I have a fascination for the First World War. With Simon Brown, I co-wrote a story called “No Man’s Land” and the forthcoming Eidolon anthology includes “Hieronymus Boche,” both stories set in the trenches. Simon and I also have a number of collaborative works in progress set in and immediately after the war. I have picked up a few pieces of WWI memorabilia — not medals, which seem to me tasteless to acquire as a private collector, or even worse, the death telegrams that can be found on eBay from time to time — but odd items like postcards, letters, scrapbooks, a broken watch, a match box carved out of a bullet casing, and the most transporting of all, an officer’s whistle. These nubbins of history are not the sort of thing most collectors desire but I am after different quarry. Because I write about the war, my small collection is meant to help me understand how the soldiers spoke, what they wrote, the feel of the things they held in their hands, and the actual sound of the whistle that ordered them over the top. I have blown the whistle. It felt like I was waking the dead from the Flanders mud. I only blew it once.

I believe that the First World War tilled the field of modern horror. But that’s an argument for another time. Today’s issue is how the War has been recorded by historians in some of the better-known books on the subject.

The war seems so long ago now. It was the first industrial war and nobody knew how to fight under the new rules. Almost none of the soldiers from WWI remain alive, and even their children are beginning to thin out. There are very few left with direct experience of the Great War. It is easy to see it as a distant event. Reading the letters of the Tommies and the ANZACs, though, holds many surprises. The language, apart from specific colloquialisms, is almost identical to English today. The English Army men really spoke with that stiff-upper-lip quality that has been parodied so well by their descendants. From a letter home to his wife, a Brigadier-Major Howitt actually opened with, “I am not going to say I have not had a stiff time — you would not believe me and it would shake you faith in my reports — I will therefore confess to the worst week I remember with the assurance that I am perfectly fit and cheery.” Shake out the self-conscious stoicism, and the language is formal but otherwise perfectly readable to modern readers. And of course, the men who were not senior officers tended to write far less formally in their letters and journals. Take out the slang — the “Tommies” and “Huns” and “salients” — and you could be reading a letter from yesterday in Baghdad. I have had to teach myself to guard against the habit of writing in overly-archaic speech, but also of writing in the same voice as the pukkah officers which, even if historically justifiable, sounds like a bad revue sketch. “I say, Old Chap, rather trying circumstances, wot?” Many of them actually spoke like that.

Lyn Macdonald’s To The Last Man: Spring 1918 (Carrol and Graf, 2001) exploits the immediacy of such personal experiences to great effect. She interviewed hundreds of soldiers to collect her oral history of the dying stages of the war, from lowly footsoldiers to high-ranking intelligence officers, and the memories bound off the page. From Musketier Hans Schetter, a German infantryman:

More prisoners are coming back in bunches now. They are Irish soldiers, for they have a shamrock fastened to their upper sleeves. Our lieutenant talks with a wounded enemy officer who has been hit in the eye and the arm by a shell fragment. We are astounded that he has the guts to talk to us. The lieutenant tells him that we are on the way to the English Channel. But he replies with pride, “There are trenches over trenches all along the way!”

It would be easy to claim that Macdonald is merely repackaging the words of her interviewees, but of course she has to have the wit to know what to include and what to cut from thousands of hours of interviews, and when she speaks in her own voice, she is just as compelling:

There was not much else to sustain life, let alone to cook a celebration meal [for Christmas 1917]. The British naval blockade of the seaways prevented supplies of essentials reaching Germany’s ports and cut her off from her African colonies and from the world markets…Before the war the average daily consumption of calories had been 2,280 for every German citizen. By 1917 he could count on less than 1,000…There was no fat, no milk, no eggs, no sugar. Such vast quantities of meat were required to feed the Army that little more than bone and gristle fell to the share of civilians, and horsemeat was a rare, luxurious treat. The bread was coarse and unpalatable, the ingredients were suspect, and potatoes — which were the staple diet that winter — rotted in the frozen ground and collapsed when they were cooked to a foul-tasting greenish pulp which could be made palatable only by dousing it with ersatz sauce. The sauce was tasty enough, but it contained quantities of sand that crunched unpleasantly between the teeth and left a gritty deposit on the plate. It had not been much of a Christmas on any of the home fronts.

If there is a criticism of To The Last Man, it is the woeful referencing. There is no link between the written word and the sources, thus making it impossible to ascertain where Macdonald found her facts except by reading every damn book in her extensive bibliography.

John Keegan is probably the best-known military historian writing today. His book The Face of Battle, which examines what it was like to be a soldier on the front line of the battles of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, is a wonderful work. Unfortunately, his attempt to take on the limited omniscient viewpoint to describe The First World War (Vintage Books, 1998), fails to engage. As always, his prose is lucid and analytical, but there are times when he appears to be analysing because he feels he has to. For instance, the following is Keegan’s response to revisionists who wrote that the “Lost Generation” exaggerated the impact of the War.

It has, as the war recedes into history, become fashionable to decry the lament for a “Lost Generation” as myth-making…At the worst, they argue, only 20 per cent of those who went to war did not return…

This is a complacent judgement. It is true that the Great War, by comparison with that of 1939-45, did little material damage. No large European city was destroyed or even seriously devastated during its course, as all large German cities were by aerial bombardment during the Second World War. The First World War was a rural conflict, on the Eastern as well as the Western Fronts. The fields over which it was fought were quickly returned to agriculture…The War inflicted no harm to Europe’s cultural heritage that was not easily repaired: the medieval Cloth Hall at Ypres stands today as it did before the bombardments of 1914-1918, so do the town squares of Arras, so does the cathedral at Rouen, while the treasures of Louvain, burnt in an uncharacteristic act of vandalism in 1914, were replaced piece by piece in the war’s aftermath.

Above all, the war imposed on the civilian population involved almost none of the deliberate disruption and atrocity that was to be a feature of the Second. Except in Serbia and, at the outset, in Belgium, communities were not forced to leave their homes, land and peaceful occupations; except in Turkish Armenia, no population was subjected to genocide; and, awful though the Ottoman government’s treatment of its Armenian subjects was, the forced marches organised to do them to death beling more properly to history of the Ottoman imperial policy than to that of the war itself.

Now I’m going to agree with Keegan’s overall argument here. The “Lost Generation” really was a shattering blow to Western Europe. It did more than kill a lot of young soldiers. It destroyed four empires: the German, the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Ottoman, with a combined history of 957 years. Goodness knows how it became fashionable to say otherwise.

But in the process of defending the obvious, Keegan makes a number of correct but odd statements. While few of the large European cities were damaged, large parts of the countryside were laid waste. And at that time, the great bulk of the population was still rural. The only reason the major cities were not devastated was because the First World War was an incredibly static affair once the initial German offensive bogged down. The war is infamous for the tens of thousands of lives thrown away to secure a half-mile of territory. And was it really unusual that peaceful civilians were allowed to continue their occupations? Didn’t Paris continue to be a functional city even during the Nazi occupation? It is impossible for an army to occupy a city, destroy or drive away all its population, and survive. And it is disingenuous to claim that the atrocities were relatively minor. The occupation of Belgium was more than just a minor blip. The invading German forces carried out massacres in town after town. They especially sought out Belgian priests. This was not bloodlust. It was a deliberate and premeditated strategy laid down by the German High Command to break the resistance of the Belgian population. The effect was so devastating that even the German soldiers had a hard time following their orders. It was like a My Lai massacre every single day.

And the destruction of the Louvain library was not “uncharacteristic.” It was ordered from on high as a message to the resisting Belgians, just as the massacres were, and the vandalism was repeated at Rheims, where a world-famous cathedral was bombed to the ground after the Germans occupied the town. The fact that Louvain library and the Rheims cathedral were rebuilt (over a span of 40 years in the latter case) is hardly cause for dismissal any more than the Fire of London should be considered a trivial event because Christopher Wren got to rebuild St Paul’s (and using this logic, the Blitz was even less important because St Paul’s was untouched). While it is true that the deliberate destruction of civilians and historic buildings settled down as the war progressed, that was again because of the static nature of the war and still did not prevent the destruction of the Basilica at Albert in the last months of the war — although at least that was not an act of vandalism but a military decision to prevent it being used as an observation tower. While there was no Dresden, there was certainly no lack of civilian loss and cultural damage, at least not enough in my opinion to set the two wars significantly apart.

Most bizarre of all is Keegan’s assertion that the Armenian genocide was different to the other, unstated but obviously Jewish one. If he had said that the difference in the two genocides was the scale (up to 1 million Armenians, but around 6 million Jews) or the horrific application of industrial methods to mass murder, then he would have a point. But Keegan claims that the Armenians were murdered by “Ottoman imperial policy” rather than as part of the war itself. But how exactly was the Holocaust not Nazi policy? How was it part of the German war effort?

While Keegan is factually impeccable and a very precise writer (”a complacent judgement” is spot on), he sometimes stretches his analysis to breaking point. It’s not that he is wrong on any of the above points. It is that he is trying to create distinctions that don’t really matter. The differences in the conduct of the First and Second Wars were almost entirely due to the evolution of technology, especially tanks and planes. There was no difference in intent. The behaviour of the invading German armies in the First World War was if anything more grotesque than in the Second. Under the Nazis, the SS got to perform the most gruesome work; under the Kaiser, it was put upon the ordinary soldier. If there is any distinction to be made, it is that the creation of the SS as a specialised paramilitary service for the commission of atrocities freed the regular Army from enforcing cruel orders and allowed them to prosecute the Second War in a more professional manner than their immediate forebears. But of course, such hair-splitting is of no consolation to the victims. These distinctions, even if they are true, do not add to our understanding. Sometimes it is enough to describe events without compulsively interpreting them.

Meanwhile, Hew Strachan’s The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (Oxford University Press, 1998) does little to add to anything. Strachan is the editor here and writes only one chapter and the introduction. But the images are not especially memorable — something of a deficiency in an Illustrated History — and never credited to the artist but to the image bank that owns the rights. And the text from the chapter I most wanted to read contained the sort of factual machine-gunnery that made my school history books so painful to read. Here is Tim Travers on the final German offensive and the counter-attack that eventually ended the war:

Ironically, the limited German success of 15 July benefitted the French counter-offensive by further deepening the salient. The French attacked with the 10th and the 6th Armies (including American and British divisions), 750 tanks, and a 2:1 superiority in artillery. The attack was a surprise, without previous artillery registration, but with a thick creeping barrage to support the infantry, and made strong initial gains. Artillery was the key to success, with one heavy shell per 1.27 yards of ground, and three field artillery shells per yard. As with all other operations, later attacks were more difficult, but French and allied divisions continued the offensive until early August.

And on and on it goes, averaging six numbers per paragraph like an interminable statistical report. There are distances and ratios and casualties and times and dates and unit numbers, all reported with excruciating precision. Did I say “six numbers per paragraph”? Damn. Now he’s got me doing it. It’s a pity because Travers’s story is well worth telling. The German offensive was tactically successful, but it exhausted the German Army to the point of being unable to resist the counter-offensive. If only Travers had taken a look at Macdonald’s disciplined use of facts and numbers as seasoning to be sprinkled into the text rather than as flour to bind it together.

Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August (Ballantine Books, 1994, orig. 1962) remains one of the pillars of WWI history. It is limited to the first month of the war, but Tuchman’s decision to narrow the scope of her history pays great dividends. She draws the characters of most of the key figures so well that you feel they are part of your family, albeit a dysfunctional one.

So ended the first day of combat for the first British soldiers to fight a European enemy since the Crimea and the first to fight on European soil since Waterloo. It was a bitter disappointment: both for the Ist Corps which had marched through heat and dust and now had to turn and march back almost without having fired a shot; even more for the IInd Corps which felt proud of its showing against a famed and formidable enemy, knew nothing of his superior numbers or of the Fifth Army’s withdrawal, and could not understand the order to retreat.

It was a “severe” disappointment to Henry Wilson who laid it all at the door of Kitchener and the Cabinet for only sending four divisions instead of six. Had all six been present, he said with that marvelous incapacity to admit error that was to make him ultimately a Field Marshal, “this retreat would have been an advance and defeat would have been a victory.”

Tuchman’s dissections of the personalities of the Great War would perhaps be in danger of following the Great Man of History theory. She is so intent on understanding not just the logic behind the decisions but the characters of the men who made them, that sometimes it appears that the War was a conflict not between armies but between towering puppets on a stage the width of Europe and Asia Minor. This accusation, though, would be a misreading. Tuchman never claims that a single dominating Great Man flexed his will, as Ayn Rand would have it, and brought about the events of the war. Tuchman is more nuanced than that. The story she tells is not of a Great Man, not even a few Great Men, but a complex web of Great Men, Not-So-Great Men, and Really Rather Trivial Men, all pursuing their own ends. The Guns of August is like a Greek tragedy in its binding of character to fate, but unlike a Greek tragedy, Tuchman is aware that one man’s destiny can interfere with another’s. Her play is filled not with predetermined soliloquys but with a bickering, shifting chorus.

My only criticism of the book is that the maps in this edition are printed in low-contrast greys making them extremely difficult to read. It is a flaw easily remedied in future editions.

Finally, Paul Fussell brings us The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press, 2000, orig. 1975), which is not strictly speaking a history of the war but an exploration of the way the war was represented in literature, drama, and poetry. However, Fussell continually refers back from the page to the front, so that even though he has no abiding interest in describing the war, he succeeds anyway. The fusion of literary insight and history can be seen in this passage on Wilfred Owen, widely considered the greatest and most tragic of all the War Poets:

Up to now, for all his disappointment about missing the university and his frustrations over money, he [Owen] had been a strikingly optimistic, cheerful young man, skilled in looking on the bright side and clever at rationalizing minor setbacks. But with his first experience of the trenches in the middle of January, 1917, everything changed. What he encountered at the front was worse even than a poet’s imagination could have conceived. From then on, in the less than two years left to him, the emotions that dominated were horror, outrage, and pity; horror at what he saw at the front; outrage at the inability of the civilian world–especially the church–to understand what was going on; pity for the poor, dumb, helpless, good-looking boys victimized by it all. He was in and out of the line half a dozen times during the first four months of 1917, but what finally broke him was an action in late April, when he had to remain in a badly shelled forward position for days looking at the scattered pieces of a fellow officer’s body. No one knows exactly how he reacted or what he did, but he was evacuated and his condition was diagnosed as neurasthenia. He wrote his sister from the Casualty Clearing Station: “I certainly was shaky when I first arrived…You know it was not the Bosche that worked me up, nor the explosives, but it was living so long by poor old Cock Robin (as we used to call 2/Lt. Gaukroger), who lay not only near by, but in various places around and about, if you understand. I hope you don’t!”

The only great shortcoming of The Great War and Modern Memory is Fussell’s repeated implication that many post-War literary devices were a direct result of the War itself, even though many of them can be traced back as far as Homer. This is a minor irritation in an extraordinary book.

It should come as no surprise, I imagine, that the books I favour most are the narrative histories, and especially those that draw out the characters of the players as well as of events. That is, after all, what I am aiming for in my own stories. But even accounting for my bias in this regard, I find it curious that the finest histories of the First World War are by women — Barbara W. Tuchman and Lyn Macdonald — who had no experience of battle, and a man whose chief interest was refined literature. Make of it what you will.