As the sun went down on the recent First World War centenary, questions started to be asked asked about what the future holds for the commemoration of this cataclysmic event. There appears (to me) to have been a fairly ambivalent response from many historians to the ‘official’ commemorative events of the past four years, with some going as far as to assert that these years have represented a ‘missed opportunity’ with regards to securing the First World War in the active memory of the current and future generations.
It is too soon after the centenary commemorations to objectively assess their longer-term legacy. However, it is highly unlikely that interest in the War will collapse overnight. The number of professional historians and enthusiasts currently using social media platforms, such as Twitter, alone – to post information, opinions and debate – suggests that the First World War is not a subject that will be vacating the (inter)national consciousness any time soon.
A recent blog posted on Twitter by a Historian I follow and for whom I have the utmost respect, Peter Anderson (“The Cult of the #FWW’s 11%’ – @flanders1914) prompted some to question whether the act of commemoration was predominantly being driven by a ‘morbid obsession’ with ‘11%’ of those combatants who were killed in the war, at the expense of to ‘the 89%’ (themselves not black and white statistics – a point very well made in a linked post by Professor Peter Doyle) who survived it and returned to post-war lives. This is indeed a very interesting point and, I am certain, not one posed by anybody intending to undermine the memory of those who did indeed make the ultimate sacrifice.
From the historians’ perspective, a desire to expand research of the war away from ‘the dead’ is applaudable and certainly there are still many aspects of the wider war which deserve further exploration. Not least, the lives of those who returned from the war. Were they – as Remarque suggests in his preface to All Quiet on the Western Front – ‘destroyed by the war’? What exactly was the War’s effect on Women’s suffrage: did it accelerate women’s voting rights (as some still believe), or did it delay it (as others believe)? How – in spite of misinterpreted claims of a ‘lost generation’ – was Britain able to successfully survive and fight a Second World War just twenty-one years later? What were the biggest changes in society and societal attitudes that can be directly attributed to the effect of the First World War?
I appreciate that there is a wealth of material already written that would at least try to answer many of these, deliberately basic, questions. However, the point made by Peter Anderson is that too much time and energy is now being given to the commemoration and remembrance of the dead at the expense of those who survived the war.
In answer to this, I would suggest that the balance is just about right. Taking the actual war as an example, the dozens of books I possess on the subject cover a vast array of aspects, from the origins of the war, to specific battles, specific regiments and divisions, uniforms, insignia, fictional accounts, gender, race, poetry, geo-political impact…the list is seemingly endless. The dead, of course, are frequently discussed – how could they not be in the context of such a dreadful event? This alone does not constitute an obsession: a better question might be to ask whether a wider obsession with death factors in our interest in the First World War per se? The answer to that would surely be one for the individual. None of this is to say, however, that there is not room for more research into individual survivors of the war as Peter Anderson suggests. There is always room for more.
Neither does the ongoing commemoration of the dead, so wonderfully represented in the work of the CWGC, both at home and across the world, equate to an obsession with them. It should be remembered that today’s CWGC evolved from a public demand (in the United Kingdom, at least), amid an unprecedented outpouring of national grief, for something with which they could permanently remember their dead by. Hence, for example, Lutyens’ Cenotaph – originally a temporary structure in 1919 – being rebuilt as a permanent memorial in 1920, and the birth of the first ‘Battlefield Tours’ around the same time. The greatest tragedy in any war must surely be the loss of human life which accompanies it. Nobody who has ever visited one of the hundreds of ‘Silent Cities’ can surely fail to be deeply moved by them. To attempt to visit Flanders, Picardy, the Dardanelles, the Middle East etc. in the context of the First World War and not find these impeccably maintained memorials to sacrifice is unthinkable: they are the metaphorical elephants in the room.
I wholeheartedly agree with Peter Anderson that the lives of those who made a sacrifice during the First World War, returning in whatever form, to whatever circumstances, will always be a worthy subject area for research and writing. My own grandfather was one of ‘the 89%’; his brother, one of the ‘11%’. However, my own moral compass will always primarily and instinctively steer me towards commemorating those who made the ultimate sacrifice. It is their memory, above all else, that I feel a tangible sense of duty to ensure never diminishes.
norfolkgeordie 