Is it time for the Secret History of the First World War to emerge?

I recently went to a very enjoyable evening of history lectures at Kingston Grammar School’s swanky Performing Arts Centre / Theatre, a local celebration of this year’s (2018) centenary of the end (or, at least, one of the ends) of the First World War. Inevitably, the urge to write a blog post in response was almost impossible to contain…

WW1 War Poetry

The first talk, given by Dr Jane Potter (Reader in Arts at Oxford Brookes University) was on war poetry: though very interesting, it became quickly apparent to me that even though war poetry as a phenomenon emerged in the military heat of WW1, it was forged as an academic study target in the ideological heat of 1960s anti-war protest.

Many aspects of war poetry that strongly engage its academic audience – its inclusivity, its naivety, and its perceived ‘genuineness’ – reflect the kind of ‘bottom-up’ social history that was emerging in the 1960s and 1970s. From that point of view, it is (I think) hard not to see that these were precisely the things that 1960s anti-war academics seized upon as giving it ideological value to them. Hence it is a field that seems to me to have been selected more for its low-impact liberal resistance values than for intrinsic artistic, stylistic, or technical value.

But even so, the academic genre itself projects back a modern dialogue about what (capital W) War is about / for (and let’s not forget it took until 1970 for Edwin Starr’s answer to emerge, famously rhyming “heartbreaker” with “undertaker”), and about what relation War has with the ‘common man’ (or indeed ‘common woman’), a dialogue only marginally in place in 1914. I think it’s safe to say that there are plenty of academic contradictions in play here.

For me, WW1 war poetry ranges all the way from the most moving and affecting to muddy drivel: but neither the best nor the worst makes me want to value it as more than just an interesting cultural phenomenon. So unfortunately I have to say that, though Jane Potter’s talk was both engaging and well-presented within its limits, I still don’t buy into the whole academic study of war poetry as something which continued study of can keep on eliciting genuine value: circa 2018 it seems more like a long-running Humanities cult, a Kodakian “gift that keeps giving” but with ever-diminishing returns, sorry. 🙁

The Moral Endeavour Driving WW1

The second speaker of the evening was Dr Edward Madigan (a Lecturer in Public History at the University of London’s Royal Holloway), and his talk was on altogether more solid ground. His starting point was that even though people in the UK now generally grasp that the Second World War was a genuine moral fight against the fascistic inhumanities of Nazism, few genuinely seem to understand what the equivalent British moral angle was in the First World War – A.K.A. ‘errrrm, what was that whole WW1 thing about, again? Franz Ferdinand or something?‘

What clearly came out from his slides and description was how British moral indignation at the 1914 German atrocities in Belgium (in particular in Louvain / Leuven) grew and grew, a sense of outrage that increased courtesy of the sinking of the Lusitania (yes, I do know about the various histories there, *sigh*), the Zeppelin raids, the raider attacks on Scarborough, and the execution of British nurse Edith Cavell. These moral flames were religiously fanned by such peopls as Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the Bishop of Westminster, whose 1915 anti-German diatribes were extraordinarily inflammatory, to the point of being somewhat hard for modern ears to take in. (Even Herbert Asquith called it “jingoism of the shallowest kind”.)

And so Madigan’s overall argument – though he never quite framed in this precise way – seemed to be that moral outrage against the Germans grew in Britain like a kind of out-of-control viral meme, taking over the thinking of all bar the most doggedly pacifistic. And this from a country that was, right up until the start of WW1, a close partner with Germany, both culturally, fraternally, commercially, and even historically. (It is no coincidence that the British Royal Family is basically German.)

But… was that the whole story? I think not, and the evening’s final speaker helped illuminate a different side of the same history.

WW1 Propaganda

Professor Jo Fox is the Director of the IHR: the topic of her talk was “Propaganda and the First World War”. We’re now familiar with the idea of agitprop (a portmanteau of “agitatsiia” and “propaganda”, as per the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party’s Department of Agitation and Propaganda, set up in 1920): but Jo Fox showed a series of images of British First World War propaganda, courtesy of the various enlisting committees and even the graphic journals of the day – intentional propaganda and unintentional propaganda, broadly speaking (echoing Marc Bloch).

One curious thing she noted was that German historians (though she didn’t say who), looking back at the First World War, pointed to the power of British propaganda as being one of the key things that swayed not only national opinion but also international opinion against Germany: and that this was one of the key mechanisms that served to isolate Germany and, ultimately, to lose it the war. Was propaganda really that powerful? Fox clearly thinks so, and indeed argued her case persuasively.

Perhaps the interesting follow-on question here is whether the Soviets ultimately stole agitprop from the Brits’ culturally weaponised WW1 propaganda. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the case, though Fox didn’t suggest an answer: maybe she’s saving this for her next book. 😉

Towards A Secret History of WW1?

From my own historical viewpoint, the problem with all three accounts presented during the evening wasn’t what they included but what they excluded. By which I mean: the act of trying to capture the vast vista of war though such narrow lenses as poetry (or even social history), viral moral outrage, or even pro-war propaganda is doomed to failure, for these are all surface symptoms. Instead, the single (but never really mentioned) driving force behind War is neither military, social, nor even moral, but political. Even Edwin Starr got it wrong: the one thing that war is good for is politics, plain and simple.

In my opinion, the thing pervasively missing from the evening was a single secret history question: how did the British Government manage to bring the Church, the State, the Establishment, the Media, and indeed just about everyone else (including writers, artists and mainstream poets) on-message with its political programme, culminating in the deaths of approximately 37 million people? Just about everyone played their part in disseminating pro-war propaganda: if there is a categoric difference from the kind of Soviet agitprop that followed not long after, it’s not one that I can easily detect.

So why, even a century on, are historians still apparently unable to peer behind the political curtain of WW1, to bring the machinations that made the propaganda possible into the light? What made the British Government’s (proto-)agitprop so effective, so far-reaching, so total? It seems to me that – unless, dear reader, you know better – the definitive secret political history of WW1 has not yet been written: or, rather, the awareness of the political framing of the war seems to be missing in action. Our historians seem to lack access to the definitive accounts of the scheming, manipulation, and political stage management that would give their own accounts context and genuine meaning: and so we seem to have fragmented histories that, for all their depth of research and technical professionalism, remain politically shallow.

Or is it the case that, even now, nobody wants to talk about how countries manipulate their peoples into going to war? Might it be that, in an age where politically unjustifiable wars continue to happen on a regular basis, this is all still too close for comfort? Might a hundred years be too soon for the real history of something so politically sensitive to emerge?