The Great War and the Twentieth Century
The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth CenturyDavid Reynolds Simon and Schuster 491pp £25
Life, the philosopher Kierkegaard believed, is lived forward but can only be understood backwards. Our understanding of history is also refracted through the prism of the present. ‘Even if’, David Reynolds argues, ‘historians write forwards, telling a sequential narrative, they think backwards from the present into the past.’ It is this ‘dialogue between past and present’ that forms ‘the dynamic pivot’ of The Long Shadow.
The Long Shadow analyses both how the Great War has been interpreted in the combatant countries and also how understanding of the war has altered through time. It is organised not chronologically but thematically. Part one is entitled ‘Legacies’ and its themes are ‘Nations’, ‘Democracy’, ‘Empire’, ‘Capitalism’, ‘Civilisation’ and ‘Peace’. Part two, ‘Reflections’, considers themes entitled ‘Again’, ‘Evil’, ‘Generations’ ‘Tommies’ and ‘Remembrance’.
Reynolds believes that the British were ‘distinctive in their experience both of the war and of its postwar impact’. For Britain, alone among the belligerents, was fighting for principle. It had not been attacked and was not seeking more territory. But perhaps he underestimates the acute sense of danger that so many in Britain felt in the face of the possible occupation of the Channel ports by a hostile power. Britain was fighting not just for moral principle, but for deep-seated reasons of national self-interest.
Nineteen fourteen revealed, as 1939 was to do, that Britain was a Continental and not merely a maritime and insular power. From this point of view, Britain’s defence policy before that date had not been congruent with its foreign policy. If its safety depended upon the independence of France, then, surely, it should have drawn the logical consequence by committing itself to a formal alliance with France and adjusting its defence policy to such an alliance by introducing conscription.
After 1918 the euphoria of victory was to give way to a profound sadness and a determination that the Great War really would be, as H.G.Wells had hoped, ‘the war to end war’. Left wingers in the Union of Democratic Control argued that the war had been caused by the arms race and by Foreign Minister Edward Grey’s commitment to a system of Continental alliances; a mistaken judgment, in my view. But, by the 1930s, it had become the conventional wisdom and contributed to the atmosphere of appeasement that brought on a second and even more terrible conflict. A.J.P. Taylor once said that we learn from history not to repeat the old mistakes. So we make new ones instead.
In Germany attitudes were quite different from those in Britain. The defeat of 1918 was so sudden and unexpected that it was easy for the army leadership to claim that it had been stabbed in the back by Marxists and Jews. The sentiment ‘Never Again’, so powerful in Britain, found little echo in Germany. Indeed, many on the Right looked back with nostalgia to the wartime experience of comradeship and, like the Italian Fascists, hoped for a return match to secure the gains of which they had been cheated in 1918. The only mistake they had made, they believed, was to have been insufficiently ruthless. That was not a mistake they were going to make again. It is hardly surprising if the liberal-minded men who ran Britain between the wars – MacDonald, Baldwin, Chamberlain – failed to comprehend such a mindset.
After 1945 the formation of the European Economic Community, was, as Reynolds perceptively notices, ‘effectively a peace settlement for Western Europe’. But, for Britain, the slaughter resulting from the belated Continental commitment in two world wars predisposed many against further association with the Continent, fuelling the euroscepticism that has run through British politics and popular attitudes since the time of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950.
It is hardly possible in a short review to do justice to the rich texture of The Long Shadow. It is the product of deep reflection on the part of a mature historian at the height of his powers, with a sure command of a vast historical literature. Clearly and attractively written, it forms perhaps the best available introduction for the general reader to changing views of the Great War. It also contains fresh interpretations that will stimulate the historian already familiar with the period. Many books have already appeared to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of the war and there are more to come, but they are unlikely to be as good. Reynolds has written many fine books. I think this is his best.
Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government at King’s College, London.
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