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On the morning of April 25, 1915, Australian and New Zealand troops went ashore at Gallipoli, and in the process laid the foundations for their nations’ identities. On Anzac Day two weeks ago, as in every year since the first world war, congregations in the Antipodes assembled to remember them. I was not there, but in New Haven, Connecticut. On my way to a conference at Yale I passed the war memorial on College Green. A service was in progress and kilted standard bearers were mustered as though this were Remembrance Sunday. My first notion, that these were the descendants of Diggers and Kiwis, now resident in the United States, seemed improbable; after all, the Gallipoli landings antedated America’s entry to the war by two years, and the Stars and Stripes was fluttering over the names of battles fought in 1917-18, ironically enough in defence of France. I entertained another speculation. America is debating whether it should publish pictures of coffins brought back from Iraq — or whether the Pentagon will allow them to be shown. Perhaps this was a service to commemorate the dead of the current war?

Then the Irish tricolour, hoisted beneath the flag of the United States, revealed the truth. These worshippers were remembering the dead of the Dublin rising of Easter 1916. Rebels ready to make common cause with Germany, they had threatened the very effort which those Americans commemorated on the war memorial had enlisted to serve. In a bizarre illustration of how memory and history can conflict, the New Haven congregation emphasised how nations have used the legacy of the first world war in idiosyncratic and often incompatible ways. Britain has been no exception.

Nowhere in the world today (except possibly in Serbia) is the war as immediate as it is here. But the public’s grip on its events remains limited. Its gaze is focused on a narrow strip of land, inevitably muddy, deeply excavated, and for the most part unlovely, running from the Belgian coast to the river Somme. Here on the western front 750,000 British and imperial servicemen died, almost three times more than total British military losses in all theatres in the second world war. This, therefore, is a matter of the heart.

Good military historian that he is, Richard Holmes hears what reason tells him. He knows that Britain’s perspective on the war is lopsided. He knows even more what the scholarship of other historians — several of them his former colleagues at Sandhurst — has argued; that the British army went through a “learning curve” as it adapted its tactics to the demands of industrialised mass warfare; that Haig may not have been a genius, but that he was no fool either; and that capital court martials were part and parcel of the military discipline of the day. However, this book, building a picture of the western front through the words of those who served in it, works because it is ruled not by Holmes’s head, but — as he himself honestly admits — by his heart.

An admirer of the British army, in whose Territorial ranks he himself has served with such distinction, Holmes is in love with his subject. The romance comes out in the prose, in his eye for uniform and equipment, and in what could have proved his undoing — his fondness for good stories. Some of the best but also most improbable were written after the event, by such masters of the genre as Robert Graves and Frank Crozier. Both are suspected to have blurred fact with fiction, but Holmes cannot resist using them.

This is perverse because the great merit of the book is its use not of memoirs but of excellent, fresh archival material, much of it from the Imperial War Museum and the Liddle archives in Leeds, and penned in the immediate aftermath of the events it describes. Holmes’s passion is not blind. He does not eschew the horrors of shrapnel wounds, of bereavement, or the possible injustices of military punishment. His portrayal is winning precisely because it is written with an affection that is born of profound familiarity. Its purpose is cultural and social rather than operational or tactical, giving as good a description as will be found anywhere of how the army was recruited, organised, administered and motivated.

The dichotomy between head and heart assails the reviewer as well as the author. The head says that this is a bigger book than it need be, and that, while the pace does not flag, there are repetitions. It is also less sure-footed in its opening chapter than it ought to be. But then the heart weighs in. Holmes quotes from a letter written by Captain W L Weetman during the battle of Loos. “Young Goze was the first down, a nasty one I’m afraid. Then Strachan disappeared along the trench and I fear was killed.” Strachan was posted missing, presumed dead. He was this reviewer’s great uncle.

OFFICER CLASS

One of many first-world-war myths exploded by Holmes concerns the bravery (or lack of it) of Britain’s most senior officers. In fact, says Holmes, some 58 general officers were killed in the war, many near the front line. Ten generals held the Victoria Cross, and 126 the DSO. As Holmes asserts, “Much can be said about the generals of the first world war, but they were certainly not physical cowards.”

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READ ON...

books:
Forgotten Voices of the Great War
by Max Arthur
(Ebury £7.99)

Moving personal records websites:
www.worldwar1.com
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