The Last Great War

"The first two books we discussed were both trying to tell the global history of the war. This book is doing something different. Adrian Gregory is one of the best historians of the British Home Front that we have. What he’s been able to do is to pull together the social history of the First World War—with a very good understanding of the dynamics of the war itself as well—and put it all into a package. This book is, I think, the best single volume book on the British Home Front in the First World War. The way that the book pulls together social history and cultural history, in particular, is the most distinctive thing about it. So when he’s talking, for instance, about what motivated people to go to war, he’s actually asking a question that French historians have asked themselves a lot, but no one in Britain had really bothered to ask until he did. His explanation is partly the political factors we were talking about earlier, but it’s also about cultural determinants, such as the role of religion, for example. He’s able to look a bit sideways at some of these questions and think of them in non-traditional ways, which I think adds a lot of richness to the story. There were people who literally thought that God was on Britain’s side, and that by fighting for Britain, they were doing God’s work. It was an extreme view, but there were people who thought that. There were others, for instance, who when the churchmen stood up on a Sunday and gave their sermons and said we should fight the Hun because he represents everything that is ungodly believed that too. A lot of the tropes that were used were suggesting—maybe sometimes very subtly—that this was a sacrifice not only for Britain but also to God. It’s striking that all the memorials of the First World War have religious overtones. There’s a cross in every Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery, for instance. There’s the stone of sacrifice, which looks just like an altar. A lot of modern historians, because of who we are and the relatively secular society that most of us have been brought up in, tend to underestimate how much religion was part of the warp and weft of everyday life 100 years ago. It must, therefore, have played a much greater role in explaining how people acted. The whole argument is essentially, ‘Were people tricked into going to war?’ And his argument is, ‘No, they were not.’ On the other hand, there wasn’t mass enthusiasm. People did cheer in the streets, that definitely happened. But most people went off to war because they felt they had to, rather than because they actively wanted to. They think they’re fighting for home and country or to protect their wives and so on. There are some people who are. There’s Rupert Brooke, ‘To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, / Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary’: we’ve been living in this murky, unsure world we don’t really understand—in the Edwardian period there was a lot of social conflict—and suddenly the war makes everything simple and clear. We know who’s on our side. We know who we’re against and we know what to do. We’ve got a job to do that doesn’t involve us having to find a job. So there’s some of that. “We’ve been living in this murky, unsure world we don’t really understand, and suddenly the war makes everything simple and clear. We know who’s on our side. We know who we’re against and we know what to do.” But I don’t think you should confuse lack of keenness with lack of willingness. They’re willing to go. They’re willing to go just as soon as they’ve sorted out their home affairs and made sure that their business is going to be looked after and that the wife and kids are going to be all right. They make sure all that is done and then they join up. The rush to the colours doesn’t happen on the first day of war, which is when you’d expect it to if everyone was mad keen to go off and fight. It happens after about a month. World War II looks like a straightforward crusade against the Nazis. World War I can look futile and hard to explain in comparison. Now, of course, that’s not quite true in either case. The Second World War wasn’t fought to save the Jews; people didn’t know what would happen to the Jews in 1939. The nature of the Second World War changed a lot as it went on. But, with hindsight, it looks very black and white. With the First World War it’s just not that straightforward. There’s another side to this as well, which he touches on, which is that the Second World War is seen as being a progressive war, in Britain anyway. What are the results of the Second World War? In 1945 you get peace, you get the Attlee government, you get the National Health Service. There’s the nationalisation of the industries and the birth of the welfare state. From very early on, people like George Orwell , and others, like William Beveridge, were saying, ‘Look. We can’t repeat the mistakes of the First World War. We have to make a better world at the end of this one.’ And so there is this social mission, if you like, that runs through World War II, at least in the popular perception. Whereas with the First World War the dominant feeling seemed to be, ‘When we finish this war, let’s get back to how things were. Life was good before. How do we get back there?’ And of course they fail to get back there. That’s one of the problems that helps cause the Second World War. So, if you like, the Second World War is in tune with history. It’s going with the march of progress whereas the First World War looks reactionary. It’s not true; a lot of this is hindsight."