(Click the cover to find this book on Amazon)
Faithful followers of this blog will recall my account on 16 December 2015 of Professor David Reynolds’s public lecture ‘Making Peace with the Great War: Centenary Reflections’. I have now read the book behind the lecture (see above) and have no hesitation in saying that if you read only one of the many superb publications about the First World War that are marking its centenary, this should be it.
You will be drawn into the repercussions of the war for all the empires and ethnic groupings of Europe, for a Britain desperate to avoid revolution, for a divided Ireland (repercussions that bedevilled it from the Easter Rising and the Somme to the Good Friday Agreement), for the British Empire (which ‘as a result of the war […] actually grew to its largest extent’), for an America whose racism was ‘masked […] on the international stage [by] its lack of a colonial empire’ and whose ‘Great War’ was actually its Civil War, for the Middle East, for the balance of power in Africa, for China and Japan down to the present day. You will discover a welter of extraordinary facts, for instance that the Germans mounted a successful propaganda campaign in the 1920s to deny the ‘war guilt’ attached to them by the Treaty of Versailles and disprove that they had ever wanted the War, that by the 1930s Britain had ‘the biggest and most committed peace movement in the world’, that during the Second World War disbelief from the 1920s about the atrocities committed by the Germans during the invasion of Belgium in 1914 led people at first to regard stories about Nazi concentration and extermination camps as ‘lies’. And you will be riveted by Reynolds’s storytelling. Most gripping of all is the fact that Reynolds’s book works like the ‘reverse perspective’ on icons, where all the lines actually meet in the spectator: the long historical lines and controversies that he traces intersect in us, the present.
Reynolds strikes me as a pretty rare sort of historian, in that he is emotional, empathetic, artistic by nature (he is the best actor of the television historians and does his own voice impersonations). I have the impression that he has to struggle sometimes to bring these responses under the more cerebral control of being an historian — the more conceptual control, shall we say, of his academic discipline.
Thus in The Long Shadow his treatment of the sacralisation of commemoration and remembrance seems conflicted. ‘The meaning of Britain’s great War was gradually whittled down to one sacred day, the First of July 1916.’ The focus on the Pals battalions is described as ‘almost consecration’; the testimony of British veterans is said to be laid out ‘almost reverentially’; on the Memorials to the Missing at Ypres and Thiepval the dead are ‘religiously named for posterity’. You cannot help feeling that this theological vocabulary is used ambivalently, ironically, and you don’t know how to take it. Does the historian in Reynolds feel that such sacralisation is inappropriate, overdone, sentimental, unhistorical? If so, I believe he should have discussed the problem with his readers.
Reynolds’s attitude to the war poets, particularly Wilfred Owen, is even more conflicted. He is one of a large number of British historians who believe, in Adrian Gregory’s words, that ‘in schools the First World War is taught more as tragic poetry than as history’, that only the British are obsessed with the ‘testimony’ of their war poets, and that as a nation we have to ‘escape from Poets’ Corner’ and ‘understand the Great War as history’. This is a theme reprised throughout Reynold’s book. Yet from his responses to Sassoon’s, Gurney’s and Rosenberg’s verse he is clearly moved by the war poets himself, and he gives as good a description of Owen’s existential situation as I have read anywhere when he says that Owen was ‘the self-sacrificial victim of a war whose immoral nature he abhorred but whose moral demands he could not escape’. Yet Owen and the ‘canon’ of war poets were only ‘sanctified’ in the 1960s anthologies that were ‘bought in large quantities by schools and then recycled year after year by teachers to justify the original investment’…
For clarity of argument, I will number my responses to this:
(1) The only thing historical about a poem is the date of its composition. This implies that the realia named in it are historically accurate, but so what? Being a synchronic artefact intended for experience now, a poem qua poem cannot have a diachronic or trustworthy historical value. A poem can therefore tell us no more about the history of the First World War than The Cherry Orchard can about the history of the Russian Revolution, or Richard III about the Wars of the Roses as an historical phenomenon. Yet the poem or play’s human (synchronic) impact on us may be immense. The First World War was a human tragedy. Is it surprising, then, that people respond more to the war poets than they do to historians’ accounts of the Great War?
(2) I do not honestly know how the First World War is taught in schools today, although when my son was taking GCSEs fifteen years ago I had the impression that the emphasis was on documentary sources and less on received historical accounts as it was when I was that age (1964). When I was at school, there was an influx of bumptiously left-wing English teachers just down from Oxbridge who definitely ‘taught’ Sassoon and Owen as though these recipients of the Military Cross exposed the First World War as an imperialist plot; just as I knew a similarly youthful Russian teacher who seriously taught that The Cherry Orchard was about ‘the coming of the Revolution’. But these were literature and language teachers. In history lessons we were taught the First World War for two years solid, from origins to Armistice, as facts, events, history. I do find it difficult to believe that today at Dulwich College, say, or a Kent grammar school, or Hills Road Sixth Form College, and other schools throughout the land, the First World War is not taught as history by historians in history lessons.
(3) If the British educational system has been spurning historical understanding of the Great War in favour of war poetry for so long, what have the historians of Academe been doing when they should/could have been authoritatively influencing the Department of Education, examination boards and teachers to redress the situation?
But let me return to the greatest strength of Reynolds’s book, namely that he weaves a narrative of irresistible pace that bears you inexorably forwards through a hundred years to the present. By the end, you are stunned by the presence of the ‘long shadow’ as Reynolds has brought it home to you. This is, surely, historical writing of the highest order because (like art) it puts you on the spot, it challenges you about where you are, it questions where the world you are a part of is going. For instance, although I by a whisker voted Remain, at the end of reading The Long Shadow post-Brexit I was left wondering whether historically the wheel of 1914 has simply come full circle. After Mons, let us remember, Kitchener had to go to France to order General French to keep the B.E.F. on European soil, as French could not see what business it had remaining there. Perhaps our ‘forward’ engagement in Europe ever since has been an anomaly in our history? Perhaps after a hundred years the time has come to disengage as we did after 1815, to rediscover our ‘historical’ identity? Perhaps Europe doesn’t need us now?
* * *
One of the most fascinating and stimulating chapters in Reynolds’s book is ‘Remembrance’. It brings home to one how startlingly different from the norm the Maison Forestière Wilfred Owen at Ors is (see Damian Grant’s guest post of 4 November 2016). The historical approach shows how much of our commemoration and remembrance is bound to time and context. If the French memorialisation of Owen had been in England, there would have been outrage and execration at the house in which Owen spent his last night being transformed into a white chocolate confection. But left as it was this house could say nothing to a nation who did not know Owen and his poetry. As the substantial brochure describing the French community’s journey of discovery to a fitting memorial describes, the challenge for them was ‘to come up with the opposite of a monument’:
Simon Patterson [The designer] presented his main idea: to preserve the cellar of the Maison Forestière and encourage the discovery of Owen’s poetic work in the space of the house, emptied from top to bottom. […] The cellar would be preserved bare, filled only with voices, with the minimum number of pointers necessary and sufficient to indicate Owen’s brief presence in it.
The Maison Forestière Wilfred Owen is therefore, the brochure goes on, ‘meaningful only when included in a context where the future matters more than the past. […] What this location invites us to do is less in the nature of remembering than of discovering, or even exploring’. Last year on Calderonia we discussed for months the British commemoration of the war and the fallen, the over-ritualisation of remembrance, even the creation of ‘war porn’ in our exhibitions, media treatments and monuments. With their commemoration of Wilfred Owen the French have, perhaps, shown us a way out of the kind of clichés and obsessions that Reynolds and others deplore.
Related
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
George Calderon, 1912
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
George Calderon c.1901
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Captain of the 11
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
‘The Long Shadow’, War Poetry, and Commemoration
(Click the cover to find this book on Amazon)
Faithful followers of this blog will recall my account on 16 December 2015 of Professor David Reynolds’s public lecture ‘Making Peace with the Great War: Centenary Reflections’. I have now read the book behind the lecture (see above) and have no hesitation in saying that if you read only one of the many superb publications about the First World War that are marking its centenary, this should be it.
You will be drawn into the repercussions of the war for all the empires and ethnic groupings of Europe, for a Britain desperate to avoid revolution, for a divided Ireland (repercussions that bedevilled it from the Easter Rising and the Somme to the Good Friday Agreement), for the British Empire (which ‘as a result of the war […] actually grew to its largest extent’), for an America whose racism was ‘masked […] on the international stage [by] its lack of a colonial empire’ and whose ‘Great War’ was actually its Civil War, for the Middle East, for the balance of power in Africa, for China and Japan down to the present day. You will discover a welter of extraordinary facts, for instance that the Germans mounted a successful propaganda campaign in the 1920s to deny the ‘war guilt’ attached to them by the Treaty of Versailles and disprove that they had ever wanted the War, that by the 1930s Britain had ‘the biggest and most committed peace movement in the world’, that during the Second World War disbelief from the 1920s about the atrocities committed by the Germans during the invasion of Belgium in 1914 led people at first to regard stories about Nazi concentration and extermination camps as ‘lies’. And you will be riveted by Reynolds’s storytelling. Most gripping of all is the fact that Reynolds’s book works like the ‘reverse perspective’ on icons, where all the lines actually meet in the spectator: the long historical lines and controversies that he traces intersect in us, the present.
Reynolds strikes me as a pretty rare sort of historian, in that he is emotional, empathetic, artistic by nature (he is the best actor of the television historians and does his own voice impersonations). I have the impression that he has to struggle sometimes to bring these responses under the more cerebral control of being an historian — the more conceptual control, shall we say, of his academic discipline.
Thus in The Long Shadow his treatment of the sacralisation of commemoration and remembrance seems conflicted. ‘The meaning of Britain’s great War was gradually whittled down to one sacred day, the First of July 1916.’ The focus on the Pals battalions is described as ‘almost consecration’; the testimony of British veterans is said to be laid out ‘almost reverentially’; on the Memorials to the Missing at Ypres and Thiepval the dead are ‘religiously named for posterity’. You cannot help feeling that this theological vocabulary is used ambivalently, ironically, and you don’t know how to take it. Does the historian in Reynolds feel that such sacralisation is inappropriate, overdone, sentimental, unhistorical? If so, I believe he should have discussed the problem with his readers.
Reynolds’s attitude to the war poets, particularly Wilfred Owen, is even more conflicted. He is one of a large number of British historians who believe, in Adrian Gregory’s words, that ‘in schools the First World War is taught more as tragic poetry than as history’, that only the British are obsessed with the ‘testimony’ of their war poets, and that as a nation we have to ‘escape from Poets’ Corner’ and ‘understand the Great War as history’. This is a theme reprised throughout Reynold’s book. Yet from his responses to Sassoon’s, Gurney’s and Rosenberg’s verse he is clearly moved by the war poets himself, and he gives as good a description of Owen’s existential situation as I have read anywhere when he says that Owen was ‘the self-sacrificial victim of a war whose immoral nature he abhorred but whose moral demands he could not escape’. Yet Owen and the ‘canon’ of war poets were only ‘sanctified’ in the 1960s anthologies that were ‘bought in large quantities by schools and then recycled year after year by teachers to justify the original investment’…
For clarity of argument, I will number my responses to this:
(1) The only thing historical about a poem is the date of its composition. This implies that the realia named in it are historically accurate, but so what? Being a synchronic artefact intended for experience now, a poem qua poem cannot have a diachronic or trustworthy historical value. A poem can therefore tell us no more about the history of the First World War than The Cherry Orchard can about the history of the Russian Revolution, or Richard III about the Wars of the Roses as an historical phenomenon. Yet the poem or play’s human (synchronic) impact on us may be immense. The First World War was a human tragedy. Is it surprising, then, that people respond more to the war poets than they do to historians’ accounts of the Great War?
(2) I do not honestly know how the First World War is taught in schools today, although when my son was taking GCSEs fifteen years ago I had the impression that the emphasis was on documentary sources and less on received historical accounts as it was when I was that age (1964). When I was at school, there was an influx of bumptiously left-wing English teachers just down from Oxbridge who definitely ‘taught’ Sassoon and Owen as though these recipients of the Military Cross exposed the First World War as an imperialist plot; just as I knew a similarly youthful Russian teacher who seriously taught that The Cherry Orchard was about ‘the coming of the Revolution’. But these were literature and language teachers. In history lessons we were taught the First World War for two years solid, from origins to Armistice, as facts, events, history. I do find it difficult to believe that today at Dulwich College, say, or a Kent grammar school, or Hills Road Sixth Form College, and other schools throughout the land, the First World War is not taught as history by historians in history lessons.
(3) If the British educational system has been spurning historical understanding of the Great War in favour of war poetry for so long, what have the historians of Academe been doing when they should/could have been authoritatively influencing the Department of Education, examination boards and teachers to redress the situation?
But let me return to the greatest strength of Reynolds’s book, namely that he weaves a narrative of irresistible pace that bears you inexorably forwards through a hundred years to the present. By the end, you are stunned by the presence of the ‘long shadow’ as Reynolds has brought it home to you. This is, surely, historical writing of the highest order because (like art) it puts you on the spot, it challenges you about where you are, it questions where the world you are a part of is going. For instance, although I by a whisker voted Remain, at the end of reading The Long Shadow post-Brexit I was left wondering whether historically the wheel of 1914 has simply come full circle. After Mons, let us remember, Kitchener had to go to France to order General French to keep the B.E.F. on European soil, as French could not see what business it had remaining there. Perhaps our ‘forward’ engagement in Europe ever since has been an anomaly in our history? Perhaps after a hundred years the time has come to disengage as we did after 1815, to rediscover our ‘historical’ identity? Perhaps Europe doesn’t need us now?
* * *
One of the most fascinating and stimulating chapters in Reynolds’s book is ‘Remembrance’. It brings home to one how startlingly different from the norm the Maison Forestière Wilfred Owen at Ors is (see Damian Grant’s guest post of 4 November 2016). The historical approach shows how much of our commemoration and remembrance is bound to time and context. If the French memorialisation of Owen had been in England, there would have been outrage and execration at the house in which Owen spent his last night being transformed into a white chocolate confection. But left as it was this house could say nothing to a nation who did not know Owen and his poetry. As the substantial brochure describing the French community’s journey of discovery to a fitting memorial describes, the challenge for them was ‘to come up with the opposite of a monument’:
The Maison Forestière Wilfred Owen is therefore, the brochure goes on, ‘meaningful only when included in a context where the future matters more than the past. […] What this location invites us to do is less in the nature of remembering than of discovering, or even exploring’. Last year on Calderonia we discussed for months the British commemoration of the war and the fallen, the over-ritualisation of remembrance, even the creation of ‘war porn’ in our exhibitions, media treatments and monuments. With their commemoration of Wilfred Owen the French have, perhaps, shown us a way out of the kind of clichés and obsessions that Reynolds and others deplore.
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