The legacy of the first world war is with us still. Not perhaps the men with shattered bodies and minds selling matches on street corners, or those polishing their medals every November. The generation with first-hand experience of the war has passed, leaving sepia photographs or a contraband bayonet in the attic as the only tangible reminders of the young men in our families who went off to fight.
Except for the memorials. In every city, town and hamlet the first world war memorials remain at the heart of the community. They are the focal point on Remembrance Sunday, but remain silent reminders the year round. Read the names. The Smiths, Owens and MacDonalds attest to the generation of farm labourers, industrial workers, clerks, teachers, shopkeepers and domestic servants who marched away, and never came home. Most of the army, navy and flying corps did come home, of course, but they came home changed forever.
I was born in the 1960s. My understanding of the first world war is shaped by popular culture as well as historical study. As a child I was taken to the Imperial War Museum in Kennington in south London. As a teen I read Alan Clark’s The Donkeys, Owen and Sassoon, Vera Brittain’s Testament to Youth, and watched Oh! What A Lovely War. As an adult I’ve visited the vast sombre memorial at Thiepval, and walked past Lutchen’s Cenotaph most weeks. In the 1970s, the march-past of the Cenotaph was led by first world war vetarans – thousands of them – with chests filled with Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, or Mutt and Jeff, the affectionate nicknames of the campaign medals. When I was growing up, there were plenty of people around with memories of the first world war.
Albert Tatlock, Ken Barlow’s ‘Uncle Albert’ in Coronation Street, who had fought on the western front, appeared in the series until 1984. Television dramas of the 1970s such as Upstairs Downstairs, When the Boat Comes In, or The Duchess of Duke Street portrayed the effects of war on those that went, like Edward the Footman, or Jack Ford, and on those who stayed behind. I swear this is true, but I can’t walk through Victoria Station without imagining rows of stretchers on the platforms, and fresh recruits on their way to the boat trains to France.
It is of course right that Britain conducts a major programme of events to commemorate the years of the war, starting in 2014. Had Labour been in office, we would have done the same thing. Labour ministers would have wanted a fitting tribute to the dead, and those who survived them. We would have wanted to use the occasion to educate young people, preserve the past, record the voices and strip away the myths. That David Cameron has announced the programme this week should not diminish our support for it. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown or Ed Miliband would have done the same. It is entirely possible that Miliband will be the prime minister between 2015 and 2018, leading the nation in marking the anniversary of the Battles of the Somme, Passchendaele, the Marne and the decisive blows of 1918.
The government’s approach is the right one. The Imperial War Museum in London will receive a grant for its modernisation. Ever since the Imperial War Museum North opened in Salford, the Daniel Libeskind design of the world broken in pieces, now shadowed by the BBC’s Media City, the older institution in Kennington has looked a little jaded. The money will spruce up the first world war exhibition, moving away from uniforms and rifles in glass cases, and towards the human story.
Two pupils from every school will visit the battlefields of France and Belgium, where every year the farmers still plough up shells, bullets and bones. Our young people will see the rows of white crosses, and read the names and regiments. This idea is borrowed wholesale from the Holocaust Memorial Trust, which arranges for two children from every school to visit the sites of the Nazi death camps. Grants will be made to preserve the memorials and plaques which adorn every public space and building in the UK. HMS Caroline, the last surviving ship of the fleet which blockaded Germany and starved them into submission in 1918, will be preserved in the docks at Belfast.
The centenary of the first world war is no cause for celebration. Even at the time, there was little triumphalism when the Allies finally defeated the German army on the battlefield, and the high command collapsed. The war’s historian Basil Liddell Hart wrote in 1930 that ‘Armistice Day has become a commemoration instead of a celebration’. It is an opportunity to remember the vast sacrifices of a generation, to understand the causes of the war, and to appreciate the changes it brought about. Marx said that revolutions are the locomotive to history, but wars have proved far more locomotive. The advance of everything from psychology to women’s suffrage can be put down to the experience of 1914-18. It is an opportunity to study history, sociology, literature and art, and the other disciplines which civilise our society.
There will be those – they’ve started already – whose infantile leftism or general Eeyore churlishness leads them to attack the idea of a national commemoration. They will say it was all about avoidable ‘slaughter’ or a manifestation of the class war, and that the £50m should be spent on the NHS. This is ahistoric as well as disrespectful. Let them swirl in their own self-loathing and prejudice. There is nothing jingoistic about commemorating the first world war, nor anything nationalistic about understanding how and why it was fought. The government has got this one right.
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Paul Richards writes a weekly column for Progress, Paul’s week in politics. He tweets @LabourPaul
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UPDATE: Chair of Labour Teachers John Blake wrote a response to Paul’s piece, The necessity of history, on the need to both commemorate and consider the questions the first world war raises today
Pleased to see that Paul’s views at full length are rather more modulated that his comments on Twitter suggested: he said we should “begin” by marking a victory. Personally I do not believe it’s infantile leftism to say that the war was “all about avoidable ‘slaughter'”: I think that’s the truth.
I am happy that there should be a national commemoration and indeed David Cameron’s words yesterday are full of good sense (though I wonder whether he regrets his highly effective ‘pre-buttal’ of the anti-European ranting about the Nobel Peace Prize). But that does not mean that any progressive should write the Tories a blank cheque on this one. Instead we should work with the government in a spirit of openness and honesty about the war, its impact and its lessons for today. If David Cameron was sincere yesterday, and I hope he was, that should be fruitful.
A real commemoration of the war and its impact would consider the fact it cost the UK 1/3rd of its national territory (as Ireland’s independence can be traced back to the failure to implement Home Rule as a result of the war and by the entirely sensible refusal of the Irish people to sign up to the slaughter via conscription in 1917 – 1918 as well as the impact of Wilson’s 14 points), the fact that it did not end in 1918 – chances are your local war memorial states 1919 because of the failed intervention in Russia (even then that was not the end, as Lloyd George was ejected from office in 1922 partly as a result of a failure of a post-war intervention in Turkey), as well as the lingering heavy hand of the Versailles Treaty in so many aspects of European life.
The war was an indictment of the failure of British (and other) ruling elites. There is no reason the progressive left should let this be forgotten a century later.
Conspicuously abent in Cameron’s announcement was the contribution made by New Zealand forces in WW1. With a population of three quarters of a million it had the highest proportion of its adult male population serving in its army of any country in the world. Yet in 1917 the Allied High command was demanding even more blood sacrifice from the country. The post war consequences were horrendous with a tiny population having to support a disproportionate number of it male population seriously physically and mentally maimed.
I think we should commemorate those who fought in, whether they came home or not, in the World War One. We must, however, prevent Cameron from making it a tory party vistory. Those who fought and fell, or returned in one piece or not, for for the most part drawn the workers, not the bosses. Whatever the justifications, or not, for war those who face the greatest peril are from Labour’s natural constituency, not the Nasty Party’s.
We also need to see that the contribution of the Commonwealth (then the Empire and former Empire states) is recognised. WWI was not the UK vs Germany, it was France and her allies against Germany and her allies with battle ground spread over from Europe across into the middle east. Without WWI Iraq would probably never had existed, the modern state of Israel would probably look very different (and be larger), Russia may never have revolted or have revolted later (perhaps Britain would have revolted?) and many other things would be different. WWI has shaped the 20th and 21st centuries and will influence our future, we need to remember and understand our past to plan our future.
We need to learn ALL the lessons of WW1:
– the bravery and self-sacrifice of ordinary men (even boys) from every part of Britain, the Commonwealth and Empire
– the liberation of women from domestic servitude to war production
– the liberation of men from domestic servitude to the army (albeit hierarchical)
– the common humanity of men on both sides at the front
– the failure of military leaders to understand that new technology had changed their world
– the folly of German leaders in failing to understand that the era of imperial expansion was ending in Europe as much as elsewhere
– the post war ambitions for a better world (League of Nations, the start of the movement for colonial freedom, Irish independence)
– the recognition of the need then and now for democracies to stick together and reach out to others (League Of Nations… UN… EU… UNASUR)
– the post war attempts of the top 1% to return Britain to the status quo ante and rejection of this by hard-working men and women across Europe (Glasgow to Berlin) and the world (Gandhi)
– how punitive German war reparations + free market economics sparked hyper-inflation and the Great Depression
I agree with Paul’s comments here. Adrian mcmenamin, I think the problem with describing the slaughter as ‘avoidable’, is that – in this as in more recent contexts – this verdict depends on us having the enemy we would like to have had rather than the one we did have. In the context of 1914, that involves assuming that the German regime would have settled for some sort of reasonable outcome that would have removed the need for war.
In fact, there is plenty of evidence that the Kaiser and his regime were planning this bid for continental dominance for some time before the crisis of 1914 actually occurred. Furthermore, the trajectory of German policy since the Kaiser’s sacking of Bismarck appears to have been driven by an increasingly fierce and ideological pan-Germanism that looks even more sinister in the context of what came later. It is in this light that we can see the alliance with Austria-Hungary, which replaced Bismarck’s careful balancing between France and Russia. How in this light should Britain have reacted to the German invasion of Belgium, which brought an aggressive continental empire a few dozen miles from Britain for the first time since Napoleon.
Now it is certainly possible to argue that even with all this, nothing justifies the horrendous slaughter that the war brought. And we can certainly agree on the callous and incompetent way the generals fought the war, wasting a generation in the process.
But we do need to temper this with the counter-factual. Suppose Britain had sat the war out and allowed France to fall? Suppose Britain had found itself confronted with a victorious Reich in control of the English Channel and North Sea coasts? Do we think there would not have been a war eventually – and fought under far more adverse circumstances?
Note that in exile later, the ex-Kaiser was enthusiastic about the rise of Hitler. Perhaps we should rename WW1 as the first antifascist war.
The ONLY reason why our politicians are ‘preparing’ for 2014 is to ‘upstage’ the SNP prior to the ‘independence referendum’.