The First World War: A New History

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Change is easier to effect if you go with the cultural grain of the organisation rather than cutting across it” Pat Barker immersed herself in many World War One books and novels, as well as researching the real-life experiences of her relatives, to inform Regeneration. Her grandfather had suffered bayonet wounds while serving on the Western Front, something which greatly intrigued the author. Nearly a century has passed since the outbreak of World War I, yet as military historian Hew Strachan (winner of the2016 Pritzker Literature Award)argues in this brilliant and authoritative new book, the legacy of the “war to end all wars” is with us still. The First World War was a truly global conflict from the start, with many of the most decisive battles fought in or directly affecting the Balkans, Africa, and the Ottoman Empire. Even more than World War II, the First World War continues to shape the politics and international relations of our world, especially in hot spots like the Middle East and the Balkans. But we do this only by conveniently ignoring that it could easily have been France that fell prey to civil unrest, or Italy. Or even Britain for that matter. They did all revolt at some point after all — both their armies and their peoples. So it couldn’t have been democracy alone then?

No, I don’t think we can. I think that’s what makes it interesting, that there still isn’t much consensus about why it was fought, how it was fought, how it ended, and its consequences. All of those remain contested ground. The centenary of the last four years has shown there are still a wide variety of views about all those aspects, which for a historian is of course fantastic. You could spend a lifetime searching for the perfect history books on World War One. There is so much to choose from for military history fans, as well as those that like to explore the political and sociological aspects of the war. As might well be expected for a book titled The First World War, Keegan’s history spans from the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (the heir to the Hapsburg dynasty, not the Scottish post-punk revival band) to the Armistice of 1918.The First World War probes the mystery of how a civilization at the height of its achievement could have propelled itself into such a ruinous conflict and takes us behind the scenes of the negotiations among Europe's crowned heads (all of them related to one another by blood) and ministers, and their doomed efforts to defuse the crisis. Keegan reveals how, by an astonishing failure of diplomacy and communication, a bilateral dispute grew to engulf an entire continent. In another part of that leave, he goes to a beer garden, and there are all these old men talking about how to win the war. And he thinks to himself: these men don’t understand that the purpose of life is to sit in a beer garden and drink beer. They think it’s to win the war, but I’ve been to the war and I know that they are wrong. Battle of Jutland. Discussion around how the battle was actually a victory for the Allies even though their casualties and sunken ships were larger in number than Germany. Germany though had far more damaged ships and weren’t left with enough operational dreadnoughts after the battle and resorted to increased u-boat production. The overall sense Keegan’s narrative conveys is one of a Precarious Balance of Power discovered by powers who thought war all too easy, perhaps deluded by the easy victories they were accustomed to in their colonial possessions.

I suppose literature allows the juxtaposition of the softer side of human emotions with the terrible machine of war. Image: Rebecca Smart's The Return of the Soldier was published in 1918 while the war was still raging There are also moments where you sense Keegan's own biases behind the facts; he seems a little too willing to get excited about the heroic Brits and it made me cautious of accepting some of his conclusions (‘Jutland was not a German victory’). Lazy comments about the ‘naturally warlike’ Serbs also eroded confidence.Although Keegan does try to balance strategic explanations of the war with journals and other first-hand accounts, there is not nearly enough – for my tastes anyway – about the conditions soldiers served in, what they talked about, how they lived, what kind of social effects obtained in these countries during the war, how women and families coped while all the men in Europe were off shooting each other. It is quite a narrowly military approach. There’s a plot parallel here with your work. In All Quiet on the Western Front, a rousing patriotic speech by a teacher prompts a whole class of boys to join the army. In your own book, you feature a group of schoolboys who similarly sign up together. Could you talk us through In Memoriam? These tended to be reversed almost immediately. Any ‘turning points’ were just the winds of war, of morale - just as in The Iliad when war seems to turn at the urging of the gods giving morale to the men. What seemed decisive at the moment soon turned out to be just another exercise in stalemate. Nothing on the field seemed to decide how this stalemate could be broken. The really major shifts in fortune were usually due to events far from the battle-filed. The debate about the origins of the First World War started even before the war broke out, and has been raging more or less ever since. Maybe it’s the same arguments coming round again and again. But, nonetheless, we’re no closer to reaching any kind of closure on the reasons for the outbreak. Regeneration is a war book that’s not really set in the war. I seem to remember Pat Barker saying that writing from the perspective of this doctor, Dr Rivers, who had also never been to war felt like a very honest place to start from.

All Quiet on the Western Front has been adapted for the screen three times. The 1930s version won the Academy Award for Best Picture, but the 2022 Netflix production is the only one to be shot in German. Regeneration, Pat Barker So you’ve got to look at the whole army and see how lessons that were learnt in one place — the Western Front, say —were then applied in Palestine or Mesopotamia or vice versa. What she also did was to say that academics have done a lot of work explaining what was learnt, but no one’s really explained how the learning process operated. How did these lessons get transmitted and how did people learn new stuff? She gets into that.Daniel Mason in the Guardian described Regeneration as “the most subtle depiction of trauma of the war I have ever read.” This teaches us an important lesson: Modern wars are not about strategy, technology or leadership anymore. It is about how long a country manages to keep its people in illusion. The longer they can, the better their shot at winning. Another WW1 novel that should be better known is Alf by Bruno Vogel. This was a cool find for me, because my book has a very strong epistolary element—Gaunt and Ellwood are always writing heartfelt letters. After I wrote the draft, I found Alf, which is by a German soldier writing in the 1920s. It’s about two gentle teenage boys who are in love. They’ve acted on it, they’re in a relationship, and one of them goes to the front. They then write each other a series of letters to each other. It’s a very emotional book. The problem I have is that the only translation we have is about fifty years old, and it’s really bad—apologies to the translator, but I wish we had a modern translation. It was repressed by Hitler, so that’s one reason that no one knows about it. Bruno Vogel went on to live in South Africa, where he fought Apartheid for most of his life. He was a very cool guy. Let’s move onto your fourth choice, Learning to Fight (2017) by Aimee Fox, which is about military innovation.