The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century

by David Reynolds

Winner of the 2014 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for the Best Work of History. "If you only read one book about the First World War in this anniversary year, read The Long Shadow. David Reynolds writes superbly and his analysis is compelling and original." —Anne Chisolm, Chair of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize Committee, and Chair of the Royal Society of Literature.

One of the most violent conflicts in the history of civilization, World War I has been strangely forgotten in American culture. It has become a ghostly war fought in a haze of memory, often seen merely as a distant preamble to World War II. In The Long Shadow critically acclaimed historian David Reynolds seeks to broaden our vision by assessing the impact of the Great War across the twentieth century. He shows how events in that turbulent century—particularly World War II, the Cold War, and the collapse of Communism—shaped and reshaped attitudes to 1914–18.By exploring big themes such as democracy and empire, nationalism and capitalism, as well as art and poetry, The Long Shadow is stunningly broad in its historical perspective. Reynolds throws light on the vast expanse of the last century and explains why 1914–18 is a conflict that America is still struggling to comprehend. Forging connections between people, places, and ideas, The Long Shadow ventures across the traditional subcultures of historical scholarship to offer a rich and layered examination not only of politics, diplomacy, and security but also of economics, art, and literature. The result is a magisterial reinterpretation of the place of the Great War in modern history.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War I, War, World History, European History, 20th Century

561 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. For more information please see David Reynolds.

A Professor of International History and a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. He was awarded a scholarship to study at Dulwich College, then Cambridge and Harvard universities. He has held visiting posts at Harvard, Nebraska and Oklahoma, as well as at Nihon University in Tokyo and Sciences Po in Paris. He was awarded the Wolfson History Prize, 2004, and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005. He teaches and lectures both undergraduates and postgraduates at Cambridge University, specialising in the two world wars and the Cold War. Since October 2013 he has been Chairman of the History Faculty at Cambridge.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Britain’s relative immunity from the fighting had a potentially troubling side…The French lost 1.3 million (13 percent of males between fifteen and forty-nine) but this sacrifice could be ‘justified’ as the cost of redeeming French territory, whereas the British and Irish death toll of 723,000 (6 percent of males between fifteen and forty-nine) was not linked in the public mind to any concrete national goals – only to abstract ideals such as civilized values and even the eradication of war. As those ideals soured in the 1920s and 1930s, so doubts were aired about the point of the sacrifice. These doubts intensified after 1939-45, which became enshrined in national memory as a true war of national survival – won, moreover, at roughly half the human cost…”
- David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century

Among my many – many, many – unfinished projects was an attempt to systematically study the First World War. I began during the year leading up to the centenary of the war’s outbreak in 1914, with the notion that I would then read an appropriate book during each of the subsequent years, capping off the anniversary commemorations by reading about Versailles.

Obviously, the hundred-year commemorations of the First World War are already in the rear-view mirror, and receding further every day. Despite my best intentions, the methodical approach that I planned broke down pretty quickly, which is a thing that tends to happen to plans when they come into contact with life. Ultimately, I ended up reading a fair-sized number of World War I titles, without ever getting to the depth I initially wanted to achieve. By way of illustration, I now know the order in which Verdun and the Somme occurred, but I could not tell you how those battles unfolded on the ground.

David Reynolds’s The Long Shadow is an artifact of my sort-of-kind-of-half-abandoned First World War reading plan. I purchased it based on its stellar reviews around the time it was first published, but immediately recognized that I was not yet ready to give it a fair shake. You can’t just jump into the “legacy” of the First World War without any understanding of the war itself. Of course, you also can’t wait forever, because we’re just not given that much time to finish – or even start – the books we want to read.

Ready or not, I finally gave this a go.

***

The interesting thing about The Long Shadow – and the thing that makes it hard to explain – is that it is simultaneously all about the First World War while not being about it at all. As the subtitle tells you, its concern is the “legacies” of the war, and assumes that you already know the ins-and-outs of the conflict before you start the first page. There is no strategic overview, no tactical descriptions of battles, no biographical sketches of soldiers or general. Aside from the prologue, everything takes place after the war has concluded. In short, my decision to save this book until I’d filled in the background was the right choice.

That said, it was worth the wait and preparation. As the old saying goes: You need to learn stuff in order to learn stuff.

***

The Long Shadow is all about consequences and interpretations. To that end, Reynolds divides his book into two large sections. The first – titled “Legacies” – deals with the more concrete echoes of the First World War. For instance, in a chapter on “Nations,” Reynolds deals with the redrawing of the European map, which saw the breakup of old empires and the creation of new countries, all of which failed to solve simmering tensions between civic and ethnic nationalism. Another chapter covers “Democracy,” and especially the crises that attended the democratic form of government famously (or infamously) championed by Woodrow Wilson in one of his many high-sounding but incompletely thought-through exhortations. A third chapter accessibly discusses the issues of German reparations, payment of other war debts, and the challenges to capitalism posed by a worldwide depression. In a book that fluidly moves through many disciplines, Reynolds also finds time to discuss the art, architecture, and poetry generated in the wake of war.

The second section – called “Refractions” – is a bit more ephemeral. In these chapters, Reynolds explains how views of the First World War changed when looked at through the prism of the Second World War. Suddenly, the “war to end all wars” seemed a terrible, lethal joke, four savage years of bloodletting that purchased a mere two decades worth of peace. Even so, there were lessons to be learned. For instance, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s call for “unconditional surrender” at the Casablanca Conference – often derided by modern historians as glib and unnecessary – makes more sense in a context that acknowledges Germany’s embrace of the “stab in the back” myth in the years after Versailles. Roosevelt was not about to enter into negotiations with Germany that might later give them the opportunity to say they had not really lost the war at all. The Allies at the end of the Second World War also took pains to avoid earlier results. In particular, Reynolds compares the stillborn attempts to prosecute war criminals – including Kaiser Wilhelm, who managed to escape into exile – at the end of World War I, with the comprehensive legal efforts culminating in the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Both sections are written with clarity and authority, and it says something that even though the two halves are quite different, I didn’t have a clear favorite. Reynolds’s arguments are coherent and amply supported, and he is able to organize a huge mass of material covering all manner of topics. It takes nothing away from The Long Shadow to say that I did not find every subject – such as war poetry, which is just not my thing – equally interesting. There is too much going on for Reynolds to dwell on any one thing, so even when my attention lagged a bit, it did not lag for long.

***

While The Long Shadow is quite ambitious, it would be impossibly unwieldy without some parameters. While the cover-copy of my American edition misleadingly suggests this is a United States-centered volume, make no mistake: The Long Shadow is focused on and told from the perspective of Great Britain. This makes sense as Reynolds is a Cambridge professor, and because trying to cram every country’s unique viewpoints between two covers simply could not be done.

***

One of Reynolds’s chief goals in The Long Shadow is to disentangle the two wars, so that the First is not simply the prologue to the Second. Though hindsight makes it difficult, he wants us to see the First World War as contemporaries saw it, a vision untainted by all that came after. In the first section, for instance, Reynolds refers to the “postwar” period, rather than the “interwar” period, because for the people living between 1918 and 1939, that’s what it was. He also vigorously challenges the notion that the British Army was composed of “lions led by donkeys,” suggesting that this conception arose as a misreading of the Second World War as a war of dynamism and movement. Throughout The Long Shadow, Reynolds interrogates the conventional wisdom that has coalesced around the First World War. Sometimes he can be peremptorily brash, dismissing Barbara Tuchman and John Keegan with mere hand waves. At other times, I was not entirely convinced by what he posited. For example, Reynolds has more work to do if he really wants to rehabilitate Douglas Haig. Nevertheless, he is never less than stimulating.

***

The First World War is a subject I long avoided due to its complexities and apparent futilities. It almost goes without saying that once I got into it, I realized that the complexity is what makes it so fascinating, and that the tragedy reaches far beyond the sheer murderousness of the first day of the Somme. It says something profound that a hundred years later, we are still unsure how to accurately construe what happened. It says something equally profound that a hundred years later, we can still feel the tremors from those distant guns, the aftershocks of a world partly shaped by what was accomplished, and what was left undone.

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a well written and thorough history that invites the reader to consider how and why interpretations of the war have changed over time, and to ponder the current ways in which the great war will be remembered during the centennial celebrations that are now and will be taking place. However, the book is long and perhaps contains a bit too much material for the casual reader of history. For those seeking an overview of prior published literature (both fiction and nonfiction) on the subject, this book does provide that along with discussions of the applicable contexts in which they were written.

The title of this book suggests support for one of my own conclusions regarding history of the the 20th century. That is that virtually everything that happened after 1918 is a consequence or out-growth in some way of World War I. This book is a history of the past one hundred years and covers a broad and multilayered scope including politics, dipolomacy, economics, literature, and art (including graphic art, theater, music, cinema and television). The book is global in scope and covers all the major participants in the war, but it places the UK in the foreground and focuses most of its attention on things British (the author is British).

One of the main points of this book is that WWI had less impact on Great Britian than any of the other European countries. That point is fairly obvious since Britain was a victor power, experienced no shift to fascism or communism, ruled a global empire and suffered less than other economies from the prolonged crises of the early 1920s and the slump. Anyone living in Russia, Italy, Germany or the new states carved out of the Austro-Hungarian empire knew that the great war had destroyed the old political order, overturned the class balance of the pre-1914 age, and generated ideological hatreds and race prejudices that reverberated down to present.

The book notes that the United States is emotionally much more removed from WWI than Britian or any other European country. The book suggests that for Americans to understand the impact and anguish Europeans feel toward WWI they need to recall the long term consequences of their own great war, the Civil War.

What the British called “the Great War of 1914-18 remains on the margins of American cultural memory, apart from the periodic Wilsonian refrains. From Europe’s suicide pact in 1914, the United States stood aloof—joining the conflict in 1917, it is believed, only to sort out a mess that was quintessentially European.
Yet that moral superiority is misplaced, or at least a little blinkered. America had fought its own great war only half a century before, during which 620,000 died—more than the combined American death toll in all its other conflicts from the revolution to Korea, including both world wars.
... ...
Here are American parallels with Kennan’s 'seminal catastrophe’ that defined twentieth-century Europe.

The book includes a section discussing the impact of the war on graphic art, but fails to make mention of the Panthéon de la Guerre. It's not clear to me if this is an oversight on the part of the author or the result of a deliberate decision (I suspect the former). The Panthéon de la Guerre was a cyclorama the size of a football field, featuring 5,000 full-length portraits of prominent figures from World War I created in Paris as an artist-generated propaganda project while the war raged. After the war was over the Panthéon de la Guerre was celebrated as a solemn and nostalgic work. People lost interest after several years, and it was shipped to the United States for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933-1934 after which it was placed in storage and forgotten about for many years. In 1957 it was placed on display (in modified and reduced form) at Kansas City's World War I Museum where it is today. Click on the following link if you want to learn more. I recommend watching the seven minute video toward the bottom of the text. https://theworldwar.org/explore/exhib...
Link to Wikipedia Article about the Panthéon de la Guerre.

[David Eppenstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

If this book was being read by a historian or a serious student of history it would probably rate 4 or 5 stars. If the book was being read by an average reader they would probably rate it at 1 or 2 stars. Obviously my point is that this is not a book for the average reader. In fact it is books like this that cause the average person to hate history. I am not a historian but I don't think I am a casual reader of history either. I am, however, an advocate for the average reader/person since they are the ones that need to read and understand the lessons found in books like this. This book, while well written and extremely well researched and thought provoking, is not written or constructed in a way that will appeal to those that can benefit from the author's efforts. Consequently, I will strike the difference and give the book 3 stars.

So what exactly is in this book? After reading the reviews of a couple of GR friends my curiosity was piqued. Starting around 2013 with the centennial anniversary of the start of WWI approaching I, like a lot of others, decided to take a better look at that war and learn more about it. After reading a few books I started to see this war and its consequences as the event that shaped the entire 20th century and its effect is still being felt in our world today. The reviews I read had me thinking that this author would be giving his readers a thorough analysis of just how much effect WWI had. I guess I was primarily expecting a discussion of the geopolitical consequences of that war. Of course the author does deal with what happens when 3 empires, Russia, Austria/Hungary, and Ottoman, are ended and their components set loose in the world as newly independent nations. Surprisingly for me, however, this was only a small part of the book. The geopolitical fallout of WWI seems to have been the easiest to predict and explain so apparently not worth a lot of attention. So what did the author want to discuss?

After the geopolitical material was dealt with the author enters into what I thought was some very strange territory. He started examining visual arts and literature and particularly poetry produced during and after the war. The art and literature of the United Kingdom was given specific and detailed attention in this treatment. At first I found the amount of attention given to these areas to be more than a little annoying. Of course art and literature were probably affected by the war as they are after every major historical event. I thought the author was giving too much attention to something rather trivial and couldn't see the point. I kept reading and the more I read it finally started to occur to me what the author may have been intending with this book.

While the primary focus of the book is the United Kingdom all of the belligerents involved in WWI were dealt with fairly in the book. The book's selling point is the legacy of WWI on the 20th century which initially had me thinking of the geopolitical effects but I believe the author was thinking differently. I think the author was interested in exploring the effects of this war on the national psyches of the belligerents to explain the actions and motivations of these countries following WWI and into WWII and the rest of the century. When viewed in this manner I came to have a greater appreciation of Neville Chamberlain's reasons for his deal with Hitler and why Field Marshall Montgomery was so slow and reticent in his military movements during WWII. Through an examination of art, literature, financial policies, political parties, social and labor movements etc. the author traces how the WWI experience shaped the people in the involved nations. The people in each of these nations evolved in different ways depending on how they experienced the consequences of the war. The Americans were the least affected by the war while the British, losing 720,000 men, was most severely affected. This loss made the British extremely reluctant to engage in any new wars that cost so much with so little to show for this expenditure. This general attitude is illustrated by the actions of both Chamberlain and Montgomery.

This book takes the effect of WWI into an entirely new area of consideration. It is not so much about the military activities and politics of war as it is about the abstractions and morality of war and how the humans forced into war deal with these abstractions both during and after the shooting. In today's language we would probably call this PTSD but this didn't exist in either of our World Wars and even if it did PTSD is an individual disability. What this book does is see this problem as a national disability affecting decisions national and international in scope. It's a good book if you have the patience to endure a long winded author in a book with long chapters and few page breaks. Enjoy?

[Colleen Browne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an exceptionally well written book that I recommend to anyone with an interest in understanding the 20th Century. It is historiography at its finest. Reynolds relates the experience of WWI for the men who fought but also explains what brought them into the war and what they thought they were fighting for. Of note is the fact that when writing this book, the author wrote about a country often overlooked when the war is discussed (or many other international events). He explains what was happening in Ireland at the time and how it distinguished them from what was then the rest of the UK. Although Scotland and Wales had been agitating for issues important to them, when the war came, they abandoned those things and supported the war. Initially, Ireland was supportive of the war as well, sending over 100,000 men to the front. But it was premised on the promise of Home Rule which was not honored. The Easter Rising occurred followed by the war with Britain and the bloody Irish Civil War.

The book focuses on how the people of the countries remembered the war, initially referred to as the Great War but changed to World War I when the 2nd World War occurred. What the belligerents hoped for and expected as a result of the war is discussed as well as the issues that impacted them the most. For Britain, it was always July 1, 1915- the first day of the Somme when over 20,000 of its troops were killed. For France, Verdun played the bigger role in memory, as two examples.

The impact of the war on the rest of the century and how memories changed often according to the time. Also discussed was the art and poetry of the war, and of course, the scholarship produced and the different perspectives they provided. One thing to note is the excellent introduction and conclusion of this book. Rarely have I read better.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Long Shadow is an extremely ambitious book that, as its subtitle avers, attempts to trace the influence of the First World War to the present day. It is divided into two halves: (1) legacies (direct outcomes of the war) and (2) refractions (changes in the ways in which the war was perceived). It is difficult to summarize because its scope is so vast. In fact, it is so loaded with facts and background and insights and references that one can lose sight of the major thesis of the book, which is a shame, because it is an important one.

Reynolds employs a number of broad themes (nationalism, imperialism, capitalism, etc.) not only to document the wide range of effects of the war. He also illustrates the ways in which the history of WWI was interpreted, first of all to serve the social and political agendas of the combatants at the time, and second, to readjust the understanding of the conflict in light of WWII. It is not revolutionary of course to claim that history is contingent, or that it is used by those in power for their own ends. But such an analysis is uncommon to most accounts of WWI, which focus on specific treaties, leaders, social movements, and battles. Similarly, such an evidentiary approach is generally taken to explain the factors contributing to the short hiatus between WWI and WWII.

Reynolds, on the other hand, wants to show us exactly how the historical reconstruction of WWI - i.e., the deliberate formation of the collective memory of the war - was used by each country to reshape what happened into a narrative that could justify not only what came before the war, but what came next. [For example, given the casualties of just one battle, that of the Somme (estimated to be some 600,000 on each side), such sacrifices had to be vindicated in light of the fact that another world war came just twenty-five years later.] Reynolds is making a broader point than “the victors write the history.” At its simplest, that precept can mean only that reports on the outcome of battles tends to be self-serving.

Reynolds uses his multifaceted approach to take us away from the material aspects of the conflict, to see how the perceptual and ideological lenses informing its history led to quite different (and selective) memories of that time. The meanings thus generated have gotten embedded into the public consciousness, whether factual or not. Especially when narratives are couched as “histories,” a certain authority or legitimacy is conferred upon what is actually a specific set of values, norms, and perspectives that in turn changes popular reactions to events.

His book is important because, while many such analyses of the social construction of memory have been made of other seminal events, such as the Civil War or the Holocaust, most books on WWI focus stay down in the trenches, so to speak.

One of the important points Reynolds makes about the construction of WWI history relates to the nature of the source documents used, particularly right after the war. When dealing with events that took place over a variety of countries in which different languages are spoken, it is critical to get information from all parties, both the vanquished and the triumphant. But this was not the case after WWI. Reynolds writes:

"...in the 1920s and 1930s most scholars of the origins of the Great War relied heavily on German materials. These served as the basis for the influential works of American revisionist historians....”

As a result of using the fragmentary German documents (many of them had been destroyed, falsified, or removed by the Russians and unavailable until after Stalin’s death), a massive legacy of disinformation ensued, foremost of which was the belief promulgated that “nobody wanted war” in 1914; that the precipitating crisis was “a gigantic muddle”; and that the nations involved “slithered over the brink into the broiling cauldron” quite blindly. By the 1930s it was hard, Reynolds contends, even for Great Britain to believe that Germany had played a major role in bringing about the war. (Certainly, and most unfortunately, Germans themselves believed the selective information they received that the war was a “defensive” one, for which they therefore suffered unfairly.) Even now, some respected scholars argue that the nations of Europe “sleepwalked” into the conflict. [See, for example, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark.]

In fact, the “sleepwalking” theme has had amazing staying power, for a variety of reasons explored by Reynolds. The upshot, however, is that the dominant narrative of WWI - i.e., a war started by “a succession of accidents”; “a family quarrel among the crowned heads of Europe”; senseless carnage informed by no clear war aims, is absolutely still embedded in public consciousness. But it is, much to the chagrin of historians, certainly not the case. [See, for example, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War by Max Hastings, and The War That Ended Peace by Margaret McMillan. Both of these scholars bemoan the way in which Germany’s large role in the genesis of the war has gotten obfuscated over time.]

Reynolds goes further to suggest that part of the power of the revisionist histories can be attributed to a major cultural development, and that was the technological advancement of artistic media - especially in the form of sound movies and later television. This changed the game of memory construction altogether. He credits the breathtaking power of movies, especially because of their novelty and their emotional impact, for creating an iconography of enduring images and establishing a narrative pattern that changed the way everyone remembered the war. (For example, many believe that the war was primarily fought in trenches, because of the overwhelming number of striking images of that phase of the war.) Reynolds even cites some historians as charging that “there were virtually two Western Fronts - the literary and the historical.”

Artistic creations focused on several recurring themes. In Europe, the predominant message was one of the horror of war, fought in muddy deprivation by young romantically heroic men fated to die meaningless deaths. Poems and paintings reinforced those images. In the U.S., by contrast, the war was portrayed as a great adventure, with American men as heroes, beloved by comrades and beautiful women alike, rescuing the desperate continent and “saving the world” for democracy.

When the continent once again became roiled in war preparations, the European message especially was not very convenient, and needed to be rewritten.

In Germany in particular, the outcome of the war had to be refashioned. Thus, Germany used a very distorted picture of the unfairness of the reparations clause in the Treaty of Versailles to accomplish several goals: deflect attention from the fact that they imposed an even bigger reparations burden on France after its defeat by Germany in 1871; blame the reparations bill rather than an inept government for the failure of their economic policies after the War; and help promulgate the “stab in the back” myth that allowed the political takeover of a militaristic party to help restore Germany’s glory. The interwar government, worried about Bolshevism, never saw fit to mention to the public that British and American bankers provided funds to support a new German currency and helped restructure reparations payments at a lower level, backed by an international loan. Between 1924 and 1930, Reynolds points out, German borrowed almost three times what it paid in reparations. The interpretation of reality by Germany, however, was shaped to alter the terrain of popular knowledge in order to help legitimate the representation of Germany as an innocent victim, deserving of revenge.

Reynolds also warns us to guard against retrospective assessments. For instance, Neville Chamberlain is now reviled for having “appeased” Hitler at Munich, but at the time, Chamberlain was responding to the absolute “gut-wrenching fear” in Britain over the possibility of a war enhanced by aerial bombers. (Whereas England had always felt a modicum of security by virtue of its geographical isolation, the populace was in a panic over the idea that Germany (or other aggressors) could now reach them quite handily by air, and moreover, wreak havoc in a way that would make no distinction between combatants and civilians.) But once it became clear just what kind of evil was unleashed with Hitler, everyone in Britain was eager to disown Chamberlain’s policies, blaming Britain’s inaction on just that one man, and grabbing on to the lifesaver of Churchill’s outstanding oratorical mastery to reframe who the British were.

One other notable instance of WWI historical reconstruction highlighted by Reynolds pertains to the role of the U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson. It is interesting to hear a British scholar’s perspective about the effect of Wilson on world events subsequent to WWI. In America, Wilson has been white-washed in many ways (not least of which to cover up his vile racist attitudes and actions, not only domestically but with respect to his rejection of a “racial equality” clause for the League of Nations), and restyled in public memory to have been a man desperate to bring peace to the world. But by Reynold’s account, Wilson did the opposite, and was notably unpopular for it abroad. By lecturing Europe on the need for “self-determination” of minorities, he roiled up anticolonial agitators and alienated most of the other world leaders, who scoffed at him for his hypocrisy and excoriated him for not understanding the effects “his seductive words would set in motion.” In response to the hostility of the Allied leadership against Wilson for stirring up trouble without knowing what he was talking about, Wilson not only backed down, stating that he had spoken “without the knowledge that nationalities existed....” but acquiesced in the imperialist policies of his allies. That precipitated a backlash against Wilson throughout the world outside America by the people as well as their leaders, with disillusioned nationalists turning to communism. Reynolds argues, “Right across the colonial world, in fact, Leninism gained from Wilson’s shattered credibility.”

Discussion: Just as selective use of documents promulgate a certain view of what happened and why, the vivid use of images shape what people remember, or by their omission, what people forget. The ability to impose a view is what is at stake with the spate of new works by so many scholars in honor of the 100th anniversary of World War I. Reynolds reminds us that these histories will be far from value-free, and that history too exists within a complex ideological web. These narratives not only help define who we are and who we were, but are pedagogical, setting the stage for future actions. As Reynolds makes apparent, the memory of World War I is still being renegotiated, even now.

Evaluation: This book is by no means just a hermeneutical analysis of World War I interpretation. It is also a densely packed account of what happened during and after the war. But overarching the details is the theme that since “lessons from the last war would guide planning for the next,” what was contained in those lessons varied by country, ideology, and political agendas. Thus perceptions of what happened have changed over time. As historian James Young famously observed, “Memory is never shaped in a vacuum; the motives of history are never pure.” We would do well to remember this as we confront the barrage of new histories coming out now on World War I.

Rating: 4.5/5

[Jamie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of a number of books that were published in the run-up to the hundredth anniversary of the start of World War One, and I remember seeing it in the bookstores, but it didn’t rise high enough on my reading list for me to get it. I now wish I had read it when it came out, because it is a thoughtful, well-researched examination of the war, both from the perspective of its direct effects on the history of the twentieth century, and for the changing ways in which it has been remembered.

The seminal event of the century, the one which set in motion everything that was to come after it, should never have happened. A bungling teenage assassin, a bad decision to go visit a lightly injured staff member, a driver who got lost and had to turn the car around, a bodyguard who was on the wrong side of the car when the killer stepped out of the crowd and fired, and thus the fuse of war and calamity that engulfed the century was lit.

For a long time the mythology that surrounded the outbreak of the war was that it was an accident, that a series of short-sighted decisions by the various nations had caused a war that none of them wanted. The Germans, who were blamed for it by the Versailles treaty, had a vested interest in this approach, because if the war was an unintentional, they too were accidental participants and no more guilty than any of the others involved. They would go on to create a propaganda machine that ceaselessly pushed this point of view, and declared that they were forced to fight because of the hostility of the France, Russia, and Britain.

It was only after World War II, when documents were made available to scholars, that it became clear that Germany had used the assassination of the Austrian Archduke as a pretext to precipitate war. One of the reasons for this was that Russia was in the midst of a rearmament campaign scheduled to complete by 1916, which would greatly increase the risks in the event of war with them, especially if France, which was determined to avenge the humiliation and territorial losses of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, made it a two-front war.

The theory of accidental war can still be found in history books, even some published fairly recently, but there is now a trend toward a more accurate understanding of how events really unfolded. Two good books that examine the outbreak of the conflict are Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War by Max Hastings, and The War That Ended Peace by Margaret McMillan.

The Long Shadow first looks at how the war affected the rest of the century. Anyone can tick off the key events: the rise of communism; the influenza pandemic; the speculative frenzy of the 1920s which would collapse into the Great Depression of the 30s; the coming of fascism; World War II; the Holocaust; atomic and then thermonuclear weapons; and the Cold War. If you want to stretch the idea a bit more you can include the proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam, and even the rise of Islamic terrorism after the Soviet Union blundered into Afghanistan and set the stage for worldwide jihad.

This book looks the major ramifications of the war, and then adds a number of others, second-order effects that altered the course of history. The Great War had been such a traumatic event that leaders in France and Britain were willing to go to almost any lengths to avoid a repetition of it, which led them to disaster when facing Hitler, who was actively seeking conflict to restore Germany to its former glory. The idea of appeasement now seems cowardly, but it was popular at the time, seen as the best way to prevent another war. Also, though it is not mentioned in this book, there is a theory that France was not compelled to surrender in June 1940, and that its military situation was no really worse than it had been in 1914, but its leaders envisioned another long war of unimaginable slaughter, and decided to seek an armistice rather than continue to fight.

The second part of the book looks at how the war has been remembered by the various nations. There is a saying that history is written anew by each generation, as it attempts to frame the past in terms of its own circumstances, expectations, and limitations. Memories of the Great War have changed over the decades from bereavement to shock and anger at the incompetence of the politicians and generals, to a generalized sense of loss for the dead of all wars, to today’s anodyne proclamations made by nations where many citizens no longer even know there was a World War One.

The book is thoroughly researched, well written, and hauntingly evocative in its sense of how the war changed everything, how things were never and could never be the same again. I am including below some quotes that I thought captured well the book’s main ideas.


- America had fought its own great war only half a century before, during which 620,000 died – more than the combined American death toll in all its other conflicts from the Revolution to Korea, including both world wars. Proportionate to total population that would equate to six million American dead today. (p. xix)

- To feel that one is part of a nation requires a big imaginative leap, and national consciousness has often been sharpened, or even generated, by fear of a hostile “Other” against which to counterpose one’s own nation and its values. (p. .5)

- For every hundred men in the [Austro-Hungarian] Imperial Army in 1914, there were on average 25 Germans, 18 Magyars, 13 Czechs, 11 Serbs and Croats, 9 Poles, 9 Ruthenes [Ukrainians], 6 Romanians, 4 Slovaks, 2 Slovenes, and 2 Italians (p. 7)

- The US Army saw combat for less than six months. During that short time, however, its losses in proportion to the number of soldiers engaged were actually comparable to Verdun or the Somme. The US commander John J. Pershing was sure that American-style “open warfare” –bravura infantry attacks with rifle and bayonet – could break through where the plodding French and British had failed. The results were predictable. During the Meuse-Argonne offensive in October 1918, one American division was totally routed by a German counterattack; another lost 5,000 men from enemy artillery before even reaching the front; while a third attacked with 12,000 men and came back with only 2,000. (p. 34)

- America’s Great War was as bloody as Britain’s but far shorter. As a result, the official death toll was only 116,516 (0.4 percent of males aged fifteen to forty-nine). Even that is a misleading figure, because combat deaths accounted for only 53,402 of the total. More Doughboys succumbed to influenza than to German bullets, and roughly half the flu victims died in the United States. (p. 35)

- How to define fascism, whether indeed any definition is possible, has engendered endless historical debate, but certain general features are: the cult of the dynamic leader, shrewd manipulation of the new mass politics, a fierce nationalism feeding on the bitter fruits of war, and the celebration of willpower and violence. (p. 52)

- Five million of the seven million troops that the British government moved overseas were British and Irish (roughly 70 percent), but 15 percent came from India and the other 15 percent from the four mail settler colonies – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa – known as the “White Dominions.” (p. 85)

- The defense of Egypt and the conquest of Mesopotamia and Palestine were achieved mainly by Indian units. The troops were largely from the Punjab, especially Muslims and Sikhs, whom the British regarded as “martial races”….By the end of 1918, India, with a population of some 300 million, had provided 1.27 million soldiers, roughly a tenth of the British Empire’s war effort. (p. 110)

- In the racially charged atmosphere of the Great War era, many congressmen wanted to keep the blacks down and the yellow men out. What masked American racism on the international stage was its lack of a colonial empire. (p. 120)

- In the 1930s the left in Britain and across Europe was fascinated by the apparent success of Stalin’s Russia in modernizing a backward peasant economy. As America’s boom turned to bust, intellectuals asked whether Soviet communism was the harbinger of the future. (p. 125)

- “In 1932,” wrote the historian Arnold Toynbee, “men and women all over the world were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing that the Western system of society might break down.” (p. 150)

- Alfred Sherman, a young communist in the 1930s who eventually became a guru of Thatcherism, later summed up the mental gymnastics of [communist] fellow travelers: “If the Soviet paradise did not exist, it had to be invented to substantiate their socialist faith. It was not so much that they were deceived by Soviet propaganda as that they deceived themselves with the aid of Soviet propaganda. (p. 153)

- The real trailblazer for commemorating democratic death was the Civil War of 1861-1865, America’s Great War. Forty percent of the Northern dead and a far higher proportion of Confederates perished anonymously. (p. 181)

- By the 1930s the war for civilization had been transmuted into a war for peace – and that became the main rationale for remembrance. (p. 212)

- In late 1931 the British Foreign Office succinctly summed up the issues for the [1932 Peace Conference]: “World recovery (the aim of our policy) depends on European recovery; European recovery on German recovery; German recovery of France’s consent; France’s consent on security (for all time ) against attack” Germany had invaded France twice in less than half a century and its population was 50 percent larger, so French leaders would not reduce their armaments before achieving firm guarantees of security, above all from Britain. (p. 214)

- the total UK death toll from German bombing in World War II amounted to 61,000. By contrast, British and American bombers killed more civilians in France – 67,000. The death toll they inflicted on German civilians was at least 400,000 and even more in Japan. (p. 255)

- Until late 1942, after the desert victory at Alamein, more British women and children had been killed by the enemy [in Britain] that had British soldiers. (p. 257)

- In 1939-45 total British Army casualties (killed, missing, and wounded) amounted to 366,000; for the Western Front alone in 1914-18 the figure was at least 2.5 million. (p. 268)

- Britain’s more limited resources, plus the mental constraints of the Great War, made a war of annihilation inconceivable...whereas the United States had not only the capacity but the intent. (p. 269)

- All the great powers used gas in 1915-18 but Germany was the biggest producer, manufacturing more chlorine and mustard gas than Britain, France, and America combined. (p. 295)

- Here was the fateful coupling: the Great War took on a different aspect once it became the First World War, always to be contrasted with the Second. (p. 420)

- Only a third of the British troops on the Western Front were infantry; the rest were in support units such as artillery and engineers or served in supply, medical, and other noncombatant units. (p. 423)

[Edgar Raines · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant book by David Reynolds, one of the leading historians writing in English today, about the meaning of the First World War and its effect upon Great Britain, "the long shadow." Reynolds sees the British experience as unique and, while emphasizing it uses varied reactions in the continental countries, the United States, and the dominions for comparison and contrast In doing so he has mastered a huge literature. He also traces how the reaction varied over time. Until September 1939 the conflict was "the Great War" in Great Britain and was seen by many hopeful as the last major war. The German invasion of Poland changed ultimately the adjective "great" to "first" and with it a fundamental shift in the meaning of the conflict for the British. He makes very effective use of memory theory to discuss shifting attitudes toward the war.

The difference between Britain and the continental countries was that while they faced an existential threat, Great Britain was never under threat of invasion. It went to war in the popular view "to protect the rights of the small nations" and in the official view to keep Germany from seizing permanent control of the Belgian coast. In any case the popular view contained a good deal of idealism, which was bound to cause a reaction if the perception of the war's costs ever exceeded the perception of the war's gains. In contrast, the United States entered the war for goals that were even more idealized---making the world safe for democracy---were the reaction against the war would be even more violent when the popular consensus of the cost-benefit ratio changed. The second major difference was that until 1916 the British fought the war entirely with volunteers. This meant that 43 percent of the British forces who served in the war were volunteers in contrast to the continental powers who entered the war with mass conscript armies. The U.S. similar to Britain had to build up quickly a small army designed for colonial policing rather than continental warfare; it adopted conscription from the very beginning of its involvement.

In Britain as the centenary of the July crisis of 1914 approaches the war is popularly regarded as a human disaster with no redeeming features, a ghastly mistake in which all the soldiers were victims. The anti-war poets have triumphed for the moment. In this attitude the British are again unique. In Russia families are allowed only since the fall of the Soviet Union to honor the dead who died defending Russian soil. During the Soviet era, the war was regarded as just another imperialist conflict, significant only because it ushered the Bolshevik Revolution. The French have always found the stout defense of the country by the French Army in 1914--1918 a source of pride. The Germans too saw themselves as defending their country in an honorable war---that is until Fritz Fischer appeared on the scene in the 1960s. The debate over the Fischer thesis and Germany's war guilt has continued ever since. In the United States since World War II, its predecessor global conflict has been seen as a step in its emergence as a world power. Canada and Australia have seen in Vimy Ridge and Gallipoli as essential in their self-definition as separate nations. How these nations and others arrived at these contingent assessments of the war makes for fascinating reading.

In this book Reynolds tackles a major problem with wit and erudition. Readers may not agree with all of his conclusions but they will appreciate all the effort he has employed in reaching them. Most of all, this is a book that will make them think and reflect, which is all that you can ask of a great book.

[Sotiris Karaiskos · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a common assumption that the First World War was such a powerful event that substantially shaped the modern world. The author of this book tries to analyze this by showing the developments it has brought to this day, presenting its implications in various areas such as politics, art, and even the people mindset. He is doing this not just by presenting the data we have at our disposal but by daring to express his own views, which I can agree or disagree with, but certainly I'm finding them to be very interesting.

Είναι κοινή παραδοχή ότι ο πρώτος παγκόσμιος πόλεμος ήταν ένα τόσο δυνατό γεγονός ουσιαστικά σε μεγάλο βαθμό διαμόρφωσε τον σύγχρονο κόσμο. Ο συγγραφέας αυτού του βιβλίου προσπαθεί να το αναλύσει αυτό, δείχνοντας τις εξελίξεις που έφερε μέχρι τις μέρες μας, παρουσιάζοντας τις επιπτώσεις του σε διάφορους τομείς όπως η πολιτική, η τέχνη, ακόμα και η νοοτροπία του κόσμου. Αυτό το κάνει όχι απλά παρουσιάζοντας τα δεδομένα που έχουμε στη διάθεση μας αλλά τολμώντας να εκφράσει και τις δικές του απόψεις, με τις οποίες μπορεί να συμφωνώ ή να διαφωνώ αλλά σίγουρα τις βρίσκω πολύ ενδιαφέρουσες.

[Alan Bowker · Rating 4 out of 5]

To understand this book to the fullest, if you are reading the North American edition, you have to realize that it is really about the legacy of the Great War in Britain, with some reference to America as ideas passed back and forth within the Anglosphere, and with reference to the rest of the world and the very different response of different countries, winners and losers, colonies and metropolitan powers, really as a point of comparison to better understand the British response to the war, and its uniqueness. Australia is mentioned briefly, and a Canadian will note that our experience of the war, and its impact on our history, is not regarded as worthy of mention at all.

Once you get this perspective, what might seem a disjointed and selective analysis makes a great deal of sense and it is wide-ranging, magisterial, and perceptive. As the participants in the war lived out their respective national destinies in the 1920s, and experienced the different aftermaths of the war, they began to view the war through profoundly different optics. Professor Reynolds engages in a number of exercises of revisionism as regards Britain, debunking such myths as massive disillusionment and pacifism, inept government, and deep economic depression between the wars – in fact, British democracy survived, its economy remained relatively strong in the 1930s, and I avoided the horrible traps into which other countries fell.

The Second World War and its aftermath provided a further lens through which the experience of the Great War was refracted, as did the passage of time, the dimming of memory, and the overlaying of new events that coloured our perception of the old. The Second War was the “good war” against which the inconclusive and more morally ambiguous slaughter of 1914-18 seemed even more futile by comparison. In the era of cold war, antic-communism, Vietnam, imperial decline, European rebirth, and disillusionment with social utopias, and as presented in poetry, popular history, and TV documentaries, the horror and futility of the Great War became an enduring myth.

At times Reynolds becomes so determined to debunk this myth that he makes some questionable assertions of his own. He is very hard on people like Fussell, Tuchman, and the “war poets” like Sassoon. This often smacks of a later generation being wiser than its predecessors. Their vision of horror and futility may have been a construct. But it is equally absurd to downplay the trenches as a horrifying experience by suggesting that, for example, most soldiers did not see major battles and only spent one week in three on the line. That is like saying a flat tire is only flat on one side. The fact that revulsion at this horror did not keep people from sticking it out does not mean it was less horrible, only that people were prepared to see it through to the end.

One in ten of the troops in the British Expeditionary Force did not come back and three times as many who did were permanently damaged. Mortality in some units of the French army was virtually 100%. That those who survived went on to live moderately normal lives, or transmuted their experiences into such varied achievements as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Giono’s novels, Dix's art, national awakenings in the Third World, and European union, as well as the gloomy novels and poetry of the postwar, is a tribute to human resilience. But it does not make their experience less awful. Read Giono’s To The Slaughterhouse.

Future historians looking back on today’s revisionist scholars with their facile use of statistics and arguments that the Somme was also tough on the Germans and was a learning experience (arguments that resemble the bloodless prose of contemporary official military histories that justified this butchery), will likely note that their ability to be so detached reflected the fact that the veterans of the Great War were safely dead and not around to throw a beer in their face.

All that aside, this is a book worth reading and one that, as the above will illustrate, makes you think. I recommend it.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Magisterial in scope. And mostly, but not always, in execution.

David Reynolds takes us through a century of political, cultural, and artistic memories of The Great War. Which interpretations are constantly changing, morphing as regimes change, new wars are fought, and new archives are opened. And these ideas shape their thinkers. Hence, The Long Shadow. Reynolds' knows what he's doing, but doesn't always seamlessly bring everything together. In a way, he's a classic academic: excellent in his strengths (which must be literature) but sometimes forced to bring in outside interests (politics, I think) to tell a bigger story.

He ends on a haunting question: how, in another hundred years, will we remember the war? Will we at all? I'm a child of the eighties who can reach directly to the Second World War and see The Great War just over the horizon. So the Silence and the Cenotaph are still real for me. But what of those who come after? The monuments will remain, and it rests with us to teach the future. On this centennial of the outbreak of war, I will bring my infant daughter to the Act Of Remembrance. So that she will learn what went before, and what we hope ever again to avoid.

Follow me on Twitter: @Dr_A_Taubman

[Bob Mobley · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding book written by a fine historian, David Reynolds' superb study of the impact of the Great War, makes fascinating reading. He examines the impact and influences of what became known as World War I, upon the cultural, political and psychological mindsets within the great warring nations, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States along its impact upon The British Empire and Commonwealth Countries. Drawing upon literature, military histories, and the way in which countries remembered their sacrifices, Reynolds weaves a compelling story and rival set of scenarios that makes the reader step back and think about the power and lingering influences the Great War has had on world history, and continues to have in our own 21st Century.

Well worth reading, as the centenary celebrations marking the start of the Great War of 1914 are launched in those nations that fought together and against each other. The next four years will see a number of new histories and literary publications (particularly those celebrating the War Poets) that will be made more relevant by reading The Long Shadow. I urge you to read it.

[Bryan Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

How did people react to the stupendous shock and horror of WWI?

In The Long Shadow David Reynolds explores the century following 1914 to see how it was remembered or "refracted". It's a very useful tour, covering a lot of ground: politics, poems, movies, historiography, architecture.

The first third of the book summarizes WWI, the immediate aftermath, and its connections to the rise of fascism. This is very useful, as the titanic experience of WWII often blots out what came before. Reynolds shows connections between veterans' groups and fascist organizations as well as their opponents. He carefully pulls out the implementation of expanded suffrage across Europe, and looks to a variety of effects, from stability in Britain to the importance of women's votes in the rise of Hitler (67). Reynolds also reminds us that the British empire actually expanded after 1918, and that London started running into problems of overextension, which in turn helps set up the immense process of decolonialization. He is also deeply critical of many Allied leaders in the way they handled events after 11/11/18:

The British had got themselves into a monumental mess in the Middle East, signing agreements that, as Balfour later admitted, were "not consistent with each other"
and represented "no clear cut policy." (95-6)

There's a fascinating argument about differences in imperial policy towards settler states (think Canada) and non-settler states (India), and an intriguing argument defending - well, explaining - Neville Chamberlain in terms not of appeasement but air power.

The book really focuses on the British response after the first third, and emphasizes how different that reaction was to the way other European nations experienced and viewed WWI over time. Britain's economy did far better than its continental peers; above all, Britain was relatively distanced from the war. The distance appears in political fallout, but also in the way artists respond; Reynolds makes the case that the UK didn't have artists like the fierce German Otto Dix or the Russian Natalia Goncharova’s "Mystical Images of War" sequence. Instead, British artists, especially poets, "were unusual in defining their country so intensely through its countryside." (186) In contrast, the several similarities between the UK and the rest of Europe are striking, such as the use of continental methods in Ireland, and a reconsideration of Ireland as one of Europe's small nations (like Czechoslovakia, etc.)

As time moves on and the practical results of WWI gradually faded, Reynolds turns more to cultural and historiographical responses. WWI becomes a kind of glass through which subsequent generations would scry contemporary issues, such as modernism, WWII, consumerism, the welfare state, the 1960s counterculture, and the Cold War. "For all the countries involved, the First World War would be refracted through the prism of the Second." (243) . For example, Reynolds reminds us of the importance of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August in John Kennedy's Cuban missile crisis (1962) decision-making, but also takes time to criticize that book (312-3).

One major surprise for me when reading was how British-centric the whole book turned out to be. The political focus is on Britain and her empire. The balance of artistic creation is British. The publisher doesn't foreground this, and Reynolds actually, carefully, introduces things by saying he "hope[s] to offer a much-needed corrective to narrowly Anglocentric conceptions of what the hell [the war] was all about." (Kindle location 188) But The Long Shadow is really about British responses. That's useful as far as it goes, especially by reminding audiences of Ireland, but as I progress in my WWI studies I grow tired of UK-centrism. As someone perennially focused on Russia, I was especially saddened at how few notes Reynolds sounds about that vital nation. Ironically, Reynolds castigates Barbara Tuchman for "focus[ing] overwhelmingly on western Europe" (312).

The Long Shadow is an interdisciplinary book, wading into disparate domains: political history, poetry, military strategy, film. As such it is not a good introduction to the topic, because it depends on reader awareness of WWI and its impact. I admire Reynolds' ambition and range.

[KB · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know if I'm just not in a reading mood or if it was the book, but I just couldn't get into this. It is divided into two parts, the first being how the world was shaped by the First World War and the second is more about how it is remembered.

The second part is infinitely more interesting than the first and I found that whole chunk of the book much easier to get through. There's a lot of politics and economics in the first half, which isn't unexpected, but I hate those two topics and I feel like Reynolds tries to tackle too much sometimes. He's concerned with so many different countries in the first half that it's a lot to take in if you don't have very much knowledge about the politics or history of these countries during the interwar years.

I did appreciate his critiques of notable books published about WWI and his tracing of the trends in writing about the war. If Reynolds wrote a book solely about that, I'd read it. It's only one aspect of the second half, but there's so much that can be said and I'd be very interested in hearing it.

[Jodie · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read on WWI... the author does a great job of tracing the legacy of WWI through the rest of the 20th century and into our own time.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well-researched and well-written look at primarily the political legacies the Great War bequeathed to the world.

A war fought one hundred years ago and now mostly forgotten. But from Paul Fussell's look at the literary legacies of the war, written forty years ago, to historian David S. Reynolds' book on the political legacies of the war, we receive a good grounding in what the war wrought. It is more with us today then perhaps ever before, and the great irony (Paul Fussell would take note) is that we still don't realize it.

I don't think this book is for everyone. You would want to be okay with taking a detailed, historical look and thus may want to have an abiding interest in the subject before starting this book. As far as intelligent and scholarly history goes, this book offers it in a dry, but detailed overview.

[Liam Keogh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a little disappointed with this. I think because I had heard many good things and had been looking forward to getting stuck in having had it on my shelf for a year. It seemed to promise to cover areas I was very interested - namely how the war had influenced, even shaped, key 20th century events since.

And to begin it did seem to fulfil this promise in part. Although as I read through it seemed a little light-touch. For example the current shape of the Middle East, shaped by the build up to the war and then Sykes-Picot following it, was covered, but not to the level I had expected. It felt like it was covered within the context of the current chapter / subject, but would inevitably be returned to so the full picture could be completed. It soon became apparent this was not the case.

The final chapters (c.80 pages) read like a literary review but little more. SO many books (fiction & NF) were covered it felt a bit meandering. Sure, draw on a few examples to highlight the point (changing attitudes to the war, revisionist history, the war as seen from within and then out of the shadow of the second WW), but it was largely just comment without much depth. I learnt a lot about how the war has been portrayed by other historians and novelists throughout the 20th century, but that's not what I came for. Maybe 1%, but not such a large chunk of the book.

I did wonder how so much would be covered in little more than 400 pages, but I was excited to find out. Ultimately though it just didn't deliver.

This is not to say this is a bad book, it isn't. It is a good book, but just not the one I was expecting it to be.

[Romuald Byczkiewicz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reynolds' book is a thoughtful and thought-provoking essay that looks at some of the legacies of the Great War. He weaves and connects his points in various ways, looking at how the Great War impacted the politics and diplomacy in Europe in the 1920's and 1930's; economic policies in the post-war (inter-war) years and how all this led to the Second World War. Reynolds also examines the cultural legacies and changes in historical narratives about the Great War, from the post-war years to the present. Along the way, he challenges many of the approaches and trends of presenting and memorializing the Great War and makes he clear his preferences. I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with many of his preferences, but I enjoyed his bursting of various sacred myths that have emerged over the years.

Reynolds is quite strong on the Anglo-Irish and Commonwealth experience and legacies and contrasts them with the various experiences on the Continent, but there, his weaknesses come through. Reynolds' knowledge about the Continent is rather superficial and cursory and does not examine much beyond France, Germany, and Russia. In part, those legacies were obscured by Communism and the Cold War, but there are several recent monographs that address that gap that could have been consulted.

[Bfisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author describes how understanding of the Great War varied among the combatant nations, and how these views evolved during the 20th century, influenced events, and in turn were influenced by events.

The author makes some interesting assertions; for example, that the observance of the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1966 may have stimulated the Northern Ireland Troubles, whereas the sense of shared trials as Britons during the Great War may have dampened Welsh and Scottish nationalism during most of the 20th century.

Primacy was given to the evolution to understanding of the war in Great Britain. Some coverage was given to memory of the war in France and Germany, but not for the other combatants.

[Joe Stack · Rating 3 out of 5]

An excellent history book on the impact of WWI. Very readable. Very thorough. It is interesting too how the meaning of this war has changed over the decades and why it has. I highly recommend this history book to get a better background to parts of our world today.

[Gary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book. More about pre and post WWI than about the actual event. I learned many things. Only negative is that I felt the book was about 25% longer than it needed to be, but it seems anyone who writes a book about WWI or WWII feels they need to hit the 600+ pages to be taken seriously.

[David Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book about the legacy of WWI. Its particular focus is on the shifting perceptions of the war in the century since it commenced. Superbly written it is a must for anyone interested in the war.

[victor harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Posted my review at Library Thing, which I doubt I will use again because of the difficulty in navigating it. Also shared to Facebook. Anyway, as you can see, a 5 star review so highly recommend it.

[Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book decreased in value for me when the author started to discuss the books I had read and formed my own opinion on. Part one was of much more interest to me than part two.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book that looks at how "The Great War" not only eventually became "World War I," but got framed by "World War II."

The author does this eclectically, with a mix of chronological and country-by-country analysis. And, he looks beyond World War II to discuss that long shadow.

For instance, the 50th anniversary of Easter Sunday jump-started Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland, and the various reactions on the Catholic side there, as well as some splashover into Ireland.

War memorials? Different in Britain and France in some ways. Germany didn't commemorate the war dead for a lost war, and losing World War II only made that worse. Russia became the USSR, and the Bolsheviks didn't want to commemorate anything about a so-called imperialist war.

Certainly in the arts; Reynolds discusses the ongoing grip of Owen, Brooke, et al, on British, or more precisely, English poetry. None of the other countries saw anything like it.

On the other hand, modernistic art, while it did get a small bit more grip on post-war than pre-war UK, nonetheless, still never took off like it did on the Continent.

The US is touched on, too. But, since WWI did not see the US at anywhere near the center of fighting activity, and it withdrew from most international affairs afterward, Reynolds doesn't draw too much to it.

I would have liked to have seen a small bit more about Russia, and a fair chunk more about Japan. The book is still 5-star, but, if I could half-star, I'd slot it at 4.5.

[Andreas · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Long Shadow deals with the aftermath of WW1 and its impact on different societies on various subjects like art, finance, peace movement to name a few. It is centered on the English viewpoint though others are described in detail as well like United States, Germany, Australia and France. The book delivers a wealth of information and can be lengthy at times but will leave you with a much better understanding of that period of time. It explains why Hitler wasn’t stopped right in his tracks after entering the Rhineland which would have avoided another global struggle a few years later. The weariness of another war for their respective nations made the policy of appeasement possible, while the Germans were dealing with the resentment of the Versailles Treaty. The author doesn’t shy away from topics like the falsification of facts by the allied propaganda and explains that that very propaganda made peace impossible for the fighting allied nations. Germany needed to surrender to “justify” the great numbers of casualties after 1916. The isolation of England’s ally Japan by the policy of the United States, the abandonment of Italy by the western allies, millions of Germans living under foreign rule while the peace was supposed to deliver self-determination are just a few of the topics in the roughly 400 page book. Five stars from me.

[Bill Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating perspective on the Great War, though the packaging neglects to mention that it is strongly Anglocentric rather than international. Once I accepted that discrepancy -- and the apparent underlying premises of British superiority in matters of governance -- I liked it.

Only incidentally a history of the war, the book's primary concern is to trace those places the war changed the world, concentrating especially on the rise of Wilsonian nation-identity and nationalism, the acceptance of violence and even atrocity as policy, and other, less obvious components of our troubled world. The book is broken into two parts, one on the war and its immediate aftermath and one largely focused on World War 2 and the years following. I especially liked the chapters on the reflection of the war in culture -- film, poetry, fiction. A very different re-consideration of the war that remade the world.

[Kit · Rating 5 out of 5]

The First World War echoes in the past, and as the author notes, is so often overlooked in the shade of the Second War. The 20th century was deeply impacted by both, yet it would be impossible to review the period from 1939 on without careful examination of 1914-1918, and the years that stretched between them.
David Reynolds does a magnificent job researching this book. The examination of politics, culture, economics, and societal development is articulate and detailed. He himself notes that our views on events such as the Great War change over time, as we change, and as our memories change both individually and nationally.
The impact of the 20th century conflicts on the world I see in the news and online is both evident and constant. One hundred years removed from the Western Front and I'm thankful to have the chance to examine how much the belligerents have changed, and how much they have not.
Very well done, and highly recommended.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Reynolds' takes two main approaches in his book. The first sets out the implications of the Great War on the world that followed, not just in the fact of the Second World War, but on the social and political implications. The second is the way in which the understanding and analysis of the war changed through time, especially following the Second World War by which it was held in comparison. This is a thorough and broad assessment - covering the implications on art, social order, domestic and international politics across the major belligerents, though with a particular focus on Britain. The changing interpretation is particularly interesting as it adapts through time, and one is prompted to consider whether the original veterans who came home would indeed recognise the image we have cast them in.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A historian once remarked that historical events need to be revisited anew every generation because while the past does not change, we do. This book, analysing the impact of World War I, 100 years on, is the perfect example. The author brilliantly and deftly traces the War from its origins down to today, noting how each generation changed their perceptions towards it, and now today, in the case of the English, appear to have lost touch with it all together. No longer rooted in history but in the memory of individuals who fought in it and through literature in the form of the War poets. In so doing this generation of Englishmen have lost sight of the bigger picture. A truly fascinating book by a historian at the peak of his powers.

[Randall Russell · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've read a large number of books on World War I, and I found this one to not be very good. First off, I found it to be quite dry and tough going, which is usually a sign to me that the author is not a particularly good writer. I also found the organization of the book to be lacking, and the "legacies" that the author writes about, like Nations, Democracy and Empire, to me were too vague to really grab my attention and I also found the author's arguments in a number of these areas to be lacking. I also found the 2nd half of the book, which discusses less direct impacts of World War I to be not very interesting, and a rehash of elements that have been discussed in a number of other books. So, overall, I found this book to be quite disappointing, and I would not recommend it.