How They Saw It

I’ve been reading Sapper’s First World War stories this week, which makes a nice change from standing on a stepladder breathing paint. These are the stories he wrote before he found the formula with Bulldog Drummond and, for anyone interested in the war, fascinating stuff. 

They’re not particularly for the faint-hearted – he loathed the enemy and there’s some blood-curdling descriptions of bayonet work.  They’re particularly interesting because they’re very close up to the action (he wrote them while on active service in France) and contain all sorts of tiny details of everyday life that a more distant view glosses out.  I doubt very much if a Sapper would be published today.  He espouses the Allied cause heart and soul and had no doubt about the virtues of what they were doing.  There’s no split vision, no asking of what’s it all about?

The Wikipeadia article on Sapper says the stories were “grimly realistic enough to seem authentic, yet managed to conceal the horrific reality of trench warfare and life at the front line.” 

            I don’t agree that Sapper conceals the reality.  I’ve read shed-loads about the war and plenty of contempory accounts and the Sapper war stories  chime in with the general feel of other accounts written at the same time.  The war poets, who many people know, tend to get lumped together, but there’s a lot of variation in what they actually said.

I say contemporary on purpose, because a lot of what we think of as the big books of the Great War, such as Robert Graves’ Goodbye To All That are written about ten years afterwards.  During that time a lot of the old hatreds had died down, an intellectual cyncism had taken hold of life and the country had gone through the Great Depression.  So what had the war been for?  After all, all that pain, discomfort and sacrifice should have amounted to something, shouldn’t it?  It’s a very natural feeling and fed the embittered we-were-fooled view that held sway in the late Twenties and Thirties.

 It was in 1933 that the Oxford Union Debating Society passed its famous resolution That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country and that attitude  fuelled the view of the war that held sway for years afterwards.  When Alan Clarke weighed in with his notorious book Lions Lead By Donkeys it seemed to tell it like it was.  (Alan Clarke, incidentally, made up the phrase.  He attributed it to a German general to give it a bit more gravitas but he made it up, all the same.) 

            The truth is, that a defensive war, which from the Allied point of view, the Great War was, is perhaps, although the most morally justifiable and the least satisfactory.  After all, you’re fighting to retain the status quo.  And you won’t get the status quo because far too many people have been injured and died and too much has been destroyed. 

            I wanted to get some of this into the Jack Haldean stories.  Modern historians, by going back to original sources, have re-discovered how people at the time – not ten years afterwards – actually thought.  No one ever said it was all good fun, but a lot did think it was worthwhile.  I don’t know if I’d recommend the Sapper War stories – as I say, they’re far too positive in their certainties for modern taste – but if anyone’s interested in what modern historians think, as opposed to the Lions Led By Donkeys school, I can heartily recommend Gary Sheffield’s Forgotten Victory, Major Gordon Corrigan’s Mud, Blood and Poppycock and Tommy by Richard Holmes. 

            Oh, and Professor Gary Sheffield  of the Birmingham University Centre for First World War Studies) likes my books.  I’ve never had a congratulation that meant so much!