THE GREAT WAR IN WORDS
by Scott Van Wynsberghe, [email protected]
National Post
November 11, 2008 Tuesday
Canada
Of all wars, the First World War has the darkest reputation. Even
though it ended a full 90 years ago today, on Nov. 11, 1918, its
images of trenches, barbed wire and poisonous gas still seem to be
the essential symbols for the horrors of war. Yet how much do we
really know about what happened during 1914-18?
Many of the popular impressions of the war have filtered through a
handful of very grim novels and memoirs by veterans. These include
Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1928),
Siegfried Sassoon’s Sherston trilogy (1928-1936), Robert Graves’s
Goodbye to All That (1929), Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms
(1929) and Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed (1930). Most
readers are likely familiar with at least one of these books, the
first and fourth of which have inspired several movies.
There is, however, a problem with the above works. As pointed out by
Ian F. W. Beckett in a 2001 history of the war, Remarque served with
the German army on the so-called Western Front (that is, northeastern
France) for little more than a month in 1917 before being seriously
wounded. His experience of the war was extremely limited, and Edmund
Blunden, a prominent Great War poet, is said to have denounced
Remarque’s book for its factual flaws.
Harrison’s novel, meanwhile, has been blasted as "rife with
inaccuracies" by Daniel G. Dancocks, the biographer of General Arthur
Currie, the commander of Canada’s Forces on the Western Front.
Hemingway is likewise troublesome. His novel highlights the Battle of
Caporetto, which occurred in northeastern Italy in 1917. As detailed by
biographer Kenneth S. Lynn, Hemingway did not show up at the Italian
Front until 1918; he served only as an ambulance driver; and he, too,
was knocked out of the war by a wound after just weeks.
As for the Britons Sassoon and Graves, literary critic Paul Fussell
has underlined jarring ambiguities in their accounts. Graves’s memoir
unexpectedly contains details that Fussell (a Second World War veteran)
regarded as ringing false for any former combatant. Sassoon’s trilogy,
for its part, oddly mixes fact and fiction to the point of causing
confusion.
In the end, however, the greatest accusation that can be brought
against the best-known books of the Great War is simply that they
are not representative. Non-Germans overlook the fact that Remarque
had a bestselling rival in his homeland, Ernst Junger, who wrote
approvingly about the war. In Britain, Charles Carrington brought out
a 1930 volume, A Subaltern’s War, that was specifically intended to
contradict the desolate tone that had infiltrated post-war writings.
While the literary aspect of the First World War is tangled, the
record of war historians is just as bad. David Stevenson — perhaps
being harsh — maintains in his 2004 volume Cataclysm that there
was little significant, independent research into the war until the
1960s. In particular, German historians refused even to consider the
possibility of some German responsibility for the war until Fritz
Fischer pushed the issue in that decade.
Indeed, this is where Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front
may have had an insidious influence: Historian Margaret Macmillan
has argued that the anguished novel tended to soften attitudes about
Germany’s wartime role among non-German readers, who thus became less
willing to press Germans on the matter.
Today, there reputedly exists among experts a consensus that places
much of the guilt for the war on Germany, but this appears to be
a fragile structure that is vulnerable to maverick opinions. In
1998, Niall Ferguson provided just that with his book The Pity of
War, which, among other controversies, blamed Britain instead. If
the British had allowed the French to be swiftly defeated in 1914,
Ferguson reasoned, the resulting political changes in Europe could
not have been worse than the millions of deaths that occurred in the
actual fighting. In 2004, John H. Morrow Jr. brutally contended that
the whole of European civilization in 1914 was rotten to the core with
arrogance, paranoia, racism, social tensions and way too many guns,
so the inevitable happened.
In addition to struggling with the origins of the war, historians have
a poor record with respect to the atrocities of the war. During the
fighting, the Allied powers issued so many false statements about
German war crimes that all such allegations came to be regarded
with scorn. In fact, some were genuine, and it can now be said with
assurance that German soldiers murdered up to 6,500 Belgian and French
civilians. Key treatments of this subject, by John Horne and Alan
Kramer (2001) and Larry Zuckerman (2004) should have existed long ago.
Similarly, only now is the famous rumour about the "Crucified Canadian"
— a captured Canadian soldier who reportedly was nailed to the side
of a building with bayonets through his body — getting adequate
attention. (It, too, could be true.) As to the horrible fate of the
Armenians at the hands of the Turks, Martin Gilbert’s 1994 recounting
of the war indicates that the most-important attempt by a non-Armenian
to preserve this memory in the first half of the 1900s involved not a
history at all but a novel, Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
(1933).
(Of course, none of this lets the Allies off the hook for their own
under-examined enormities. Gilbert brings up the British naval blockade
of Germany, which caused so much disruption in German society that
some 760,000 civilian deaths are associated with it. And Tim Cook has
documented a number of incidents in which Canadian soldiers killed
German prisoners.)
Ultimately, one senses irony in the fact that the First World War led
to the origin of the commemorative concept of the Unknown Soldier. In
some respects, the war itself is unknown.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
