The
edition I have declares on the cover “This will overturn everything
you thought you knew about Britian and the First World War”. This
is a bold statement, “everything” is a big claim”! I did my
best to set this aside, remembering not to judge a book by its cover
and all that...
However
this book's intent is a myth-buster, and so at a certain level it
wills you to be a fully paid up subscriber to the myths to give
fullest effect to its party trick of demolishing them. Corrigan is a
retired solider and a large part of his argument is based on, what he
sees as, the inherent inability of civilians to understand the
military.
There
were some “myths” which I was aware were not true – such as the
notion that men spend the whole war in the front line trench. This
is an idea that pervades, for instance my secondary school had a
mock-up of a trench built on the sports field – but this was a
small section of the front line, and gave no sense of the supporting
network of rear teaches, communication lines and reserves etc, and so
the idea was naturally bred from it that what we saw in our field was
all there was. That men were rotated in and out of the trenches,
spending only a couple of days at time in the “firing line” is am
important point to your wider understanding of the experience of the
war.
The
issue of those shot for cowardice or desertion is one of the hardest
to approach, I think that Corrigan gives a helpful insight into the
conduct of the Court Martials, showing the while it might have been
swift military justice was far from summary. While I think it might
be valid to review of individual cases I have always been troubled by
the call for a general pardon of all those shot. To do this seems a
disservice unless there was certainty all, each and every one, of
those shot was wrongly accused. For to pardon one who was wilfully
deserting would still leave those who should have been subject to the
army's medical rather than criminal systems diminished if we continue
to hold them as a collective. I am perhaps not as confident in the
good order of Military justice as Corrigan, but he confirms the basis
on my unease about the idea of a general pardon. It might win
present day politicians some cheap points but it would not be an
expression of the fundemental truth.
Corrigan
is also helpful in unlocking the way in which the geographical
recruitment, and in particular the “Pals” battalions, heightened
the experience of collective grief. The sense of a lost generation
was not so much a product of the absolute numbers of lives lost but
the way in which a town, village, or street was likely to suffer its
lost due to a single engagement. In the Second World War the army
had moved away for geographical recruitment. So while the casualty
rate after D-Day was comparable to that to the major battles of the
First World War, the bereaved were unlikely to be known to one
another, and so grief remained more personal. There was not the
cumulative factor at play.
Corrigan's
historical accounts are clear and well written, it is his
interpretive passages that are less comfortable. The facts, for the
most part, speak for themselves, but Corrigan's ranting add a feeling
of trying too hard. Corrigan generally seems to view the myths as
the product of deliberate attempts to distort the memory of the war,
and in most cases this doesn't stack up. Misunderstandings have been
perpetuated, but this is a error of a different order from that that
Corrigan rants against. For example at one point he disparagingly
refers to “poets who wrote for money”, while a large part of the
book is given over to the defence of Field Marshal Haig (and hand in
hand with that an attack on Lloyd George), I accept that history has
been unfair on Haig but I have the sense that Corrigan is pushing the
pendulum too far in the opposite direction.
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