Ww1

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Brave Tommies and dim earls — Oh What a Lovely War is hoity-toity reductionism

Here it is. Fifty years late. Oh What a Lovely War was originally staged at Stratford East in 1964. It returns to its birthplace to cash in on this year’s anniversary of the Great War. Sorry, I meant commemorate. The title is so familiar that one overlooks its callow, misanthropic glibness. Does anyone think war ‘lovely’? The show’s narrator sprints through the causes of the conflict, and its chief battles, without offering any historical insight. Music-hall songs and comedy stereotypes trundle past on a conveyor belt of laughter and slaughter. The show was inspired by angry dogmatist Joan Littlewood, who wanted to sock it to R.C. Sherriff for writing a

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Wind and bias, and the Scots at war

Caution over wind Sir: While the broadcast media have assailed their audiences with simplistic yet blanket coverage of the floods crisis, it behoves Christopher Booker to provide a long overdue critical perspective of the Environmental Agency (‘Sunk!’, 15 February). The two main tenets of his article have been ignored by most, if not all, other journalists. With something approaching delicious irony we are then treated in the same issue to a self-serving missive from the Renewables UK boxwallah Jennifer Weber (Letters, 15 February). Replete (as one would expect from an organisation that previously went under the name British Wind Energy Association) with dismissive assertions and bogus statistics, Weber’s letter exemplifies the

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes: What shall we call the Country Formerly Known as Britain?

Last week, David Cameron said that we have ‘seven months to save the most extraordinary country in history’. He meant the United Kingdom. It was a powerful speech, part of a welcome and overdue campaign to make us all think about what is at stake in the referendum on Scottish independence. It seems strange to argue that the loss of less than 10 per cent of the population would bring this country to an end, and yet I do really suspect it might be so. Mr Cameron did not touch on the question of what the nation, minus Scotland, might be called, perhaps because he does not know and is fearful

Thursday

Christopher Booker

How the first world war inspired the EU

Among the millions of words which will be expended over the next four years on the first world war, very few will be devoted to explaining one of its greatest legacies of all, the effects of which continue to dominate our politics to this day. One of the best-kept secrets of the European Union is that the core idea which gave rise to it owed its genesis not to the second world war, as is generally supposed, but to the Great War a quarter of a century earlier. It was around that time that the man who can be described as ‘the Father of Europe’ was first inspired to the

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

When No Man’s Land is home

Countless writers and film-makers this year will be trying their hand at forcing us to wake up and smell the first world war.  How do they plant a fresh, haunting, horrifying image into our unwilling and saturated heads? We know it all: the trenches, the mud, the shell holes, the rats, the man plodding towards the house with the telegram, the local surnames repeated with different initials on the war memorial. All very much in the ‘too sad to think about’ department, particularly if you love Edwardian children’s stories and start contemplating What Happened to Oswald Later. Helen Dunmore, an assured writer who in a previous novel has forced us

Friday

Ed West

Playing down Australia and New Zealand’s role in the Great War is shameful

Back in the 1950s my grandmother wrote her memoirs of childhood in Edwardian London, a story that ends in the summer of 1914, when she was 14. In contrast to the image we’re given of cheering men skipping to war, she recalls her father in tears at the breakfast table, lamenting that the politicians had failed. He foresaw total disaster (optimism runs in the family). She then finds that her brother has joined up, not out of excitement or glory but because he’s ashamed not to be in uniform; he survived, although broken by shellshock, and his elder son was killed in the next war. It’s clear from her recollection

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Bye-bye Bric, hello Mint — are Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey really the new boom economies?  

New year new ideas as we woke up on Monday morning to find ourselves in Lagos with Evan Davies trying to convince us that Nigeria really is undergoing an economic earthquake. It’s part of a week-long campaign by Radio 4 to make us believe that the next economic leaders among world nations will be Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey. These new Mint countries are destined, we are told, to take over from the Bric countries, now deemed passé after just a decade in the limelight generated by the economist fashionistas. It’s stimulating stuff for this hibernating time of year. Bulletins and programmes high on optimism and imbued with the belief that

Wednesday

Steerpike

Sarah Vine: Michael Gove loves Germany

While Michael Gove and academic lefties continue to row about the causes of the Great War, the education secretary’s wife, Sarah Vine, has helpfully poured some fuel on the fire. Vine’s always-mischievous Mail column reveals that her husband admires the Germans: ‘While I wasn’t looking, my husband, Michael Gove, appears to have declared war on Germany. This has prompted some commentators to compare him to Basil ‘Don’t mention the War’ Fawlty. This is understandable, but wrong: he actually loves Germany and all things Teutonic, from Richard Wagner to bratwurst.’  She mentioned it once; but I think she got away with it.

Friday

Kate Chisholm

How radio — and the digital age — help us to remember the first world war

Perhaps the most moving programme of all amid the huge range that will mark the coming centenary of the Great War will be on 28 June, the day when in 1914 Gavrilo Princip shot dead the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie while they were on a state visit to Sarajevo. On that night, Radio 3, along with other members of the European Broadcasting Union, will transmit live from Sarajevo a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, marking that first step on the road to war. But the evening will also inevitably reflect on how the aftermath of 1914–18 led ultimately to another war, this time in Bosnia, and

Thursday

Sebastian Faulks

Sebastian Faulks’s diary: Inside the official first world war commemorations

A year or so ago I was asked to sit on a committee that advises the government on how to commemorate the first world war. It consists of about 30 dauntingly well-qualified people (former heads of the army and of Nato, historians, ex-defence secretaries), so there seems little for me to contribute at meetings. But it is interesting to be on the government side of something and see how it deals with public expectation and the press. In the summer there was a report in a British paper that the Germans had sent over their commemoration team and asked if, instead of dwelling on the conflict, the British could make

Norman Stone

Norman Stone: From Syria to Iraq, the mess of the first world war is with us still

The European statesmen who went to war in 1914 were extremely well-educated men. Churchill staggered Roosevelt as he could quote reams of quite obscure poetry; the secretary of state for war translated German philosophy; the French president’s brother was a revered mathematician; General von Hindenburg read Faust on campaign (even Corporal Hitler had his Schopenhauer). The only exceptions were probably the aristocrats of the Vienna cabinet, whose definition of scholarship was that it was what one Jew copied down from another. But that world gave us 1914, and a whole set of amazingly bad judgments. No war in modern times has been launched with such a vast failure of cognition.

Thursday

Gavin Stamp

The Briton whose achievement equals that of the Pharaohs’

We constantly need to be reminded that the consequence of war is death. In the case of the first world war it led to death and destruction on an inconceivably vast scale. To convey the enormity of what the industrialised slaughter that supposedly civilised governments unleashed between 1914 and 1918, film-makers like to pan the camera over a vast sea of white crosses. But if they do, that cemetery will probably be French or American. It will certainly not be British. The only cross in a cemetery maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission will be a free-standing one with a bronze sword attached, a rather ‘Onwards Christian Soldiers’ symbol

Tuesday

Alex Massie

When 50,000 Irishmen gathered to commemorate the First World War

As I wrote last week, I had not thought commemorating the centenary of the First World War need be a matter of controversy. But one of the reasons why it is worth doing – and worth doing properly and on a large scale – is that the First World War is complicated. Consider the photograph at the top of this post. It was taken on Armistice Day in 1924. In Dublin. Yes, Dublin. The Union Flag is flown. The National Anthem – ie, God Save the King – is sung. A Celtic Cross is erected on College Green prior to its transportation to France where it would serve as a

Friday

Alex Massie

Commemorating the First World War is not a festival of British Nationalism

You should never, these days, under-estimate peoples’ ability to be outraged – outraged, I tells you – by the most innocuous event. Never. There are, after all, a depressing number of chippy morons in this country. Even so, I confess to being surprised by the hostility with which plans to commemorate the First World War have been met. At least in some quarters. I had thought, naively it is now clear, this commemoration would be uncontroversial, what with the First World War being, by any reckoning, an episode of some seriousness and consequence. That’s hardly to say that the war’s arguments have been settled. Far from it. Interpreting or understanding

Tuesday

Mark Amory

The View from 22 podcast books special: World War I and grave hunting

I’m delighted to present the first View from 22 books podcast. We begin with Allan Mallinson’s new book 1914: Fight the Good Fight (reviewed here by Peter J. Conradi), which argues that the Great War might have been won in 1915 if the British Expeditionary Force had been used as a strategic reserve in 1914. Mallinson and Charlotte Moore (who has reviewed Great Britain’s Great War by Jeremy Paxman and Fighting on the Home Front by Kate Adie in the latest issue of the Spectator) imagine what modern Britain would look like if the war had ended earlier. Ann Treneman has written Finding the Plot: 100 Graves You Must See Before You Die.

Thursday

Charles Moore

Charles Moore’s notes: It’s great there’s a World Islamic Economic Forum — now can we have a Jewish one?

As I write, the World Islamic Economic Forum is opening in London, the first time it has been held in a non-Muslim country. David Cameron boasts that investors will now be able to buy sharia-compliant British gilts. If the forum helps Muslim countries share their commercial expertise with one another and the rest of us, well and good. But should modes of global commerce be defined by religious allegiance? What would the conspiracy theorists say about a World Jewish Economic Forum? How would Saudi Arabia — or even Dubai — react to the suggestion of a World Christian Economic Forum taking place within its borders?  And once it is officially proclaimed a

Charlotte Moore

Why Jeremy Paxman’s Great War deserves a place on your bookshelf

The Great War involved the civilian population like no previous conflict. ‘Men, women and children, factory, workshop and army — are organised in one complete unity of social resistance, to defend themselves both by offence and by ordinary defence,’ said Ramsay MacDonald. Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, the popular army padre nicknamed ‘Woodbine Willie’, declared ‘There are no non-combatants.’ This premise underpins both these books. While Kate Adie specifically addresses ‘the legacy of women in World War One’, Jeremy Paxman discusses more generally the state of the embattled nation, its press, its political, industrial and social life, its assumptions and priorities. The strengths and weaknesses of both offerings are surprisingly similar. Both

Thursday

David Blackburn

Come over here, Tom Stoppard

‘I was mad with jealousy,’ said Gwyneth Williams, the controller of BBC Radio 4. ‘I am mad with jealousy,’ she corrected herself, and I believed her. We were discussing Tom Stoppard’s Darkside, a radio play written to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s album Dark Side of the Moon. The play, which was perhaps the radio event of the summer, aired on Radio 2. ‘Mad with jealousy,’ she repeated, in case I had missed the point. Williams has spent the year revitalising Radio 4’s arts coverage. Stoppard’s perfidy aside, she has had marked success. Her aims were to ‘give people a break’ from the Great Recession and to see

Thursday

Jane Ridley

What caused the first world war?

The centenary of August 1914 is still almost a year away, but the tsunami of first-world-war books has already begun. The government tells us that 1914 must be commemorated, not celebrated, and ministers worry about British triumphalism upsetting the Germans. But the debate about Germany’s responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914 won’t go away. Historians are divided into those who blame Germany — John Rohl, Max Hastings — and those who point the finger at someone else, such as Serbia (Christopher Clarke) or Russia (Sean McMeekin) or even Britain (Niall Ferguson). The blame game is of course conceptually flawed. The international system in 1914 was seriously dysfunctional. The

Thursday

Peter J. Conradi

Meeting the Enemy, by Richard Van Emden; 1914, by Allan Mallinson – review

The Great War was an obscene and futile conflict laying waste a generation and toppling emperors. Yet here are two books that situate the horrors of trench warfare within a much larger perspective. One argues that the war had a forgotten ‘human face’. The other that it might all have had a very different outcome. Henry James described  the 1914 plunge of civilisation into blood and darkness as ‘too tragic for any words’ — and about tragedy there is always some air of inevitability, of sailing Titanic-like towards a foredoomed catastrophe. This air of unstoppable fatality has solidified over the intervening century. During the famous 1914 Christmas truce the Tommies