Thomas, if you’re taking recommendations for your bibliography, my favorite book on the Great War is Paul Fussell’s “The Great War and Modern Memory.” It’s the definitive treatise on how World War I impacted British literary tradition. Here’s a description of the book that I found on the Internet.
“The Great War and Modern Memory is a book of literary criticism written by Paul Fussell and published in 1975 by Oxford University Press. It describes the literary responses by English participants in World War I to their experiences of combat, particularly in trench warfare. The perceived futility and insanity of this conduct became, for many gifted Englishmen of their generation, a metaphor for life. Fussell describes how the collective experience of the "Great War" was correlated with, and to some extent underlain by, an enduring shift in the aesthetic perceptions of individuals, from the tropes of Romanticism that had guided young adults before the war, to the harsher themes that came to be dominant during the war and after.”
One interesting speculation of Fussell’s concerns one of the most famous lines in all of poetry; the first line of TS Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” Eliot was one of the first modernists and, like his colleagues, he was heavily influenced by the horrors of the Great War.
Fussell believes that when Eliot began his poem with,
“April is the cruelist month,”
he was referring to the rainiest and wettest times of the year that tormented the soldiers hunkering down in their trenches.
In many respects “The Wasteland” which is the greatest poem to come out of Great Britain since Shakespeare (written by an American living in England) traces its roots to the Great War.
The only modern war to inspire as much literary work as the Great War is the American Civil War which produced brilliant works by Stephen Crane and Walt Whitman.
Also, if you haven’t seen it, the 1997 film “Regeneration” is a fictionalized account of the friendship of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen after they meet in Craiglockhart War Hospital, a psychiatric facility. It’s an excellent movie. See,
The British commanders were competent, sometimes more than competent, as evidenced by their success in the early months of the war stopping the Germans. Nonetheless, the later battles showed just how stuck their thinking was in the 19th century, in spite of all the effort to modernize the British army (which was better prepared than the French army in 1914). No one sane impugns the physical courage or patriotism of these commanders, just their higher mental ability to combine imagination with mental discipline in the face of truly new circumstances. Churchill, along with a few others, came closest to what was needed.
I have read ALL of Winston Churchill's books . . . I believe it was in The Gathering Storm that he said WW1 was worse than WW2 because all of Europe's college aged young men died senselessly in the trenches . . .
I do believe Churchill was right about the Dardanelles, the Turks only had 3 rounds of ammunition left . . . and if Britain and its allies would have helped the German Emperor of Russia (Tsar Nicholas was a Kraut) and defeated the Communist Jews, WW2 would have never happened.
Of course, Britain had been a communist country since the Peterloo Massacre . . . Karl Marx, who was descended from rabbinical families on both the maternal and paternal sides, spent most of his life under his Jewish father's assumed surname in London.
And . . . it was Lord Kitchener's ego that drove those young, promising British youths to their ignoble end with his outdated military tactics.
The sunken Lusitania has been off limits to divers for over 100 years - the UK Government doesn’t want them finding the war explosives that it illegally carried, which made it a legitimate target for the German U-Boats under the international rules of war in World War One.
The Lusitania was bait, the Brits knew there would be an outcry in the US over the unprovoked murder of US citizens; they were quite content to lose them and a thousand Brits in order to spur support for US entry into a literally crazy war. I have no brief for the German government in WW1, but it wasn’t marginally worse than those of US European allies . . . The Brits complained that the U-Boats were sinking their ships, while Britain was enforcing a Naval blockade on Germany. It was much easier to cut-off Germany from ships than Britain, the U-Boats were just trying to level the playing field.
And the fact is, if the US was truly neutral, they would have told the Brits they wouldn’t get anything from us, unless they ended their blockade of Germany.
This, I believe, is a fair assessment. And it tracks with C.S. Forester's judgement of the Great War generals. When one reads that Sir Douglas Haig argued against increasing the infantry battalion's allowance of machine guns from two to sixteen, remarking that it was "a much overrated weapon," the issue comes into focus.
I'll soon be posting an article about trench warfare as part of the Great War series, which enlarges on this subject.
Thomas, if you’re taking recommendations for your bibliography, my favorite book on the Great War is Paul Fussell’s “The Great War and Modern Memory.” It’s the definitive treatise on how World War I impacted British literary tradition. Here’s a description of the book that I found on the Internet.
“The Great War and Modern Memory is a book of literary criticism written by Paul Fussell and published in 1975 by Oxford University Press. It describes the literary responses by English participants in World War I to their experiences of combat, particularly in trench warfare. The perceived futility and insanity of this conduct became, for many gifted Englishmen of their generation, a metaphor for life. Fussell describes how the collective experience of the "Great War" was correlated with, and to some extent underlain by, an enduring shift in the aesthetic perceptions of individuals, from the tropes of Romanticism that had guided young adults before the war, to the harsher themes that came to be dominant during the war and after.”
One interesting speculation of Fussell’s concerns one of the most famous lines in all of poetry; the first line of TS Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” Eliot was one of the first modernists and, like his colleagues, he was heavily influenced by the horrors of the Great War.
Fussell believes that when Eliot began his poem with,
“April is the cruelist month,”
he was referring to the rainiest and wettest times of the year that tormented the soldiers hunkering down in their trenches.
In many respects “The Wasteland” which is the greatest poem to come out of Great Britain since Shakespeare (written by an American living in England) traces its roots to the Great War.
The only modern war to inspire as much literary work as the Great War is the American Civil War which produced brilliant works by Stephen Crane and Walt Whitman.
That's a good recommendation.
Also, if you haven’t seen it, the 1997 film “Regeneration” is a fictionalized account of the friendship of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen after they meet in Craiglockhart War Hospital, a psychiatric facility. It’s an excellent movie. See,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_(1997_film)
A haunting poem about trench warfare during the Great War. “Break of Day in the Trenches” by Isaac Rosenberg.
-----
The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe—
Just a little white with the dust.
After reading Keegan’s WWI book, I’m skeptical of the “lions lead by donkeys” narrative.
The British commanders were competent, sometimes more than competent, as evidenced by their success in the early months of the war stopping the Germans. Nonetheless, the later battles showed just how stuck their thinking was in the 19th century, in spite of all the effort to modernize the British army (which was better prepared than the French army in 1914). No one sane impugns the physical courage or patriotism of these commanders, just their higher mental ability to combine imagination with mental discipline in the face of truly new circumstances. Churchill, along with a few others, came closest to what was needed.
I have read ALL of Winston Churchill's books . . . I believe it was in The Gathering Storm that he said WW1 was worse than WW2 because all of Europe's college aged young men died senselessly in the trenches . . .
I do believe Churchill was right about the Dardanelles, the Turks only had 3 rounds of ammunition left . . . and if Britain and its allies would have helped the German Emperor of Russia (Tsar Nicholas was a Kraut) and defeated the Communist Jews, WW2 would have never happened.
Of course, Britain had been a communist country since the Peterloo Massacre . . . Karl Marx, who was descended from rabbinical families on both the maternal and paternal sides, spent most of his life under his Jewish father's assumed surname in London.
And . . . it was Lord Kitchener's ego that drove those young, promising British youths to their ignoble end with his outdated military tactics.
The sunken Lusitania has been off limits to divers for over 100 years - the UK Government doesn’t want them finding the war explosives that it illegally carried, which made it a legitimate target for the German U-Boats under the international rules of war in World War One.
The Lusitania was bait, the Brits knew there would be an outcry in the US over the unprovoked murder of US citizens; they were quite content to lose them and a thousand Brits in order to spur support for US entry into a literally crazy war. I have no brief for the German government in WW1, but it wasn’t marginally worse than those of US European allies . . . The Brits complained that the U-Boats were sinking their ships, while Britain was enforcing a Naval blockade on Germany. It was much easier to cut-off Germany from ships than Britain, the U-Boats were just trying to level the playing field.
And the fact is, if the US was truly neutral, they would have told the Brits they wouldn’t get anything from us, unless they ended their blockade of Germany.
This, I believe, is a fair assessment. And it tracks with C.S. Forester's judgement of the Great War generals. When one reads that Sir Douglas Haig argued against increasing the infantry battalion's allowance of machine guns from two to sixteen, remarking that it was "a much overrated weapon," the issue comes into focus.
I'll soon be posting an article about trench warfare as part of the Great War series, which enlarges on this subject.