Popular history

Another visit to the Book Festival, this time to hear Max Arthur (of the Forgotten Voices series) and Richard Holmes (Tommy etc). Both were excellent speakers, but it was a shame there were so few people at Arthur’s session, whereas Holmes was a sell out. I suspect this was because the schools are now back and Arthur was on during the day while Holmes was on at 18.30.

Arthur was promoting his new book, Lost Voices of the Edwardians, and it sounds a useful book to read for anyone researching the Great War, as this is the generation that went to war. He said the book arose out of his previous book, The Last Post, which was a series of interviews with the then last surviving veterans, and he thought it would be useful to do a book on their background. Society has changed a lot in the intervening century and he hoped to provide some insights into the sort of people who happily volunteered in 1914. We tend, as a society, I think, to have a very rose-tinted view of the Edwardian period. It’s all Upstairs Downstairs (which incidentally I re-watched on DVD recently, and still loved) and croquet on the lawn, not the grinding poverty described by Arthur’s respondents in his book. Even television such as the 1900 House a few years ago, and its country house follow-up, or others such as the Victorian Kitchen, failed to capture the experience of most people. Grinding poverty doesn’t make attractive television I suppose.

We also tend to think that the Great War acted as this huge fault line in society, creating a barrier between the “golden” Edwardian period and the flapper-filled twenties. However, one of the points Arthur made, was that there wasn’t a huge difference in the experience of most people between say the late Victorian period and the nineteen twenties, and he gave a plug for a future book covering that latter decade. There were changes, certainly, but they were not perhaps as far-reaching as we generally believe they were.

Holmes, who admitted to wearing two hats, that or military historian and member of the armed forces, asserted that he had not wanted to write his current book, Dusty Warriors, about the experience of a battalion serving in Iraq a couple of years ago. It had come about as a result of the regiment of which he is Lt Col, having one of its battalions posted to Iraq. This was less interesting for me in a historical sense, although the politics of it were fascinating. Holmes kept having to steer a course between what he could say, as a member of the armed forces, and what he wanted to say as a historian, and there were some questions he refused to answer. What did come over, however, were the attitudes and behaviour of the soldiers, whose average age after all, was only twenty. They seemed very similar to those described in Tommy, which was interesting. What was even more interesting from the point of view of my current writing project was a brief discussion about preventing post traumatic stress disorder.

The audience were almost equally interesting, there being large numbers of bristling moustaches, and fearfully pukka accents, although in response to a question, Holmes did say that the army was much less class ridden than previously and commissioning from the ranks was fairly common.

All in all, two fascinating speakers well worth seeing.

If I should die: A Foreign Field, by Ben MacIntyre (2002)

This is another book I would have been unlikely to have read unless I had been given it. Once again, it is more narrative non-fiction that history per se. It tells the story of four soldiers, members of the original BEF who were trapped behind enemy lines in 1914 during the retreat from Mons. In microcosm it tells the tale of the many men in similar positions although none appear to have suffered quite such an extraordinary fate.

Like many, they were sheltered by French villagers, only in their case was their fate stranger. Many of these soldiers did not last long – the villagers, believing the threats of the occupying Germans (often with good reason) handed them over, or the soldiers themselves surrendered. But not our four. They survived until May 1916 when they were eventually betrayed and shot as spies. This isn’t giving away anything – it’s on the blurb on the cover of the book.

What I found with this book, even more than with the Janet Morgan I reviewed recently, is that it reads almost like a novel. While these soldiers were real people, they are treated like characters in a plot, and the narrative as if it were a tragedy complete with hero and fatal flaw. The only problem I have with this is that it is being presented in some objective sense as ‘true’ when in fact it’s nothing of the kind. It’s very readable, and very sad, but I’m not sure that it’s history.

I know that some of you who read this blog are either historians or have an interest in history, and I would welcome your views on this type of writing.

Soldiering on: Old Soldiers Never Die, Frank Richards (1933)

Most memoirs of the Great War were written by officers, and there are numerous volumes with titles along the lines of A Subaltern at Ypres. This is not to denigrate the experience of these men, but they formed a minority of those who participated. By comparison the number of memoirs written by the majority, the other ranks, is tiny. This book is one of them.

Richards served in the 2nd Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, and although a miner, had originally served with the battalion in India (hence his other book, Old Soldier Sahib) before spending some years as a reservist. Called up at the start of the war, he served with the battalion all the way through to the end, one of the very few to come through without a scratch.

The 2nd Royal Welch are well served in a literary sense, as two of its more famous members are Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, and it was also the subject of the detailed battalion history, The War the Infantry Knew written by Capt JC Dunn. I am currently struggling my way through this and have been for some months. It is fascinating being able to compare the different experiences of men who served with the same unit and their differing perceptions of what happened. Richards started off a private, and largely through choice we are told, ended the war that way. He says he had no desire for the responsibility NCO rank would have brought, but reports that others jumped from the rank of private sometimes straight to sergeant depending on how badly they were needed.

It’s a very chatty book, and reading it I got the impression that Richards recorded his experiences as if recounting them to a group of mates down the pub. He was wise to do so rather than attempt a more literary style, as that would have been forced and come over as less genuine, although I understand that Graves gave him some help with the editing.

An annotated version providing maps (which I always find helpful) and some more biographical detail, edited by John Krijnen and David Langley is also available(scroll down).

Similar, but written in a very different style is With a Machine Gun to Cambrai by George Coppard, a corporal in the Machine Gun Corps, which I read last year and thoroughly enjoyed.

I spy: Secrets of the Rue St Roche, Janet Morgan (2004)

I don’t know that this is necessarily a book that I would have bought, but I was given it as a present, and it proved an extremely interesting read. We don’t tend to think of spies and the Great War as going together, they are something that belong far more to WW2 in the popular imagination. And yet the British security services, MI5 and MI6 had their origins during the Great War. In this book, Janet Morgan documents an intelligence operation based in Paris during the latter part of the Great War, geared towards gaining advance knowledge of German troop movements, and thus of any potential planned advances.

The operation began with the serendipitous meeting of a middle aged Luxemburger with the head of the Paris operation in the spring of 1917. This lady lived near the massive rail junction in Luxemburg city, and the intelligence officer realised that if they could find a way for the information to get out of occupied Luxemburg, they would have vital intelligence that could help them win the war. It certainly stopped them losing it. After many false starts the operation finally got going in early 1918, just before the German March offensive.

It’s not so much a history, as I suppose, narrative non-fiction. It’s written as a story, which seems somehow less authoritative. Or perhaps I’m just used to my history in dull, dusty tomes. I enjoyed the insight into a largely forgotten area of the war, and it was well written, so I can’t complain on that front.

Last Gasp – Prisoners of the Kaiser, Richard van Emden (2000)

Van Emden seems to have spent the last few years rushing around interviewing the last Great War veterans before they died for a series of books on the subject. This is not to say these are not good books – they are certainly informative, and they reflect a general desire to secure first hand testimony before it is too late.

It’s an interesting book, useful as a starting point for further research. Rather than follow each contributor from start to finish, or describe the aftermath of particular battles, it is structured to cover chronological topics – capture (whenever, and wherever that may have been), behind enemy lines, surviving in a prison camp etc.
This is a topic that is not covered so extensively as others in all the forests of Great War related material, and it’s good to see such an accessible book on the subject.

The book was based on a Channel 4 documentary of the same name, which unfortunately I don’t recall seeing. As a result of the documentary there was a flutter of interest in the mainstream press, and this site republishes an article from the Guardian, which took on some of the issues in the documentary.

For further reading, there is some interesting discussion on the subject in this forum thread, discussing POW conditions, and this one, discussing British POW attire.