed that were touched on in the question and answer session but never addressed directly.

Related to this is the second reason. By spreading the question of gender across themes rather than devoting a session to the topic, we run the risk of atomising the issues. There is still a tendency to view gender history, particularly the gender history of war, as a binary. Although we are moving beyond simply the histories of men on the front line and women on the home front, there is still a tendency to discuss gender in relation to one or other of the sexes. Dan highlighted this problem when he asked Claudia Siebrecht about the absence of fathers in German women's art. By focussing on a specific group, as one conference paper must, the experiences of other groups around them can become lost. This is particularly true for the histories of masculinities in war. Work is only beginning to be done, by collections such as Masculinities in Politics and War (Manchester University Press, 2004), on how war impacted on the gendering of men as well as women. Having a panel focussed on gender would allow for these less visible issues to be discussed alongside the more familiar ones related to the changing status of women. In addition, the sexes did not live in isolation from each other and the ways in which various groups were gendered had direct implications for not only their experiences of war but also for others with whom they come into contact with. What happens to gender in the spaces where one person's home front is another's front line, an issue raised for me by Jovana Knezevic's on the occupation of Belgrade? A panel discussing gender might go some way towards addressing not just questions of gender but also broader questions of gender relations.

Which leads to my third reason, which is as much about what gender history can gain from First World War studies as vice versa. The transnational history of gender and the war certainly exists, but it remains rather limited. Masculinities in Politics and War goes a great way towards addressing this gap in terms of masculinity and war in general and Behind the Lines (Yale University Press, 1987) covers British, French, American and German experiences of the two world wars, but has recently come in for considerable criticism both in terms of use of sources and national exceptionalism. And there still remain huge areas to be covered. These were highlighted for me by Daniel Steinbach's paper on the war in Germany's African colonies. Can we compare imperial and martial masculinities in Germany and Britain? And that is before we start to question the interrelation of gender and race in the uses made of non-European troops, something that could have been discussed in relation to George Morton Jack's paper on the Indian Army on the Western Front. As someone who works very much within a national framework, limited, I'm ashamed to say, by my inability to speak any language but English, the sort of transnationalism that this series of conferences emphasises is not merely a corrective but also challenge. All I am asking for is the opportunity for historians of this particular facet of cultural history to be allowed the space to explore how we are and can continue to meet that challenge.

Dublin (1), Dublin (2), Dublin (4 - not yet active)

Uncovering the First World War (2)

2005-09-28T15:29:00.000+01:00

Further thoughts on Dublin.

Some thoughts about how to improve the next conference:

The conference organisers did a great job of putting together a stellar cast of conference attendees. About 60 academics and students attended in total, including more than half of the world’s leading authorities on aspects of the First World War from the UK, Ireland, France, Germany and the US. I’ve thought in the past that a spot of food poisoning would be an excellent career development opportunity. At one sweep, you could create the room for all the junior academics to move up the ladder and all the postgrads to get jobs (presumably I will keep chuckling about this until I’m at the top, at which point I will start checking the kitchens).
This is one of the best features of the conference: the opportunity for young researchers to have their work commented on by their seniors.
I wonder, however, if it hasn’t rather outgrown itself. The problem with having 60 scholars, some of them big names, in one room, is that it doesn’t necessarily encourage discussion, particularly from postgraduates who are sometimes just starting their research. Many people will make points, but any discussion that starts has to be curtailed reasonably quickly so that the next paper can begin. And you have to have a chairperson with a hand of iron to force senior academics to be succinct. It struck me that very often we were saying ‘we need some comparative information about this topic’ and that the basis for that information might be in the room. But to access it, you have to have an environment in which scholars are happy to speculate.
(Personally, I always operate from a minimal knowledge base and I suffer from a pronounced inability to keep my trap shut, so I have no problem floating ideas which are subsequently shot down. But a conference room full of mes would be absolutely unbearable. And very noisy.)
So here’s a suggestion for whoever gets the ‘opportunity’ to organise this next time. How about parallel sessions, capped at a maximum of 20 participants each, with the academic big guns spread between the two, and chairpersons empowered to ask experts to provide that comparative perspective?
Please note that this is in no way intended as a criticism of the conference organisers, who I will continue to praise to the high heavens. It’s aimed to be part of a continuing dialogue which will improve the next occasion.

Incidentally, those interested in finding the full conference programme can download it here.

Uncovering the First World War in Dublin post 1

Uncovering the First World War (1)

2005-09-26T14:21:00.000+01:00

Just back from the 'Uncovering the First World War' conference in Dublin. Obviously, ideally I should have been blogging this as it happened, posting from the conference hall on a wireless network, possibly whilst sipping my triple strength expresso and bopping to my ipod nano. But academic that I am, I preferred to actually participate: not least in the socialising and drinking that make these events so important. I've also found that blogging these things afterwards is a great way to make myself reflect on what happened. Rather than trying to summarise every paper that was given, I'm going to make a few points about the format of the conference, the range of papers, some key bits of information that I picked up and what seemed to me to be the key themes.

1) Format. The aim of this conference - the third in a series originally by the International Society for First World War Studies - was to allow postgraduates to share their work with more established academics. It was set up differently from most others. Every paper was published online (on a password protected site) before the conference took place. Every participant was expected to read all the papers. In each session more senior scholars acted as discussants, summarising and commenting on papers. The paper's author then responded, before general discussion ensued. This approach has some clear advantages - it involves the audience, it makes for less conference fatigue than other formats (ie it was possible to maintain attention beyond the third paper of the day) and it should put everybody on a similar footing - making it easier for postgrads to present their work. It does rely on everybody reading most of the papers - not too much of a problem, in fact, since academic guilt/fear of appearing stupid creates an effective moral economy - and on discussants recognising that they are meant to provide constructive criticism. Fortunately, it's generally a friendly field, and most did so.

2) Range of papers - I was only in Dublin for two out of three days, but the papers I saw ranged widely in terms of subject, approach and area. Three subjects that often came up which might particularly interest readers of this blog: early war Britain, occupation studies (probably the fastest growing field of WWI research over the last few years), and national identities.

3) Random interesting facts I came away with:

a) There's an Argentine football team called Douglas Haig FC, set up by an Englishman in November 1918 to commemorate the Field Marshal. Those with better Spanish than mine can find out some more through here. They seem to have done quite well in the 1920s and 1930s, but now they’re in the Second Division. Obviously, I am now frantically trying to buy a team strip on ebay. (Thanks to Professor Gary Sheffield). Their Dennis the Menace style crest is at the top of this post.

b) Romanian prisoners suffered worse than any other PoWs in Germany – 29% didn’t come back.

c) In another aspect of my life, I’m sometimes quite a serious cyclist. The club I ride with is based in the tiny village of Ugley, Essex. In Dublin, I discovered that the village contains a plaque commemorating the evacuation route for civilians established in 1914 in case of German invasion. Yet again, the First World War is inescapable. (Thanks to Catriona Pennell)

d) So popular were rumours of German barbarity and mutilation of children in 1914 that one British woman, offering to adopt a Belgian refugee, specified that she would ‘prefer a whole baby’. (Thanks to Rebecca Gill).

e) Quite a lot of people actually read this blog. But most of you are keeping pretty quiet. So I’m going to try some new ways for encouraging participation, including requesting some guest posts and raising the controversy level.

4) More seriously, key themes that stood out for me:

a) Rather than concentrate on the home or the fighting front, historians are increasingly examining those areas of total war where the line seems more blurred – occupation studies, prisoners of war, and preparations for violence. This is opening rich fields in terms of the variety of experience of war.

b) The key need is for comparative history. Throughout the conference I lost count of the number of times that I heard commentators say ‘What we really need is some comparative studies to know how typical this phenomenon is’. This was certainly a common reaction to Isobel Hull’s stimulating conference lecture on the German army’s attitude to total war and total victory. A few – very few – really high class scholars are doing this. They’ll know who they are when they read this, and I can only say how in awe I am of those able to work across national boundaries. But I was moved to consider whether the conference took every opportunity to promote the possibility for comparison (a subject for a future post).

c) There are still pieces missing in the jigsaw. Most apparent to me, in the growth of occupation studies, is the need for a large scale study of occupiers. Len Smith said something particularly striking about German forces in Belgium ‘performing the power of the occupier’. This seems a potentially fascinating area of research.

d) I was also struck in the papers I saw by the recurrence of what we might call the ‘preformation of experience’. To take just the papers I was involved in discussing: Britons entered the war with a clear set of tropes about what was meant by ‘refugee’, ‘invasion’, ‘atrocity’ and ‘citizen’. They used these to try to understand the war as it happened. Wartime experience challenged all these interpretative models – but what stands out to me is the degree to which they were altered but not abandoned. Rather, wartime events were interpreted through a lens that was already in place. Again, this was a topic that came up in Professor Hull’s lecture as well.

(of course, regular readers might point out that this is a subject I discussed here after the Giessen conference. So perhaps my own experience was preformed).

More on Dublin soon – and hopefully some other comments. I’ll close by congratulating the organisers on an excellent conference. I hope that as the dust settles and their heads clear, they’ll realise what they’ve achieved – not just in bringing scholars together, but in actually moving the field forward.

Link to next Dublin post

Writing War Seminar Provisional Programme

2005-09-20T15:46:00.000+01:00

Writing War Seminar 2005 Programme
Wednesday 1800-1930
Lock Keeper’s Cottage, Mile End Campus, Queen Mary University of London

5 October Welcome: Discussion of Seminar Aims and Format
Drinks
Catherine Merridale and Dan Todman (QMUL)

19 October Coventry after its ‘Coventration’: local memory and transnational networks.
Stefan Goebel (University of Kent)

23 November Writing about Modern War
Ben Shephard

30 November The Red Army and the Experience of War 1941-45
Catherine Merridale (QMUL)

14 December Remembering the First Crusade
Tom Asbridge (QMUL)

Please contact the Postgraduate Administrator, history-postgrad@qmul.ac.uk, to express your interest

Writing War Seminar

2005-09-20T15:44:00.000+01:00

Writing War
Location: Queen Mary University of London (Mile End Tube)
Convenors: Professor Catherine Merridale, Dr Dan Todman.

War and the ways it is experienced and remembered are a topic of continuing academic and popular interest. They form key vectors through which we understand the past and the present. Scholars in a wide range of disciplines touch on how war is described and analysed in their work, often from different perspectives and with little direct awareness of each other. In convening this new seminar, we would like to bring together those who study the experience and memory of war to discuss their work in an effort to build the field and develop a coherent approach across the disciplines. In terms of historical period, discipline and approach, the aim is to be inclusive rather than exclusive, in the belief that the very different challenges facing scholars of different periods can serve to illuminate the work of all.

The Writing War seminar will provide a setting which is interdisciplinary, informal and inspiring. The aim is to create a group in which every participant will feel happy to contribute in order to improve work in progress. The seminar will run as a mixture of workshop-style discussions and more formal papers and invites attendance from everyone with an interest in the field.

Amongst the questions we would like to address:

How are wars experienced as they happen?

What factors affect individual’s experiences of war and how do societies compose broader versions of wartime experience and meaning?

How should scholars write about war, combat and trauma? Are some elements of war ‘unwritable’?

How have wars been remembered – both by the individuals who take part and by the larger communities of which they are part? What factors affect the subsequent representation of war?

What can the many scholars who engage with the topic of war and memory - whose expertise varies widely in terms of period, discipline and approach – learn from each other?

The seminar will seek to identify and confront some of the key issues and problems - of materials, methodology and morality – implicit in the questions posed above.

The Writing War Seminar will meet on occasional Wednesdays throughout the year in the Graduate Centre, Lock Keepers Cottage, Queen Mary University of London. This semester the programme is as follows:

Suggestions for papers in the spring semester (and subsequently) are welcomed.
In order for us to gauge numbers, please contact the Postgraduate Administrator, history-postgrad@qmul.ac.uk, to express your interest.

Target marking

2005-09-19T11:44:00.000+01:00

Bit quiet on the blogging front for a while, I know. I've been working on one project which is hard to blog, and others where the need has been to produce something specific for a deadline. I'd felt the risk that blogging could be a diversion from work rather than an aid to it, so I knuckled down and just got it done. The other reason for my silence has been that this is the pre-registration week before term begins and that, like academics across the country, I've been remembering all the jobs I meant to get done over the summer but haven't.
Amongst that preparation, things that might be of interest to readers of this blog (I hope you're both well):
1) encouraging my own first PhD student that he should blog his work (a decision he needs to make for himself, rather than having it forced on him, but at least there's plenty of good practice to point to).
2) re-writing my 'Britain in the Second World War' undergraduate course to include a Clausewitz lecture and seminar. I had to think carefully about where to put this. I don't think that my classes generally do enough to extend students' range conceptually, and C von C's remarkable trinity is a fascinating/useful way to look at WW2 (particularly since one of the themes of the course is the interconnectedness of every aspect of the war). When I taught at Sandhurst, we hit the cadets with Clausewitz early on, then referred back. But they were people with quite a lot (in some cases) of background knowledge about war. I can't always rely on that broader knowledge with my undergrads. So I've put the lecture at the end of the first semester, so that they'll be able to apply the theory to some examples they already have. I'll update on progress.
3) converting aspects of my Great War course for use with 'gifted and talented' sixth form students in an online study group.
In the next couple of days, I'll post up this material. And there's also the details of the War and Memory seminar group that Catherine Merridale and I are starting. And then I'm going to a conference in Dublin which I'll summarise for y'all. And then I might finally get back to considering the points about the military experience ratio and the Fathers and Sons threads which I've been meaning to write up for some time.
Phew.

Fathers and Sons (2)

2005-09-10T13:39:00.000+01:00

'As an only child, his main companion though early childhood was his French grandfather. Soon after his father's return home from military service in 1922, young Douglas switched allegiance and adopted military dress: with metal buttons, puttees and a medal made out of a halfpenny, he patrolled the garden, challenging all who passed. His infatuation with this colourful, ebullient father, so suddenly returned from the wars, seems to have been intense and from that time his obsession for playing soldiers came near to dominating his life.
Domestic accidents followed which, one imagines, encouraged him to rationalise his emotional investments, reducing them, perhaps, if possible, to something that would fit in a kit bag. When Douglas was four, his mother collapsed with encephalitis. This illness dragged on (and recurred throughout Douglas's adolescence), the faily smallholding business failed, and on borrowed money Keith was sent, at the age of six, to boarding school. Two years later, his father moved away to North Wales and it soon became clear that he was gone for good.'
Ted Hughes, 'Introduction' to D. Graham, ed, Keith Douglas: The Complete Poems, OUP, 1987, xvii.
Fathers and Sons (1)

Fathers and Sons (1)

2005-09-10T13:23:00.000+01:00

A Grand Night

When the film Tell England came
To Leamington, my father said,
'That's about Gallipoli - I was there.
I'll call and see the manager...'

Before the first showing, the manager
Announced that 'a local resident...' etc.
And there was my father on the stage
With a message to the troops from Sir Somebody
Exhorting, condoling or congratulating.
But he was shy, so the manager
Read it out, while he fidgeted.
Then the lights went off, and I thought
I'd lost my father.
The Expedition's casualty rate was 50%

But it was a grand night out,
With free tickets for the two of us.'

D.J. Enright (b.1920), Collected Poems, OUP, 1981, 120 (Originally from his The Terrible Shears: Scenes from a Twenties Childhood, 1973).
My thanks to Professor John Ramsden for pointing this poem out to me.

On blogging (5)

2005-09-06T13:33:00.000+01:00

Great post by Sharon Howard on the topic below. Quality discussion demonstrates value of blogging shocker, as the headline should doubtless read.

On blogging (4)

2005-09-05T14:42:00.000+01:00

Interesting discussions starting over at Blog Them Out of the Stone Age and Cliopatria on 'Ivan Tribble's' article 'Bloggers Need Not Apply'. Sitrep - Tribble is the nom de plume of a professor at a 'small Midwest liberal arts college'. The original article was about how job applicants for a post in his department had been disadvantaged by the evidence of their blogging. After receiving the predictable backlash, Tribble's next article was about how, even if he'd been wrong, we still need a debate about academic blogging.
What was wrong with these bloggers? Tribble's argument seemed to have two parts. One was that he didn't get blogging. The other was that the applicants had, online, revealed aspects of themselves or their research that disadvantaged their applications.
The first is, I think, an understandable response from those who haven't linked into this world. And it is a matter of taste. I find this a useful tool - not least for enabling academic discussion at a point in the year when my department is deserted. But it might not work for everyone. I don't force my use of powerpoint and video on my colleagues. They don't force their use of yellowing OHP's on me. We get on fine.
The second is an area more complex than Tribble allows. As Mark Grimsley's passionate response suggests, the whole point of blogging is that the personal will creep into the public. And I would argue this happens in any published piece of work in any case. If you are easily findable (and the great and awful thing about having a distinctive name is that I am very easily googleable), then you probably do want to keep an eye on what people can learn about you from the net. I haven't included a lot of personal stuff on this blog - but that has more to do with traditional English reticence than with a desire to police my image. On the other hand - in a much more important area than tenure location - I did once get our administrator to change my online photo on the departmental site when I knew a potential date was scoping me out. (Is this a damaging confession, Professor Tribble?). No, you don't want to see the original.
An important but usually unacknowledged part of the academic selection process has always been gossip and informal inquiries about personality. If you have a reputation as a difficult colleague, it will probably get to the appointments board. But since they are more bothered about how much research and funding you will generate, they might be willing to overlook that. I suspect that this is probably true of the Google search as well. Name an academic without a personality which is at least slightly strange or socially dysfunctional... I'm not sure those people go into academia in the first place.
It would be an awful thing if Tribble's article put off a generation of younger academics who might be tempted to dip their toes into the blogging waters. Come on in, guys and gals. Just keep your bathing costumes on.

Military History and Theory

2005-09-02T10:59:00.000+01:00

As one of my new grad students put it: 'Why are military historians so scared of theory anyway?' My answer - historically, it was a military historian who best defined theory's utility and place:

'Theory cannot equip the mind with formulae for solving problems, nor can it mark the narrow path on which the sole solution is supposed to lie by planting a hedge of principles on either side. But it can give the mind insight into the great mass of phenomena and their relationships, then leave it free to rise into the higher realms of action. There the mind can use its innate talents to capacity, combining them all so as to seize on what is right and true.' (Carl von Clausewitz, On War, (Howard and Paret trans, Princeton UP, 1989), 578.

Clausewitz scholars will, of course, point out that he was talking about a particularly 19th century German definition of theory here (in translation, in any case). But he did have to explain, to a difficult audience, why theory was useful but not all encompassing. And what a great job he made of it.

'Modern' Poetry

2005-09-01T14:21:00.000+01:00

Briefly back at my Mum and Dad's: partly for family reasons, partly because the ultimate cure for 'manflu' is, of course, to demand parental pampering. No update on the military experience ratio for the moment, therefore, but instead a minor diversion inspired by one of the few family relics.
My Great Aunt, long deceased, was a librarian, and left a bookcase full of the cheap Everyman (and suchlike) editions she collected during the 1930s. She is a semi-mythical figure in the family: cantankerous spinster, fiercely independent, engaged in a fight with my grandfather from the time they were seven and quarrelled over who'd found the sixpence in the sandpit until she was laid in her coffin. I disappointed my mother when I pointed out, recently, that she couldn't have lost a fiance in the Great War (she would have been about seven in 1914), but there are two or three independent accounts of her declaration, at her 60th birthday party, that the worst thing about getting old was the lack of opportunities for sex.
Looking through her bookshelf last night, I found a copy of Modern Poetry (ed. Guy. N. Pocock, Dent and Sons, London). First published in 1920, it was in its 11th (1932) reprint when she acquired a copy in 1936. My assumptions about who counts as modern were fairly swiftly overturned by the picture of Rupert Brooke on the frontispiece, and by the selection of poems from Newbolt, Stevenson, Kipling and Masefield (on the other hand, it does have some Whitman and Sacheverell Sitwell). Of most interest, however, is its section on 'The Great War'.
Pocock introduces this section by writing:

'These poems have been written either by men who have seen modern war and tried to seize something tangible amidst its awful complexity, or by those who have had to stay behind and bear the strain of suspense and anxiety. The result has been not a vast epic or drama, but a great number of telling scenes, significant thoughts, like flashes in the great dark chaos. These war-thoughts are often expressed in verse of extreme simplicity; and this is especially so when the writers have themselves looked death and horror straight in the eyes; for to them the thing seen or the thought inspired is too poignant in itself to bear any elaboration.
...
Whether the war-poetry is designed to live, it is not yet possible to say. All one can be sure of is this: that when time has dimmed the memory of these terrible years, the thoughts of the men who fought, and of those who worked and waited at home, will be found embodied in these poems by those who care to read. No statues, nor pictures, nor novels will put those thoughts so intimately and vividly before us.' (85-6)

The poems are:
Thomas Hardy, 'Men who march away'
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, 'Hit', 'The Messages'
Robert Nichols, 'The Assault'
Herbert E. Palmer, 'The Bushrangers'
Siegfried Sassoon, 'Attack'
Anon. 'The Cricketers of Flanders'
Julian Grenfell, 'Into Battle'
Guy N Pocock, 'Years Ahead'
John Drinkwater, 'Clouds'
Gerald Cumberland, 'The Winging Souls'
Robert Graves, 'The Dead Fox Hunter' (which to me bears a resemblance to Keith Douglas' 'Aristocrats' - a connection I'd never spotted before).

I've never come across Pocock before, and a Google search seems only to suggest that he edited a lot of books in the 1920s and 1930s. His own poem is not impressive in aesthetic terms - but the selection he made, two years after the war, is fascinating.

Updates available!

2005-08-31T15:46:00.000+01:00

My ACUME paper is available to read at Mark Grimsley's site. Many thanks to Mark for hosting the paper. I'd be very grateful for any feedback.

My fellow member of the Jay Winter Supervisee's Club, Jessica Meyer, is organising a conference on the representation of the First World War in Newcastle next year. The closing date is almost upon us (15th September). I promised a submission: time to put my thinking cap on again.

Upcoming - some thoughts on previous blogs/comments about 'military cultural memory', involving the useful concept of the military experience ratio.

Comparative Cultural History (2)

2005-08-29T19:09:00.000+01:00

One topic of abiding interest to me has been how soldiers learn. Partly about how armies teach them, but much more what they learn informally, not least before they join the army, about what it is to be a soldier and what they should expect of war. This has particular importance for the writing of military history given the things I learned at Giessen about the importance of preformation of expectation in the shaping of experience (see ACUME (2) below).
One thing that forms soldiers' expectations and experience of war is what they know about previous conflicts. In some cases, of course, they may have participated in these earlier wars, but otherwise they may have learned about them through a mixture of family participation, popular culture and more formal education.
As an example of this mix of expectation and experience, consider British soldiers in the Second World War. Most had grown up in an atmosphere where the First World War was both celebrated and mourned. As children they learned that the trenches had been terrible - but also that heroism and self-sacrifice were still possible, and that the defining experience of masculinity was soldiering. When the Second World War came, most Britons did not avoid military service. They did seek, where they could, to join 'clean' arms (the navy, the air force, anything but the PBI). Those who did end up in terrestrial combat arms continued to make use of their forefathers' experiences as a sort of emotional talisman. There's plentiful evidence of Second World War infantrymen - often those who experienced what were, by any definition, awful wars - saying to themselves "This is bad, but it's not the worst. If my father could serve for three years in Flanders, then I can stick this. At least I'm not in that war."
Sam Hynes has some useful stuff on this in The Soldiers' Tale I think - primarily about Vietnam.
What about other wars? Using some of the comparators suggested below, what formed soldiers' cultural expectations? Lots has been written about the literary basis for First World War soldiers' world view. Much less about what they had learned from fathers/older brothers/uncles/their own involvement in the Boer War or the pre-war militia or TF. With the American Civil War, I recall that many of the men who held senior command had won their spurs in the Mexican War, but the forces engaged were small relative to the American population. What were the popular 'memories' of 1812 - or the Napoleonic Wars, given the mass of European immigration at the time?
Again, new comments always welcome: I'm finding the blogging inspirational to thought, as you can tell.

Comparative Cultural History

2005-08-28T21:46:00.000+01:00

Right, away from the literature/history dichotomy that seems to have been dominating my writing here since it began, some actual WWI related thoughts. One of the problems of British history of the First World War - both that which examines the war itself and that which looks at its mythic aftermath - is that the war tends to viewed as unique.
Spurred on by the writings of John Terraine, British military historians have tried to place the Western Front in the context of other modern total wars, but often on a comparatively simple level. This usually takes the form of a statistical comparison of rates of recruitment, numbers of divisions and percentage losses. Useful to a degree (although a statistic is like a glove puppet - stick your hand far enough up its backside and it'll say anything) - but often decontextualised.
This is much more, however, than analysts of the British mythology/cultural memory have done. Although there have been attempts to compare British remembrance with that of other participants in the First World War - see the work of Stefan Goebel and Jenny Macleod - there hasn't so far as I know, been a proper comparison with other wars over the long term, in an effort to bring out the effects of anniversaries, generational change, cultural context and so on.

What might be our criteria for choosing other wars? Off the top of my head, some combination of:
1) scale and totality - level of popular involvement
2) media context - presence of myth-making and spreading structures
3) subsequent impact - how well have they been remembered?
4) ease of access to resources - including, for the moment, my lack of linguistic skills/background knowledge - although my French isn't too bad, my French history is rubbish.

On these grounds, I wondered about comparisons with:
The English Civil War (huge popular involvement, very different media context)
The Napoleonic Wars (in Britain relatively much less popular involvement (depending on how we rate militia service), different media context)
The Indian Mutiny (following a suggestion from Astrid Erll) (tiny popular involvement but huge impact at the time, start of the modern media age - photographs)
The American Civil War - the most obvious source of comparison, I think
The Boer War
Second World War - obvious and probably already being written.

The idea would be to follow through the mythology of these wars in the century or so after they ended, examine how their myths developed and changed, and compare these processes to those which operated in Britain, 1918-2008ish.

Responses, anyone?

ACUME 2

2005-08-26T18:09:00.000+01:00

What was a war historian to make of all this?

The atmosphere between the youngest generation of history and literary studies academics is much friendlier than it used to be. There is a lot for us to learn: particularly on reading texts and using cognitive psychology. The boundary between the disciplines here is sometimes pretty blurred.
That having been said, there are some areas in which our academic paradigms are still very different. Military history (as distinct from war history) does, I think, encourage a pragmatic, empiricist approach. The result is that I can bristle at an overly theoretical – or an overly metaphysical/metaphorical – approach. There does seem to be a tendency amongst literary scholars to say ‘the well established fact that…’ where ‘well established seems to mean ‘asserted by lots of other eminent literary theorists’ rather than ‘proven by use of evidence’. I suspect I’ll get some flak for saying that, but I think plenty of literary scholars would acknowledge these faults – just as I would acknowledge the numerous problems in my own discipline. One of them is an unwillingness to theorise – so perhaps this is swings and roundabouts.
There is also a more general issue which I think relates to the place of war in popular culture. In this field in particular there is a tendency to regard strongly held beliefs as historical facts. By its nature, modern war attracts strong beliefs and assumptions. ‘War is bad’, ‘Armies (and generals) are stupid’, ‘All war is traumatic’. Lay readers, literary scholars – and many military historians – often end up inflicting these beliefs on the past, imposing ahistoric judgments because of what they ‘know’ to be the truth.

I was surprised that I was the only speaker at the conference to consider audience reaction. I think that reception studies is an area that some literary scholars are interested in, so I’m surprised that nobody working on this area spoke. Even if excellent work being done on the creation of these texts, without studying the whole process we are hardly looking at ‘cultural memory’. Many of those working in the field of literature are telling us how the roads are made, but they don’t seem to be paying much attention to the atlas.

ACUME 1

2005-08-26T18:08:00.000+01:00

(This posting, and the ones that follow, are brought to you by Lemsip and Sudafed. I have been struck down by a severe dose of ‘manflu’ which has left me coughing like a hag and cursing through sludge. So if I sound irascible, that’s probably the explanation).

Just back from the ACUME conference in Giessen. Excellent venue – a 19th century schloss which made me feel I needed a couple of duelling scars. Interesting selection of papers. Although the overall topic of the conference was cultural memory, most of those speaking were literary scholars. I was one of two historians out of about twenty participants.

This made me a bit apprehensive, but I have to say that for the most part I found it stimulating. It made me think about the study of literature and history in a way that should wrap up some of the points Esther and I have been bouncing back and forth on our two sites.

Papers that stood out for me:

Max Saunders on writing traumatic memory in both world wars: for a military historian, very interesting on the way that memoirs/autobiographical fiction have been written and the shifts that take place around the writing of traumatic experiences. Max used examples from Graves, Douglas, Ford Madox Ford and making reference to Freud. I was struck by the way authors write around these key experiences – circumnavigating them before writing them in detail (arguably The Great War and Modern Memory is a giant circumlocution of Fussell’s Second World War experience), and by the changes in syntax and imagery that accompany them. Most military historians would not, I think, interrogate a text so closely to derive meaning.

Astrid Erll offered a great summation of current thinking on the formation and rehearsal of memory. Astrid’s used research in cognitive psychology to suggest how important pre-formed expectations are in shaping experience and memory. Again, lots for historians to consider here about what ‘witnessing’ war actually means – what scripts are witnesses using. These were points bolstered – from a wider historical perspective, in a paper by Horst Carl.

Geert Bulens gave us a paper on modernist poetry and responses to the Great War that focussed on way these poets – from across the continent – envisioned ‘Europe’ in response to the war. A lot of the work I’ve looked at in terms of re-discovered poetry of the First World War has concentrated on more traditional poets – Geert’s paper had some wonderful examples of avant garde poetry from Belgium and Poland which I’d never seen before. I’ve mentioned elsewhere a possible European-funded project on the 100th anniversary of the war – I think Geert stands a great chance of securing such funding!

Andrea Birk’s paper on recent German literature dealt with a lot of the issues I’m interested in with regard to the First World War in relation to the Second. Particularly: how do you represent a ‘lost’ family experience, the impact of generational change on fictional representations and the growth of ‘family memory’ texts in recent years. Obviously the context and event being represented are different, but I think there are interesting comparisons to be drawn. I left with a list of German texts I need to read and compare.

Elena Lamberti's paper on the Spanish Civil War immediately preceded mine and (miraculously) dovetailed quite well with it. Elena had some excellent points to make about the development of a universal visual language of war in the 20th century - that we all have a set of shared images of 'war'. There is a technological-chronological explanation for this - the coincidence of information and print technology with a period when mass wars were being fought. Elena pointed towards the Spanish Civil War as the moment when a war which attracted international concern coincided with the growth of magazines which relied on pictures to tell their stories - most obviously Henry Luce's Life. I need to think a bit more about the implications of this 'globalisation of war-imagery' for my own work on the 'memory' of the First World War in the 1960s.

Diederik Oostdijk gave a paper on the US WW2 poet James Dickey. Dickey wrote about the war at various stages in his later life. He was also, it turns out, an inveterate fantastist and fabulist about his experiences (and the writer and screenwriter of Deliverance). In terms of witnessing history, Dickey’s changing story – depending on personal and national context, medium and other texts (including Rambo) – was a very informative case study. Again, some interesting comparisons to be made with WWI authors.

War and Literature

2005-08-22T19:49:00.000+01:00

'A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could and would happen either probably or inevitably. The difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse – indeed the writings of Herodotus could be put into verse and yet would still be a kind of history. … The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.'
(Aristotle, The Poetics, trans W. Hamilton Fyfe, (London, 1955), 35 [9, 1451b]. My thanks to Professor Alex Danchev for first pointing me towards this quotation.)

To continue with the post below, and to touch on an issue that Esther MacCallum Stewart is discussing elsewhere, how should historians react to popular historical fiction? Should we just say 'Well, what do you expect?' and dismiss it? Should we try to work with it? These books aren't going to go away, and they have formed a route into interest in the war for many readers. Some of them might even go on to buy our books.

The question I finished my paper at Oxford with was whether it would be possible to have a book about the First World War which was inaccurate at the level of historical detail, but which offered concepts of which historians could approve? For me, Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy is an interesting example. At the level of historical detail, it is packed full of anachronisms. Its take on Edwardian male sexuality, the development of military psychiatry, the writing of poetry and the relationship between Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen are all just plain wrong (ironically, these seem to anger literary historians more than they annoy me). At the level of concepts, however, a reader could leave these books with the following ideas: 1) the First World War wasn't just about the war poets, 2) some First World War soldiers believed that they were fighting a just war, 3) total wars create a range of social and cultural tensions, 4) some elements of the military experience might be enjoyable to some men. These could represent a significant shift of the reader's opinion from the normal mud, blood, donkeys cliches. In contrast, I think you could argue that Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong is more historically accurate, but far more likely to reinforce its readers' existing prejudices. Which, as historians, should we prefer?

Interviewed after she won the Booker Prize, Barker commented: ‘What people don’t like to be told, I think, is that there are dictatorships so abominable that in the end you have to fight. People aren’t comfortable with that – they’d rather think about innocent young men being slaughtered at the behest of stupid generals.’ That could be Brian Bond talking, or Gary Sheffield. Or me.
(A. Quinn, ‘What Sassoon could never resolve’, Daily Telegraph, 2 September 1995, A4.)

War and literature

2005-08-22T18:32:00.000+01:00

One of the aspects of the First World War in Britain that I find particularly interesting is the intersection between 'literature' and 'history'. We can perhaps have a semantic debate later about what exactly the boundaries of those two terms are. The particular relevance for my work lies in the way that modern Britons form their ideas about the war as historical event - what it was like and what it was meant - from literary sources - either the poetry they are taught in schools or the modern popular fiction which uses the war as a setting.
Earlier this summer I took part in a colloquium on 'Periscope and Telescope' at Wolfson College Oxford. The aim was to bring together 'literary' and 'military' historians to discuss 'conflicting views of the Great War'. I was slightly surprised to find myself the junior representative of the military historians. This put me in some excellent company, but left me rather open to the preconceptions most academics seem to hold about the study of military history (and since I wasn't wearing my regimental blazer, had a goatee rather than a moustache, and seldom sit up straight, this could have been confusing).
In a session set up as a debate, I was asked to speak against the motion that 'Historians need creative imagination as much as imaginative writers need historical information'. Facetiously, I opposed it on the grounds that it was insufficiently strong: historians need far more creative imagination (whether in devising a methodology, analysing incomplete information, or writing without committing the crime of 'psychological anachronism') than do imaginative writers. Indeed, if you look at the field of recent First World War fiction, it's apparent that a lot of writers use only the bare minimum of historical research, and seldom look to assess their sources (even on the simplest primary/secondary basis) in the way that a historian would do. The whole point, of course, is that it's creative writing - if historical fact doesn't fit what you want, you're allowed to bend it. Let's steer clear, for the moment, of how much some historians do exactly the same thing.
The problem for many historians of the war is that readers tend to accept these works of historical fiction as accurate pieces of reconstruction. This suspension of disbelief is probably true of all historical fiction, but is particularly the case for a war in which many Britons still feel bound up by myths of family involvement. Like many of my colleagues, I have had otherwise perfectly reasonable and intelligent people tell me that books like Birdsong or Regeneration told them the 'truth' about the First World War. This frustrates historians for three reasons: 1) we see the errors, plagiarism and anachronisms, 2) we can't understand why readers get confused between fact and fiction, 3) some of these books sell in quantities we could only dream about and reach audiences we never will.

Veterans (2)

2005-08-22T15:01:00.000+01:00

Positive representations of the war experience flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, often alongside more negative representations. This HMV catalogue for 1930 contained an advertisement for 'The Darker Side of War' - a record of a gory radio play about the destruction of a German communication post called 'Brigade Exchange' (starring a very young John Gielgud, btw) - and 'The Lighter Side of War' - 'Cockney humour in the trenches', which was illustrated on the front cover.

Veterans

2005-08-22T14:52:00.000+01:00

When we look at how the First World War was 'remembered' in the 1960s, we need to remember that a) there were still a lot of veterans alive (c. 2m in 1961, by one estimate) and b) that although they might look old, many were still active. They retained a wide variety of different views about their war service - and rehearsed them sufficiently strongly to avoid being immediately overwhelmed by new 'anti-war' texts like Oh What a Lovely War. Here, British veterans play football after the 50th anniversary commemoration at Thiepval, on the Somme, July 1966 (thus combining the myth of chasing a football over the top, and the notorious 'two world wars and one world cup' chant!).
I would really like to use this photo in my book. I found it through the Liddle Archives at the University of Leeds, but they have no details as to its provenance (it looks like it was cut from a newspaper). If you have any clue where it came from, please let me know.

Giessen Conference Paper

2005-08-22T10:26:00.000+01:00

The problem, as noted below, of working up papers online is that the finished product can be a bit long to post on something which is meant to be immediately engaging and easy to read. The long-term answer to this, I suspect, is to move to a more complex combination of host/software that gives one a bit more flexibility. For the moment, Mark Grimsley has kindly offered to put the finished version on his site, so you can go and read it there. As soon as I have made sure we have enough students for next year, I'll organise getting it up.

On Blogging (3)

2005-08-19T14:55:00.000+01:00

Esther also commented that I'd put a list of what I'd like to write about as my first post: which she feared I might find rather restrictive. Hopefully this doesn't breach some rule of blogging etiquette-
'in some ways that might restrict 'random' entries if you feel they always have to have a level of gravitas to them in terms of content. I tend to blog relatively randomly, so length of entry is usually small and there is room to be flippant. But there are some contentious ideas on your site which I think are more on the epic scale...'
Well, ta very much. I try always to maintain an air of gravitas, obviously, although sometimes my tongue gets stuck in my cheek. And I am struggling about how to put longer papers online whilst avoiding the problems of MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) or TLDR (Too Long, Didn't Read).
Putting a list down was a way to save my sanity as much as anything - making sure that I would eventually get round to topics without keeping a massive list in my head.

On blogging (2)

2005-08-19T14:45:00.000+01:00

To continue that point about warblogging - one of the other suggested criteria is that a blog is 'pro-war'. I think I might at a stretch be described as 'pro-military' in the sense that I believe we need an army (and even a navy and, on particularly bad days, an air force) and that since we have to have one, it ought to be the best - not least intellectually - we can manage. I've taught and socialised with a few soldiers, and I've found some of them hugely impressive people.
With regard to the First World War, I think that I am now bracketted - whether I want to be or not - in the ranks of the 'revisionist' military historians . Simplistically, that means that I believe, on the basis of research and argument, that faced with a hugely difficult situation, the British army of the First World War didn't do too bad a job.
Whether that's what I'm actually interested in arguing about is another matter. How armies (indeed countries) respond to the demands - military, technological, cultural, social, political - of total war is much more interesting to me than the personality-bashing/defence which has dominated British military history of that war for so long.
At some point I want to write about my own definitions of self and subject here - but not the day after clearing!

On blogging

2005-08-19T14:34:00.000+01:00

First reactions have started to come in to the blog - varying from 'What is a 'blog'?' (Distinguished Military Historian who can remain anonymous till he figures out how to post here), to really encouraging and helpful points from Esther and Mark, both mentioned below.

Esther raises a point on her site :
Is this a warblog? I think not: I've always taken these to be the product of serving soldiers engaged in a war (police action/peacekeeping mission, whatever). And although I say elsewhere that the 'death of the First World War is greatly exaggerated', it's hardly an ongoing conflict (although the last person to explain to me how Birdsong was 'history' might feel differently).

The Future of the First World War

2005-08-17T17:07:00.000+01:00

It's now two months since we held The Future of the First World War colloquium, and if it's not too late, I thought I would finally fulfil my promise on the day to blog up the results.
The only problem there may be is that I was so psyched up with the desperate desire to make the whole thing run smoothly that I may have forgotten to switch to 'receive' mode. So when I've bashed this into some decent shape, I will send it round to the other participants and ask for their comments.

Format:
A day of discussion between 'interested practictioners' of the First World War - mainly academic historians at various levels, but including some workers in other cultural fields: museums, archives, television and film. Four 25 minute papers (more or less) each followed by discussion, then a round table. Many thanks to QMUL, who gave me the opportunity to host the whole thing, provided excellent food and the pleasant (if eventually rather hot) setting. Thanks also to all who came.

Thoughts:
For me,six things stood out
1) the death of the First World War has been greatly exaggerated. Although I realised that the last twenty or so years had seen extensive developments in the field, I think I needed reminding of just how much very high quality research is going on. As John Horne's paper revealed, much of this has been driven by the boom in the cultural history of the war and is being carried out on a trans-European basis. The result is really to open up the full variety of this huge war to academic eyes - although we might wonder what parts of this will make it into the public sphere. For some idea of the range of topics being explored, have a look at the programme for the upcoming conference in Dublin here.
2) the blurring of boundaries. One of the aspects of this boom in First World War studies that makes me feel most positive is that - although it is often carried out under banners like 'cultural', 'military', 'literary' history - it has become far more standard for students to reach over the boundaries that formerly existed between these disciplines. I don't think that this is by any means a complete process - it is still far from likely that someone studying the literature of the war would see an extensive knowledge of its military history as a prerequisite - but it is a start. Certainly I got the impression that these various groups are much more likely to talk to each other than in a previous generation - perhaps one positive effect of postmodernism.
3) there's still a lot of work to be done. It's a big subject area with room for everybody, and in lots of cases what we're seeing now is still the first mining of the archives, rather than revisionism. I thought that I'd spotted the chance for a grand cross-European project on 1918, but I rather suspect, from his comments, that David Stevenson might have beaten us to it. David would, of course, be the man to pull off what would otherwise be a collaborative project, impossible for any one historian, on his own.
4) the impact of historical fashion and popular cultural concerns on academic study. David's paper on international history and the First World War pointed out that this was the field that had obsessed the historical profession in the aftermath of the war (how had the catastrophe happened?) The result was that a large quantity of documents were published relatively swiftly, a lot of academic work went in, but that now the field is comparatively quiet. This historical mine has, if not been worked out, then at least had its seams so thoroughly explored that further work doesn't tempt new scholars. This is at best a half-formed thought, but I think there's something quite interesting to be done on the ebb and flow of academic interest in a subject area, and the lengths of time and contexts in which different fields of study retain relevance (academic fashion being, I realise, something of a contradiction in terms).
5) Is any of this actually getting out there?
One of the key questions I wanted to ask was whether all these academic developments were having any impact on the public discourse. Here, I think, there's an interesting point of definition. Is it possible for an interested lay reader/viewer to discover the cutting edge of First World War research - absolutely. I suspect that this is going to get easier as time goes on: not only will recent research be more widely disseminated, but my feeling is that the market effect of the web has been generally positive - the most frequently linked sites, on my own anecdotal experience - are those offering a complex and rich version of the war of which historians can approve.
On the other hand, have all these interesting developments made it into popular and successful TV series (still, I think, the basic mark of whether they are reaching a wide audience)? No, but, as Steve Badsey pointed out in an excellent paper, not necessarily because all TV producers are ignorant commercially obsessed fools. As well as the host of structural issues around turning 'good' academic history into 'good' TV, the influence of funding bodies and so on, historians have also to shoulder some responsibility. We are either too easily dismissive of 'public history' or too easily seduced by its wiles. Few of us are trained in its methods - and those few tend to have gained their training by hard-fought and ill-paid experience. We not only have to recognise the limitations of the various media we want to use, but to think about how we can exploit the advantages they do offer. Quite how to do that is perhaps another matter.
6) What is going to happen around the 100th anniversaries?
The colloquium arose out of faintly remembered debates with Jay Winter about what would happen around the 2014-18. Would the war still be remembered? Would it be slipping over the edge into history rather than memory? Could we see comparisons with other wars/anniversaries. I don't have a definite answer yet, but the colloquium led me to have the following thoughts:
a) following on from something Steve said, the date to look out for is probably 2017, since that will be the anniversary the American media may want to mark. They've got the cash to put on a big production.
b) if historians want to influence the European-wide commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the war, we need to get our act together now: working with public bodies like museums to put together funding bids. That probably means exploring - even deciding - what the war can mean in the 21st century.
c) one key factor in the remembrance of the war in this country has been the family connection. I continue to believe that the scale of involvement and a modern interest in the heritaged past has made the total wars of the 20th century different from their predecessors. My strong suspicion, however, is that by 2014-2018 we will have passed so far from the original event that those familial links will be severely tested. The children and grandchildren of those who fought will have passed away - the potential will be for the emotional connection to have been lost.
d) in Britain and elsewhere, what is taught in schools really matters. This is what lays the groundwork for future fascination and underpins mythology. What do we think is going to happen to the place of the First World War in the History curriculum in our different countries - and to its place in English Lit, in the UK at least?

Enough - I want to get this online and get some responses.

Outcomes
Catherine Merridale and I are going to run a 'War and Memory' seminar series on Wednesday afternoons/evenings next year. I'll be posting more on this as I discuss it with Cathy and set up the details, but I'd appreciate it if those who expressed an interest in a First World War seminar series could get in touch. Can we link these - or at least cross-publicise?
Anybody interested in putting together funding applications for a trans-national, trans-disciplinary project on 1918? Let's brainstorm.

Regrets, rethinks and apologies.
First, I wish I'd pulled my finger out and got on with this blogging lark earlier. I really hope that someone's going to get back to me on this, but it was far too long between the conference and setting this up. Next time I run anything like this, I'll set up a blog thread on it beforehand. I will endeavour to report back on the other conferences I go to this summer - I've actually enjoyed having the opportunity to reflect.
Second, it was only as the conference was ongoing that I realised that I had organised a predominantly male set of speakers and commentators. You can take the fact that I hadn't thought about it either as evidence of my 'gender-blind' approach or as a case-study in unconscious prejudice (either mine or the academy's) as you will. I could have got a set of speakers of equal eminence whilst maintaining a male-female balance (although it would have been harder work, just in terms of my network of people I could ask favours from). Should I have been thinking in those terms? Comments on that much appreciated.
Third, I was disappointed not to get more people from outside the academy. Some of that was happenstance - it was a particularly difficult weeken for some of those I'd expected to come. Some of it may be to do with reputation/gatekeeping: again, thoughts on how to surmount those problems please.
Fourth, I obviousy wished we could have dealt with more subject areas - but time and space were limited. Comments on really glaring omissions will be taken with a smile.

ACUME Conference in Giessen, 24-25 August

2005-08-16T14:55:00.000+01:00

I've been asked to give a paper at this conference, on 'Writing and Visualising War: To Bear Witness as a Complex Act' on 25 August. ACUME is a European wide research and teaching network examining 'cultural memory' using an interdisciplinary approach. I have a few problems with using the word 'memory' to discuss the combination of personal recollection and cultural constructs that seems to be summed up by 'cultural memory', but given the complexities of translation, perhaps its the best/most easily understood term. Certainly it's a huge privilege and opportunity to be given the chance to discuss my work with a very wide range of European scholars.
I have been told that I have 20 minutes to discuss some of my work, with particular emphasis on the tension between bearing witness and the dynamics of the mode of representation - what I think I would call the structural influence. How much does the fact that you're producing a TV documentary series affect the eventual output, in addition to whatever your own individual viewpoint is.
Obviously a 20 minute paper is one of the most difficult things to pull off successfully - engaging and informing the audience without being superficial - and since I note that each 3 paper session has been given 3 hours of time, I might end up with 25. On the other hand, this is all useful discipline and training in tight writing and thinking.
It does mean, however, that I will have to choose a single example to talk about. I am going to choose either my work on the 1964 BBC TV series The Great War or on the 1963 'musical entertainment' Oh What a Lovely War. Both, it seems to me, display precisely the sort of tensions that I take this conference to be examining. On The Great War, the eventual form of the series was shaped as much by the severe pressures of time under which the production team operated as by their historical understanding and their hopes of producing a new sort of television history. Oh What a Lovely War reshaped the First World War twice - first as Joan Littlewood and her cast adapted Charles Chilton's original script to inform a radical 1960s audience about the perils of nuclear war, then a second time as Theatre Workshop met the commercial demand for a more nostalgic singalong (some of which came from veterans of the war themselves). The whole thing was reshaped again when it was made into a film in 1968. When the National Theatre revived Oh What a Lovely War in 1998 (for the first time, nationally, although it had been a rep and am dram favourite in the intervening years) it was reshaped again - since the audience viewed it in terms of nostalgia for the 1960s. Arguably, Chilton's original radio script The Long Long Trail was itself a re-working of the songs of the war. That makes - what - five reshapings? Plenty to fit ACUME's 'fils rouges' of manipulation, spectacularisation and sellability.
Ah - first evidence of the success of the blogging approach. The process of writing all of that down seems to have clarified my ideas and settled that decision for me. Oh What a Lovely War it is. I'll put up the paper as I write it. Should be helped by the fact that the new proofs of the book will be here tomorrow, so there'll be good reason to go through all this again.

Points of departure.

2005-08-12T02:30:00.000+01:00

This is by way of dipping a toe into the world of blogging. Light years behind the development curve, I realise, but recently three different factors have inspired me to start using a blog as an intellectual diary, a web-collecting ground and an opportunity for self-promotion.
First, I recently organised a colloquium at Queen Mary, University of London, on The Future of the First World War. Historians from a variety of backgrounds came together to discuss where the academic study and popular representation of the war would go over the run up to the 100th anniversaries - 2014-2018. It was a great day and incredibly stimulating, and the impact of the web was a significant topic of debate. But I was so caught up in running the day and presenting my own paper that I felt that I needed an opportunity to reflect on it at leisure. More than one of the participants suggested I blog the day.
Second, I've recently been spending a lot of time on two excellent academic blogs, both related to my field of study. Esther MacCallum-Stewart's Break of Day in the Trenches site is a great examples of how to bring together the huge quantity of WWI material together for personal and academic benefit. Mark Grimsley's Blog Them Out of the Stone Age blows me away with the complexity and variety of its thought. Mark is making remarkable efforts to move the topic on. In particular, Mark's thread on why Custer would have been blogging if he were alive today has convinced me that this is the way forward.
Third, I'm increasingly using web-based learning with my students, and it seemed useful to have a site where I could create and test-drive some of the material I'd use on them.
With all that in mind I thought that I'd start at the easy end of the blog market and see what I came up with. The aim is to create somewhere to discuss ongoing projects and try out new ideas. Let's see where that takes us. I'm very eager for any suggestions about how to improve the site and my work.

Ongoing projects

2005-08-11T15:22:00.000+01:00

Things I want to write about here in the coming weeks:

The Future of the First World War - outcomes and perspectives
Why have I started calling myself a war historian, rather than a military historian?
Why 'trench fever'?
Project papers for my NAFGTY online study group:

- Six Key Ideas About the First World War
- Using literature as a historical source
- The war books boom
- Why don't we remember 1918?

Remembering the First World War in Britain and New Zealand in the 1980s
Memorial language
Conference reports - Giessen and Dublin
Helping students improve their writing
Study day at the IWM
War and Memory seminar/workshop series