Great Britain's Great War by Jeremy Paxman

Great Britain's Great War by Jeremy Paxman
Buy Great Britain's Great War by Jeremy Paxman at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: History
Reviewer: John Van der Kiste
Summary: An account of the First World War, not just the conflict itself, but also how it affected the British people back at home, and the changes it wrought
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 356	Date: October 2013
Publisher: Penguin/Viking
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 9780670919611
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Throughout the nineteenth century, Britain was regularly at war with one or more overseas nation, be it France, Russia, South Africa or elsewhere. These conflicts generally passed the public by, except for families who had loved ones serving overseas. When the declaration of war against Germany was announced to the crowds in London in August 1914, it was assumed that once again most people would not be affected, and that it would probably be over by Christmas. This was proved wrong on both counts. A weary conflict dragged on for four long years, and nobody in Britain escaped from the long shadow which it cast.

Jeremy Paxman has his own personal family tale to tell. On 7 August 1915, 24-year-old Charles Edmund Dickson was killed on active service in Turkey. He was one of thousands of eager young recruits who went to fight for King and Country, only to leave a grieving widowed mother behind as he became another of the many names carved on memorials. Mr Dickson was the author’s great-uncle Charlie.

Books on the First World War are plentiful enough, and there will doubtless be more in the coming months to mark the centenary year. What makes this one so compulsively readable is not just Paxman’s compelling style, spiced with the occasional dry sense of humour to liven up what is fundamentally a pretty sombre subject. It is also his crisp and straightforward portrayal of the facts, from the midnight deadline in August 1914 which came and went without any response to a British demand that Germany should withdraw her troops from Belgium, to the Armistice some four years later, against a setting of the impact it had on everyday British life and how this changed as a result.

For some it was not a bad war at first, and the Christmas ceasefire when British and German soldiers briefly put aside their national differences and fraternised as they swopped conversation and cigarettes is revealed as an instance when there was hope for mankind. Sadly it gave way to worsening conditions as the conflict dragged wearily on, with grim conditions on the western front, where the sickening smell of dead bodies and excrement hung over everything, and where rats grew enormous from feasting on the corpses. (Apologies if that’s a shade gross for some readers, but at the risk of stating the obvious, war is a vile business). Newspapers fed their readers wildly over-optimistic stories of progress in the early months, only to be contradicted by soldiers returning on sick leave who were angered by what they saw as misplaced propaganda if not downright lies. And how true were the stories about German soldiers raping and mutilating women and young children as they advanced on Belgium, or of German factories where the dead were boiled down inside vast cauldrons to provide raw material for pig-feed and fertilizer? Sensationalist twaddle, avers the author, pointing out that the German government denied the latter story as fabrication. They would, wouldn’t they? Meanwhile, British governments provided no corroboration but did nothing to deny it. They wouldn’t, would they?

The ineptitude of some of the generals and the appalling catastrophe of mass casualties at the battle of the Somme are factors which still have the power to amaze us a hundred years after the event. 1916 was indeed something of an annus horribilis in war terms with a failure at the battle of Jutland, officially seen as an indecisive conflict but claimed as a victory by both sides despite the number of dead and wounded, the loss of ‘Your Country Needs You’ poster hero Lord Kitchener at sea, and the Easter Rising in Dublin, put down with what seemed like unnecessary vindictiveness and too many executions. The entry into the war a year later of America, declaring that the German submarine campaign was ‘a warfare against mankind’, was undoubtedly a turning point.

Too many soldiers and sailors did not come back, and girls at a school in Bournemouth were warned by a senior mistress that only one out of ten of them could ever hope to marry, because so many of the young men they might have married had been killed. One who was spared for greater things was young Lieutenant Macmillan of the Grenadier Guards. Having been shot in the thigh in no-man’s-land, he lay in a shell hole for almost a day, awaiting rescue and passing the time when he was not unconscious by reading Greek literature. When he returned home, he was one of many to feel a sense of guilt that he had lived while so many others had not. Forty years later, he became Prime Minister.

It was not the war to end wars, as so many had hoped, but the profound changes which it wrought in British society are emphasised. The conflict altered the relationship between classes, between the sexes, and it had a profound effect on the political system. There was a pronounced break between the Edwardian way of life and that which came after peace was declared, and in some ways it made Britain the country it is today. Paxman says that in retrospect the war was the moment when the British decided that what lay ahead of them would never be as grand as their past, and they began to walk backwards into the future.

Paxman’s books are a joy to read. He has the knack of taking a British institution, or a subject from the past (or a combination of both), and writing about it in a lively way, full of wisdom and insight, always arousing our curiosity. There will inevitably be many books on the 1914-18 hostilities coming our way, but few if any are likely to improve on this one.

For another account of those four long years, The Great War by Peter Hart and Voices from the Front: An Oral History of the Great War by Peter Hart.

For a searching look at the country it left behind, The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War by Juliet Nicolson

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