At a time when there are no living protagonists left to offer first-hand accounts, the World War I centenary years from 2014 to 2018 are bound to provide numerous reminders and analysis of the course of the conflict. This absence of firsthand recollection may now allow us to view these events more dispassionately, through an undistorting historical lens that allows us to sift through details to identify salient points, and even learn lessons. On the other hand, it could allow us to ignore or simply overlook essential points that, once appreciated, could inform the way we interpret the whole.
In the mid-1960s, of course, World War I celebrated, if that’s an appropriate word, its fiftieth anniversary. At the time, there were many living survivors of the conflict, most of them in their sixties and seventies, and thus still able to contribute their own opinions, criticism, or praise when confronted with published accounts.
This, therefore, may be the perfect moment to revisit an apparently popular work that, despite its title, offers nothing less than a rigorous, thoughtful, and utterly serious account of the conflict. The book in question is The First World War: An Illustrated History by AJP Taylor. Yes, there are many photographs, but this is much more than a picture book. Yes, the intent was to bring the story of the war to a mass audience, but AJP Taylor’s text never speaks ill of its readers. The descriptions, though often succinct, are admirably detailed. The analysis is relevant and compelling. And most importantly, Taylor brings a professional historian’s perspective on official figures, views, and policies, all of which receive critical scrutiny and, where appropriate, rigorous evaluation.
The scale of the carnage simply staggers. Twenty thousand Britons died in one morning on the Somme. The men moved so slowly through the Paschendale mud that they sank and, immobile, provided static target practice for the machine gunners. Quite astonished, the reader should be prepared to be surprised when Taylor points out that all this carnage was nothing less than the main board of Allied military strategy. Commanders believed in the power of simple arithmetic. Great Britain, France and Belgium combined, certainly when Russia was also included, would ultimately prevail over the more limited number of men Germany and Austria-Hungary could provide. It was simply a matter of numbers. When we’ve killed all of their people, logic ran, we’ll still have a few men left. This was the level of intellect that commanders applied in the act of planning, while lower ranks were simply supposed to do as they were told. No wonder the German high command described the British as “Donkey-led Lions”. It seems that to this day little has changed in British society.
Not that the German commanders were any better… In fact, the ruling class as a whole, it seemed, was particularly reluctant to come forward. They repeatedly showed themselves capable of pointing to places on maps, places they neither knew nor had ever visited, where offensives would be planned and waged, places where young people would be massacred to accomplish precisely nothing. A reader of such history today cannot but conclude that some of these famous political and military figures, had they been alive today and plying such a trade, would be tried as war criminals, and judged for what they inflicted on their own people, not because of what they did to the enemy.
No one, for example, initially realized that gas used against an enemy on the battlefield could also harm one’s own forces. What about the men who were ordered to go over the top only to be killed by shrapnel wounds to the back of the head because their own covering artillery was firing at the wrong range, causing friendly fire? break out behind their own lines? How about landing forces in Thessaloniki, in a place where they could never advance due to the lay of the land? The forces concentrated there were effectively in a concentration camp of their own creation. And then there was Gallipoli, the result of another ignorant point of a finger on a map.
But AJP Taylor’s book is also a pictorial story, and sometimes pictures tell more than words can. There is a photograph, for example, of a group of smiling boys holding garden forks and shovels. The caption tells us that these are members of Eton College doing their part. The irony is chilling. In the text, Taylor does not argue that the upper and upper-middle classes did not suffer as a result of the war, but he makes it clear throughout that those people who followed this strategy of feeding the battlefields with cannon fodder were precisely those people. who suffered a lot. any of the consequences of how the war was conducted. In fact, French troops mutinied as a result of a lack of trust in their masters, and thousands were accused of treason.
World War I: An Illustrated History by AJP Taylor is a must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in the centenary of the war. What AJP Taylor’s remarkably clear and insightful analysis continues to tell us is that, even now, we must not be complacent. It may now be impossible to send millions of young people to certain death, a massacre needless by design. But a dispassionate assessment of contemporary conflicts must conclude that war today is largely waged against civilians unable to defend themselves, and as seemingly helpless bystanders, we continue to watch as conflicts continue to claim the lives of people they frankly don’t care what bunch of asses might lord it over them. One hundred years later, the donkeys clearly still have it: power, that is.