Forgotten Voices of the Great War
By Max Arthur. Foreword by Sir Martin Gilbert
Ebury Press in association with the Imperial War Museum
pound;19.99
We call it the First World War because of the one that followed, but in our minds it remains, even as we move towards its centenary years, the Great War. Men who came home on leave found they could not communicate their experiences to their families; but in due course, they were to communicate them effectively to the next generations through a remarkable series of interviews conducted between the 1950s and 1970s by the Imperial War Museum. Nothing can compare with the power of a first-hand account, and the tapes make compelling, sobering, often humbling listening.
Max Arthur has edited these into a series of extracts, each capturing a particular moment in the story, and tailor-made for classroom use as well as for maximum impact on the general reader. The weight of the material is drawn from British soldiers on the western front, but there are contributions from women at home, Australians at Gallipoli and moving testimony from German soldiers.
Huge numbers of Germans had lived in Britain before the war: one Tommy finds himself talking during the 1914 Christmas truce to a German soldier who had kept a butchers shop opposite his uncle’s cobblers on Essex Road in north London; a Mancunian gets into a friendly argument across no-man’s-land with a German who claims to know Manchester better.
Such moments bring out the surreal horror of the slaughter, that men who bore each other no ill will, and who would not normally think of hurting anyone, should kill each other so savagely and in such numbers.
The familiar set pieces are here: Kitchener’s New Army sent into the slaughter of the Somme in 1916; Passchendaele, where you either survived relatively unscathed or died, because the wounded drowned in the mud; Gallipoli, where the Australians and Turks were so close that they could chat with each other, and there was so little space that one account tells of having to use a dead Turk as a table.
There are fresh angles on familiar tales. We have all heard of women giving white feathers to men out of uniform, often soldiers on leave; I had not realised how they targeted young boys who were below military age. Not all of those who lied about their age were joining up out of patriotic eagerness: many were virtually forced into it.
Sean Lang is head of history at Hills Road sixth-form college, Cambridgenbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;
Read this review in full, together withnbsp;many more,nbsp;in this week’s TES Friday magazine
