The Unquiet Western Front

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Fascinating and thought provoking - Rated
Brian Bond's short (just 128 pages including notes and index) book is based on his views articulated at the 1997 Liddell Hart lecture and further developed for the Lees Knowles lecture at Trinity Collage Cambridge in 2000. I mention this because it's clear that the need to distill his thoughts down to a very focused discussion has allowed Mr.Bond to present a very powerful and cogent argument against the "Futility" school of Great War scholarship.

However, Mr. Bond's major target is the "literary myth" of the Great War - summarised by the "Blackadder Goes Forth" view of events. Here he scores a bullseye as his arguments are both compelling and highly entertaining. His command of his subject matter and his easy to read style captured my attention immediately and kept it until the very end.

Highly recommended.

Professional, sincere, but...? - Rated
An excellent professional work, and an always-useful antidote to the all-too-often emotional response to the Great War. Bond doesn't sneer at the emotionalism of others, but he does take to task those who all too often base their scholarship on such emotive sources yet who would call themselves professional historians.

Bond's target is not the trench poets and other contemporary writers but today's historians. He rightly points out that history, as we understand it--as the historian makes it--is not the stuff of individual experience . This view does not invalidate the suffering of an individual soldier, but it would invalidate any history of the war that limited its subject-matter to the collective suffering of all the soldiers--even if the war for all soldiers had been all suffering, which Bond denies. History must take in the larger picture, which encompasses the larger world beyond the trenches.

This is great stuff. And the book is a brilliant read and a good fund of information (though more of value for its argumentation than for any new information the reader may get out of it). Without being callous (though no doubt some will look for callousness and find it) Bond firmly takes our focus away from the "traditional" treatment of the war and forces us to look at it from a more professional perspective.

Unfortunately he skirts too close to polemicism for comfort. By refuting the traditional view he is all but forced to identify with those we might call, with respect, the "reactionaries"--John Terraine, for instance--whose contention all along is that Britain did a fine job, with all that follows from this thesis, notably, that Haig was a great man or at least a damn good one. And Bond does indeed offer evidence that no one could have done more: that there was a technological gap that only was closed in the Second War and that it was this technological gap--primarily in battlefield communications--that led inevitably to the horror for the soldier that the Great War often was.

Fine. But Bond's stance leads him to weaken his own thesis by rubbishing those who would oppose him. Many of these might deserve to be treated as less than professional historians, but none deserve to be treated with contempt, and a one-line dismissal of Denis Winter simply will not do. In HAIG'S COMMAND Winter raises serious questions (even if that book also raises certain questions about its own thesis). The fact that Winter would disagree with Bond ought to draw out the most professional, not the most dismissive, in Bond's treatment of Winter's disturbing book.

Making way for a new generation - Rated
If you think that the First World War was all mud, blood and poetry, you need to read Brian Bond's latest book 'The Unquiet Western Front'. It is a must for anyone with an interest in the most persistent myths that have contributed to Britain's 'modern memory' of the Great War. Refreshingly short and to the point, Professor Bond has started to peel away the layers that surround Britain’s 'Forgotten Victory'. In doing so, he is paving the way towards a more objective approach that is being developed by a new generation of historians who are now rising through the ranks of British universities.

If you know your History, you may say that the series of battles known as the Great War finished on 11th November 1918. In fact, the fighting over the perception of the war is as old as the conflict itself. Numerous poets, novelists, memoirists, historians, playwrights and scriptwriters, together with film and television directors have sought to portray the war as a futile massacre, where stupid chateau generals led millions of brave Tommy Atkins to certain death in the muddy trenches of the Western Front. The 'Lions Led by Donkeys' approach, beloved of certain 'historical' writers, has resulted in the cult of the ‘million dead’ eclipsing the real reasons why Britain went to war in 1914. Not only that, the futility angle does a great disservice to the five million volunteers and conscirpts of the British Expeditionary Force who grew in strength and expertise to defeat the Germans in 1918. For those who remember Geoffrey Palmer’s Field Marshal Haig sweeping up toy soldiers with his dustpan and brush in the 1989 BBC comedy 'Blackadder' or of battle casualty figures on cricket scoreboards on Brighton Pier in the 1960s film 'Oh! What a Lovely War', Brian Bond will remove the scales from your eyes.

The book is a succinct and comprehensive introduction to this area, deconstructing the development of selected Great War myths in just 101 pages. Professor Bond has successfully attempted to return the war to its rightful historical context, by getting to the root of the most persistent war myths that have been perpetuated by literature, visual art, film and television from the inter-war period via the 1960s and 1990s. In my opinion, it is the most fascinating study of this subject area since Samuel Hynes published 'A War Imagined' in 1991, Bond's work being more accessible to those outside academia, to be easily digested by those reading for general interest. It is certainly a book that will prove required reading for any discerning student of the cultural effects of the Great War on modern British society.