CELIA Long Long Way - Echoes of the Great War: Home

In 1917 the decorated military hero and increasingly famous poet Siegfried Sassoon issued a public protest to the war and refused to fight any longer. In an effort to control the public relations damage, the military declined to court-martial him and sent him instead to Craiglockhart mental hospital in Scotland. There the eminent doctor W. H. R. Rivers reluctantly agreed to treat him for shell shock, even though neither he nor anyone else was convinced that was really the problem. Based upon meticulous research among case notes from Craiglockhart and other factual sources, yet brilliantly conceived as a work of fiction and beautifully written, Regeneration follows the stories of Sassoon, Rivers, the poet Wilfred Owen, and the fictional Billy Prior, tracing some of the more quiet yet still momentous battles of conscience and principle that were waged behind the lines.

The Western Front, to be sure, dominates the historiography of the war; and on the Western Front, it's the British and German experiences of the war that get the lion's share of the attention. Yet the French lost more men (and civilians) than the British, lost a higher proportion of their population than did the Germans, and in fact were second only to the Ottoman Empire in percentage of prewar population killed as a direct result of the war. Barthas' memoir of the war is one of the few French accounts, written from the perspective of a common soldier, that has been translated into English. Unlike a lot of common soldier narratives, it's also a great read.

Although there are many anthologies of Great War literature, Dover's editors have done a great job collecting some of the best verse from the British poets who lastingly defined the very idea of war poetry and exemplary fiction from a number of participant nations, doing it all with helpful-yet-concise annotations and at an economical price.

A WWI reading list should include a work of war-related fiction; the most famous choice in this genre, of course, is Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. But some prefer Boyd's Through the Wheat. Boyd was a highly-regarded writer in his day, associating with folks like Sinclair Lewis, but Through the Wheat has been all but forgotten since it first appeared in print in 1923. Boyd fought with the Marines in France, so the novel is semi-autobiographical; it's short, brutal, and beautiful. Not a fun read, but a powerful one.

A daughter of the prosperous middle class in England's industrial north, Vera Brittain spent her early life playing tennis and passionately discussing poetry and music with her brother and his school friends. This poignant memoir recounts how dramatically that all changed when she abandoned her education at Oxford to become a military nurse early in the Great War, ultimately serving in several major theatres and, with emblematic irony, in her old Oxford college when it was commandeered as a convalescent hospital late in the war. By war's end, she had lost her brother, her fiancé, most of her closest friends, and the entire world she had grown up believing she understood. Testament of Youth tells of her struggle to find hope and purpose in the wake of that devastating loss.

This history reads like a novel, but is based closely on the actual diaries of those who experienced the war. In this way, Englund describes the war from the ground level, both civilian and military, by focusing on individual stories from all around Europe. A great advantage of this approach is to avoid taking sides, and see this period as a human story, involving the individual victories and defeats of refugees, aid workers and medics, as well as sailors and soldiers. Though it is not a novel, this work has a novel's narrative power to invoke the emotions of the war years.

An eminent man of letters known later in his long life for his novels and classical translations, Robert Graves made his first splash as a poet of the Great War and came to be regarded as something of a poster child for a lost generation of promising young British men when he published this memoir of his early life and war experience in 1929. Cynical yet engagingly funny, Good-Bye to All That draws the reader irresistibly into its elegantly brash anti-hero's caustic perspective on the war in particular and early twentieth-century British culture in general.

Griffith, probably the most pugnacious (and controversial) operational military historian of the past two decades, takes on the notion that -- on the Western Front and especially in the British Army -- the common soldiers were "lions led by donkeys," men sent unwittingly to their deaths by incompetent commanders, and that the primary characteristic of fighting on the Western Front was a grueling and inescapable tactical stalemate. Griffith shows that while ignorance of the realities of modern warfare persisted in the highest echelons of the British command, lower-level officers and their men had adapted to the demands of modern warfare very well after the bloodbath along the Somme in 1916. For those interested in the interplay of technology and tactics, this is -- like most of Griffith's books -- a real treat.

An absorbing and comprehensive political and military account of the war as told by one of the great military historians of recent years. This is a good choice for a reader searching for an introductory survey of the war from start to finish. Keegan offers a level-headed assessment of the hard questions, including who or what were responsible for the outbreak of war, and the strategic and tactical failures—and occasional successes—on the western, eastern and southern fronts.

In these two books, Margaret MacMillan offers a clear narrative of the origins and consequences of the First World War. Her histories offer to help us, in her words, "think carefully about how wars can happen and about how we can maintain the peace.” She shows how Europeans stumbled into a war they did not adequately anticipate or imagine. In Paris 1919, she describes how the final peace treaty had greater consequences, for good and ill, in modern history than any other. MacMillan explains the ideals, pressures and compromises that generated the new world order in 1919 and the often dire consequences in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, helping to created divisions and resentments that have survived to this day.

In these two books, Margaret MacMillan offers a clear narrative of the origins and consequences of the First World War. In the War That Ended Peace she charts the political, economic, and cultural pressures that lead to war. Her unusual text interrupts the historical narrative that declares that the Great War was inevitable.

Nelson's grandfather -- a Swedish immigrant and a doughboy in the 28th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division -- was badly wounded in the heavy fighting around Soissons in July 1918; his company was all but wiped out in a few minutes of fighting along the Paris-Soissons Road. Nelson never succeeded in getting his grandfather (who died in 1993) to tell him the details, so Nelson did a remarkable bit of research: he tracked down the descendants of nearly every soldier in his grandfather's company and assembled a massive pool of written documents and personal recollections from them. The result is a very personal and moving narrative of the life and death of an infantry company in 1918 -- and, incidentally, a highly instructive portrait of life in rural America on the eve of the war.

Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is in many respects the original modern war novel, exploring the devastating physical and psychological trauma of modern warfare. Remarque’s novel is fiction, but offers an authentic depiction of soldiers’ experience of war, and the chasm of misunderstanding between those on the front and those at home. This novel helps readers who have not experienced war to comprehend why veterans of any war have great difficulty even speaking about their experiences.

If one had to pick a military history survey of the conflict (a survey that isn't elephantine, that is), it should be Sir Hew Strachan's The First World (reprint edition, Penguin, 2005). This work should not be confused with Strachan's multi-volume survey. While not as well-known as John Keegan's brief survey history of the war, Strachan’s work has a better grasp of the tactical/strategic context of the Great War than Keegan does.