Janet Taylor
MA Social and Cultural History
Abstract
Much has been written about the First World War, but the experience of the soldier was often excluded from traditional military histories. Interpretation of the soldiers’ experience developed from traditional history where it was considered of no importance, through social history which uncovered and interpreted their stories, to cultural history which aimed to understand their experience in depth and place it in a wider cultural context. Research into the soldiers’ experience continues to evolve. Recent historical studies have incorporated digital technologies and moved away from a national to a trans-national perspective.
Historians have generally used very similar sources (such as letters, diaries and official documents) from archives and personal collections to extract evidence for their research, but the soldiers’ experience has also been told by non-academics in war poetry, literature and memoirs. This historiographical study examines how interdisciplinary approaches have been used to reveal the soldiers’ voice; why these changes came about; the impact of the methodology used by the historian, and how approaches from other disciplines helped to produce a richer understanding of the soldier experience of the First World War.
Much has been written about the First World War. This essay will focus on the experience of British soldiers on the Western Front during the First World War. It examines how that experience has been investigated and represented by historians and how the historiography has changed over time. Consideration will also be given to why these changes came about and the impact of the approach and methodology used by the historian. It will trace how the soldier experience was excluded from traditional military histories and how the development of social and cultural history has enabled historians to research and analyse the soldier experience, incorporating approaches from other disciplines for a richer understanding. Following Winter and Prost (2005, p. 2) this examination of the historiography is not limited to that of professional historians and will include literature and the work of non-academics, such as the soldiers themselves.
The soldier experience excluded – traditional history
In the period following the First World War historians focused on the origins of the war and military operations. This was a period when nations attempted to justify actions and decisions and official war histories were written which recorded events as they had occurred. The British official history covers twenty-nine volumes and was written by a small number of military historians between 1919 and 1948. Official documents and records were the main sources used, alongside memoirs written by generals, politicians and diplomats (Green, 2005, p. 1). Captain Liddell Hart’s The Real War published in 1930 continued to focus more on the war ‘than the warriors’ experience (Winter & Prost, 2005, p. 15). History at this time was traditional and represented the view of the war ‘from above’ and generally focused on national interests. The experience of the front line soldiers did not feature in these histories, they were not considered relevant to the analysis of operational activity (Winter & Prost, 2005, p. 13). According to French historian Pierre Renouvin, who wrote extensively about the French experience of the First World War in the 1920s and 1930s, ‘the soldiers’ accounts … can hardly give any information on the conduct of operations, since the horizon of these witnesses was too narrow’ (Winter & Prost, 2005, p. 14).
However, it is important to note that although the day-to-day reality of the war did not feature in the official histories, the war veterans and general public were interested in how soldiers experienced the war. Poetry had been written by soldiers (mainly junior officers such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon) during and after the war, which provided vivid descriptions of their experience. The 1920s and 1930s saw the publication of a large volume of war literature which brought the experience of the soldiers to public view (Winter & Prost, 2005, p. 85). War correspondent Philip Gibbs published The Realities of War in 1920, which was one of the first books to include the experience from the soldiers’ perspective (Green, 2005, p. 2), although it has been criticised for not providing full details of the ‘suffering and dangers’ (Finn, 2002). Other work included: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1926-28); Erich Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), which was also released as a film in 1930; Robert Graves’ autobiography Goodbye to All That (1929); Charles Edmond’s Subaltern’s War (1929); and Siegfried Sassoon’s fictional account of his own life Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) (Winter & Prost, 2005, p. 86). The late 1920s and early 1930s was a period of economic depression and there was a general sense of disillusionment, which may have influenced the nature of the literature produced at this time. The reason the non-academic literature is important is that it laid the foundations for the common understanding of the front line soldiers’ experience and the idea of the soldier as a hero fighting a futile war has become embedded in social memory. This body of work was used by later historians, but at the time it was largely ignored, and academic and non-academic accounts of the war continued in parallel.
The 1960s form an important turning point in the historiography of the soldiers’ experience. The fiftieth anniversary in 1964 fostered a renewed interest and saw the BBC broadcast The Great War series and A.J.P Taylor published The First World War: an Illustrated History (1964). Both showed images of the soldier experience and the perspective changed showing the war through the eyes of the soldiers (Winter & Prost, 2005, pp. 20-21); visual evidence was more widely used and reached a much wider audience. Historians, though, continued to exclude the soldier experience from their work, for example Alan Clark’s Donkeys (1961) focused on the behaviour of the generals and Arthur Marwick’s The Deluge (1965) focused on the home front. Winter and Prost note that even the Annales school, which was at the forefront of social history at this time, considered it to be ‘mere events’ (2005, p. 88). The 1970s saw an increase in the publication of memoirs from front line soldiers. By this time most of the soldiers were retired and it was an opportunity for those who wanted to tell their story of the war. W.H.I. Groom wrote Poor Bloody Infantry (1976) to counter the ‘war histories that are more concerned with strategies of war than the impact of the fighting on the common soldier’ (Groom, 1976, p. 16) He wanted to show what it was really like, in contrast to some of the accounts from officers which portrayed the heroic attitude to war (p. 20). His personal memoir of the First World War describes the conditions soldiers endured in the trenches, the songs they sang and the impact of problems such as food shortages. In places it is in a diary format, is illustrated with maps and photographs and also includes letters from senior officials, which he critically reviews in the light of his experience.
The soldier experience – social history
The 1960s and 1970s was a time of considerable change in society. There had been an increase in levels of education and an expansion of universities, which led to more academic historians and an increase in history journals and conferences (Winter & Prost, 2005, p. 204) which enabled ideas to be shared and developed. Many of these historians were influenced by the sociological and anthropological developments in social history in the 1950s and 1960s, and the focus on ‘history from below’ was associated with developments by Marxist historians such as E.P. Thompson (Hobsbawm, 1971). Alongside this, in 1968, the Imperial War Museum and Public Records Office made war documents available, which provided historians with access to new source material, including letters and accounts from soldiers (Winter & Prost, 2005, p. 91). This began to have an impact on the way historians examined the First World War and they started to include the experience of the front line soldiers in their research.
Martin Middlebrook was one of the first to use the personal accounts of the soldiers. He was not an academic historian at the time and was inspired to write The First Day on the Somme in 1971 following a visit to the French battlefields in 1967. He wanted to tell the story of the battle ‘through the eyes of the ordinary soldiers’. He drew on 400 personal accounts that had just been released by the Public Records Office and advertised in the press for veterans to contact him. He collected personal memories of the battle using questionnaires and face-to-face interviews and used direct quotations to illustrate the story (Middlebrook, 2004). This appears to be an important milestone in the historiography of the soldiers experience, although French historians Ducasse, Meyer and Perreux included eye-witness accounts in Vie et mort des Francais in 1959 (Winter & Prost, 2005, p. 88) and this method of using direct quotations to illustrate war histories was a model followed by later historians up to the present time. ‘Writing the war’s history became conditioned by the need to reflect the experience of the war’s participants’ (Trudell, 2014).
In The Great War and Modern Memory, published in 1975, Paul Fussell used the poetry, literature and correspondence written by soldiers in the 1920s and 1930s to examine the language they used to describe to their experience of the First World War. Fussell was influenced by his experience as an infantry officer in the Second World War, identifying himself with the likes of Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon (Fussell, 2013, p. 363), and the atrocities of the Vietnam War (Fussell, 2013, p. xi), reflecting the anti-war sentiment of the 1970s (Gregory, 2014, p. 191). He has been criticized for his selection of material as it mainly represents the officers rather than ordinary soldiers (Fussell, 2013, p. xii), but his focus on cultural material as well as personal documents was very different to the narrative histories that had been written about the war; for the first time the focus was the soldiers’ emotional experience. His textual analysis reflected the linguistic turn that was taking place in academic history. This approach also paved the way for other historians, such as Samuel Hynes’ A War Imagined (1990), to use literature and other cultural material to research the experience of the soldier. American Professor of History Eric Leed also explored the emotional experience of war in No Man’s Land (Leed, 1979) and, although his study was primarily based on first-hand accounts, he also included war literature. His focus was the traumatic experience of combat and how modern industrialized war affected the identity of front line soldiers and is clearly influenced by psychological, sociological and anthropological approaches. This interdisciplinary approach was a key feature of social history and enabled historians to research from a different perspective. Leed’s very narrow focus allowed him to mine the archive material in a different way to Fussell, resulting in an analysis of an experience beyond accepted levels of endurance.
John Keegan, a military historian and teacher at the Royal Military Academy, also considered the emotional experience of soldiers, but his focus was on why soldiers were prepared to fight and The Face of Battle (1976) was considered to be ground-breaking at the time it was published. The use of ‘face’ in the title suggests the importance he placed on thinking of the soldier as a human being, and not just part of a battalion. He used printed sources for his research (including memoirs), which may have excluded the voice of the front line soldier as it was mainly officers who published, but his work has been recognised for reorienting military history and identifying that the study of battle should include the human response to battle (Winter & Prost, 2005, p. 92). Tony Ashford, a sociologist, examined how soldiers endured life in the trenches, using their diaries, letters and accounts, including battalion histories. Trench Warfare 1914-1918 (1980) examines the relationships between the front line soldiers and the staff officers in the rear. With his sociology background, he identified the importance of regimental tradition, the masculine code of behaviour, cultural values and the primary social group in maintaining soldier motivation (Ashford, 1980, pp. 204-206). Keegan and Ashford’s work laid the foundations for further studies on the motivations of soldiers to continue fighting in adversity, such as J.G. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies 1914-1918 (1991); Gary Sheffield, Leadership in the Trenches (2000) and Alexander Watson Enduring the Great War (2008).
These four examples illustrate how the historiography of the soldiers’ experience of the war changed during the 1970s and laid the foundations for future research. The soldiers’ accounts had become one of the main sources of evidence used by historians and it was the impact of the war on their experience that was central to the research. They demonstrate how the approaches of historians moved away from its traditional ‘view from above’, to a concern for the history of society. John Tosh, Professor of History at Roehampton University, suggests that this history from below ‘concentrates on the unorganized and the marginal who have been least visible in the historical record’ (Tosh, 2010, p. 71). As the ordinary soldiers did not usually appear in the official war records, using social history methods enabled historians to examine the experience through the eyes of the soldiers, who were previously on the margins. The Annales school introduced methods drawn from the social sciences into historical research (Evans, 2008) and this is evident in the approaches of the historians above.
At this point it is helpful to reflect on the use of diaries, memoirs and literature. Social historians recognised that the history of ‘ordinary’ people could not be discovered in the official sources and turned to the documents that they produced themselves. Without them historians would not have been able to identify the soldier experience, but the use of subjective sources has been a matter of debate among historians. One of the issues is that memoirs and autobiographies are written several years after the event and could be subject to distortion over a period of time. Traditional empirical historians such as Richard Holmes, Professor of Military and Security Studies at Cranfield University, used personal papers, trench newspapers and army manuals and pamphlets to illustrate his analysis of the First World War and considered it important to refer to contemporary documents (i.e. written at the time) rather than material produced many years after the event (Holmes, 2004, p. xxiii). Tosh views them as providing a ‘human face to a story’ (2010, p. 104), but is also mindful that the historian has to understand the context in which they were written (pp. 126-132). The letters, diaries and memoirs that have been used as evidence for the experience of the soldiers all have a context – for example there were restrictions in what could be written in letters, which were censored, and the author may have exaggerated or toned down his experience according to who he was writing for.
Michael Roper, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex, uses psychoanalysis techniques to examine the letters to uncover the ‘unconscious impact of the war’. The contents of the letters often reflect the culture of the time, for example the ‘stiff upper lip’ mentality could affect what the soldiers were prepared to admit to family members. He also suggests that some experiences were too disturbing to write about at the time and ‘retrospective accounts are generally more reflective about the emotional experience’ (Roper, 2009, pp. 20-21). Janet Watson, Associate Professor of History at Connecticut University who has researched British representations of the First World War, uses poetry and novels as well as diaries and letters to examine how the soldiers experienced the war at the time and how it changed over time, and her bibliography in Fighting Different Wars lists sources according to whether they were written during or after the war (Watson, 2004, p. 10).
In order to capture details of experience that are not recorded in documentary sources, historians have also turned to the methodology of oral history, which also developed in the 1960s and 1970s, to capture ‘impressions and recollections’ of everyday life (Tosh, 2010, p. 315). The Imperial War Museum created a ‘sound archive’ in 1972 which contains publicly available recordings of interviews with war veterans (Coll, 2014) and Lyn MacDonald has interviewed veterans of the First World War to obtained eye-witness accounts. 1914-1918 Voices and Images of the Great War (MacDonald, 1988) provides a narrative account using the interviews to describe events from the perspective of the soldiers. Winter and Prost (2005, p. 94) comment on the ‘richness of this working class culture’ that is probably only obtainable through oral history. The idea of memory is central to research about the First World War. Starting with war poetry, post-war literature and later film and television (the BBC sitcom Blackadder from the 1980s is often cited as an example), the ‘myths’ of the futility of war and the image of the soldier as a hero and victim have become part of the nation’s collective memory and as such may influence the memories of individuals (Watson, 2004, pp. 1-2). Oral history has been criticized for being subjective and influenced by nostalgia and collective memory (Tosh, 2010, pp. 321-323), but as first-hand testimony it does provide historians with a wealth of evidence of what soldiers remember of their experiences.
Understanding the soldier experience – cultural history
Morale has featured in many studies and it is interesting to compare the social and cultural history approaches. In 1967 (republished in 1988) John Baynes, an army officer, published Morale. A Study of Men and Courage which he wrote to fill a gap as there had been little written about this in histories about the First World War. He researched the experience of ‘one battalion in one battle’ (Baynes, 1988, p. 7) and identified five aspects of morale: regimental loyalty; the relationship between the officers and other ranks; discipline; a sense of duty; and the provision of ‘the necessities of war such as rations and ammunition’ (pp. 253- 254). Baynes’ findings may well have been influenced by his military background and probably reflected his training and, although he uses the same sources, it lacks the rigour of an academic historian and he does not consider the issues or the evidence in great detail. In Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies, 1914-1918 (1991), Dr. J.G. Fuller, a senior lecturer at the Civil Service College in London, researches soldiers’ morale through diaries, letters and memoirs, but also looks at the trench magazines, and he covers a wide range of units to provide a wider context for his research. In addition to the experience in the trenches, which had been the focus of much previous research, he also examines activity behind the front line and the importance of aspects of working class culture, such as canteens, excursions, sport, and concert parties, on the morale of the men (Fuller, 1991, pp. 176-177). Through this research we see the soldiers’ experience from a different perspective and in a different context. Fuller’s work is an example of how cultural history helps to provide a deeper, more rounded understanding of how soldiers endured the war. Since 2000, historians have taken Baynes’ and Fuller’s research further by utilising methodologies from psychology, sociology and anthropology.
The personal testimony of soldiers was used to illustrate histories of the war and new lines of research focused on their experience. Social historians, working with other disciplines such as sociology and psychology, uncovered new sources which brought the soldiers’ experience into focus and provided a different perspective on the military history of the war. Historians such as Fussell, Keegan and Leed, discussed previously, tended to be quite wide ranging, and asked questions about how soldiers endured the conditions and combat and what motivated them. The next stage in the historical interpretation was the development of a deeper understanding of the soldiers’ experience and the investigation of ‘new’ areas, which came about following the development of cultural history in the 1980s and 1990s. Historians started to consider the influence of cultural traditions on events, focusing on ‘shared meanings, attitudes and values’ (Tosh, 2010, pp. 246-248). Psychology, literary theory and anthropology became increasingly used as methodologies for historical research (Tosh, 2010, pp. 259-267). The difference between the approaches of social and cultural history can be considered as a ‘difference in emphasis’, with social historians creating a ‘social narrative’ and cultural historians producing ‘contextual understandings’ (Tosh, 2010, p. 270). This pattern is reflected in the history of the soldiers’ experience, specific aspects have been researched in depth and many sub-fields have developed.
Alexander Watson, Professor of History at Goldsmith’s University, researched combat and morale in British and German armies during the First World War, making extensive use of personal papers, war diaries and official documents from British and German archives. He focused on psychology to understand ‘fears, motivations, mental defence mechanisms and coping strategies’ to understand how soldiers coped with battle and why they were willing to fight. He uses a comparative approach to eliminate cultural bias and understand the psychological factors involved (Watson A. , 2008 , p. 7). Joanna Bourke, a Professor in Economic and Social History at Birkbeck College, examines how First World War impacted Edwardian concepts of manliness and one of the issues she focuses on is the treatment of shell shock. She highlights the differences in the way officers and other ranks were treated, with officers classed as suffering from neurasthenia and the ranks hysteria. She discusses the class differences and the issues around the gendering of shell shock as hysteria was considered a complaint of the ‘weak’ and ‘female’ (Bourke, 1996, pp. 107-123). Jessica Meyer discusses the gender implications further and considers the debate not just to be ‘masculine versus feminine’, but also an issue of manliness, referring back to the stereotypes from Victorian and Edwardian eras. Many men saw the war as an opportunity to ‘prove their manhood’ and those who suffered shell shock were considered ‘childish’ or immature. She examines four cases of ‘regression’ published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1920 (Meyer, 2009). In contrast, Tracey Loughran, Senior Lecturer in Medical History at Cardiff University compares historical and literary approaches to shell shock and considers medical opinion, identifying the different ways this experience can be studied and the importance of understanding the contemporary interpretations (Loughran, 2012). Another approach is taken by Fiona Reid, University of South Wales, has researched the shell shock using a trans-national approach, comparing how it was considered and treated in Britain, Germany, France and Italy, exploring the language of cowardice and how men would avoid seeking treatment because of the negative ‘labels’ applied to the condition (Reid, 2014). These examples identify how the study of the experience of shell shock through a psychology ‘lens’ has fragmented the historiography into a range of other disciplines, including the history of medicine, trans-national history and gender history.
Another ‘lens’ that historians have utilised in the study of how soldiers endured the front line experience is that of sociology. Michael Roper has researched how young soldiers coped with the separation from their families and how letters and parcels helped them cope emotionally. He considers the maternal influence of the mothers, the substitute ‘mother’ role of the subalterns and the domestic ‘duties’, such as cleaning and cooking (Roper, 2009, pp. 130-134), that are important to the morale of the young men. A shortcoming of his analysis is that he has only researched correspondence between single men and their mothers; it would be interesting to compare this with that between husband and wife. Rachel Duffett has focused on the role food plays in the morale of the soldier; Michael Roper was her PhD supervisor, so it is not surprising that she has taken a sociological approach, she was also influenced by a symposium on food and war in 2009 (Duffett, 2012, p. xiii). Having researched factors affecting morale, she identified that food had not been covered in any depth (p. 5). Her research includes what the men ate and their reactions to rations, the parcels of food sent from home and the food they could obtain from French locals (pp. 215-219). These examples demonstrate how historians have used interdisciplinary approaches in the study of the experience of front line soldiers. It is clear that cultural history has enabled new areas of research to develop, with the history of emotions and senses adding to research into social and cultural histories of the war.
Conclusion
Historians’ interpretation of the soldiers’ experience of the First World War has developed from traditional history where their individual experience was considered of no importance, through social history which uncovered and interpreted their stories to cultural history which seeks to understand their experience in depth and place it in a wider cultural context. It has been noted that historians have deconstructed the experience of the war and the studies have fragmented into specialist areas which often overlap. Historians have generally used very similar sources from archive and personal collections, but mined them in different ways, using interdisciplinary approaches, to extract evidence for their research and identify new areas. There is a danger that historians could be selective in the evidence they use, making it fit their subjective position. The history of the soldiers’ experience has also been told by non-academics in war poetry, literature and memoirs, and these have been used as source material alongside letters, diaries and official documents. Historians have developed methodologies to use subjective personal testimony and memories which may be distorted by time or social memories. The centenary in 2014 generated increased interest in the First World War and many new books have been published, but there appears to be a tendency for research to develop existing themes rather than developing new areas. What is new, however, is the use of digital technology to share the historical research. Websites are being used to represent the experience of soldiers, digitise records for independent research and present case studies for education. Europeana 1914-1918 is a trans-national online project to transcribe handwritten testimonies and virtual exhibitions are available of ‘untold stories’ (Europeana, 2016). The British Library (British Library, 2016) and the Imperial War Museum (Imperial War Museum, 2016) both have extensive collections of documents, photographs and articles. Recent historical studies appear to have moved away from a national to a trans-national perspective and this will help to put research into a wider global context. Research into the soldiers’ experience continues to evolve.
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