The Great War at 100 – by Dr Tim Wilson
As the date of the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence Symposium – Political Violence and the Long Great War 1914-1923 approaches, Dr Tim Wilson from the School of International Relations provides some reflections on browsing the Russell Cawthorn (WWI) Collection in the Main Library. View the below article and other resources we’ve gathered on our libguide.
The Great War at 100
Reviewing the riches of the Russell Cawthorn collection on the Great War, it is hard not to be struck by the evolution of the conflict in the (British) popular memory from righteous crusade to liberal cautionary tale; in effect, a metamorphosis from John Buchan into Edmund Blackadder. One 1922 account presented the history of the 36th (Ulster) Division as the ultimate triumph of discipline and ‘racial spirit’ over ‘the munition factory and the mud of its making, the roll of barbed wire, the slab of reinforced concrete’.[1] In 1934, however, the Daily Express would publish a sort of ‘war-porn’ photo essay Covenants with Death that firmly equated British imperial interest power with pacifism: it aimed ‘to reveal the horror, suffering and essential bestiality of modern war, and with that revelation, to warn the nation against the peril of foreign entanglements that must lead Britain to a new Armaggedon’.[2] By 1961, Alan Clark could entitle his irreverent study of the British general staff in the war simply as The Donkeys – and be confident the allusion would be instantly recognised by the reading public.[3]
The high noon of technocratic thinking in the mid-20th century saw renewed interest in the Great War as a moment in which the tragic potential inherent in modernity was revealed: scientific management applied to war had created the Verdun ‘mincing machine’ that devoured 714,000 lives. In general terms, then, such battlefields represented, then, not the failure of industrial civilisation but its malignant triumph – as well as a future endlessly generative of further mechanised horrors. Thus Harry Truman progressed from a mere captain in the US 129th Field Artillery at the end of the Great War to the destroyer of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.[4] Likewise, Rudolf Höss had already attracted notice for his leadership skills as a precocious officer in the German Army in 1918: 25 years later he was directing Auschwitz. By the 1960s, a global war that had (supposedly) been begun by railway timetable and ended by stopwatch (at the 11th hour of the 11th month) seemed only too heavily freighted with highly disturbing lessons for the present: a Cold War in which leaders seemed only precariously in control of the means of destruction. Indeed, in the age of Dr Strangelove and ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, the Great War came to be seen as the ultimate cautionary tale for what happened when hair-trigger deterrence fails, and two power blocs slide inexorably into a catastrophic conflict that neither wants.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union (born in 1917) where does this leave the relevance of the Great War in the post-Cold War era? In many ways, it seems to have become a distant conflict – an incomprehensible European civil war impossibly remote to the concerns of our own age. Before his death in 2009, Harry Patch, the last British veteran of the trenches became something of a pacifist icon honoured by rock bands such as Radiohead for articulating this view:
I went back to Ypres to shake the hand of Charles Kuentz, Germany’s only surviving veteran from the war. It was emotional. He is 107. We’ve had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it’s a licence to go out and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn’t speak?
Still, we should think twice before dismissing the relevance of the Great War to our own world. Much that seems alien to us about that conflict stems from a myopic focus on the experience of the (atypical) Western Front between 1914 and 1918. But the war elsewhere did not end on 11 November 1918 – in many places, indeed, fresh conflicts fed off each other down to 1923 (at least). Historians such Robert Gerwarth have provocatively encouraged us to think beyond our conventional reference points with regard to the Great War.[5]
Hence, if the focus is widened, then many contemporary crises come into sharper historical focus. At a foundational level all of the (spectacularly unstable) states of the Middle East are fragments of the old Ottoman Empire that collapsed in 1918 – indeed, there is something horribly familiar about the reports of widespread starvation in Syria then as now.[6] Likewise, the chaos in eastern Ukraine has many of its roots in the incomplete nation-building attempted there in 1917-20 during the chaos that followed the collapse of Tsarist Russia. More generally, a study of these old (and now new again) trouble spots encourages us to think critically about the post-Cold War scene. The claims of some scholars such as Mary Kaldor that the intrinsic nature of conflicts have recently shifted profoundly into ‘new wars’ look distinctly shaky when measured against the sheer anomie of the 1918-23 period.[7] There was certainly no shortage of rampantly transnational paramilitary viciousness on offer between 1912 and 1923; nor sexual violence, either, as Lawrence of Arabia’s eye-watering account of his own rape in Deraa (of recent Arab Spring notoriety) makes abundantly clear.[8]
As commemorations loom aplenty from August 2014, the Great War will be appropriately prominent in public life – not (just) for reasons of mawkish sentiment, but because that episode represents so much that is foundational in contemporary Europe and the Middle East. Closer to home, Fife is studded with reminders of the Great War period for those who have eyes to see – the naval base at Rosyth (1909) is a leftover from the pre-war Anglo-German arms race, for instance, while the airfields at Crail and Leuchars date from the war itself. In addition, it’s good to see St Andrews Library staff (in general) and student intern Caralina Wonnacott (in particular) so proactive in highlighting the print resources under our noses. For their part, the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV) at the University of St Andrews is hosting a major symposium on the 100th anniversary of the assassination at Sarajevo that lit the fuse for world war:
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~cstpv/longgreatwar/index.html
In short, there will be no lack of opportunities to reflect seriously on the legacy of the Great War to all our lives over the coming months – but also no better place to start than the superb Russell Cawthorn collection in the University Library. We are all deeply in the debt of John Cawthorn for making it available at St Andrews.
Dr Tim Wilson
3rd June 2014
[1] Cyril Falls, The History of the 36th (Ulster) Division (originally 1922, reissued by Constable and Co., 1996), pp. 144, 301
[2] T.A. Innes and Ivor Castle (eds.), Covenants with Death (Daily Express Publications, London, 1934).
[3] Alan Clark, The Donkeys (Hutchinson, 1961).
[4] Nicholas Best, The Greatest Day in History: How the Great War really ended (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2008), p. 25
[5] Robert Gerwarth and John Horne (eds.), War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford, 2012).
[6] Hikmet Ozdemir, The Ottoman Army 1914-1918: Disease and Death on the Battlefield (The University of Utah Press, 2008).
[7] Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars. Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford, 1999).
[8] T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom(Penguin, 1962).