Just as I predicted, World War I: A Complete History has taken me into the third week of January. I’m not finished yet, but I’m getting there. The US has entered the war, and the Central Powers’ alliance is beginning to break down. Austria is looking for a separate peace, and desertions are rampant among both the Central and Allied armies. Russia has already overthrown the Tsar and while the Provisional Government wants to continue fighting, the Bolshevik opposition is resolutely opposed. We all know how that turned out.
*****
“A Complete History” is a bit of a misnomer as a subtitle for this book. It’s a pretty complete military history (as far as I know but I won’t be fact checking) but except for broad scene-setting of social and political events in the various combatant countries, and sketchy biographical detail on most of the war’s major figures and a few less well-known people (mostly men in both cases natch), it’s almost exclusively concerned with military action - taking and retaking of trenches and villages and redoubts, weaponry and materiel, and especially conditions on the front lines, which were absolutely dreadful.
*****
I love to read and I love to write. I have a degree in English, summa cum laude no less (full disclosure - I started college at 18 and finished at 48, but a 4.0 is a 4.0). You might expect that someone like me would love poetry, but I do not and I never have. I have never even pretended to love poetry, not as a college girl who pretended to like a lot of things that she didn’t actually like, and not as a young person with literary aspirations, and not as the mother of high school students complaining about having to read poetry who should have been telling them that poetry is wonderful but instead commiserated and agreed with them that poetry sucks. Poems are not my thing. I’m a prose girl.
The war poets of WWI are the exception to this rule. I love Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke and Robert Graves and Vera Brittain and especially Wilfred Owen. Throughout the book, Gilbert quotes from the letters and reminiscences and poetry of all of these writers as well as lesser-known war poets, to great effect. I think I might have to reread some of these poets. The TBR list gets longer by the day.
*****
Gilbert also shares excerpts of letters and telegrams from soldiers and officers (mostly the latter). In one letter, a young officer writes to an invalided friend that it is impossible for soldiers to convey the filth and horror of the trenches to family and friends at home. He is sympathetic, acknowledging that he himself could never have imagined the things that he’s seen. "They shudder, and it is forgotten,” he writes resignedly. Some things never change.
*****
1917 and 1918 were shit-show years. We think 2020 was bad? Add a world war and violent revolutions to the pandemic and then imagine how much worse it could have been. At least they didn’t have social media, so they were ahead of us on that count.
The Russian revolution would have happened with or without World War I, though possibly not in the same way or at the same time. But the revolution in Germany that led to the fall of the Hohenzollern dynasty (good riddance) was almost completely a result of the war. Gilbert acknowledges contributing factors to the revolutions - economic inequality, inhumane treatment of military conscripts, social and political injustice - without really acknowledging (or even understanding) that the entire monarchical system was (is) corrupt. He seems to believe that monarchy is basically good, and that revolution is an unfortunate aberration made necessary only when the monarchy doesn’t work as intended. But the whole point of monarchy (or oligarchy) is for a tiny group of all-powerful people to control all of a country’s wealth, leaving most of its citizens impoverished and powerless. The poverty and misery of peasants and workers is a feature, not a bug, of monarchy.
Anyway, we’re all about to understand this a lot better than we want to.
*****
Gilbert was a product of his time and place - England and what was left of the British Empire in the mid and late 20th centuries. Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne when he was a teenager, and she was still Queen when Gilbert died in 2015. He was too young to have fought in World War II but he was old enough to remember it and he would have grown up with parents and grandparents who remembered the first war and were adults during the second one. His childhood and youth were dominated by war, and he writes from the perspective of a person who believed in the greatness and goodness of the British Empire and its rulers and its “civilizing” influence on the rest of the world. He writes about the League of Nations’ post-war “mandates” over territories in Africa, the former Ottoman Empire, and Asia as though it should be understood that non-white lands had to be ruled by white Europeans - the only question would be which white Europeans should rule which mandate. The word “colonialist” was not a pejorative in Martin Gilbert’s England.
*****
Despite way too much detail on the minute-by-minute action in various trenches in France and Belgium and despite the casual racism and colonialism and despite the fact that you’d think that women were 5 percent of the population of the world and not 50 based on the number of times women are considered or even mentioned in this book, it’s still a great work of history and literature. And I’m very glad that I’m finished with it because it made me absolutely furious.
*****
The Armistice that officially ended World War I took effect at 11 AM on November 11, 1918: the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Soldiers on both sides of the barricades died that morning as both sides were ordered to continue fighting until exactly 11 AM. Of all of the senseless and stupid and infuriating waste of life chronicled in this book, this was the thing that made me angriest.
“At any cost,” “at any price,” “whatever is necessary” - just words until you understand that when warmakers say those words, they mean them literally. The cost, the price, the whatever - that means as many human lives that must be wasted to take a bridge or a hilltop or a few yards of territory - they’re willing to waste them.
*****
By the way, I am not a pacifist. War is necessary sometimes and humanity being what it is, the strong will always attack those they perceive as weak. Victims of aggression have every right to fight back and America should absolutely defend its allies. There is such a thing as a just war.
*****
Wilfred Owen’s most famous war poem was “Dulce est decorum est.” The title is taken from the words of the poet Horace: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. In English: It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. Owen blames that ethos - that it is somehow beautiful and glamorous to die in battle - for the senseless militarism and imperialism that consumed an entire generation of young men in England (and France and Turkey and Germany). Having lived the destruction and violence of the trenches, he criticizes the romantic view of war in a poem that ends with the words:
“My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
The old lie: Dulce est decorum est...”
Wilfred Owen knew that it is sometimes necessary, but never sweet, to die for one’s country. He was killed in action in France on November 4, 1918, one week before the Armistice. He was 25. Neither sweet nor fitting.
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