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they remained unpopular if not incomprehensible. As Alex
Danchev suggested in concluding his scintillating analysis
of bunking and debunking in the 1960s, the overall effect
of the upsurge of renewed interest in the Great War was to
revive and perpetuate the impression made on the public by
the anti-war memoirs of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In
the play and the film of Oh What A Lovely War The gener-
ational ghosts were rattling their chains in the 1960s once
more through the incantatory names of the villages and
rivers and battlefields, the numbers of dead and the dates
now flashing a garish reminder on the screen . . . ( October
12 1917, Passchendaele British loss in three hours 13,000
men gain 100 yards ). The enormity of the event was the
ruling concern. 40 Are the generational ghosts still rattling
their chains, and does the compelling myth resurrected in
the 1960s still prevail? This will be the subject of my final
chapter.
4 Thinking the unthinkable
the First World War as history
Ten years ago, in an editorial introduction to a collection
of essays The First World War and British Military History
(1991), I suggested that The time is surely approaching, if
it has not already arrived, when the First World War can be
studied simply as history without polemic intent or apolo-
gies . This hope and expectation has not been realized;
indeed, the gulf between serious historical studies and pop-
ular misconceptions, encouraged by the media, may even
be widening. This is a somewhat depressing state of affairs
which historians must do their best to remedy. Public in-
terest in the First World War has recently become more in-
tense, due mainly to the development of a battlefield tourist
industry, so there is certainly an audience and readership
to be reached.
In this chapter I shall first explore a small sample of the
works which perpetuate myths, stereotypes and caricatures
about the British role on the Western Front, before con-
cluding with a survey of some of the positive developments
which provide reasons for guarded optimism about the fu-
ture understanding of this very important subject.
75
76 the unquiet western front
In recent years there have been mercifully few polemi-
cal works like John Laffin s British Butchers and Bunglers
of World War One (1988)1 or Denis Winter s Haig s Com-
mand (1991),2 which essentially reworked the old lions led
by donkeys theme of the 1960s with, at best, the substi-
tution of weasels for donkeys .3 Military publishers are
generally aware that more scholarly, though still critical,
research is now widely available.
On the literary front, Paul Fussell s The Great War and
Modern Memory (1975), although savagely reviewed by re-
spected military historians,4 still continues to exert power-
ful influence, not least in its post-modernist argument that
the Western Front can only be understood as a unique, un-
historical event taking place outside time. By popularizing
an approach to the war through literature and cultural arte-
facts Fussell has contributed greatly to what one scholar has
termed the emergence of Two Western Fronts .5
Two fictional bestsellers of the 1990s display the ten-
dency to dwell on the horrors of the Western Front. In
Birdsong (1993) Sebastian Faulks made full use of soldiers
diaries and letters to recreate in imaginative terms an ex-
treme view of the slaughter on the Somme on 1 July 1916
and of the worst nightmares of the tunnellers war which
was more applicable to the Ypres sector in 1917. Pat Barker s
trilogy, Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993) and
The Ghost Road (1995), essentially recreated for a modern
readership the story of the breakdowns of the war poets
Sassoon and Owen and their treatment by the psychologist
W. H. Rivers at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh. But
she introduced a cynical, lower class, bisexual officer, Billy
Prior, to provide a late twentieth-century interest, notably
in this character s loathing of the war and sordid sexual ex-
ploits which leave nothing to the imagination.6 The story s
culmination in The Ghost Road is reminiscent of All Quiet
on the Western Front in the deaths in combat of the main
thinking the unthinkable 77
characters, Wilfred Owen (in actuality) and Billy Prior and
his comrades in fiction. In a final harrowing scene, Lieu-
tenant Hallet, ex-public schoolboy, son of a regular offi-
cer and former believer in the justice of the war, is dying
in Rivers s hospital ward with half his face shot away. In
his death agony he cries out repeatedly shotvarfet , which
Rivers translates as It s not worth it . All the wounded
soldiers in the ward echo the cry and even Rivers feels im-
pelled to join in. This is the authentic whingeing note of
the 1990s transposed unconvincingly to 1918. As Stephen
Badsey has recently written:
It is doubtful if any British play, film or television
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