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Rewriting history
The Unquiet Western Front
By Brian Bond
Cambridge University Press, 2002, £17.50
Forgotten Victory
By Gary Sheffield
Wiedenfeld & Nicholson, 2002, £7.99
Reviewed by
Geoff Jones
EVERY TOWN and village in Britain has its memorial to the
dead of World War I (1914-18). Most people see the death of a million British
soldiers in that war as a pointless slaughter. But a new group of ‘revisionist’
historians, represented by Brian Bond and Gary Sheffield, deride this as
a ‘myth’, perpetuated by ‘lefty’ non-historians. According to them, a
whole generation has been misled by the play and film, Oh What a Lovely War. And
worse (in a story set to enter right-wing demonology), it is alleged that in
some schools the TV programme, Blackadder Goes Fourth, set in the trenches in
France, is the main GCSE exam text for this period!
The revisionists make three main assertions. First, that
Germany started the war and Britain had a duty to fight to preserve ‘her
interests’. Second, that the British troops were not ‘lions led by donkeys’ (a
remark on battles in 1915 made by German colonel, Max Hoffman), uselessly
massacred on the orders of incompetent generals. And that only the failures of
1915-17 are recognised, ignoring the victories of 1918 when the British Army
‘single-handedly’ smashed the German forces.
The German high command had been planning since 1905 for a
war to defeat France and Russia. The actual trigger, the assassination of
Austrian Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, on 28 June 1914 was almost immaterial. The
real reason for the war was economic: the struggle for raw materials and
markets. By the beginning of the century, Germany’s economy had surpassed France
and Britain. But continued expansion necessitated colonial exploitation, and the
rest of the world had been parcelled out already between Britain, France, Russia
and the USA. Expansion for Germany meant wrenching an empire from one of the
others. The only way was through war.
Every belligerent wrapped itself in patriotic colours:
Germany fought to defend the ‘fatherland’, France for its ‘lost provinces’,
Britain for ‘gallant little Belgium’. And the leaders of the workers’ parties
fell for this lie, acting as recruiting sergeants, while only a few socialists
called for workers’ unity against the war. At first, leaders such as Rosa
Luxemburg in Germany, the Bolsheviks in Russia, James Connolly in Ireland and
Keir Hardie in Britain, were isolated and reviled. But as the war ground on,
workers came to realise the truth. By 1917, anti-war strikes, protests and riots
were common in all the countries involved, culminating in Russia with the
collapse of tsarism.
All war is abomination. But the ‘Great War’s’ western front
was a particularly static, pointless abomination, its horror best described by
poets and novelists like Wilfred Owen and Erich Maria Remarque. The new
revisionists have the effrontery to suggest that these ‘sensitive’,
‘middle-class’ writers just could not cope with the conditions in the trenches
in the way the rough ‘proles’ could. In fact, they expressed the revulsion felt
by the ordinary soldier. And it is no accident that works that can only be
described as ‘anti-war’ have survived while the many jingoistic ‘pro-war’ ones
are forgotten.
As early as winter 1914, the war had congealed – an ‘iron
curtain’ of trenches stretched 350 miles from the Swiss border to the North Sea.
Generals on both sides had planned a mobile war with sweeping advances and
cavalry charges but modern weaponry, such as fast-firing, accurate rifles and,
above all, machine guns made this impossible. Attackers had to break through an
enemy front line consisting of tangles of barbed wire, mines, row upon row of
strongpoints, trenches and more barbed wire. If that was achieved, they had to
advance faster than the defender could bring up reinforcements to plug the gap,
which was practically impossible. However, that would leave them so weakened
that they could not exploit their breakthrough.
The first to realise this was the German Commander-in-Chief,
von Falkenheyn. Throughout 1915 the Germans were on the defensive. When they
resumed the offensive in 1916 it was with a new strategy, brutally but
accurately described as ‘the meatgrinder’. The idea was to destroy enemy armies
by a process of attrition, forcing them to sacrifice their troops uselessly
against strong defensive positions until the soldiers mutinied or ran away.
For reasons of arrogance and incompetence, French and
British generals could not accept the facts. In the British case, there was also
a real lack of experience. The British empire had developed via overseas trade.
A large conscript army had never been necessary. Instead, a relatively small
regular force ensured the safety of the imperialist exploiters and kept
indigenous peoples under control. That army was more or less wiped out by early
1915. Its replacement, built at high speed, had minimal equipment, minimal
training and very few experienced officers.
British soldiers were lions certainly, led by men who had to
learn on the job. But the generals deserved the name of donkeys, refusing to
learn any lessons. They refused to accept when an attack had failed, leaving the
majority of their infantry hanging dead on the barbed wire. Driven by a belief
that ‘just one more push’ was needed, they continued to feed ever more soldiers
into the meatgrinder. The battle of the Somme in 1916 started on 1 July and
continued until November by which time the German line had been pushed back
around seven miles. The losses were 600,000 killed, wounded or missing on either
side.
The revisionist historians complain bitterly that people
only hear of bloody disasters like the Somme and never of the British Army’s
victorious advance between August and November 1918. The truth is more complex –
and it is more than simply a military question.
The battles of 1918 resembled the 15th round of a slogging
match between two heavyweight boxers, both at their last gasp. In March, a major
German offensive drove west 40-50 miles before losses and the inherent advantage
of defence brought it to a halt. From August, allied offensives pushed the
Germans back eastwards 50 or 60 miles. Nonetheless, the front line on armistice
day, 11 November 1918, was still many miles west of the German frontier.
So what had brought the German government to sue for peace?
The army command had realised that it could not win militarily: the USA entering
the war had provided Allied armies with abundant new munitions and the promise
of more than a million troops by 1919. But the overarching reason was revolution
at home.
At the beginning of the war, workers’ parties had been
swamped by the chauvinist flood. But as early as 1916, there were anti-war
demonstrations of tens of thousands in industrial areas of Germany. War
weariness and opposition to the slaughter grew during 1917, and the Russian
revolution triggered anti-war strikes and demonstrations involving millions of
German workers. This opposition spread like a tide towards the front line: troop
trains had messages scrawled on their sides like, ‘We’re not fighting for
Germany’s honour but for the millionaires’. Officers were stoned and even shot
at in stations. New troops marching up to the line met calls of ‘blackleg’, or
‘you’re prolonging the war’. On 28 October the sailors of the High Seas Fleet
mutinied, raising red flags. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils were established in
all the main industrial areas. It was the uprising of the German working class
that brought the war to an end.
The revisionists deride the majority view of the ‘Great War’
as stemming from the ideology of the ‘radical 1960s’. The myth they are trying
to create, however, is a hangover from the Thatcherite 1980s – there was ‘no
alternative’ to war to safeguard ‘British interests’ and, having gone to war,
there was ‘no alternative’ to the meatgrinder. But in whose interests? The war
was fought to defend the interests of British imperialism, which subjected a
quarter of the planet to destitution. Far from being a battle ‘for freedom and
democracy’, it was a battle for the right of British and French capitalists to
continue to exploit the workers and peasants of Africa and Asia. This was the
‘cause’ that condemned a million men to death in the trenches and the mud of
Flanders. There was of course an alternative: that taken by the Russian workers
in 1917 when they smashed tsarism; and the German workers who threw out the
Kaiser in 1918, only to be betrayed by their leaders.
The revisionists are as wrong now as British field marshal
Douglas Haig and his gang were then. The popular view of the war is the right
one, Blackadder and all.
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