'Here Dead we lie' - the First World War revisited

I have spent much of the past few weeks living half in the present day and half in the terrible four years from 1914 to 1918. I spent many evenings watching (in most cases for the first time) the BBC’s majestic 1964 series ‘The Great War’, all 26 episodes of it.  I missed it when it was first shown, though even then, aged 12, I had begun to grasp that 1914 was the most significant moment of modern history . As one reviewer of the series said at the time it was ’the most important historical event since the fall of the Roman Empire’.  

 

In one way, you might say that it fulfilled all the worst aims of the French revolution (the triumph of the general will, the destruction of monarchy and aristocratic government, the binding of patriotism to political nationalism, the primacy of state over family and of egalitarianism over religion; the destruction of the Church and of Christian belief) ; It made the Russian revolution possible, elevated Hitler from insignificance to great power,  and handed global dominance to the USA for 100 years.  It also more or less created the disastrous idea of national self-determination for all peoples which – because it is practically impossible – became the pretext for all sorts of horrors far worse than the benevolent imperialism it so often replaced.

 

We did not have BBC2 at home (it wasn’t transmitted in much of the country outside London, and even where it was, sets capable of receiving 625-line transmissions were rare and costly) , and I was not allowed to watch TV at boarding school, so –even when it was eventually repeated on fuzzy old 405-line BBC1 I can’t have seen more than a dozen episodes. It always rankled with me that I missed it at the time. But to watch it as if it were new was a very odd experience . This was made more intense by my decision finally to re-read Robert Grave’s ‘Goodbye to All That’, which I hadn’t opened since about 1967, but which has burned large parts of itself permanently on my memory. I was amazed by how much I accurately remembered. (The series, by the way, is available as a boxed set, - got mine second hand - and some of you may have collected the individual DVDs when the Daily Mail was giving them away a few years ago).

 

It was disturbing because it was simultaneously very modern and very old. Its style and editing were very advanced for the time, and have to some extent been copied by every documentary historical TV series made ever since.

 

But it is also intimately connected with that is now the unattainable past. All of the interviewees, at the time in their early seventies, still spry and alert, are no longer with us. But then they were still in their full vigour. I was brushing past such people in buses and markets, mostly without realising how interesting they were, though I will say for myself that as a child I was given to questioning old people about the past, when I could.  Some of them taught me in school. They had actually been on the great retreat on the Marne in 1914, or at the Somme. They had been among those crowds described by Philip Larkin in ‘MCMIV’. It’s a sobering measure of how old I am that 50 years have passed since these forceful, articulate ghosts (astonishingly unidentified in almost all cases) gave their accounts. And when they were recorded, the events of which they spoke were 50 years in the past – almost exactly as far from me as the Great Train Robbery and the October 1964 general election – both of which I remember very clearly, are from me.  

 

The programmes are very British in a way now impossible. Measures are in yards and miles ( except where it is necessary to refer to foreign kilometres, as in the kilometre posts on the road to Paris, showing how far the Anglo-French armies had retreated). The narration, by Sir Michael Redgrave, and written by  distinguished historians, uses an educated and literate English of the sort that would now get you into trouble in a lot of places.

 

As so often with documentary film if you watch it all at once, episode after episode, you spot quite a lot of nifty repetition, and there’s far too much artillery, though you can see why. But there’s another thing – the faces. Of course, the mild, contented faces of the British young men , the New Army marching, singing to their deaths in 1916, are intolerably moving. The British people would never look, or feel or behave like this again.  I am sure that we are less free because the best men went to their deaths and left no sons behind of the same quality. Those who would have stood up against the great siege of petty bullying that has enveloped us since 1914 are all dead and left no heirs.

 

But this is nothing compared to the film of the Imperial Russian army marching to war ( and to its grave) , so many magnificent, upright, healthy countrymen, totally unlike the stunted, downtrodden Soviet Man which was what was left after world war,  civil war, famine, purge and second world war.   To a greater or lesser extent this was true of all the main belligerents apart from the USA. But Russia’s woe was undoubtedly by far the worst, and I think this film, without even meaning to, shows it.

 

It is , I am glad to say, full of references to the Eastern Front so often forgotten in our discussions of this terrible event, though it is unforgiveably sketchy about the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, that neglected cataclysm which still shapes Europe’s destiny today.   It describes the Dardanelles disaster, and the horrors of the Mesopotamia campaign, which I mentioned here the other day. The archive film even if sometimes repeated, is astonishing in its range and originality. There is no doubt,  from this account,  that a huge amount of the suffering and death really were the result of incompetence and folly.

 

I won’t enter here into controversies about its treatment of  the war. My view remains that Germany deliberately started it, that Britain had no business entering it, that it is this – its pointlessness and worse than pointlessness from our point of view – that makes the dreadful sacrifice of so many young men so unforgiveable. After all, our great and costly efforts did not prevent German domination of Europe, which we now have anyway, on far, far worse terms than we could have had the same thing if France had been beaten in a swift war in 1914. I am not sure what France has gained, either,  from pretending that it was militarily matched with Germany after 1870, when it wasn’t. Nor can I see what Belgium gained form  holding up the German armies at liege for those crucial days at the start of the war (which was much more of a war of motion, at the beginning, than I had really understood).

 

As for the blockade of Germany, I quail at the thought of what we did. And as for inviting the USA into our quarrel, and imagining that she would not exact a stern price for her help, what were we thinking of? Lord Lansdowne, who increasingly seems to me to have been the most intelligent statesman of the age, gets a decent amount of prominence for his (entirely justified) doubts, though his great ignored letter urging a compromise peace before it was too late is not mentioned.

 

There is astonishing film of naval warfare including the German dreadnought Goeben, given to the Turks by the Kaiser (its German commander was given flag rank in the Turkish navy) and sent to bombard lovely Sevastopol , one of my favourite cities (this ship survived into the 1960s, and was nearly preserved, the last of the Dreadnoughts); the battle of Jutland, portrayed here as a more or less complete defeat of the Royal Navy by the Germans, in military terms; was it?  Perhaps it was, though it was not enough to give the German Navy the freedom of the seas. There’s amazing film of a huge German submarine built to carry cargo through the blockade; and of the sinking of the Austro-Hungarian battleship ‘Szent Istvan’ (it means ‘Saint Stephen’) , the great and powerful monster, holed by an Italian torpedo, sinking at first slowly and then with a terrible, violent speed as its ship’s company try to save themselves. Happily, many did, But as always not all. To watch it now, when all involved are long dead, is nearly as distressing as it would have been at the time. It is never pleasant to watch the death of any ship, even an enemy. Defeat for this navy was total . Losing the war meant losing its coastline, and utterly ceasing to exist (though the Hungarian Admiral Horthy found other things to do).

 

And then there is the end, with Germany losing all, as must happen in the wars of democracy – and we know how that story finished.  The final episode quotes an A.E.Housman verse which is so severe that it is not often mentioned. It comes after Charles de Gaulle is quoted as saying that France above all had lost all her young men, men she could ill afford to lose.

 

Housman wrote : ‘Here dead we lie because we did not choose to shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose. But young men think it is, and we were young’.

 

I have never,  since I first heard these lines, been able to remain composed after reading them, even silently in my head.

 

I’ll end here, and return in a later posting to Robert Graves’s book.