Introducing “The Long Shadow” (2013), the proposer
said that, as our meeting fell in the month of the centenary of the Armistice, he
felt we should mark the occasion with a book about the impact of World War One
on the century that followed. The David Reynolds book was the only serious
candidate of which he was aware.
David Reynolds is a British
historian who is Professor of International History at Cambridge. He specialises
in the two World Wars (although
until now most of his book output has been about the Second) and the Cold War. He served as Chairman of the History Faculty at Cambridge for the
academic years 2013–14 and 2014–15. A short TV series narrated by
Reynolds accompanied the launch of the book, and he also lectured at the Edinburgh
Festival.
In his
introduction Reynolds quotes George Kennan, who characterised the First World
as “the
great seminal catastrophe of this century”.
Kennan was struck by the “overwhelming
extent” to which communism, Nazism and the Second World War were all “the products of that first great holocaust
of 1914-18.”
Although the
book was long, it was written with unusual clarity and incision. Reynolds was
able to simplify complex ideas across a whole range of subjects with admirable
brevity. If it sometimes made you pause, or was challenging, it was only
because the wealth of ideas successively described left you giddy – a sort of
intellectual fairground ride. The book was in many respects the history of the
last century.
The general –
and very enjoyable – discussion that opened up reflected the vastness of the
subject matter covered by the book. It cannot be covered in a blog of
acceptable length, but here are some highlights.
It was very
unusual to get a writer so comfortable in writing across such a wide range of
subjects. He covered military history, political history, economics, painting,
poetry, literature, general culture and more. He did this across a time span of
a century. And, although his major focus was Britain, he wrote very cogently
about developments in Germany, France, Russia, Ireland and America. Reynolds
was inclined to give both sides of an argument without overtly stating his own
position, but that gave the book a welcome feel of objectivity and absence of a
personal agenda.
A “terrific book” was the general view, “very enjoyable”, “enlightening and absorbing”.
But there were
some notes of reservation. “At times too
much detail for my taste….I would have preferred more focus on what is the
shadow….I think his writing is too diffuse, and in the end I wasn’t sure what
he was trying to say”.
‘Could we define “the shadow”? Was it loss of
life, anguish, the rise of fascism, the spread of communism, the Great
Depression, World War Two, the ongoing crisis in the Middle East?’ The consensus was that it was all of these and
more. He had been wise in using the evocative concept of the “shadow” rather
than in striving to demonstrate causation, always very difficult in considering
history. He was talking about impact in a general sense. And the word “shadow”
– for which 16 meanings are given in the OED! - is not necessarily pejorative.
Another
reservation was that “the structure was a
bit confusing (Part One ‘Legacies’; Part Two ‘Refractions’), and it led to a
degree of repetition”. But for most the structure was fine.
Irritatingly we
found Reynolds hardly put a foot wrong in his grasp of the bewildering array of
subjects he covered, whether on concept or on detail. For a book of history to deprive
us of the satisfying opportunity to pick nits is rare indeed. Finally, however,
our resident statistician claimed to have nailed him – Reynolds had asserted
that German South West Africa (today Namibia) was roughly the same area as
England and Wales combined, whereas we reckoned it was 6 times bigger!
Occasional
shafts of ironic humour brighten the narrative, such as:
“A year after the Armistice, Sir Henry
Wilson, chief of the imperial general staff, fumed ‘We have between 20 and 30
wars raging in different parts of the world’, which he blamed on political
leaders who were ‘totally unfit and unable to govern’. Wilson’s deputy, Gen.
Sir Philip Chetwode, warned colourfully that ‘the habit of interfering with
other people’s business, and of making what is euphoniously called ‘peace’, is
like ‘buggery’; once you take to it you cannot stop.”
The financial
dimension of the War was one of the few that Reynolds did not discuss in depth.
We noted the heavy financial impact on Britain of the two German wars. Britain
had not been entitled to reparations after the First War, having declared war
and not having been invaded, but found herself in substantial debt to the US,
as it did also after WW2. British WW2 Lend Lease debts to the US were not fully
repaid until the end of 2006. War bonds raised from the British public for WW1
(and earlier wars) were not repaid until 2015.
We debated the
impact of World War One on religion, again one of the few subjects not tackled
in the book. Had the War accelerated the decline in religious belief, which
could be traced back to Darwin and beyond? We could not resolve this, noting
that many in the forces and amongst the bereaved had found religion a great
comfort during the War, but accepting that later reflection on the appalling
violence and subsequent brutalisation might have shaken the belief of many.
An interesting
fact unearthed by one of our members was that the Armistice would have been at
2.30pm on the 11th of November if Lloyd George had got his way. For
Lloyd George, with characteristic egotism, wanted to announce it at 2.30 when
he stood up for PM’s Questions. Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, the senior Forces member of
the British Delegation, had to appeal to the King to overturn Lloyd George’s
order and change it to 11am. Thereby Wemyss saved hundreds of lives, and
thereby he incurred the vindictive fury of Lloyd George.
We noted that
Reynolds heads a whole chapter “Evil”, which is devoted to genocide in the Nazi
concentration camps. But, leaving aside that as unquestionable evil, could the
Allies claim the moral high ground given some of their behaviour in other aspects
of the Second World War, such as the hundreds of thousands of European citizens
killed by RAF bombing, the use of flamethrowers and thermite grenades, and the
use of nuclear bombs? The defence is that such tactics were necessary to win –
or shorten – the War, but not all of us accepted that argument.
Reynolds is
particularly strong on tracing the changing perspectives on the War in Britain,
and clear-sighted on the ways in which the facts had become distorted. However,
the head of the Imperial War Museum recently said that he had hoped that the
commemorative efforts for the centenary of the War would lead to the popular
view and the historians’ view of WW1 moving into alignment, but that they had
failed to achieve that.
In conclusion,
we agreed for our part with the historian John Horne’s view, quoted by
Reynolds, that the Great War was “the
seminal event in the cycle of violence and ideological extremism that marked
the twentieth century.”
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