We are disturbed [...] that David Cameron plans to spend £55m on a “truly national commemoration” to mark this anniversary. Mr Cameron quite inappropriately compared these events to the “diamond jubilee celebrations” and stated that their aim will be to stress our “national spirit”. That they will be run at least in part by former generals and ex-defence secretaries reveals just how misconceived these plans are.
Instead we believe it is important to remember that this was a war that was driven by big powers’ competition for influence around the globe, and caused a degree of suffering all too clear in the statistical record of 16 million people dead and 20 million wounded.
In 2014, we and others across the world will be organising cultural, political and educational activities to mark the courage of many involved in the war but also to remember the almost unimaginable devastation caused. In a time of international tension, we call on all those who agree with us to join us – by adding their names to ours at ww1.stopwar.org.uk – to ensure that this anniversary is used to promote peace and international co-operation.

Today historian Gary Sheffield replies with guns blazing, strongly criticising ‘the popular view of the war as a futile one, a belief that is sharply at odds with most modern scholarship, and with how it was perceived at the time.’ He points out:

Britain went to war with Germany in August 1914 for similar reasons to those which the country fought Hitler’s Germany in the second world war: to prevent an authoritarian, militarist, expansionist enemy achieving hegemony in Europe and thus imperilling British security. Most historians argue that Germany and Austria-Hungary were primarily responsible for initiating the war (recent attempts to blame Russia are not wholly convincing). Whoever started it, the fact is that in 1914-18, Germany waged a war of aggression that conquered large tracts of its neighbours’ territory. As has often been pointed out, there were distinct continuities between the policy and strategy of imperial Germany and its Nazi successor.

This seems to me completely true. The one thing that bothers me about his article is the subheading:

Planning next year’s first world war centenary, we shouldn’t rely on Wilfred Owen’s version of events

This seems to me unfortunate, not only because Owen was a truth-teller about the War, so that we can rely on his account, at least of the things he saw. Also it implies that he did not agree that the war was fought in a righteous cause, and that victory was important. His brave actions in the last month of his life hardly support this hypothesis.
More, though, it sets up a literature versus history opposition that is unproductive. In the (educated) popular mind, the literature of the First World War gets reduced to a few poems. When I tell people that I study that literature, many assume that I am looking at poems. When I mention a few prose writers, they often look blank and change the subject.
What I would like to see at the centenary is a recognition that the literature of the War extends beyond Owen, Sassoon and futility. (The BBC made a good start with its production of Parade’s End, even if then it set the campaign back a bit with Birdsong and The Village.)
For another response to the celebrities’ letter, see this post on Jessica Meyer’s blog.
And while I’m at it, I’ll mention a review in the current Times Literary Supplement of a novel by Thomas Kenneally called The Daughters of Mars. The novel is about nurses in France, and sounds as solidly made as the same author’s Schindler’s Ark and The Playmaker. Since I’ve not read it I don’t know if Peter McDonald’s generally negative verdict is appropriate. What I do know, however, is that in the last sentence of his review McDonald sums up what is wrong with so much modern fiction that takes the Great War as its theme:

Thomas Keneally’s industrious imagining of pain and waste plays not to an argument, but to a consensus.

In other words, it does not go beyond what we already know, or think we know, about the War. The differences of opinion between Sheffield and the letter-writers show that there is more to our current relation to the War’s history than an unexamined consensus. When are we going to get some works of imaginative literature that really tackle this?

We have nothing like the French Bulletin des Armies de la Republique, which issues serious information, explains matters of service and pay to its readers, and gives them opinions, for example, about the geological specimens they have picked up in digging trenches. Several smaller French journals published just behind the lines are quite as much in earnest. When the French journal unbends it flies to the opposite pole, and is more Rabelaisian than we can indicate here. And of course in writing, as in military action, the French have a dramatic sense of which we are nearly destitute. A British officer has been quoted in the Times as saying of a French charge which he witnessed: “My God, how wonderful I And don’t they know it too !” French gestes, and French gestures— they are alike beyond us. The rapier-play of French wit, cold yet delicate and unerring, is not for our journals, which subsist on more riotous fun. The British journals keep an even middle course, light-hearted, and innocent alike of Voltaire= exercises in wit and Rabelaisian sallies. Their seriousness when it appears is not launched at the enemy, and is not employed in consciously bracing up the readers to a worthy service of their country, but is bestowed upon the British dead in grateful and most affectionate memory. The ironic titles of some British journals at the front tell their own tale—the Strafe, the Whizz-Bang, the Gasper, the Holy Buys’ Chronicle, the Dead Horse Gazette. We take these names at random from an article in the Nation. The Somme Times parodies the too familiar journalistic vicissitudes by telling us that with it are ” incorporated ” the Wiper’s Times, the “New Church” Times, and the Kennel Times. It has a serial story by ” Ruby N. Dares,” a ” Chronicle of Fashions ” by ” Violet,” and some uproarious bosh advertisements, among which not the least to our lilting is the ” famous cure for optimism.” We are also grateful to the correspondent who extols the new cross-breed of carrier birds known as the ” Parrotidgin.” It is a cross between a parrot and a pigeon and delivers its messages by word of mouth.

Examination papers and a column called ” Things we should like to Know ” appear fairly regularly in the journalism of sailors and soldiers. Here is a characteristic question from a sailors’ paper called the Exmouth Express : ” A ship containing members of the V.A.D. having arrived in harbour describe (a) what methods you would employ to become acquainted with such members, and (b) how you would ensure that only a limited number of Ward Room Officers secured this acquaintance, such officers being neither senior nor junior to yourself.” That N.C.O. at the front was a no less humorous instructor, though all unconsciously, who, as described in one of the letters of the late Captain C. Philipp (Smith, Elder, and Co.), imparted patriotic history to some privates in the following manner :— ” ‘Ave you ever ‘eard tell o’ the Black Prince i No f—Well, you ignorant blighters. ‘E was a cove what rode about in armour, ‘eavy cavalry ‘e was, and ‘e licked the French. Well, a pal o”is was St. George what as ‘is birthday to-morrow : ‘e’s the cove as I want to tell you about. Never ‘eard tell of ‘im? Why, look at the back of ‘arf a quid. . . Well, this ‘ere St. George is the patron saint of cavalry and don’t yer forget it. What’s that? What is a patron saint ? Now none of your back answers ‘ere, my lad, or you and me will fall out. Carry on!”

So we get Arnold Bennett sailing above the others until his death in the mid-thirties, when Lawrence, who had died in 1930, overtakes him as a subject for comment. Lawrence peaks round about the time of the  Lady Chatterley trial in the sixties, but goes in decline after some feminists in the seventies began to strongly question his sexual politics. Joyce, from a slowish start, creeps up to be the modernist novelist, firmly ensconced on all university reading-lists.

Galsworthy, meanwhile, gets his modicum of fame, which dwindles continually after his death in 1934. Which shows, I think, the limitations of Ngrams as charters of reputations. They track mentions in books, not in journalism or other media. At the end of the sixties, all England was talking about the BBC adaptation of the Forsyte Saga, the TV event of its time.  The tie-in reissues became very healthy sellers, and there was a great deal of press coverage – though clearly this did not translate into references in printed books.

So one needs to take Ngrams with a pinch of salt as indexes of levels of interest. Books mentioning writers tend to be aimed at a small, professionally-interested audience, and to favour particular types of writer, such as James Joyce, the academics’ favourite.

It would be interesting to see a similar graph of actual book sales for these writers, and to compare it with the Ngram. My bet is that in terms of sales Lawrence would go to the top in the sixties, and would probably stay there.

As a distinguished intellectual with upper-class connections, Russell was punished a good deal less harshly than protestors without his status (Laing was an insurance clerk before the War.) Even when he did eventually go to prison, Russell was treated with more respect than other objectors, and was able to work on the introduction to a book on logic while in jail.

We all know that the ceasefire came into operation at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Which would be 11 a.m. French time.

What time was this in Germany?  There’s a suggestion that in Germany the War would not have stopped until 12 noon local time.

Does anyone know if this is correct?

Those fellows in the Great War – some of them, anyhow – had found some queer gladness in suffering lice and mud and shell-fire for the sake of England, or some ideal inexplicable to themselves.

The parts of the book that would have most appealed to readers in 1923 as topical are those dealing with the newspaper magnate Buckland, who is clearly based on the propagandist and fraudster Horatio Bottomley. (Julian’s father works for Buckland, and Julian only gradually comes to realise how much it has cost his father to subjugate himself to the monster, in order to keep the family in comfort and pay for the Oxford Education that his son has thrown away.)
Buckland’s paper is called The Week, and is closely based on Bottomley’s John Bull. During the War it had been ‘The Soldier’s Friend’; it supports the little man against the Establishment, whips up hatred of foreigners, and spreads scandal. Gibbs makes it clear that the Week is the worst form of journalism because it follows its readers’ prejudices; Buckland tells Julian:

I’ve been devoting a good deal of space lately to spiritualism [….] It’s most important as a means of circulation.

(A reminder of The Road to Endor, which suggests that the gullible do more of the deceiving than the deceiver does. Gibbs even makes Buckland say: ‘Also, I don’t mind telling you that I believe in fairies’ – a dig surely at silly old Arthur Conan Doyle, whose simple faith in the Cottingley fairies had done much for sales of the Strand.)
Bottomley’s Victory Bonds swindle had landed him in prison in 1921, and Buckland’s similar scheme has similar results. As topical satire, the character would have excited eager recognition among Gibbs’s 1923 readers. And yet… As a character in a novel, Buckland is flat. He is so obviously a villain, and has no inner life. We are never encouraged to wonder what made him the man he is. A greater novelist would be deeply interested in such a man (think Trollope’s swindlers, or Merdle in Little Dorrit.) Gibbs seems more interested in telling us what he thinks of him.
But then, few of the characters in this novel have much inner life. The nice people behave nicely; some of them have wrong ideas, but they learn the error of their ways and then prosper. The bad characters are signalled as such from the start, and continue to behave pretty badly. Gibbs does not do much in the way of ambiguity.
Julian, like all of Gibbs’s central characters (or at least those of the half-dozen novels that I have read) is essentially passive. Things happen around him and he observes. Even his love affair is started and ended by the older woman, not by himself. The novel’s denouement – the exposure and conviction of Buckland is something that he plays no part in causing; he simply watches aghast as the facts come out. (The novel was adapted into the film High Steppers (1925) and the plot summary of this indicates that the movie-makers made Julian a lot more proactive: “Learning that Buckland is actually an embezzler, Julian gets a job as a reporter on a muckraking publication and sets out to expose Buckland.”)
Finally, Gibbs seems a lot more interested in opinions than in psychology.
Gibbs’s characters are very likely to start editorialising. Sometimes this is tedious, but it can be fun, as in this list of things that middle-class England was afraid of in the 1920s:

They were fairly wallowing in self-pity, and quaking with fear for the future. They were afraid of every damn thing – afraid of trade unions, labour unrest, the income tax, American competition, France, Germany, Russia, H.G. Wells, the Rising Tide of Colour in the Mohammedan world, Bolshevism, Dean Inge, and above all, and always, afraid of the younger generation.

So if you judge Gibbs by the standards of ‘good novelists’ (Conrad, say, or Forster) you have to pronounce his work thin. What Gibbs lacks is negative capability, the ability to lose himself in a character or situation.
Having said which, he is part of an important (but neglected) strand of English fiction – the tradition of topical, scandal-breaking journalistic novel-writing. Charles Reade’s Put Yourself in His Place is very much the Victorian equivalent of Gibbs’s novels about industrial relations (like his General Strike novel, Young Anarchy, which has much in common with Heirs Apparent). He is also, as I said at the start, very readable. The characters may be a bit pasteboard and the opinions may sometimes crowd out the action, but this was a novel where I kept on turning the pages because I wanted to find out what would happen.

Oh the road to En-dor is the oldest road
And the craziest road of all!
Straight it runs to the Witch’s abode,
As it did in the days of Saul,
And nothing has changed of the sorrow in store
For such as go down on the road to En-dor!

This book was a best-seller in the twenties. The copy I bought in Stratford is a Weekend Library edition of 1930. It lists sixteen reprintings in the decade since the book appeared at the end of 1919. The book remained in print until the 1950s, when there was a Pan paperback.

Here’s the Times review from December 1919. I think the last paragraph sums up the book pretty well. Click on the small image for a readable version.

The Google Ngram Viewer is ‘a phrase-usage graphing tool.’ Based on scans of over 5.2 million books, it charts the yearly appearance of  any n-grams (letter combinations) that you care to enter.

I’ve plotted incidences of the phrase ‘Great War’ against appearances of the phrase ‘First World War’ over the twentieth century. The result is much what I expected – though it’s interesting to see the dramatic rise of ‘First World War’ after 1935, as fears of a second increased. (click on the graph to see it enlarged).

Since this website possibly has a family audience, I shall not post the graphs I made to track the usage of very rude words over the century. But try it for yourself. It’s fun.

Update, half an hour later:

It’s just occurred to me that one can possibly use this tool to track the reputation of writers. This graph suggests quite a bit about how the  popularity of   ‘Edith Sitwell’ and ‘Siegfried Sassoon’ fluctuated over the twentieth century:

This one tracks the relative fortunes of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen:

And this shows the inexorable triumph of Virginia Woolf over Arnold Bennett:

But now I really ought to stop doing this, and get on with something more useful.

“A man and maiden met a month ago;
She said there’s one thing I should like to know;
Why aren’t you in khaki or navy blue;
And fighting for your country like other men do?
The man looked up and slowly shook his head
Dear madam, do you know what you have said?;
For I gladly took my chance
Now my right arm’s in France;
I’m one of England’s Broken Dolls.”

Trying to find the source for this, I did some googling, and found on the National Archive website a reference to a collection of family photos, property of a Mrs Aspin, in the Manchester Record Office. Some of these relate to her father, W. M. Harris, who was killed in the War. A note is appended:

The donor’s father often sang in public for charity parties etc. Often he would borrow a kilt and do Harry Lauder songs. He also wrote some verses and this is a satire he wrote on a well-known song of the time. The original began: “You called me baby doll a year ago; And told me I was nice to know ……”; Using the same tune the donor’s father wrote:

“A lady spoke to me the other day;
She told me I was looking bright and gay;
Why ar’nt you in Karki or Navy Blue;
Fighting for your country as other men do.
I turned around and answered with a smile;
My dear young lady you don’t understand;
I once took my chance.
My right arm’s in France;
I’m one of England’s broken dolls.”

Both sets of words roughly fit the tune of the Al Jolson 1916 hit:

You called me baby doll a year ago
You told me I was very nice to know
I soon learnt what love was – I thought I knew
But all I’ve learnt has only taught me how to love you
You made me think you loved me in return
Don’t tell me you were fooling after all
For if you turn away you’ll be sorry some day
You left behind a broken doll.

Which indicates that this is a parody, rather than, as I originally assumed from Bourke’s reference, a popular song in its own right. (In her book, the footnote refers us to various mentions of the song in the IWM correspondence archives, rather than to any printed source). Was it indeed composed by W.M. Harris, or was it just part of his repertoire, and assumed by his family to be his own?

Does anyone else know anything about this song? I’m interested by the way that the wartime parody adapts one of the most popular of wartime anecdotes, about the ‘white feather’ woman who asks a man why he isn’t in France, only to be shown up when he reveals that he has already lost a limb, or won the V.C., or given some other proof of manhood.

More googling produces a different version, from Scotland. An internet poster writes:

The best man at my wedding, an ex-Seaforth Highlander, used to sing two or three versions of this song. The fragments I can recall are as follows;

A fellah came up to me a year ago,
He said ‘There’s something I would like to know.
Why aren’t you in khaki or Air Force blue,
Fighting for your country like the other fellahs do?’
I, of course, immediately replied,
‘I’d like to have the chance,
but my left leg’s left in France,
I’m one of Scotland’s broken dolls.

He then (with an apology) offers another, very alternative version:

Her glass eye, her false teeth she laid on the chair,
When she took her wig off, baby, she wasn’t there.
She then unscrewed her arm and wooden leg,
And what was left of her hopped into bed,
And when I awoke, I found it was no joke,
I was married to a broken doll.

When I posted details of that 1918 list of Great War books, someone asked me for my own list of 100 best.
Well, I’m thinking about it, but one definite candidate will be a book I’ve been reading recently, The Making of the Great War by Ian F.W. Beckett.
This doesn’t aim to be a comprehensive history of the War, but instead chooses twelve key moments that defined the War, and were crucial either to its progress or to the way it shaped the twentieth century, and presents an illuminating essay on each of them.
These key moments are not always what you would expect. At the start of the War he chooses, not the Battle of the Marne, but the flooding of the Yser in October 1914 as the key moment that made the trench stalemate on the Western Front inevitable. This essay puts into focus King Albert of the Belgians and the decisions he made. He was, as Beckett says. ‘a prickly ally of the British and French’ and ‘technically, he was not an ally at all, for, throughout the war, Albert maintained the fiction that Belgium remained a neutral country defending its territory as an “associated” rather than an allied power.’ The description of the difficult choices that Albert had to make contained much that I did not know.
The next two essays head eastward, looking at Turkey’s entry into the War and the Australian contribution at Gallipoli, which Beckett presents as a crucial stage in Australian nation-building, and a key ingredient in the Australian myth. (He has some sharp words about how this myth was presented in the Mel Gibson movie.)
Myth is important, too, in the essay on ‘The Power of Image’, which considers how the documentary The Battle of the Somme shaped perceptions of the War and set precedents for later conflicts.
There are also essays on the rise to power of Lloyd George, on air-raids and on submarine warfare. I learned something from all of these, and from the piece on the Balfour Declaration, which explains Middle Eastern complexities with welcome clarity.
The last essay is an interesting one, since he diverges from what seems to be the prevailing view among British military historians – that Allied generalship won the war by skilful strategy during the last hundred days. Ian Beckett argues instead that the German generals lost the war by the mistakes they made after the March offensive. I’m not entirely convinced – since, after all, they only lost because the Allies were able to take advantage of these errors. Still, it’s a bracing argument, as are those of all the essays.
If the centenary gives us more books of this quality, we shall be very lucky.