Book Review Supplement Spring 2000

Canadian Military History Volume 9 Issue 2 Article 10 2000 Book Review Supplement Spring 2000 Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh Part of the Military History Commons Recommended Citation "Book Review Supplement Spring 2000." Canadian Military History 9, 2 (2000) This Book Review Supplements is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Canadian Military History by an authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact [email protected]. et al.: Book Review Supplement Spring 2000 CANADIAN MILITARY HISTORY BOOK REVIEW SUPPLEMENT Spring 2000 Issue 11 We are pleased to begin this issue of the Book Review Supplement with something a little different, in the form of an extended review essay by Professor Robert Martin of the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario. Professor Martin, who was a gunner officer in the regular army and spent eighteen months with the Army Historical Section, will be familiar to readers of Canadian Military History for his eloquent essay, first published in the Globe & Mail, on the disappearance of military history from Canada’s schools. We hope to publish longer review essays on an occasional basis in the future, and will also be adding a “Briefly Noted” section in the Fall 2000 issue, to provide readers with information on an even broader range of new publications in military history and strategic studies. As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions. Jonathan F. Vance, Book Review Supplement, Editor 1 root, it is slow to fade; the war The Great War and Canadian Memory continues to exert an irresistible pull. Professor Robert Martin Over the last twenty-five years University of Western Ontario the outpouring of books has continued unabated. Some extraordinarily creative and 1. The Great War My interest in the First World carefully constructed works have War was kindled by reading appeared. Pride of place amongst he history of the Great War Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of these books must be given to Paul “Tis a subject of perennial August in 1962. From this well- Fussell’s The Great War and fascination.” So reads the first written work of popular history it Modern Memory (Oxford: OUP, sentence of Jay Winter’s was almost inevitable to move to 1975). Like much of the recently remarkable book, Sites of Memory, other popular First World War published work, Fussell’s book Sites of Mourning: The Great War books of the 1960s – Alan Clark’s does not deal with the First World in European Cultural History. The Donkeys, Alistair Horne’s The War as such. This is not a narrative This essay explores the “perennial Price of Glory, and Leon Wolff’s In of the events of the war, but a record fascination” with the Great War. It Flanders Fields. The next logical and analysis of its cultural effects. begins by discussing a number of steps were the memoirs of Fussell is not an historian, but a books dealing with the war which Blunden, Graves, and Sassoon, the Professor of English Literature have appeared since 1975 and poetry of Owen and Sassoon, and whose knowledge of the literary moves on to look at recent and not- the novels of Aldington, Barbusse, works which emerged from the so-recent Canadian writing about and Remarque. Once the fascination First World War is vast and the war. with the First World War has taken profound. He describes the war as © Canadian Military History Book Review Supplement, Spring 2000 1 Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2000 1 Canadian Military History, Vol. 9 [2000], Iss. 2, Art. 10 a very literary war. Fussell writes limits of its endurance. In the First book which suggests that elegantly and movingly, with a deep World War, shell-shocked soldiers Stravinsky caused the First World sympathy for what the soldiers on were often shot, while shell- War?” the Western Front endured. Fussell shocked officers, or lucky officers, Another species of recent First himself was an infantryman in the might find themselves in the care World War books has been more United States Army during the of someone like Dr. Rivers. It anthropological in nature. Denis Second World War, so he has a real occurred to me that it would be Winter’s Death’s Men: Soldiers of sense of what he is writing about. fascinating to explore what the Great War (Harmondsworth: There are, it seems, two broad happened at Dr. Rivers’ clinic and Penguin, 1979) is an engrossing and perspectives from which one can the friendship amongst these three compellingly written exploration of view any historical event. The event extraordinary writers. This is the anthropology of British soldiers can be seen as part of a process of precisely what Pat Barker set out on the Western Front. This focus change, or part of a process of to do in her three memorable on ordinary soldiers is interesting; continuity. Fussell sees the First novels, Regeneration (1992), The most of the literary works World War as a cultural watershed, Eye in The Door (1993), and The discussed by Fussell were written as the event which wrenched Ghost Road (1995). She has had by and about officers. Death’s Men Europe out of traditional literary remarkable success at the task is an outstanding piece of work but forms and into modernity. The which she set herself. unfortunately the same cannot be cultural and intellectual worlds of An exceedingly original work said of Denis Winter’s other First 1920 and 1913 were utterly by a Canadian which further World War effort, Haig’s different. The war, in Fussell’s view, elaborates the notion of the Great Command: A Reassessment shattered the social and emotional War as the cultural watershed of the (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). bases for traditional modes of century just past is Modris I am no admirer of Haig, who was, thought and expression. Its main Eksteins’ Rites of Spring: The next to Redvers Buller, surely the result was a cultural and intellectual Great War and the Birth of the least able general ever to have transformation. Fussell is at pains Modern Age (Toronto: Lester & commanded British troops, but to document the extent to which the Orpen Dennys, 1989). The title Haig’s Command is bizarre and Great War remains with us, still suggests the direction of Eksteins’ scurrilous and, in the end, shaping our discourse and our analysis. Much writing about the unconvincing. rhetoric eighty years later. He calls War, in Eksteins’ view, prefigures A sub-genre of Great War the war “all-encompassing, all- post-modern historiography: books has sought to investigate both pervading ... the essential condition “history becomes nothing but a tool its memorials and the ways in which of consciousness in the Twentieth of the present, with no integrity it has been remembered. Geoff Century” (3). The Great War is very whatsoever of its own” (313). One Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme likely the source of the endemic of Eksteins’ more original (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995) is and empty cynicism which defines observations is the suggestion that a moving essay in architectural and the response of contemporary one can find in the early cultural history. The book’s title is journalism to most events. Fussell expressions of cultural modernism taken from Lutyens’ memorial at also notes the ways in which the the intellectual and artistic roots of Thiepval upon which are recorded rhetoric of war has become part of fascism. He observes of the Nazis the names of the 73,077 British, our everyday speech. Contemporary in Germany that “terror, like Empire, and French soldiers killed North American feminists would everything else, was turned into an during the Battle of the Somme in probably not wish to see themselves art form” (316). Eksteins 1916 who have no known graves. as cultural and intellectual heirs of anticipated certain elements of late Lutyens was the great architectural the Great War, but their language twentieth-century post-modernist figure of the British Empire (India often suggests a perception of politics when he described the is littered with his grand creations), themselves as being permanently at “pursuit of authenticity” and and Dyer describes the style of the war. observes, “what was important was Thiepval memorial as “High Having for a time immersed constant confrontation, an Empire,” noting further that it is myself in the literary war, I was unflinching adversarial posture and “unphotographable” (126). Dyer has fascinated to discover that Graves, not the details of that posture” (317). high praise for Walter Allward’s Owen, and Sassoon had all known The link between Nazism and post- Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge, each other. Owen and Sassoon had modernism is made clear: “Nazism calling it “less a memorial to the spent some time in the care of a took as its point of departure the dead, to the abstract ideal of Dr. William Rivers at a hospital for subjective self, feeling, experience, Sacrifice, than to the reality of grief: shell-shocked officers. Shell-shock Erlebnis, and not reason and the a memorial not to the Unknown was described in the next war as objective world” (311).2 I cannot Soldier but to Unknown Mothers” battle fatigue, and denoted that leave Eksteins without noting the (114). point at which the stresses of battle telling question a friend raised Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, pushed the human mind beyond the about Rites of Spring: “Isn’t that the Sites of Mourning: The Great War 2 © Canadian Military History Book Review Supplement, Spring 2000 https://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol9/iss2/10 2 et al.: Book Review Supplement Spring 2000 in European Cultural History Ferguson’s The Pity of War Ferguson’s villains is Sir Edward (Cambridge: CUP, 1995) is an (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1999), a Grey; he argues that Grey’s extraordinary work, probably sui book which is more recognizable manipulations and machinations generis amongst First World War as history than many recent efforts.

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