Thursday, 30 January 2014
Transgression and bodily adornment
Wednesday, 22 January 2014
The First World War: Right- and left-wing interpretations?
[I post this with trepidation as it is likely to open all sorts of flood-gates of abuse.... What I
want to do in this very personal essay, which has turned out to be far longer
and more rambling than I envisaged, is to argue that there are ethical undertones
to the different readings of the Great War that have grabbed the headlines of
late and that therefore there are political stances that underpin different
historical standpoints. These need not
equate with the proclaimed stance of the writers in question. We need to be entirely up front about that
and not pretend that one side's view represents truth and the other myth. I will try to show, first, that the revisionist view of the war
is as partial as the straw man myth that it aims to dismiss. I will then move to argue that there are
non-empirical steps taken within the historical methodology adopted which are
inseparable from a particular set of political ideals which implicitly underpin
the reading espoused. I will finally
argue that the revisionist view, in its exclusion from the debate of a range of
issues, is motivated, consciously or otherwise, by what I consider to be fairly
unpalatable assumptions. I also contend
that a historian who espouses such a reading without seeing these underpinning
assumptions can justly be castigated as not possessing the imaginative or
critical ability appropriate to the status of a good practitioner of the
discipline.]
***
First of all, since I will talk about others' inherent
biases here, let me come clean at the start about my own position. I am
not a WWI specialist of any kind, but then again nor are a number of those who
have sounded off thus far. I have had a
passing hobby interest in the conflict (as a wargamer) for 20-odd years but
won't pretend to any more than that. In
other words I am not going to dispute the fact that there are hundreds,
thousands of people who know more about the war than I do in any sort of empirical
terms. I couldn’t tell you what exactly happened at Loos or Messines or the
Chemin des Dames, or at any number of other battles, or even, with the smaller
ones, where they fit into the chronology; I couldn’t tell you who commanded
whom, where and when; I couldn’t describe the organisation of a German division; I couldn’t tell you the difference between a
Mk.I tank and a Mk.IV or between a Spad XIII and a Sopwith Pup – actually maybe I
could have a stab at that last. Anyway,
if you could, well done you. I can always look them up. Where I take my
stance is in the rather more complex area of the writing of history, and the
ethics and politics thereof, something which I have been professionally interested in. This has led me to a slightly macabre
obsession with what I have termed (and I admit that I am quite proud of this
coinage) ‘Haigiography’ (see what I did there?) - the attempts to rehabilitate
the British high command in the First World War and to re-package the war (or
rather restore the war's original packaging) as a Just War against
tyranny. My family, like most, lost several
members in the conflict, one of whom was listed as missing presumed dead (blown
to bits in other words, or mutilated or decomposed beyond identification) at
Arras, and the powers that be couldn't even take the trouble to spell his
surname properly on the memorial. That
puts me in the opposite camp from the likes of Dan Snow and his family. For that I make no apology.
***
There has been a good deal of ink spilled in recent
weeks over the commemoration of the Great War, particularly since Michael Gove dismissed 'left-wing historians' as propagating a 'myth' about the war as a
fruitless waste of life. Part of the
response to Gove's characteristically ill-informed outburst(1) rightly concerned
his depiction of rival interpretation as a myth. Another component concerned
whether the view of the Great War as a futile and badly-conducted mess was
really a left-wing view. Richard Evans correctly identified a number of writers critical of the war and its conduct
who could by no means be considered as left-wingers: his old sparring partner
Niall Ferguson, for example; Alan Clarke; etc.
Empirically, that may be fair enough, but there are serious problems
with the ad hominem refutation.
To my mind it involves making an important category error in conflating
the documented political stance of the historian with the implicit political
and ethical assumptions that underly the reading. What I hope to demonstrate is that there can
be serious discrepancies between the two but that serious grounds for a
critique of a historian's work and indeed of their ability at the critical
skills essential to the discipline are furnished when a historian proclaims
adherence to one political viewpoint while penning history that is at least
implicitly motivated by notions incompatible with such a stance. I will also propose
that, while the critique of the First World War can originate from a variety of
political positions, the view castigated by Gove actually is left-wing
in its assumptions, while those of the 'revisionist' view in developed,
Haigiographic form cannot be other than reactionary.
Let us take the critical view first. As is clear from Richard Evans' description,
a number of possible starting points exist for such a position. Some critique originates from a judgement of
the national interest - as in Ferguson's work - which is by no means
incompatible with right-wing political views.
Other criticism of the war's conduct takes as its starting point a
purely 'operational', military historical view.
Thus Max Hastings' (a journalist rather than a historian) criticisms of
the British high command in 1914 are not out of keeping with his view of the
war as a just conflict in defence of international law, against German
aggression, in defence of small nations.
From what little I recall of Clarke's The Donkeys, the starting
point was more on these tactical and operational lines, though I may
misremember. Thus a criticism of the
First World War need not originate in a left-wing political stance. It need not. But I would maintain that the particular
critique identified by Gove and others actually is, fundamentally, only
compatible with political and ethical assumptions that sit more readily on the
left than the right. It is not often
that I will admit to Michael Gove being correct about anything so, to whoever got
20 January 2014 in the sweepstake, well done!
The interpretation of the events of 1914-1918 as a
European and even global tragedy, in which something like ten million soldiers
lost their lives, as well as millions more civilians and still millions on top of
that who were physically wounded or maimed or psychologically damaged, in a war
that could have been averted had the ruling class (principally perhaps but
certainly not only in Germany) had the will, sacrificed simply on the altar of
the bragging rights of nations, fits uncomfortably with any political
characterisation other than left-wing.
The tactical or strategic competence or otherwise of the high command is
essentially irrelevant to such a reading, although if incompetence could be
proven it might add to the indictment.
Some would say that a certain heartlessness in the high command is a
requisite of effective military leadership, even in a somehow ethically
justifiable, 'just war'. Someone like
U.S. Grant , willing, in Lincoln's words, 'to do the arithmetic' might end a
war more quickly and at less cost than someone, like George McLellan, obsessing
about risk and drawing out the war and the casualty list as a result. What is at stake at the end of the day is the
reading of the war as a waste of human life and a refusal to accept national
honour and patriotism as any sort of justification for slaughter.
[Incidentally, let me clarify at this point that the
justification of slaughter on the altar of the class struggle may
unproblematically be a left wing reading of a sort, but it is not one that I
share and is one that I would similarly - and fundamentally on directly
analogous grounds - castigate as bad history.]
At this point it is worth pausing to consider the
nature of the reply to Gove's attack made by Labour shadow education secretary,
Tristan Hunt (who at least has a PhD in history, unlike some we'll
encounter). This is classic Labour Party
gutlessness. Hunt typically makes no
stand on any sort of actual left-wing
principle, and instead air-brushes out those socialists like Keir Hardie who
urged the troops not to go, and all those on the Left - in several countries -
who rightly pointed out that the troops had much more in common with the
soldiery on the other side than with the ruling class that was sending them to
war. Instead, he characteristically
dances to the Tory tune and panders to the populist Daily Mail vote by arguing
that the Tories had nothing to teach the Left about patriotism in 1914. Well, good for them; we all know the Dr
Johnson quote about patriotism.
***
Let us turn, then, to the so-called revisionist view.
What, it seems to me, is crucial here is a consideration of historical
motivation. It is, let me be clear,
entirely compatible with my idea of good historical practice to want to
question received ideas; it seems to me, too, to be similarly commendable to
want to set the record straight where analyses have been manifestly unjust to a
particular group or person. With that in
mind one might consider the initial move to reassess the popular ideas of the
Great War to be consistent with no particular political viewpoint.
Certainly the revisionist view has made a goodly
number of important points, all of which are worth knowing about. These, to be
fair, mostly confront the extreme version of what one might very loosely call
the 'Blackadder view'. Attacks were not always unsuccessful; generals did not
always send their men over the top in the same old way; the British army
command did try new and more flexible tactics; troops weren't kept in the
trenches all year round; the British certainly had no monopoly on blood-thirsty
high commanders or military incompetence; some generals were quite good; some
were actually popular with their men; in the end the war on the western front
was a clear military victory for the Entente Powers. And so on.
This is all fair enough and still not necessarily consistent with a
specific political stance.
The problem for me is that revision has gone way
beyond that, and become the distorted Haigiography that I mentioned
earlier. Here is a crude version of the
genre, possibly - who knows?- even a
parody, though far from a misrepresentation of many. It is written by self-proclaimed 'historian'
Dan Snow. ("The History Guy"
on Witter - sorry, Twitter. No,
really.) Like most of this sort of
thing, it sets up a straw man (the so-called Blackadder view) before peddling
an argument that becomes staggering in its sophistry. Now it may be that somehow Snow doesn't see
the political and ethical implications of what is written here. Maybe the article is ghost-written. It will be less insulting to Snow's intelligence
though to assume that his views are consistent with those implicit in the
argument actively being made. If not,
and if he cannot see this, then I think the honest thing for him to do would be
to cease work in the historical sphere immediately.
Elsewhere, in a Daily Heil article (and do
please note the place of publication) where he claims that the officer class
who led Britain into the maelstrom were as much victims as anyone else, Snow
claims to have learnt his WWI history at school from 'Blackadder'. That, evidently, is the historical education
your seven to eleven grand a year buys you at St Paul's… Caveat emptor. I know that, at the
state school I attended, what we were taught about WWI bore no resemblance to
what is now being peddled as the 'left-wing orthodoxy' spoon-fed to children by
horrid, biased schoolteachers. Be that
as it may, Snow is descended from a WWI British general, he's public school-
and Oxford-educated, married to a daughter of one of the land's wealthiest
aristocrats and, as with most British army officers in the Great War, his
family connections are hardly irrelevant to his position (though he does at
least have a first-class degree in history, and that puts him ahead of some in
this discussion). That he seems clearly
to be parti pris in support of the British aristocracy and military
establishment is perhaps therefore no surprise.
Let me be clear, though, the article is not composed of lies,
falsifications or untruths, as such. What it does is to select another
set of facts and spin them in a particular way to make a particular
argument in support of a political position, and then to pretend that that spin
is 'the truth', debunking 'myths'. The
attitudes and decisions behind such selection and spin are what need to be
brought to the surface.
To caricature Snow's article, only very slightly,
essentially the war really wasn't so bad and anyway the toffs had it worse than
the rest while the oiks were jolly glad to be out there. Those of us whose origins lie in
working-class families with members listed as 'missing', in the new euphemism
of the war, on the western front should all actually be grateful to the aristos
for risking their lives to allow the chaps to get out into the fresh air, have
a decent square meal and get the clap off French prostitutes. Huzzah!
Cor blimey, God bless you, mister Snow.
You're a real gent, gov, and no mistake.
Excuse me while I tug my forelock.
…. OK, you may justly charge me with being a bit
unfair in, as an actual historian, using my blog (readership at best 500 hits a
day, some of whom redirected from some - shall we say? - less wholesome websites) to take to task a
little journalism by someone no better qualified than our MA intake last term:
a simple summary of other people's actual research like an undergraduate essay,
and not an especially good one at that.
But Snow's piece, he says, has had over a million readers and, even if
only an intellectual pot-boiler in itself, it does sum up a series (and style)
of arguments that I find grossly misleading and offensive and which constitute,
as I hope to demonstrate, Bad History to the same degree as the equally
caricatured 'myth' they take aim at. It
will mislead a lot of people.
 |
| Some of the chaps, taking time off from army food banquets and banging Mademoiselle from Armentières to have an absolute bally load of fun in the special Passchendaele adventure playground, thoughtfully provided for them by the kind-hearted gentry |
Even at its best, the revisionist argument remains
partial. Not every unit on the Somme in
1916 was ordered to advance towards the enemy in a more or less straight line -
but some units were. If, as one
'revisionist' writer has been argued, it was tactically essential for British
troops in the attack to carry those 60lbs of equipment with them into No-Man's
Land, why was that not also true for their French allies and German
enemies? It is pretty difficult, with
all the will in the world, to avoid the 'donkey tracks' on some fronts,
especially the Dardanelles and Mesopotamia.
It's difficult to see the fruitless uphill frontal attacks against
Bulgarian positions at the Battle of Doiran (18-19 September 1918; a Graeco-British
defeat), when the war was all but over, as anything other than a senseless
waste of human life - pointlessly adding another 10-12,000 to the war's
'butcher's bill'. Haig was popular; a
lot of very bad generals (most notably the afore-mentioned Geo. McLellan) were
very popular with their men so you don't get far on that line. It becomes a little difficult to push praise
of Haig and the rest too far for their competent and flexible handling of a
novel position with new and insurmountable tactical problems when one considers
a series of points.
Snow regurgitates: "Rarely in history have commanders had
to adapt to a more radically different technological environment. British
commanders had been trained to fight small colonial wars, now they were thrust
into a massive industrial struggle unlike anything the British army had ever
seen." In fact, of all the western combatants in 1914, the British (after their
experience of smokeless powder, magazine rifles, machine guns and quick-firing
artillery, trenches and barbed wire in South Africa in 1899-1901, where the
officer class hadn't exactly distinguished itself) had the best and clearest
idea of what new forms of firepower could do on a large scale. Since the Franco-Prussian war, forty-three
years previously, the German and French armies had had less experience of
modern warfare than the British. And
yet, in spite of the country having been steadily geared up for a war for years
(viz the naval arms race with Germany), the British went to war with a small
(if impeccably trained) professional army, in which no commander had had any
experience or training in handling a formation larger than a division, in which
the C-in-C Sir John French pooh-poohed his subordinate Horace Smith-Dorrien for
having trained the cavalry disproportionately (in his view) in dismounted
fighting. Even Snow's account of his
ancestor is filled with criticism of British preparation. Somehow, the British
went to war, in spite of being as aware of the possibility of war as any other
nation, in spite of their Boer War experience, with the view that a force of
80,000 men (from a population of 46 million) would somehow be sufficient, would
somehow last long in a modern war on a European scale. By way of comparison, and as the high command
well knew, in 1914 the French were fielding an army ten times that size from a
slightly smaller population. As they doubtless didn't know but could have
guessed, the German Empire mobilised a slightly larger army (800,000 or so)
from a population of 65 million. If the
nature and scale of this war really took the British military high
command by surprise, that is something that, in terms of culpability, is really
pretty difficult to put a positive spin on.
The fact that they subsequently (albeit slowly - more slowly than their
opposite numbers - see below) did their best to put that right amounts to
little by way of mitigation.
 |
| Passchendaele in 1916 before the battle... |
More importantly, French and German infantry tactics
evolved faster than British, even though they started from a lower base. That the French turned up for the Great War
dressed for the Franco-Prussian is well known; less widely appreciated are the
facts that the German army still employed attack in deep, fairly close-order
columns and, like the French, still brought their regimental standards forward
into battle, something the British army had stopped doing in 1880. '[W]ithin three years the British [sic]
had effectively invented [sic] a method of warfare
still recognisable
today', says Dan Snow or his researchers.
The tactics that the revisionists praise the British
command for having developed by 1917 were, in outline, in use by the French at
least by the middle of 1916. On the
first day of the Somme, while the British lost 60,000 casualties in a day, the
French attacks - using some of those tactical methods - broke through the
German lines for some distance. There
were reasons for the difference in the degree of success, but none that
entirely gets the British command off the hook, especially when requests to
divert men and resources to support the French success were turned down. By not taking a properly comparative view,
even justifiable revisions of the stock view of the incompetent British high
command nevertheless, misleadingly, only tell part of the story, and thereby,
you might reasonably argue, become as bad history as the myths they claim to
dispel.
 |
| ... and after. "Huge artillery pieces fired with pinpoint accuracy - using only aerial photos and maths they could score a hit on the first shot." (Snow) That dashed Jerry had to run about all over the place before we got him. |
So, although it has produced a welcome increase in
nuance, the debate on tactical competence cannot be considered over. This is a
pretty narrow element of the analysis, however. If one is thinking about the inevitable
political content of history, which is ultimately the main point of this essay,
one is entitled to ask what motivates a historian to try to exonerate the
officer class, especially when that argument pushes far beyond the
establishment of corrections to earlier views.
And some of this work has very much done that. One might take as an extreme case the
apparently best-selling book by one Gordon Corrigan, not an historian but an
ex-army officer, which dismisses the negative view of the war as 'poppycock'
and even goes so far as to deny that the generation of the 1914-1918 combatants
was a 'lost' generation. I find that
distasteful. Demographically, one in ten of France's active male population was
killed; France did not recover from the war for decades in demographic terms. Similarly, while Snow's piece does mention
the numbers of British dead, although estimated on the low side (he claims
'just over 700,000'; other sources give figures 100,000 or so higher) he
glosses this ('[a]lthough
more Britons died in WW1 than any other conflict…') with sophistic arguments about percentages, saying that a higher
percentage of British troops died in the Crimea and a higher percentage of the
population during the Civil Wars, as though that in any way justifies those
brute, absolute figures. What is
being presented here, firstly, is a pretty hollow attempt to exonerate the
British high command by saying that British troops stood a higher chance of
dying in a worse (if smaller) mess produced by the British military elite's
organisational incompetence a half century earlier. As for the Civil War, what Snow is doing here
is presenting an estimate - we simply don't have robust data even for the sizes
of armies and numbers of battlefield casualties, or overall population, for the
Civil War - as a fact with the same epistemological status as the hard data
from WWI. So ponder, for now, the moral,
ethical and political motivation that must surely lie behind such
arguments. Ponder how well it sits with
what I have argued before to be the fundamental ethical demand at the heart of
serious historical enterprise. Ponder
whether someone who writes such arguments without thinking of these
issues or who simultaneously claims to take a political position incommensurate
with them could seriously be considered competent.
I find distasteful the denigration, for the simple
reason that it took the form of poetry, of contemporary primary source
material, written by men who were there and who in many cases lost their
lives. What, politically, one might again
reasonably ask, motivates a writer to deny the validity of a corpus of genuine
source material simply in the interest of abstract, clinical, sanitised
operational analysis? Some have gone
as far as to question the psychological or mental suitability of these 'mere
poets', a view which really cannot be categorised other than as mindless
right-wing militarism. Certainly, for
me, I would find the mental state of a Wilfrid Owen or a Siegfried Sassoon,
deeply troubled by the slaughter, far less a cause for concern than that of an
automaton who went through the experience of the trenches without suffering any
adverse effect, let alone that of someone who actually enjoyed it (Ernst
Juenger?). Ponder whether the explaining
away of a corpus of primary material constitutes good history. Ponder the ethical and political motivation
for doing so - let alone those for impugning the mental health of those
sources' authors.
For what little it's worth, I think I might prefer to
be commanded by someone who took a critical stance to the whole business than
by someone who simply, slavishly and unquestioningly obeyed. Who knows?
We have recently had it pointed out that the casualty rate among
officers was higher than that among ordinary troops, as though this changes the 'lions
led by donkeys' view. That doesn't
follow. All armies make a particular
effort to kill the other side's officers because doing so tactically disables a
larger number of the enemy army.
Dan Snow claims that it was the
officers' job 'to lead the way over the top and expose themselves to the
greatest danger as an example to their men.'
Not so. What a field officer is
there to do is to lead and command, sure, but it is most certainly not
his job to get himself killed in heroic acts of derring-do - for precisely the
tactical reasons just mentioned; it would leave his men leaderless. Acts of battlefield heroism may demonstrate
courage - and I don't believe anyone ever seriously doubted the bravery of
these men - but say little about military competence or - to be fairer -
appropriate military training. As an
analogue for what I mean (it may not be entirely apt but it'll serve) during
one battle in the Boer War (maybe the Modder River but I forget), Lord Methuen,
in command of the British army, abandoned his command post to lead platoon
level attacks, when his operation got bogged down. This was courageous, for sure, but it
abdicated any sort of control over the battle.
My point, of course, simultaneously defends 'Chateau Generalship' to
some degree, but, as mentioned, operational analysis is a pretty small part of
the historical whole. Dan Snow claims
that 'most
[generals] visited the front lines every day'. Most. Every day. The front-line trenches. That is a
claim that cries out for actual demonstration.
And 'more
than 200 generals were killed, wounded or captured'. Note the sleight of hand here and again ask
about its motivation. This includes wounded and captured - and, um, what's a
decent general doing getting captured?
That couldn't be a reference to Townshend at that triumph of British
Imperial arms, the siege of Kut al-Amara
could it? 50-70% of the imperial
forces captured there died in miserable conditions in Turkish captivity while
Townshend spent the remainder of the war in comparative luxury. The figure for actual British/imperial
generals who died in the war is 58, not all in action, compared with 900,000
other ranks. Well that's all right then. Some might say it was their war after
all. I'm not sure I would, but articles
like some of those I have read, not just Snow's, are enough to turn even
wishy-washy lefty liberals like me into raging Jacobins [Haigiographers: ask a
friend what a Jacobin is].
Casualties among the officer corps might lead to the
promotion of competent, experienced men from the ranks below, but few are the
armies in which this is uniformly the case, and the army of the British Empire
in 1914-18 certainly wasn't one such. Field
Marshal Slim, who made it to that rank from private, is well-known is precisely
because his case was effectively unique.
What officer casualties led to instead was the appointment of ever
younger men of the right sort of social class to field command. From 1916 - so after only two years of
slaughter (well done, chaps!) - the British did stop directly commissioning
officers into the army in the old way but officers from the right class could
be very young. Anthony Eden (an old
Etonian, needless to say) was battalion adjutant at 18. Just three weeks ago I was looking at the
memorial window in Worcester Cathedral to a seventeen-year-old captain killed
in action in the Great War. That was no
less a tragedy for his family than the death of a relative in the war was for
any other family, of course, and it is a pretty unimaginable burden for a
seventeen-year-old to be put in charge of a combat unit. But is it surprising that young lads like
that got killed? You might even say that
that burden made things worse for them than for new recruits, just told what to
do and maybe looked after by more experienced soldiers. It's not a suggestion I would take issue
with. But spare a thought, too, for the
men put under the orders of these teenagers. The Worcester man was a captain in
a British imperial African unit, which raises an extra, unsavoury element of
the 'revisionist' view, to which I will return.
But hey, if I was going to go over the top into No-Man's Land and into
the teeth of barbed wire, artillery and Maxim Gun fire, how better to do it
than behind some brave but inexperienced teenager whose ideas of war came from
the playing fields of Eton?
For all that the
revisionists have made the picture more sophisticated - and they have - the
conditions of trench war, especially during the early years, were
horrific. Not so in Dan Snow's idea of
the war. He wants us to believe that
many men enjoyed the war. Not of course
that we might question their mental state… But to see that this is at best a gross
distortion, just skim the Imperial War Museum’s recent volume of WWI photographs. Again it does not get you away from brute
statistics. The British army is said to
have suffered 20,000 cases of trench foot in late 1914 alone. The overwhelming weight of contemporary
witness to front-line experience suggests something horrific, which it simply
won't do to explain away with the fact that they did get a square meal and some
time away from the front. Snow omits to
mention that frequently even 'rest areas' lay within German artillery range so
that troops could be and were killed even when their unit was officially 'out
of the line'. Here is an old veteran,
Arthur Savage (not a poet as far as I’m aware), interviewed at the age of 92:
“My
memories are of sheer terror and the horror of seeing men sobbing because they
had trench foot that had turned gangrenous. They knew they were going to lose a
leg. Memories of lice in your clothing driving you crazy. Filth and lack of
privacy. Of huge rats that showed no fear of you as they stole your food
rations. And cold deep wet mud everywhere. And of course, corpses. I’d never
seen a dead body before I went to war. But in the trenches the dead are lying
all around you. You could be talking to the fellow next to you when suddenly
he’d be hit by a sniper and fall dead beside you. And there he’d stay for
days.”
Ah, c'mon now, Mr
Savage, you know you loved it really…
In my own family
lore, the story goes that my grandfather's family knew his Uncle Joe wasn't
coming back again on his last spell home on leave, when he sat with what would
now be called a hundred-yard stare, by the fire, still obsessively listening
for the sound of German miners. The war
had got to him. When the war got to Dan
Snow's ancestor, the general, he retired, commendably enough to give the job to
a younger and better-suited man. That
option wasn't open to men like my Granddad’s Uncle Joe. And they couldn’t even be bothered to spell
his name right. If he'd written an
account, even his testimony would doubtless now be rejected by the revisionists
as irrelevant, what with him being clearly a bit, you know, psychologically
unfit, …
 |
| More larking about in the puddles. What jolly japes. |
The blinkered
aspects of the narrowly military historical revisionist camp are further
pointed up by briefly considering the period after the war. Returning troops came home to a bad
situation. Any understanding of
'shell-shock' was at best rudimentary.
Then there was mass unemployment and the Great Depression. The likes of Douglas Haig, by contrast,
returned to comfort, honours and
glory. They are claimed to have 'done what they could' for their men, although
in all fairness men of their position and influence could have done way, way
more, had they had any sort of political will.
But then Haig in later life became, like many of his class, something of
a fascist sympathizer, even on the account of his loyal historian Gary
Sheffield –
a fact which alone gives the lie to the revisionist ‘Great Just War for
Civilisation’ argument
***
What I have wanted
to do thus far is to demonstrate that the revisionist view is no less partial
than that which it claims to confront - although that which it claims to
confront comes frequently from satire, and the point of satire is frequently to
exaggerate, but let's let that pass. Its
most common target, Clarke's The Donkeys, wasn't even a work by a proper
historian - indeed Clarke evidently later admitted that he made up the 'lions
led by donkeys' quote himself. What I
have also wanted to do is to suggest that, just that there are political
reasons to paint the war misleadingly as a heartless and deliberate slaughter
of the working class by the ruling classes, there are similar political and
ethical choices that lie behind the attempts to exonerate or rehabilitate the
British high command, the officer classes and so on. All the selection of facts, the prioritising
of some sources over others, the spinning of the casualties, emphasising the
relative rather than the absolute: these are all the results of conscious
decisions independent of empirical accuracy.
It is entirely disingenuous, in other words, to claim simply that all
this represents 'the truth', devoid of political intention.
I want to suggest,
nevertheless, that there are also some serious methodological problems lying
behind much 'revisionist' work, qua history:
1. That it is narrowly military, and narrowly tactical at that
2. That it concentrates to an unjustifiable degree purely on
the years of the war, or its immediate prelude, choosing its time frame as
narrowly as possible to suit its argument
3. That it concentrates on the British army while ignoring the
comparative aspect presented by other armies, not least because that would
attenuate many of its arguments
4. That it attempts to explain away or negate a considerable
corpus of contemporary primary source material
That last point
leads to others, which relate more directly to my own stance on history
writing, as repeatedly outlined in this blog:
1. That it does the latter (point 4, above) in an attempt to sanitise the war by
concentrating on operational analysis, and
2. That it is thereby unethical and breaches the fundamental,
implicit ethical demand at the heart of the historical endeavour
For now, let us
accept that the debate on the conduct of the war is now more nuanced and subtle
than it was, and that it has some way to run.
Those are both Good Things. Let
us also assume that, even then, the case could be argued empirically either
way. If that is the case then, even if
we assume that we went into the subject with a completely unbiased mind (were
that possible), we choose on the basis
of politics or ethics between one reading or the other, where the empirical
cannot help us decide. In other words we
enter the space of what Derrida would call différance. This is where (for all that is such a misused
term) deconstruction comes into history, to isolate and open up those spaces of
the undecidable where writers (and readers) make choices based upon their
political or ethical preferences. It
comes into play when historians make a choice to privilege one type of
unimpeachable contemporary evidence over another. In other words to expose all the decisions
that go into how to write up an argument such as that in, say, Dan Snow's
piece. It matters to do this because it
helps us to be honest enough about the inescapably political nature of all
historical writing, rather than claiming one view (ours) to somehow represent
an unalloyed, objective truth and the other (theirs) to be a distorted
politically-motivated myth - as is all too often the case (on both sides but
lately more on the Right) in this discussion.
As regular readers of this blog know, I think that there is a humanist demand
at the heart of history that allows us to choose between readings.
Either way, given
that the tactical argument is indecisive and even irrelevant, in order to
progress, the debate has at this point to change terrain and become above all
one over whether or not this was a war worth fighting. The ‘revisionist’ view (not actually that
revisionist since it first saw the light in a controversial German book
published over half a century ago) alleges, first, that German militarism
caused the war and, second, that, had the war been lost it would have led to a
Europe dominated by a near-fascist, militarist German Empire. German atrocities are used to claim, somehow,
that the Second Reich was getting on for being as bad as the Third.
It is really at
this point that the serious problems start to open up in the ‘revisionist’ view
as any sort of 'good history', even in straight empirical/methodological
terms. As may have become clear already,
in my view the revisionist discussions of the
war’s causes are riddled with contradictions that make them very difficult to
place coherently alongside the attempts to exonerate the ruling/officer class
from claims of ineptitude. Numerous
countries were geared up for a war in 1914 for all sorts of reasons. That didn’t make war inevitable. Anyone (like me) who took history O-Level in
the 70s or early 80s knows that the whole period between 1871 and 1914 was
peppered with crises that could have led to war, but didn’t. There was no prima facie reason why
Franz Ferdinand and his wife’s shooting by Gavrilo Princip (who, ironically,
very nearly survived the war he started before succumbing to TB in an Austrian
jail in April 1918) had automatically to lead to war any more than the Agadir
crisis of 1911 had done. The German aristocracy
and royalty were still hob-nobbing with their British and other counterparts
(and relatives) right up to the war’s outbreak.
And so on. As I tell my students,
nothing in history ever ‘had to be that way’.
Plenty of good historians who know far more than I do have countered the
'wicked Hun' argument on many empirical grounds and without necessarily coming
from any sort of unique or shared 'left-wing' political angle - even if those
writers who have espoused the attempts to blame Germany have frequently overtly
been of the Right (e.g. Max Hastings).
Further, to move
from the fact that many troops believed that they were fighting to defend their
land from aggression to the argument that that was what was definitely at stake
in the war is to commit another ‘category error’. After all, many German troops, Austrian
troops, Russian troops, all thought they were fighting for something
similar.
Claims for a
somehow proto-Nazi German inhumanity, worse than that of the other
belligerents, that had to be stopped to make a better Europe are difficult to
substantiate. They ignore the many
genocidal statements produced by British and French statesmen and others about
wiping out all Germans. It is impossible
to say how Franco-British troops would have behaved towards German civil
populations had the war been waged on German soil. You could at least say that the history of
the Boer War presents sufficient reason not to be too sanguine. The revisionists also ignore the exploitation
of the manpower resources of their African and Asian Empires (I don’t only mean
as soldiers) by Britain and France.
Before you argue that that was somehow ‘different’, just stop and think
for a minute about what rather – shall we say? – tricky assumptions
underlie the idea that the exploitation, degradation and even massacre of white
westerners was worse than that of non-Europeans in conquered colonies. Again we
enter the sphere of argumentative decisions and their inescapable
politico-ethical implications. I’ll see your German atrocities and raise you an Amritsar Massacre,
gas-bombing in Morocco by Spain and France and in Abyssinia and Libya by Italy,
and the bombing and strafing of civilian settlements by
French and British air-forces in Syria Mesopotamia and the North-West Frontier - all after the war, all in the world allegedly saved
from German military despotism by the sacrifice of 17 million lives. While acknowledging that the alleged British
use of mustard gas in Mesopotamia and Waziristan is at best unproven, one has
to remember that RAF commanders (Trenchard and Harris) and politicians
(Churchill) urged its use against ‘savages’ whom, they claimed, were not covered by the Geneva Convention.
Here's another
point, which seems to be overlooked by those arguing (Eurocentrically) that
Britain went to war in August 1914 simply as a Just Crusade in defence of
plucky Belgium and international law.
Britain declared war on 4 August.
On 5 August, British forces began hostile operations against the German
colony of Togoland. On 7 August, still a
week before any British troops had even landed in France, British troops
invaded, incidentally - and more than a little ironically - ignoring the 'Congo
Conference' of 1884-5, signed by Britain and France, that had agreed on Congo
Basin neutrality in the event of a European War and which the German governor
had offered to respect. By 25 August, a
few days after the Battle of Mons, British troops ignored similar German offers
of neutrality to invade Cameroon. By
September, operations had begun against German Namibia. And so on.
The British Empire had its eyes on other issues than the violation of
Belgian neutrality.
The treaty
guaranteeing Belgian neutrality, dating to 1839, which provided the pretext for
the British declaration of war, was signed overtly to protect the newly created
kingdom from aggression and annexation either by France or by the Kingdom of
the Netherlands, against whom the Belgians had just risen in revolt to achieve
independence. Small wonder that
Bethmann-Hollweg called it 'a scrap of paper' and justifiably saw it as merely
a pretext for activating the Entente Cordiale.
For most of the war, King Albert did not view the British and French as
technically his allies, maintaining instead that his country remained only a
violated neutral party in the conflict.
It also seems to have been forgotten that the French Plan XVII envisaged
at least the option for a French offensive through Belgium, an option taken up
in the event.
Weakest of all in
the 'Just War' revisionism are arguments about what 'would have' happened had
the war been lost. No decent historian
hangs an argument on a counter-factual (a claim that something that didn’t
happen would have happened if something that did happen hadn’t happened) for
the simple reason that it is unprovable and untestable. But then, to be frank, there are, in my
estimation, few enough decent historians among the ‘revisionists’ and, among
that group, proportionately not many writers who qualify as historians of any
sort, rather than journalists, retired army officers and writers of popular
tactical studies. The simple truth of
the matter (and this is a simple truth) is that no one knows what
would have happened had the First World War been avoided, or lost. It might have turned out that way; it might
not. There are so many variables, so
many imponderables, in so many spheres that there is no - there can be
no - ‘balance of probabilities’ to deploy either way. One can as easily argue that a German victory
would have produced a situation roughly comparable to that after 1871.
Nevertheless, one
lands the real killer blow against the rather silly ‘what if’ justification for
the 'just' Great War by looking at its actual
results. The militarist German-dominated
Europe envisaged in the counter factual just
mentioned would
have been worse than the one that did actually eventuate, worse than fascism,
Nazism, Stalinism, the Great Depression, the influenza epidemic … how, exactly? Surely a war
allegedly fought to prevent one particular outcome but which, even when won, at
the cost of millions of dead, produced an even worse situation is the very
definition of pointless slaughter.
The commemoration of the war should focus on it as a global tragedy, something put very well here by Margaret MacMillan, Dan Snow's auntie, as it happens. Only by doing so can we challenge the ideas that helped bring the war about. Banging on about courage, patriotism and national honour, celebrating national victory and apportioning national blame only does the opposite, perpetuating the factors that took Europe and her empires over the precipice.
***
Let me, at last,
conclude. What I have been at pains to stress is that there is - as there
always is - a process of deliberate selection at work in revisionist
history-writing. That deliberate
selection and the choice to spin data in one way or another are not driven
simply, empirically, by the data themselves.
A choice is made to play down the horrors and loss of the war. A choice is made to do this in order to
justify the war as a Just Conflict. We
see the deliberate, selective narrowing of analytical foci to suit the argument
being made - whether thematically, geographically or chronologically. In some cases I have argued that that makes
the work in question bad history. In
other cases we can identify motivations, such as to exonerate a particular
class, which only sit comfortably on the right.
The justification and celebration of the war for virtues such as
patriotism and honour, sits still more comfortably in that area. Some of the arguments deployed, ignoring the
imperial context, are based ultimately on attitudes that can only be
described as racist. Now, let me be very
clear here - read this bit as though I am saying this very … slowly … and … clearly - that does not
mean that writers who have made arguments ultimately on these grounds are
racists. It means that there is an
assumption that underpins an argument that they have made which, if you
excavate and scrutinise it properly, is based upon some fairly unpleasant,
racially-based attitudes. This leads me
to propose two alternative conclusions.
There are only two. One is that
the writers are actually pretty happy with that and so are happy enough to be
identified with the socio-political attitudes and positioning that their work
implies (Max Hastings) - and all well and good.
The other is that they haven't bothered to think this through - in which
case we can justly say that they are pretty damn poor historians. Thus I contend that revisionism is
reactionary.
As to the opposing
view, the idea to stress the scale of damage and slaughter, the incompetence of
generals where it existed, the disproportionate chances and opportunities for
the elite over the rest, the disallowing of the justification of any of this by
appeal to nationalism, patriotism, honour (personal or national) - yes, this
does only sit comfortably on the political left. As some of you know, I think this stance sits
with fewer contradictions alongside the implicit ethical demands of the
historical project and that that therefore makes it better history, but that
case is argued elsewhere.
I am happy enough
to own up to being a left-wing academic historian, and confess that that shapes
how I conceive of and write about history.
It behoves all of us to be honest about their choices and not to pretend
that they exist independently of political, social or ethical belief, let alone
that they represents the single 'truth' of the matter. That really is Bad History.
-----
1: Not to be undone in their jockeying for position to be Cameron's successor, Boris Johnson penned a piece demanding Tristram Hunt's resignation for denying that 'it was the Germans that started it'. It was in the Telegraph and so intellectually piss-poor that it's not even worth the link.
Tuesday, 21 January 2014
An Analysis of the Situation in France
For Francophiles like myself, occasionally exasperated by the way the country works, here is a pertinent analysis of the problems of the republic.
"The Executive power, with its tremendous bureaucratic and military organization; with its wide-spreading and artificial machinery of government--an army of office-holders, half a million strong, together with a military force of another million men--; this fearful body of parasites, that coils itself like a snake around French society, stopping all its pores, originated at the time of the absolute monarchy, along with the decline of feudalism, which it helped to hasten. The princely privileges of the landed proprietors and cities were transformed into so many at-tributes of the Executive power; the feudal dignitaries into paid office-holders; and the confusing design of conflicting medieval seigniories, into the well regulated plan of a government, work is subdivided and centralized as in the factory. The first French revolution, having as a mission to sweep away all local, territorial, urban and provincial special privileges, with the object of establishing the civic unity of the nation, was hound to develop what the absolute monarchy had begun--the work of centralization, together with the range, the attributes and the menials of government."It comes from the pen of ... Mr Karl Marx, towards the end of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852). Still seems to me to be a valid analysis.
Wednesday, 8 January 2014
Great Myths of the Migrations, no.1: The Huns and Deformed Skulls
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| A deformed skull from an 'Alamannic' context |
If there is any aspect of 'Hunnic' archaeology that might be called 'well-known', I suppose it is the 'fact' that the Huns had deformed skulls. Roman authors said they were misshapen beasts and so when people found artificially deformed skulls (effected by binding the child's head between boards) they leapt to the conclusion (not least by ignoring the ethnographic traditions within which Ammianus and the others were writing) that these must be Huns. And that is the interpretation you will find in most books on the subject (my Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West included, although I do strike a note of caution).
However, it is rather less straightforward than that. For one thing, I think I am right in saying that the known individuals with deformed skulls are more often women than men,
whereas the Romans were talking about Hunnic warriors. Be that as it may, here (right) is a map of deformed skulls up by Joachim Werner a long time ago (redrawn in an article about the cemetery at Sézegnin in Switzerland - where the symbol in the box is - where the three examples were all female). It is almost certainly out of date although I don't think the overall pattern has changed very much. The map has been generally used to argue that the Huns had a cultural influence on the Germani whom they subdued, so that the latter adopted the 'Hunnic' practice of skull deformation. In a rather circular argument, this is then used as proof that the Huns deformed their skulls...
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| Joachim Werner's map of cranial deformation |
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| The western European section of Werner's distribution map |
Note at this stage that there is no reason to associate the examples on the steppe specifically with the Huns rather than the other groups that inhabited the region.Indeed in the Volga area the rite is known as early as the 2nd century.
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| Cranial Deformation in the 'Age of Attila' |
The picture only becomes more complex if you sort out the burials by date. Let's look, first, at the distribution of burials of individuals with deformed skulls from the actual time of Hunnic domination north of the Danube. Let's take this as, say, c.400 to c.450, although Hunnic domination of the areas now in Germany can't seriously be postulated until the 430s at least and was probably never very intensive, breaking up within a couple of decades at most in any case. At right I have crudely rubbed out the later examples and left only those dated by Werner to the 5th century - remember, first, that there may be some new examples here and there and, secondly, that there may be some missing in south-eastern France. Undated examples have been left on. You'll note that here the Hunnic Empire's 'core area' is even emptier than in the overall picture. Remember too that, if anything, the Steppe distribution of cranial deformation at this time is moving back eastwards... The real area of density in Europe is to the west of the Huns, and - and this is the really odd thing - largely west of the Danube, inside the Roman Empire. This part of the world was being infiltrated by all sorts of shadowy small peoples, even the existence of some of whom isn't certain (Skiri, Turcilingi, Rugi, Gepids, Heruls etc., etc.) but if this is a barbarian practice then it originates inside the old limes. Maybe these people were trying physically to distinguish themselves from the provincial Romans? Either way, if we were allowing the archaeological evidence to speak for itself we would hardly see this map as proof that cranial deformation was something introduced into the west from the steppes via the Carpathian basin.
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| Cranial deformation at the end of the 5th century and in the 6th century |
Now let's look at a slightly later situation. In the map at left I have rubbed out all the examples from the 'age of Attila' (and the undated ones, which probably is an error) and left only the ones from the end of the 5th century and the 6th century. Remember again that there are new discoveries and the southern French examples missing. Now there is a cluster of deformed skulls in the Hunnic Empire's core area - but dating to after the end of that Empire! The main area of distribution has shifted to an area just west of the middle Elbe, with some outliers on the Rhine. If I reinstated the undated examples there would be a thin thread of possible examples connecting the two groups shaded in green. The western distribution, as it happens, is not dissimilar from the distribution of supposedly 'Thuringian' metalwork from the same sort of period (see below, right). If anything, then, when this rite spread to the Merovingian world, it may have been a sign of Thuringian identity but, from these distribution maps, there is precious little evidence to suggest that the Thuringians adopted it from their Hunnic overlords.
What a closer study of the distribution suggests is that the fifth-century practice of cranial deformation originated among the mix of people west of the Hungarian stretch of the Danube and then spread out to east and west. By this stage there are very few examples in the Steppes region. In the east the practice's appearance may be something to do with the competing political identities in the complicated political 'interregnum' that lasted in the area from the collapse of the Hunnic realm to the establishment of Avar hegemony over a century later. The maps to the right (from Barbarian Migrations) show how the Elbe and connecting rivers were a real artery of cultural exchange in the fifth and sixth centuries, as they had been earlier. That the practice of cranial deformation should have spread to the Thuringians along this route is unsurprising. Here it may have become a sign of Thuringian ethnicity, as that interesting realm spread its hegemony over other groups in trans Rhenan barbaricum during the later fifth century. I argued in 2007 that the presence of 'Thuringian' metalwork was related to this, even if I suggested that those buried with it might be those claiming Thuringian identity in local politics, rather than actual Thuringian immigrants. Some valuable work is being done, using isotope analysis, on whether women with deformed skulls have married in to particular communities from outside. If they are they could represent a different element of the process. But either way I think we have to get away from the assumption that deformed skulls necessarily have anything to do with Huns.
* Map from Christian Simon, 'La déformation crânienne artificielle de la nécropole de Sézegnin GE.' Archäologie der Schweiz/Archéologie Suisse/Archeologia Svizzera 2 (1979), pp.186-88.
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