Rec books about WWI?

[mightymads]

I’d like to expand my knowledge on WWI which is quite rusty, to be honest. The last time I studied anything about it properly was at school, and that was about 15 years ago. Until I read Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, it was but a historical event for me as the history program at my school wasn’t particularly strong. It was something from the textbooks, and that was all. The letters made me realise how tragic it was. They gave the sense of “immediate presence” and the taste of how it affected one particular family. So now I’d like to know more.

Comments

[oldshrewsburyian]

*historian rubs hands together in Holmesian fashion* Mine hour is at hand!

A classic is Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory. More recent review articles will sum it up (and changes in the field since), but it's a beautiful work in its own right.

David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War, is a collection of letters you might be interested in.

Among primary sources, I'd recommend Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, which is tender and searing by turns.

A few summing-up thoughts (and I'd be happy to recommend more books for more specific things you're curious about:)

No one agrees on the causes of the war. The centenary of its coming produced not only commemorative campaigns from art installations to Twitter initiatives, but a number of monographs. Was Europe sleepwalking? Was Europe terrified? Historians disagree… and so did contemporaries. From 1914 onwards, the changes that the war brought to society resulted in the time that came before becoming designated as “pre-war,” a time with its own contradictions and contrasts, and, certainly, with its own changes and controversies, but suddenly marked off as starkly, crucially different. This was a total war, and that really cannot be overemphasized. Participation and fear both came to mean new things. Refugees were in England by September 1914. Displacement and violence were experienced by vast numbers of civilians, and civilian life changed drastically as well.

We see in England's and Europe's upper classes, especially, the idea that civilization as known had played itself out… that after the long debates of the 19th century, what was needed was an upheaval, a crisis that would allow each of these powers to reveal or rediscover or reacquire their vitality; that they could be renewed through a purgative experience. You may also see a sentiment somewhat analogous to that of Cecil Rhodes, exhorting young men to leave boring offices for conquest on the plains of Africa… here the idea is less terribly imperialist, but associated with similar ideas of virile heroism. For the men (and women) themselves who joined up, the concept was usually more muted, an idealistic sense of duty which may be hard for us, now, to understand; it was hard to understand even for those looking back on their own sentiments of 1914 in the later years of the war… Again, accounts differ. As the universities were drained of their best and their brightest, the middle class brought up to ideas of both superiority and obligation, there were triumphalist church services held in their honor; the organs of Oxford and Cambridge, Paris and Berlin, rolled mightily. But accounts also survive of a dulled, apprehensive mood; of columns of recently-recruited men marching silently down the avenues.

The Western Front has given modern Europe many of its images of war. Here were the trenches, the mud, the weeks and months of shelling that changed the landscape of France in ways that can still be seen today; the battles that shook the earth across the sea. Here were the disasters, the travesties that found their ways into poems and novels and nightmares, into drawings of destroyed landscapes and fractured men that were deemed too obscene for public exhibition.

The scope of the conflict owed much to the fact that it was an imperial war. The infamously narrow strips of blood and mud and metal on the Western Front were fought over not only for their own sakes, but also very much for the sake of which of the empires in the conflict would have the power to draw the maps of the future.

In the aftermath, all the members of the League of Nations — everybody but Germany and the Ottoman Empire, or what Woodrow Wilson called “dismembered Turkey,” — agreed not to go to war without first submitting the decision for either arbitration or discussion. What collective security means, in practice, is that the members of the league took oaths to protect the “territorial integrity and existing political independence” of other member states against external influence. There was here a significant caveat: there is no oath taken to protect member states from internal disruption. So… Spain’s Civil War, for instance, was not something on which the League of Nations was obliged to step in.

The civilian population, too, was changed—often traumatized—by war. Air raids were a reality for the first time in WWI, meaning that, for urban populations at least, the war could happen anywhere, and at any time. Because of this, and because of the sheer shortage of raw materials, fuel, etc., blackouts were a necessity. Food shortages became increasingly acute as the war dragged on. Rationing was severe in Britain; in France, too many fields had become war zones; in Eastern Europe, too, where the grain fields of Hungary and Romania had been plundered and trampled. Part of the difficulty of collectively processing WWI came from the fact that the hardships of war didn’t automatically end with the declaration of a truce, or even with the signing of the peace treaty (which dragged on so long, and was so conspicuously a space for political rivalries, that it was the subject of jokes even before it was done.)

Changes in the structure of civilian society also had to be coped with. Changes in laws about women’s participation in public life (voting, getting university degrees) seemed almost anticlimactic… freedom in women’s travel and participation in careers had become de facto a necessity, and continued to be so, due to the vast numbers of men killed or incapacitated.

...Clearly, I could go on, but I'll stop doing so for now!

[mightymads]

Thank you so much for your recommendations and an extensive reply. It's stunning really how much WWI changed the society, and it's heartbreaking indeed that "the war to end all wars" was followed by another devastating massacre about two decades later.

[oldshrewsburyian]

Well, it is not only tragic; it is a consequence, however indirect, of the border-chopping done by empires.