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This is a live performance of the song One by Metallica. This song was inspired by the 1939 novel "Johhny Got His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo.

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Metallica - One [Live In Seattle '89] (2018 Remastered)

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This is a painting of a troop ship painted in "Dazzle Camoflauge in World War One. This pattern broke up the outline of a ship from far away, making it harder for a submarine to target. How did this go on to later influcence art in the 20th century?

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Old Head of Kinsale, Downmacpatrick, County Cork, Ireland

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Old Head of Kinsale, Downmacpatrick, County Cork, Ireland

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Old Head of Kinsale, Downmacpatrick, County Cork, Ireland

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This is the final resting place of the liner RMS Lusitania. The perception of the ship has changed overtime, for example, we now know the ship was carrying war material. How does this change the narrative of World War One?

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This video is a commentary on the impact of the 1914 Christmas Truce of World War One.

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The Christmas Truce of 1914: What Really Happened?

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This video explains the legacy of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand

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A Shot that Changed the World - The Assassination of Franz Ferdinand I PRELUDE TO WW1 - Part 3/3

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This is the 1930 film based on the German novel "In the West, Nothing New".

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This essay by Yassamine Mather comes on the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One. This essay diccusses the impact of the Fall of the Ottoman Empire and how its legacy continues to shape Turkey's relationship with the West and and Arab World.

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The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the way Arab territory was divided immediately after the First World War had a profound effect on the contemporary history of the Middle East. This article looks back at the agreements signed after the War, resulting in the creation of British and French protectorates from territories ruled by the Ottomans. The arbitrary nature of these borders can explain aspects of current conflicts in the region. It also reminds us that the original colonial policies in the region were also pursued as 'humanitarian interventions'. Last but not least, it should help explain the obsession of the peoples of the region with conspiracy theories and the role of foreign powers.

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The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and Current Conflict in the Middle East

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The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the way Arab territory was divided immediately after the First World War had a profound effect on the contemporary history of the Middle East. This article looks back at the agreements signed after the War, resulting in the creation of British and French protectorates from territories ruled by the Ottomans.

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This by Jeremi Suri from the TEXAS LBJ article focuses on the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In particular, it looks at how it affected cultural centers in Europe like Vienna.

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By Jeremi Suri, LBJ School Professor
This article originally appeared in National Intelligence Council's blog "Global Trends 2030" on July 23, 2012.

Vienna was the center of European creativity in the years between 1780 and 1914. It was the city of Mozart and Beethoven. No place could rival its music. It was also the city of Klimt and Kokoschka. Vienna pioneered modern art as we know it. In addition, the Austro-Hungarian capital led the new science of psychoanalysis with the work of Sigmund Freud and his many followers in medicine, philosophy and literature. The mix of ethnicities and cultures in this uniquely cosmopolitan nineteenth century city made it a true crucible of innovation and creativity. You can still see and hear the remnants of that long-gone golden age today in the music, the art and the libraries that have outlasted their political masters.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire did not collapse in 1918 because it failed to cultivate new ideas or nurture personal freedom. It was filled with expressive, entrepreneurial and free-thinking groups. The problem was that the Habsburg political system, which for three centuries had held diverse groups together, generated remarkable wealth and defeated foreign tyrants (notably Napoleon), failed to adjust to new demands for national independence and democratic participation. Franz-Josef served as Emperor for more than sixty years before his death in 1916, as a pious, hard-working and fair-minded political leader. He even encouraged equality for Jews at a time of rising anti-Semitism throughout Europe. Nonetheless, the system of imperial monarchy that he directed failed to address the growing demands for independence, development and wealth redistribution throughout his lands. Despite his efforts, he was a prisoner of a stagnant and outdated set of political institutions.

Even with the best of leaders and institutions, large societies cannot prosper if they cannot adjust to change. At the same time that the cosmopolitan city of Vienna entered a terminal crisis in 1914, much more provincial cities like Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee and Cleveland led a rapid growth in American wealth and power behind their flexible political systems of governance. These midwestern cities were the heart of a Progressive Movement that courageously assessed the needs of businesses and citizens at the time, and experimented with institutions in ways that traditional Europeans would never contemplate. The Progressives believed in the US Constitution, but they took their inspiration from the needs of the time, what William James and John Dewey called a "pragmatic" impulse.

Pragmatic reforms were the engine behind the transformations that allowed American society to grow and adjust while European society stagnated. Americans in the late nineteenth century created the public high school before any other society, with the expectation that all workers needed some basic vocational and intellectual preparation for a modern economy. Americans invested in railroads and highways on a scale that no other society would match until Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Most important, Americans expanded political participation for poor citizens, for immigrants and for women beyond other countries at the time. (African-Americans, still frequently denied the right to vote in the former Confederacy, were the notable exception to this final trend.)

When the Austro-Hungarian Empire entered World War I it was a sophisticated but stagnant political regime, unable to harness the creativity of its citizens for victory in war or prosperity thereafter. When the U.S. entered World War I it had a still provincial but incredibly dynamic government, ready to experiment with new policies and institutions, best embodied by the creation of the Federal Reserve System to manage a modern economy in 1913, and President Woodrow Wilson's articulation of the "Fourteen Points" to manage a modern world system in 1918. People in Chicago and Detroit were not better innovators than their counterparts in Vienna, but they had a government that was more responsive and encouraging of their new solutions for contemporary challenges.

This basic historical analysis is the source of my combined frustration and optimism about the future of the U.S. in the early 21 st century. Our society is filled with more creative young people than ever before. Just look at our technology, our medicine, our entertainment industries and our university campuses. No other country has as many diverse individuals pushing the boundaries of innovation on a daily basis. We continue to nurture and attract the best people in these and other fields. American society is as creative as it has ever been, as impressive as the Vienna of Mozart and Beethoven.

The problem is our governance, and that is the source of my frustration. I believe this is a frustration shared by millions of other Americans. Our political system that served us so well in the past does not harness the creativity of our citizens today. It does not address the core challenges that most need flexibility and innovation. Our political system is stagnant and non-responsive to needs across society. Our political system often disgusts us in its daily operations, and it does not inspire us. Citizens do not look up to our politicians for good reason.

Despite all of our new technology, we have failed to build 21 st century infrastructure for our society. Our electrical power grid, our roads, our airports - they are all crumbling. Despite our remarkable advances in medicine, we have made absolutely no progress during the last decade in delivering health care to all citizens in a way that is affordable, cost-effective and sustainable. We are, in fact, bankrupting ourselves because we cannot manage the best medicine in the world. And then there is education. Since the 1970s our system of education has failed to provide the social mobility for hard-working people of modest means that it pioneered in prior generations. Children of well-educated professional parents get a high quality education today, preparing them for success. Children of poorly educated non-professional parents get an inferior education, and they are statistically stuck in the same circumstances where they started. What happened to the American dream of self-improvement for the unwashed masses?

The real "game changer" for the American future is whether our society can summon the will to bring the creative impulses of our citizens into government. We have good solutions for our challenges, but they are not getting attention from our government as it exists. American citizens must demand creative leaders and more dynamic political institutions, as they have not in the last decade. American voters must begin, as they did in the late 19 th century, by electing school board leaders, mayors and governors who offer innovative policies, not the empty rhetoric about cutting waste or class warfare that animates this year's presidential election so far. The U.S. needs more innovative and responsive government if it is to avoid the fate of Habsburg Vienna.
Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has appointments in the Department of History, the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law.

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The Austro-Hungarian legacy: Creative citizens need innovative governance

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Vienna was the center of European creativity in the years between 1780 and 1914. It was the city of Mozart and Beethoven. No place could rival its music. It was also the city of Klimt and Kokoschka. Vienna pioneered modern art as we know it.

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This article from Cambridge University is an overview of a book by Dominic Lieven titiled Towards the Flame. Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia. This book dicussses the relationship between Russia and the various ethnic groups  of the Austro Hungarian Empire.

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The decision to go to war in 1914 had catastrophic consequences for Russia. The result was revolution, civil war and famine in 1917-20, followed by decades of Communist rule. A new book, Towards the Flame. Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia, by research fellow Dominic Lieven explains why Russia's rulers allowed their country to be pulled into the First World War. It is a study of diplomacy and military policy, as well as of geopolitics and power. Lieven digs beneath the surface to investigate issues such as the structure of Russian government decision-making and the mentalities and values of the decision-makers: these are vital to any understanding of the forces that impelled Russia to war.

The book also studies how Russia's rulers envisaged and planned for a future European conflict and does so on the basis of a mass of new and very revealing archival material. One of the book's strengths is that it is based on a vast trawl of materials from seven Russian archives, the most important of which were closed to foreign historians until the 1990s. In addition, Professor Lieven has found important new material in Russian émigré archives, and has utilised archival and published primary sources for all the other great powers.

The Russo-Serbian relationship, vital to the outbreak of war in 1914, is just one area in which the mass of new archival materials Professor Lieven draws from Russian, American and private family archival holdings radically changes the received understanding of events. In this area he has read all the official correspondence between Russia's diplomatic and military representatives in Belgrade and the foreign and war ministers, as well as the unpublished memoirs and private correspondence both of the Russian number two in Belgrade and of the head of the Near Eastern (ie Balkan) department of the Foreign Ministry.

Professor Lieven says Towards the Flame provides a unique insight into the war and revolution that engulfed Russia in 1914-21, but it is about far more than just Russia. One third of the book provided international comparisons and contexts. By looking at the international crisis of the early twentieth century from an unusual Russian and east European angle one gains a radically different understanding of the war's causes, course and consequences.

For Professor Lieven the war was above all an east European war brought on by the struggle between empires and nationalisms. Though war was by no means inevitable in 1914 he says it was certainly no unforeseeable accident and, even if avoided in 1914, might well have happened in the near future. The basic issue at the root of the war - the struggle between empires and nationalisms - lay at the heart of twentieth-century world history , says Professor Lieven. At the very moment when this struggle drove Europe to war in 1914 it was - in the form of the Irish crisis - paralysing British government and threatening the United Kingdom with civil war. Professor Lieven argues that the Suez Crisis of 1956 was in many ways the "1914 moment" of the British and French empires: imperial elites, facing geopolitical decline and nationalist challenges, struck out with a combination of desperation, arrogance and miscalculation rather similar to Austrian behaviour in 1914.

This is one of the ways in which Professor Lieven draws parallels between the international crisis that led to the First World War and subsequent political developments, some of which are still highly relevant today. For example, he shows that the Ukrainian issue was far more important a source of Austro-Russian tension and Russian domestic weakness than Western historians of the First World War era allow. In those days, without Ukraine's agriculture, coal and metallurgical industry Russia would cease to be a great power.

In 1918 as a result of the Russian Revolution Ukraine became a nominally independent country and in fact a German protectorate. Had Germany been able to sustain the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk which established German domination of eastern and central Europe then it only needed a stalemate on the western front to ensure its victory in the First World War, says Professor Lieven. He argues that had the Germans not brought the United States into the war on the very eve of the Russian Revolution's destruction of Russian power then victory would have lain within their grasp. "Maybe such a victory and a Pax Germanica would have been better than the Versailles order which followed German defeat. The Versailles settlement was based on the defeat and exclusion of both Germany and Russia, which potentially were the continent's two most powerful countries. For that reason alone it was unlikely to survive," he says.

"For the Russian people the greatest tragedy of all was that the two million soldiers who died in Russia's First World War died for nothing. In large part because the Revolution meant that Russia was not one of the victors at Versailles, the first world war needed to be fought a second time at terrible cost 20 years later."

*Towards the Flame is published by Allen Lane on 28th May, price £25.00. Professor Lieven will be speaking about his book as part of the Cambridge Series at the Hay Festival at 7pm on May 30th.

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dominic lieven dominic lieven first world war

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russia school of the humanities and social sciences

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school of the humanities and social sciences

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The decision to go to war in 1914 had catastrophic consequences for Russia. The result was revolution, civil war and famine in 1917-20, followed by decades of Communist rule. A new book, Towards the Flame. Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia, by research fellow Dominic Lieven explains why Russia's rulers allowed their country to be pulled into the First World War.

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This article from the Duke University press by Hanna and Horne anaylzes the relationship between France and Germany in the years since the war.

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As France embarked on the centenary of the Great War in 2014, the last poilu had already passed away. Lazare Ponticelli, an Italian immigrant who fought in both the French and Italian armies, was buried with full state honors in 2010. Aside from those with a childhood memory of the conflict, the living links had gone and the war was a purely historical episode. Yet the sense of popular engagement with it was if anything greater and more varied than it had been on the fiftieth anniversary. Then Charles de Gaulle had emphasized the epic battles and the tenacity of the French. Although the president of the new Fifth Republic had fought in the Great War, he had a somewhat unusual profile, having been captured at Verdun in 1916 and spending the rest of the war in a German camp. His was perhaps not the typical veteran's view. In fact, de Gaulle's real concern in the mid-1960s was French recovery from two more recent conflicts in which he had played a pivotal role: World War II and Algeria. Each had been traumatic for the French in a sense quite different from World War I. Not surprisingly, he insisted on the unity and victory of the nation in the Great War.

It is perhaps not surprising that after a century the themes of reconciliation and the war dead should have become as important as national unity. From the end of the conflict the French measured the cost of victory in death and broken families: with over 1.3 million military dead, they suffered proportionately higher losses than any other country except Serbia. For them, World War I has come to express the general tragedy of war more readily than World War II, because while victory was achieved in 1918, the war's political agenda now seems remote whereas the war dead remain omnipresent. The opposite is the case with World War II. The French military dead were fewer than in the Great War. But the political-and moral-agenda of the conflict and the divisions it caused still shape contemporary France, not least through belated recognition of the French role in the Holocaust. So in relation to the Great War, Hollande could also stress the cost of all war: "The commemoration is dedicated to peace. . . . During four years, the allies and enemies of yesteryear-henceforth reconciled-will come from the five continents to remember together, with us, their dead and their missing."

. . .

As far as the scholarly history of the war is concerned, the roots and implications of this development go back at least half a century. In 1968, the last year of the fiftieth anniversary, Pierre Renouvin published a remarkable article in the Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine. Doyen of French historians of the war since the 1920s and the figure who presided over the establishment of the Bibliothèque-Musée de la Guerre, now the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC), Renouvin more than anyone shaped a master narrative of the war from the French perspective. Pioneering the study of "international relations" in France as something broader than conventional diplomatic history, he wrote a series of political studies on the origins, course, and outcome of the conflict that culminated in his work La crise européenne et la Première Guerre mondiale, first published in 1934, just as the postwar order based on the victory was crumbling, and revised and reissued over the next forty years. It epitomizes that "first generation" of World War I historiography identified by Antoine Prost and Jay Winter as the military and political history of a conflict that dominated present time down to 1939.

Renouvin did not only capture the distinction between the causal narratives of high political history and something else that he still sought to define; he literally embodied it. For he was a veteran of the Great War who had lost an arm in General Robert Nivelle's failed offensive on the Chemin des Dames in 1917 and who showed his sensitivity to the "social psychology" of the war by the role he played in the BDIC in the 1920s, when he organized its catalog to highlight materials on the experience of soldiers and civilians and on the cultural aspects of the conflict-from the soldiers' press to the war's rich iconography. He was, in short, an ancien combattant like six million others who believed that theirs was the defining experience of a generation.

Naturally, such a belief had been expressed in an outpouring of soldiers' published memoirs, diaries, and novels that started with the war itself and that one of their number, the Franco-American literary critic Jean Norton Cru, sought to list and evaluate for their fidelity to what he understood that experience to be. But academic historians had never addressed the soldiers' experience. This was left in the 1960s to the veterans who sought to transmit the message of their war to future generations and to protest against any glorification of the conflict. Notable among them were the agrégés André Ducasse, Jacques Meyer, and Gabriel Perreux, who found a popular readership for their books on daily life during the war. In 1967 an association of veterans (presided over by Maurice Genevoix, the main surviving veteran novelist of the conflict) opened a museum, the Mémorial de Verdun, which stood at Fleury-sous-Douaumont on the sacred soil of the farthest point reached by the Germans during the battle of 1916. Refurbished for the centenary of Verdun in 2016, it remains perhaps the last collective statement made by the veterans.

Yet neither a public appetite for such topics nor even access to the archives that allowed them to be addressed was sufficient. After all, as Renouvin pointed out, the press, diaries, and correspondence had long been available. It required above all a different approach by a younger generation of historians, whose formative experience had been World War II and the postwar years and who were open to the prevailing paradigm of social history, including the Annales School, at least in its insistence on deep structural factors if not on the longue durée.

The point was borne out by the most controversial episode of the poilus' war, the mutinies occasioned by Nivelle's disastrous offensive that erupted in late spring and summer 1917. For just what those protests consisted of and signified was vital for answering larger questions about the war. Minimized in much of the soldiers' autobiographical literature, they stood nonetheless for the Left as a symbol of the soldiers' revolt against incompetent military leadership or even the war itself. When Guy Pedroncini's Les mutineries de 1917, the first scholarly study of the French soldiers, was published in 1967, therefore, its impact was the greater for the author's special access to the military archives. Establishing the geography, dimensions, and chronology of the incidents, Pedroncini likened them to an apolitical strike by some forty thousand men who had been involved in Nivelle's offensive and who now refused not so much to fight the war as to fight it on the basis of discredited tactics. He rebutted the more lurid contemporary myth that the revolt was fanned by pacifist propaganda, threatening a breakdown of the war effort. Pétain, who had grasped the significance of the movement and knew how to restore morale by limited repression and attending to the poilus' many practical grievances, emerged as the key person. Pedroncini went on to write Pétain's biography, rehabilitating him by contrast with his divisive role in World War II.

Three other studies in the following decade bore the influence of Renouvin and the epistemological change that he had identified at the end of the half centenary. Jean-Jacques Becker published a thesis (supervised by Renouvin) on public opinion in 1914 that punctured the later myth of a French population insouciantly consigning the belle epoque to oblivion as it embarked enthusiastically on war. On the contrary, that moment of undoubted unity was shot through with somber resolve and a belief that the crisis was a struggle for national survival, making the unity all the more impressive. The thesis published by Antoine Prost (and dedicated to Renouvin) took the most distinctive of the interest groups mentioned in Renouvin's article, the anciens combattants. He studied their massive presence and evolution in postwar France, when, with three million members, they formed the largest civic movement in the country. He concluded not only that they were far from being prisoners of the Right or the Left but also that, with their prevailing "patriotic pacifism," they opened a window into interwar French opinion at large. The final work, prefaced by Renouvin, was Marc Ferro's history of World War I. This sought to combine the politico-military narrative and the social psychology of experience that Renouvin himself had kept distinct. It translated Renouvin's article into what such a history of the war might look like.

It is not surprising that the study of World War I in the 1970s and 1980s-stamped with the hallmark of social history even if alternative approaches were still practiced-should have focused on the "other front," to cite a key collection of essays on the interior. Indeed, Patrick Fridenson's 1914-1918: L'autre front was published by the social history journal Le mouvement social, which promoted a historiography that centered on class, the labor movement, and industrial unrest. The question behind much of this scholarship was of course that of revolution. It included the fate of French syndicalism and socialism with their revolutionary orientation during the war; responses to events in Russia, that new lodestone of revolution in 1917; and the question of how, and how much, the war radicalized labor in France as elsewhere.

The labor history of the war focused on a wartime working class generated by the industrial mobilization and reconstituted both geographically as a result of the invasion and socially from new sources (women, immigrants). The "dilution" of the labor process faced skilled workers (especially in engineering) with the challenge of the semiskilled worker and visions of the assembly line of the future. Fed by rampant inflation and powered by acute labor shortages, local trade union militancy sprang up in the chief munitions centers and then the railways. From 1917 to 1920 it fueled the biggest strike waves in French history to that point. Anglophone historians contributed to the study of this new working class, its radicalism, and also a countervailing labor reformism. A highly interventionist wartime state engaged in three-way corporatist politics with the main trade union body, the Confédération Générale du Travail, and parallel employer organizations, thereby managing labor unrest through bargaining and the concession of reforms-at least while the war lasted.

Jean-Louis Robert supplied the culminating study of the complex relationship between patriotism and revolution in the case of the Paris working class. Pointing to the multiple milieus in which identities of both class and nation were forged by workers (trade unionism, war factories, the state) and to the stimulus of industrial militancy, as well as to its limits, he concluded that a rising hope for a revolution in the sense of a social transformation that would address the ills and inequalities of wartime was indeed apparent among many Paris workers, but that victory and the solidity of the state, which (as noted) intervened in social affairs, frustrated in France what their opposite precipitated in Russia. One might add that the peasantry, still half the French population and more than half of the infantry, had by and large become a mainstay of the social and political order of the Third Republic, whereas it contributed significantly to the Russian revolution. Like other social groups (the classes moyennes, the bourgeoisie), the peasantry failed to attract the attention of the social historians. However, the prefects and other agents of the state were acutely aware of how these groups limited wartime disaffection in 1917-18, something underlined by the continued work on public opinion.

Equally shaped by social history and "second wave" feminism, and influenced by Anglophone work, research in these same decades saw women written back into the history of the war. In addition to women's waged work, already referred to, scholars contested an earlier belief that war service contributed to women's "emancipation," especially since in France (unlike other countries) it did not lead to the vote. They suggested instead that the war reinforced gendered distinctions and hierarchies owing to the moral supremacy accorded men in combat, the exploitative nature of much women's work during the war, and an emphasis on motherhood. Yet even those most pessimistic about the capacity of the war to modify the gender order recognized that the experience did change women, albeit that men (especially veterans) monopolized the retrospective discourse. Other historians emphasized how the war enhanced women's agency, especially in volunteer roles such as nursing, philanthropy, and various forms of war service. Moreover, even the concern with maternity (and its compatibility or otherwise with waged work) enlarged a professional sphere for women as educationalists and social workers-a paradox increasingly apparent between the wars. In an influential study Mary Louise Roberts concluded that the war reinforced both notions of masculinity and contrasting views of femininity. Gender emerged above all as more conflicted and more likely than before the war to express broader social and political tensions.

The seventy-fifth anniversary of World War I passed without comment. The French had other things on their mind in the bicentenary of the Revolution and the year that ended communism, opening the way to the reunification of Europe. Yet in retrospect 1989 marks a turning point in the "regime of historicity" (or the sense of historical time) that was to shape the historiography of the war and much else. The decline of Marxist certainties and the erosion of the social paradigm, with a turn toward subjective meaning (most evident in a growing fascination with language), had been apparent in the 1980s. Jean-Louis Robert had referred in his study of Paris workers to a wartime moral vocabulary that turned on the figures of the embusqué (or shirker), the hoarder, and the war profiteer. The best social history had always prized subjectivity as one of its themes and part of its evidence. Yet its main categories, such as class and industrialization, addressed durable structures and longer-term processes. They were less adapted to a "total" war-social historians tending to neglect the military. They also failed to formulate the vital question of whether the wartime moral economy of "sacrifice" was related to, or different from, the social relations of peacetime, a matter taken up only more recently.

Representations, language, and memory became more than symptoms of explanations that lay elsewhere. As subjective experience, individual and collective, they became explanations in their own right, for which larger structures provided the context. Analysis turned on reconstructing meaning, expressed in social codes, values, beliefs, emotions, representations, acts. This in turn revealed the wealth of contemporary understandings of the war, including myths, that could no longer (at least not easily) be dismissed as propaganda. It also used the mass of sources in which such experiences could be traced. Studies of art, literature, intellectuals, the popular press (including that of the trenches), and religion plunged historians into the world of the war. Winter's seminal book, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, took the very languages of war (visual and verbal) as its subject, arguing that in coping with death millions of people drew on tradition as much as on modernism.

Conceptually, ideas such as "war cultures"-or the beliefs and representations that expressed the engagement of the French (and other peoples) in the war-and "mobilization" and "self-mobilization," the cultural and political processes by which that engagement was structured, framed the new approach. Institutionally, it found expression in a museum. Whereas the memorial at Verdun had conveyed the last message of the anciens combattants as a self-evident truth (pride at their sacrifice in an appalling if unavoidable war), the Historial de la Grande Guerre, the first major museum on the western front in a generation, founded in 1992 on the Somme, was the exact opposite. European in orientation (it showed the British, French, and German empires at war) and animated by a group of academic historians, it treated World War I as an enigma to be explored and explained anew.

Historians in the first decade of the 2000s enlarged on the range of topics already indicated, including a renewal of local and regional studies (which had never entirely ceased) focusing on processes of mobilization and the role of the local in an intensely national experience. Deconstructing interwar myths (such as that of propaganda), which had so powerfully shaped perceptions of the conflict, continued. A new generation that came of age after the caesura of 1989 in Europe and a wider world where mobility and transnational perspectives were taken for granted produced a host of new studies. Many of these confirmed that (contrary to what they often wrote after the war) the poilus enjoyed close if complex relations with the world of the "interior" and especially with the intimacy of home life.

Of course, as Winter and Prost observed, the "three generations" of World War I historiography-political, social, and cultural-have never been neatly sequential. They have overlapped, each approach evolving as the dominant paradigm of the field shifted because each continued to address different issues such as (respectively) power and authority, economic and social structures, and experience and representations. They have varied in strength and speed, as new themes became mainstream while older ones, eddying on the margin, tried to edge back in. If cultural history exerted its pull during the decade before the centenary, it by no means monopolized World War I historiography in France.

Thus while the political history of the war had been in the "slow stream" for some time, and studies of the wartime state had been neglected since Renouvin's pioneering study of 1925, this was partly rectified by Fabienne Bock's important book on the resilience of the French parliamentary system under the stress of the war. French military history may have seen fewer breakthrough works and in-depth studies than the British military history of the conflict. Yet Anglophone historians have contributed significantly to the French case, notably Elizabeth Greenhalgh's trilogy, which stands as the most sustained recent study of the French army. French military historians have begun to renew the subject with work on battles and trench warfare. Michel Goya's La chair et l'acier (2004) remains a masterly statement of the nature of industrialized warfare overall.

As for diplomatic history and the origins and responsibilities for the war, these have troubled the French less than their neighbors across the Rhine. While Christopher Clark's magisterial study, The Sleepwalkers, was translated into French, it did not have the seismic impact that it did in Germany, where over two hundred thousand copies sold in the first year. This was in spite of the departure from orthodoxy whereby it assigned French and Russian leaders a major role in provoking war by dint of their refusal to let Austria-Hungary (backed by Germany) eliminate Serbia. It was as if the legacy of Renouvin's diplomatic history, with its qualified endorsement of French resistance to German aggression, still held sway. This relative indifference to outside views had long been shown by the failure in the 1970s to translate one of the few critical works on French prewar armaments policy, by the German historian Gerd Krumeich, though it did appear in English. By the same token, Krumeich's nuanced rebuttal of Clark for his neglect of Germany's role in the July crisis, and his qualified endorsement of Renouvin's position, was translated into French in the centenary year. The French, in fact, have been more interested in the legacy than the origins of the war. This has proved fertile for studies of the transition to peace and for the omnipresent traces of the conflict in interwar France, in memorials, collective mourning, artistic and intellectual reactions, and the anciens combattants already referred to. Nonetheless, a cultural approach has much to offer the vital matter of how the French (like others) imagined war as such before 1914-and in ways that allowed the "sleepwalkers" to act as if their eyes were wide open.

All this shows the vitality of French World War I studies at the centenary. Yet the scholarship reflects the major questions that such an overwhelming episode still poses for the French, questions that have by no means been resolved. This is especially clear in the way that the poilu emerged definitively during the two decades before the centenary as the key figure not just in the popular "memory" of the war but also in debates over its deeper meaning. Nor is this surprising, for he stands at the intersection of national unity and the tragedy of war-two themes of the centenary, as we have seen. He also stands where the military outcome encounters the "social psychology" of individuals, those two dimensions of Renouvin's own stance toward the conflict, as historian and veteran. For victory (as defeat) turned on the efforts of the soldiers as well as the generals and politicians.

In fact, the poilu had always occupied this place. In a telling study Nicolas Offenstadt showed how those executed during the war attracted powerful campaigns of rehabilitation in the interwar years, especially in the most unjust cases. The soldier reemerged as the ultimate victim in the 1990s with a movement to pardon the "fusillés pour l'exemple." The official view now embraces them in the suffering of all the soldiers, though unlike in Britain the campaign has not yet been successful.

The experience and motivation of the soldier raise questions of whether men fought willingly or under duress, whether contemporaries felt that the stakes justified the sacrifice, and what kind of institution they felt the army of a "nation in arms" (which the French had invented in the Revolution) to be. In short, the social order, the legitimacy of the state, and the agency of the individual all intersected in the soldiers' experience of a kind of war that no one had anticipated, and of which the mutinies remained a touchstone. Historians who underlined the imperatives of warfare in a now-remote period portrayed the poilus as men who, while developing their own culture of survival, internalized much of the broader war culture and above all the need to defend the patrie. Leonard V. Smith undertook the most detailed study to date of a single unit across the war: the Fifth Infantry Division. He concluded that the mutineers were more political than Pedroncini allowed and also that they extended beyond those who had fought in the Nivelle offensive. The mutinies were indeed a major crisis of military morale, but one largely resolved not by Pétain but by the men themselves. In agreeing to return to the front once key demands had been met, they were (in Smith's view) recognizing the sovereignty of the state that resided in them as citizens. Emmanuel Saint-Fuscien added a military discipline that relied on a degree of consent by the men and on the hard-won authority of the officers, though Nicolas Mariot viewed this relationship more skeptically.

For it is also hard to deny the coercive aspects of the army, the strong social hierarchies on which it rested (which meant that "intellectual" junior officers did not necessarily share the outlook of "their" men), and the rhetorical radicalism and popular anger that the mutineers vented as a social movement. These elements underpin a more radical interpretation by André Loez while also posing the crucial question of what the bulk of soldiers who did not revolt felt about those who did. By grasping the scale of the disturbances, not just behind the front but in trains back to Paris and by men on leave, Loez stresses a more fundamental "refusal" of the war while agreeing that the influence of socialist and pacifist opinion was small. There seems no doubt that something broke in the army at large after the Nivelle offensive. That the mutinies gave voice (and action) to a "refusal" that had been there since the bloodletting of 1914-15 (the highest numbers of French casualties were at the start) is less evident. The point is that they were an episode that then gave way to the rising morale and fighting spirit manifested by the French army, as Bruno Cabanes showed, during the last year of the conflict (including Smith's Fifth Division). It may be that the breakdown in 1917 was (among other things) cognitive-the moment when the language and imagery of war inherited from 1914 no longer had any purchase on the experience of the battlefield and the soldiers' hopes of survival.

The debate is vital, the issues are substantial, and none of the answers are entirely satisfactory. The questions, moreover, also apply to the crisis of civilian morale in 1917, which continues to be treated in a separate category owing to the diminished interest in the social movements of the "interior." One way to overcome simplistic distinctions between constraint and consent is to seek another term (dialectical or not) that encompasses both. Sheer "endurance" is the focus of a new collaborative study that emphasizes how shifting and paradoxical the boundaries of support and refusal often were, whereas the capacity to "remobilize" for what Clemenceau termed "the final quarter of an hour" and endure until victory became the comparative test for all the societies at war. One result of the scope and diversity in Great War studies since 1989 has been a relative dearth of works able to synthesize the new approaches and resolve such interpretative issues. The centenary with its own crop of conferences, few of which have yet been published, will add to the perspectives on offer. The debate can only intensify, and the answer to Renouvin's conundrum-how the "social psychology" of the French at war enabled the "military outcome" to favor them and their allies rather than their opponents-remains to be formulated. Perhaps this will happen only when the cultural and the social aspects have contributed their full weight to the causal narratives of the war.

. . .

The foregoing discussion of the historiography over the last half century has shaped the choice of articles for this special issue of French Historical Studies on the centenary of the Great War. Alex Bostrom's analysis of how the French government, army, and armaments industry coordinated their efforts first to forestall defeat and then, by 1916, to develop a strategy that would make victory possible underlines the point that "traditional" ways of analyzing the Great War can still tell us a great deal. The emblematic figure of the war remains the poilu, the "poor bloody infantryman" who bore the brunt of the fighting and the casualties. Yet as Bostrom's article reminds us, and the data he amasses reveal, this was increasingly an artillery war. Victory would belong to the nation (or nations) that successfully coordinated its industrial capabilities to make possible an operational strategy predicated on the massive production of munitions and an ever greater reliance on heavy artillery. Ill-equipped to wage an artillery war in 1914 and woefully short of munitions, France had to make significant strides in the manufacture of munitions and artillery if it wanted any hope of winning. Bostrom demonstrates how important 1916 was-but not for the reasons customarily cited.

It was, of course, the year of Verdun and the Somme, battles in which the lethal effects of industrial warfare were tragically evident, but it was also-and this is the crux of Bostrom's argument-the year in which France successfully coordinated its industrial production to accommodate its new operational strategy. This did not guarantee a quick and easy victory in 1917, as the Chemin des Dames made all too evident. But by the fall of 1917 qualitative and quantitative improvements in munitions and artillery production-including the manufacture of poison gas shells (euphemistically referred to as "specials")-were instrumental in securing French victories on the western front. Many factors contributed to the Allied victory in 1918, including the demoralization of German frontline troops, but Bostrom's careful archival study demonstrates that critical advances in the production and deployment of high-quality munitions and heavy artillery were vital. He also exposes the myth that the French by mid-1917 were somehow exhausted, able only to wait "for the Americans to arrive." France found within itself the capacity to fight the war in a different way after the crisis of morale triggered by the Nivelle offensive and also the economic and industrial modernity necessary to sustain such an effort.

However, access to archival materials not previously available allows Orr to tell a story about women, work, and military identity in the 1920s that prompts us to modify further, if not completely overturn, our understanding of the interwar years as a reassertion of masculinity and male predominance. While many officers were quick to deride their female employees, it proved impossible, inefficient, and fiscally irresponsible to fire all women. Indeed, women hired during and after the war were invaluable in a postwar army depleted by wartime losses and revision of the military service law. Unlike conscripts, whose term of service in the early 1920s was reduced to a mere eighteen months (and by 1927 to one year), women could-and did-serve in a unit for many years. One woman was thus worth at the very least one and a half conscript men! Women's continued employment in the army was by no means an unalloyed victory for gender equality: they were paid less than civilian men, and their eligibility for employment in the army derived, at least in the early 1920s, primarily from their status as war widows. As Orr demonstrates, however, ultimately it was women's second-class status that qualified them for employment in the civilian ranks of the French army: unlike conscripts, who gained the right to vote in 1927 in acknowledgment of the sacrifice of their wartime forebears, women could not vote and thus did not risk corrupting the military with disruptive radical ideas. Orr adds to the arguments of the historians of women already cited to show that the gender order of interwar France was more complex-and conflicted-than a simple misogynist backlash.

Hassett takes a different approach by showing how the conflict, which rewrote the relationship of war victims (military and civilian) to the nation in terms of obligations and rights rather than charity, did so very differently in the case of children, depending on whether the "sacrifice" was incurred in France or the colonies. Starting from the decision of the National Assembly in 1917 to provide financial and moral assistance to all those whose fathers had been killed or disabled in the war-not as a form of means-tested welfare but as a matter of right-Hassett demonstrates that the universalism underpinning the law as it was applied to French children played out unevenly in the colonies. In some parts of the empire, the principle of universal eligibility and the administrative infrastructure to guarantee the law's implementation prevailed, but in many colonies, including those of sub-Saharan Africa, which had contributed a significant number of men to the French forces, only children who were deemed financially needy qualified for the assistance that in France was given to all pupilles de la nation.

The discrepancies that thus emerged-a consequence of financial calculation, racialist ideology, and different colonial cultures-marked an "associationist turn" in French imperial administration after 1919 that undermined the universalist spirit of the original law. Insisting that indigenous fathers were not as central to the well-being of their children as were the indispensable pères de famille of France, insinuating that volunteers from the colonies-unlike conscripts at home-had been motivated more by greed than by patriotism, and persuading themselves that the nuclear family was an imposition of European custom on indigenous societies more accustomed to thinking of child rearing as a communal responsibility, colonial administrators could easily justify (to themselves, at least) their denial of support to indigenous war orphans. The consequences more generally of this differential and utilitarian attitude to the empire would only become more pronounced with the economic pressures of the interwar years. Eventually it would contribute to the inability of successive French regimes to chart a peaceful path to decolonization after comparable issues around military service emerged during World War II.

Physically confined to the edges of the French imperial nation-state and consigned to the periphery of the French collective imagination, the pupilles de l'empire could at least lay claim to one badge of honor: having defended and died for France, their fathers had accepted the legitimacy of the nation's war effort. But what of those in France who had come to reject the war, its legitimacy, and the sacrifices it compelled? Who from 1916 on called for an immediate end to the bloodletting, preferring a negotiated peace to unconditional victory? Were those who defined themselves as pacifists even more marginal in the French collective imagination than the unfortunate orphans of the most distant colonies? Curiously, while much attention has been paid (as we have seen) to the mutinies, concluding in the end that the influence of overt pacifism was marginal if not quite nonexistent, and also to the fluctuations of civilian as well as military morale in 1917 (the subject of Renouvin's 1968 article), the history of pacifism during the war has suffered from the more general neglect of the political history of the conflict. Despite publication of the output of the main socialist and labor antiwar bodies, the study of antiwar sentiment has been more vital for the interwar period than for the war itself.

It is this gap that Norman Ingram addresses in his close and careful reading of the first wartime congress of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, held in Paris in November 1916. Ingram brings to light the impassioned debates and internal divisions of men and women who tried to reconcile in a time of war their patriotism and their pacifism. Although most who participated in the congress believed that a lasting peace first had to be built on the definitive defeat of Prussian militarism, a minority called for immediate negotiations to end the war, whatever the territorial cost to France. Their unequivocal repudiation of a war that had by the end of 1916 cost a million French lives was not widely shared even within the ranks of those who called themselves pacifists, but the cumulative effects of war, and the as yet uncertain prospects for victory, made the minority's repugnance understandable enough. What they could not have known-and what Bostrom's article makes evident-is that by late 1916 the transformation of the nation's industrial infrastructure to accommodate new military tactics made victory on France's terms more likely than ever. But if the minority's repudiation of war fell on stony ground during the Great War, its arguments found more fertile soil in the interwar years when the human cost of that success became apparent along with the realization that what had been won in 1918 was anything but definitive.

The articles in this special issue thus prompt us to reconsider what, and who, should be central to our understanding of the experience and impact of the Great War for France. Military history still has much to tell us about the conflict and its ultimate outcome, and there is more to be explored-and decided-about the nature of the soldiers' war, including the long-neglected other fronts on which the French fought, at the Dardanelles, in Macedonia, in Italy, and in Russia in 1919. But without begrudging the poilu his heroic stature and the trenches of the western front their iconic place in our conception of the war, the French success in organizing an industrial effort and waging a war ever more dependent on heavy artillery, aircraft, and tanks is ripe for reevaluation in its economic, social, and above all political dimensions. France not only showed that it could sustain a war for democracy without entirely sacrificing democracy but also demonstrated (rather against the perceptions of the French themselves) that it was after all a major industrialized power. The failure to build on both those successes in the interwar period only makes this central dimension of the war more important-and more challenging-for longer-term interpretations of twentieth-century French history.

Women and children, once all but invisible in the collective and scholarly understanding of the war, are no longer peripheral to how we view the conflict and its aftermath. This has become apparent in the restoration of the poilus' story to that of the families and civilian lives from which they came. It has been especially important to the reopening of the crucial subject of "occupied France," flagged but not pursued in the 1960s. For the two million occupied French, many of them forcibly "repatriated" via Switzerland to an alien homeland on the far side of the front, were predominantly women and children. Yet this issue of French Historical Studies also suggests that in postwar France and throughout the empire, questions of gender and generation shed new light on an experience whose legacy, in November 1918, was only beginning.

18. Tesnière, "Documenter la guerre."

References

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France and the Great War on Its Centenary

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As France embarked on the centenary of the Great War in 2014, the last poilu had already passed away. Lazare Ponticelli, an Italian immigrant who fought in both the French and Italian armies, was buried with full state honors in 2010.

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This article by Liva Gershon was published in 2017, on the 100th anniversary of the U.S entering World War One. Greshon compares public sentiment of World War One to contemporary U.S affairs.

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What Americans Thought of WWI - JSTOR Daily

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What did Americans think of World War I before the US entered the conflict 100 years ago? “Public opinion” was no more universal in 1917 than it is today.

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Simon Heffer's article comes from the 100th anniversary of the war in 2014. His article anaylzes the historiography of World War One and how as the last of the veterans have passed away the research has shifted from living accounts to documented sources.

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There is a significant difference between writing the history of a subject some of whose sources are still living and breathing, and that of a subject whose sources are only documentary. In the past decade or two the First World War has undergone a transition from one to the other. A few centenarians can remember soldiers marching through the streets on the way to the front, or home in parades to mark what proved to be a hollow victory. Otherwise, the written word in memorandums, letters, diaries, despatches and memoirs forms the basis of our understanding of the period, together with extensive recordings made of old soldiers, sailors and airmen from the 1950s onwards.

That treasure trove of eyewitness accounts - what earlier generations routinely heard while sitting on the knee of their fathers and grandfathers - has enormous value: but old men forget. History is riddled with examples of memory warping reality; we know it from our own experience. Also, the old men, heroes though many of them were, saw only their own microcosm of war. The value of their experience is not to be diminished by the fact that the bigger picture, inevitably, escaped them. The contemporaneous record, if it exists, may well be superior, provided we have the judgement to see when for propagandistic reasons it has been doctored or distorted, or censored. While the last Tommies were still alive a natural deference to their experience shone through much of the writing about the period. Now no one is alive who served in the trenches or on a dreadnought, and the reliance is entirely upon documents, there can be, paradoxically, far more rigour in the analysis, as sources are tested against each other, and the unreliability of active memory ceases to intrude.

In looking at the British historiography of the First World War one starts with writing that is absolutely contemporaneous, and ends with that from this first era beyond living memory. Aside from history written as history there is also history written as literature - Sassoon, Graves, Blunden and so on. One also becomes conscious of the compartments into which the story of the war must be placed. Few historians have the range of specialisms needed, at least in the depth to which each is required, to tell the whole story, and the few who have tried usually have failed.

First, an understanding of the history of power, international relations since (at least) the Congress of Berlin and of European diplomacy is required to illuminate the catastrophe of August 1914. One also requires a knowledge of the political heritage and divisions in certain countries that played a leading role in the drama: Austria-Hungary and its tensions with Serbia before and after the annexation of Bosnia; the question of Belgian neutrality; the history of the rivalry between King Edward VII and his nephew Kaiser Wilhelm II, which helped create sufficient distrust in the kaiser of the British that it coloured his feelings towards this country after Edward had died and his far less provocative son George V succeeded to the throne; the feelings in France since the war with Prussia of 1870-71; and the growing chaos in Russia and its relations with states in eastern Europe.

Second, one needs the skills of the advanced military historian not simply to outline strategy and tactics after war breaks out, and to recount the movements of troops and the joining of battle, but also to link these with the political direction (or, sometimes, lack of it) of the chancelleries of Europe. Here the documentary evidence takes on a new importance, following the chain of events from politician to general to the man in the trench. One must understand the democratic pressures on politicians - in those countries with a reasonable semblance of democracy - to advance the interests of their country through warfare: understanding why, for instance, such a deluge of young men joined Kitchener's army in the first three months of the war, and the cultural pressure not simply on them to do so, but on the government to make the most of their service.

Third - and this is neglected by too many historians of the war in a way it seldom is of the war against Hitler - there is the question of life away from the front. The political pressures and civilian unrest that led to the dissolution of first the Romanov, and then the Hohenzollern, the Habsburg and the Ottoman empires in 1917-18 say as much about the effect of the war and its pervasive influence in the ensuing decades as the final outcome itself. In Britain a prime minister was deposed and a coalition formed that would, in effect, kill one of its component parts in the years immediately after the war. A few Zeppelin raids did not constitute the Blitzkrieg that so disrupted the life of civilians during the Second World War, and Germany occupied relatively little foreign territory compared to its subjugation of Europe in 1940-44; but the profound effect
the war had on the lives of people away from the front is also a neglected subject.

In Britain the effect of 19,000 men dying in one day - 1 July 1916, the first day of the Somme - is beyond our computation today, when the death of a platoon of soldiers in Helmand quite rightly gains national recognition and prompts deep reflection. It is the job of the historian to try to convey that titanic sense of loss, over those first few days of July 1916, as telegrams arrived in homes all over Britain informing parents, wives and children of the fate of men who would never come back. It is as yet inadequately done, perhaps because of the stiff upper lip that pervaded the 20th century, or perhaps because of sheer inability to comprehend the scale of the disaster.
II

The historiography of the war began when the war did. On the most basic level there was a running commentary in the press. Further up the scale of debate and analysis, Oxford University Press quickly published Why We Are At War - the authors given as "Members of the Oxford University Faculty of Modern History". The book is subtitled Great Britain's Case, and the historians outline the background to the events of July 1914. Their account of the neutrality of Belgium and Luxembourg and the development of alliances between the main powers since 1871, and their examination of the policies of individual nations, were the leaping-off point for subsequent generations that examined the concatenation of events culminating in the declarations of war. The book went through several editions in the first few months of the conflict as governments made available correspondence and documents that presented each nation's justification for its course of action - Britain's Blue Book, the German White Book, the Russian Orange Book and the Belgian Grey Book.

The respective justifications told only part of the story, for to tell it all would have caused discomfort for all concerned. The necessary incompleteness and deliberate distortion at least provided scope for the historians of the next century to try to piece together every aspect of the story; which eventually, more or less, one or two did. But Why We Are At War, however time has compromised it as a source, is a valuable document for what it says about the feelings of the people in the autumn of 1914. It is unequivocal in its support for the line of the British government and the righteousness of the fight; there is none of the nuance that would come into other, later accounts.

A number of popular histories appeared in the years after the Armistice, not least Winston Churchill's The World Crisis, published in five volumes between 1923 and 1931. For much of this time Churchill was chancellor of the Exchequer, but his political life was still overshadowed by his failure as First Lord of the Admiralty and the debacle of the Dardanelles. Churchill wrote the book because of his romantic attachment to writing the history of his own nation; because he needed the money; but above all because he felt he had to justify his conduct in 1914-15, and later in the war when he returned to front-line politics from the front line itself. The history of the First World War would ever be as much a political history as a military one.

Churchill knew what he was doing; he described the work as "not history, but a contribution to history". More valuable, in terms of its surprising objectivity, were the two volumes of Lloyd George's War Memoirs, written with the benefit of greater distance in the early 1930s. Of the general histories still read today the first truly rigorous one that probed more deeply was Captain Basil Liddell Hart's. He was a veteran of the Somme; his The Real War was published in 1930 and is still in print today under the title History of the First World War. Having experienced the rigours of war (Liddell Hart was shell-shocked, gassed and wounded, and saw much of his regiment wiped out in July 1916), he strove to pursue more profound truths rather than simply retail events. One, based on his own experience, was that frontal assault achieves nothing apart from hefty casualties. So influential was this view that Liddell Hart ended up advising the government at the outbreak of the Second World War.

In the 1920s there was a slew of memoirs by soldiers and sailors, as well as by other politicians. Regimental histories, also popular at the time, tended to give accurate, but dry, accounts of military activity. Of the general histories written by those without an axe to grind, one of the more entertaining and insightful is Charles à Court Repington's two-volume The First World War, published in 1920. In more ways than one it has all the immediacy of journalism, and not just because of the near-instant way in which it was written. Repington, an Old Etonian and a member of the Wiltshire squirearchy, had once had a glittering military career. However, while posted to Egypt in the early 1900s he'd had an affair with a government official's wife, and had then broken the promise he had given to a senior officer to keep away from her. He was forced to resign his commission; a lieutenant colonel in 1904, he could well have been a general when war came. Instead, he was the war correspondent of the Times; and by 1914 so many of Repington's contemporaries were senior officers that he had privileged access not just to information, but to the Western Front itself.

Repington's two volumes are a history of the conflict told through the medium of a memoir, compiled as a journal. They are a compelling read, not least because he also had superb political contacts: indeed, when his work was published, so many of them found their private conversations had been retailed for the entertainment of the reading public that he suddenly found himself short of friends. The books are packed with instant observations of the war, both on the home front and occasionally in France, and are not academic history by any means. They see the story from one viewpoint only, which is Repington's: but they are vivid, atmospheric, honest and dramatic. Wars are fought in cabinet rooms as well as on battlefields, and Repington's eyewitness accounts of both make his book an essential source today. He was also the man who first used the term "the First World War", in September 1918: not so much to coin a phrase to describe a conflict involving international empires and, since the previous year, America, but to warn that there might one day be a second one.

III
The modern school of First World War history has its origins in the 1960s, at around the time of the 50th anniversary of the conflict. It is from this time onwards that popular history - that is, books written with the intention of being read by an intelligent general public, rather than just a small circle of elevated academics - begins to evolve to its present sophisticated state, and standards of scholarship rise considerably. Put crudely, history moves from having hardly any critical apparatus to being supplemented by pages of footnotes and bibliographies. Ironically, however, the new vogue for popular history of the First World War began with a book that displays none of these qualities - Alan Clark's The Donkeys, published in 1961.

The book is an attack on the quality of generalship, notably an assault on Sir Douglas Haig. Although praised on publication for its readability and wit, it was also roundly condemned by serious historians for its lack of rigour, and the hostility against it has increased over the years. Clark had been an apostle of Liddell Hart, whose own methods he did not follow. This is not least because Clark, who had earlier attributed the phrase from which the book takes its title - "lions led by donkeys" - to a member of the German high command, eventually confessed he had made it up. Haig's diaries are often quoted, but selectively. The book is a clever piece of propaganda and manipulation of (usually) the truth, and its revisionism created an entirely new view of the war and how it was fought. It is, however, a view that more reputable historians have sought to correct for the past half-century.

The late Professor Richard Holmes (whose books The Little Field Marshal, on Sir John French, and Tommy, describing the life of the private soldier, are models of serious research and objective writing) accused Clark of having brought "a streak of sheer deception" into the historiography of the period. Sir Michael Howard called it "worthless" as history because of its "slovenly scholarship". Unlike later historians, Clark did not attempt to explore whether there might be two sides to the story of apparently weak British generalship.

The BBC's landmark documentary series of 1964, entitled The Great War, stimulated great interest in the subject, not least because of the realisation that the generation that survived it was beginning to die. The series filmed numerous veterans and prompted a vogue for oral history; the Imperial War Museum undertook an enormous, and hugely valuable, project. For the rest of that generation's life oral history was given more emphasis than documentary records, the focus on it becoming more intense as the numbers with first-hand recollection of the events declined. The half-centenary also prompted a further wave of books. In America, Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August had appeared in 1962. George Malcolm Thomson covered similar ground in his highly acclaimed The Twelve Days, published in 1964, a detailed account of the diplomatic activity between 24 July and 4 August 1914.

But the 1960s also brought the beginning of a far bolder interpretation of the war and its causes. A J P Taylor, the highest-profile historian of the time, published in 1969 War by Timetable, which argued that the mobilisation timetables of all the great powers - whose generals had prided themselves on being able to mobilise faster than their potential enemies - led to an inevitable drift towards a war no one actually wanted. This notion that the First World War was not a deliberate plot by Germany to expand its power was highly controversial, and led to the birth of the two rival schools of thought that have dominated the study of the war in recent years: one that says Germany was hell-bent on world domination, the other that says the war happened by accident.

Three years later the first volume of Correlli Barnett's Pride and Falltetralogy, The Collapse of British Power, although only in passing about the First World War, contained some telling insights about it - such as how many of the men who fought the war had, for the first time in their lives, proper food, clothes, boots and their own bed to sleep in.

In 1998 two serious British historians of different generations published authoritative histories of the conflict. Sir John Keegan's The First World Warwas based almost entirely on secondary sources, but written with a measured expertise that made it the perfect entry-level guide to the fighting, taking into account almost all of the scholarship since 1914. Professor Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War was a different beast; a more political book, making greater use of primary sources, and offering a more controversial judgement: that the kaiser had not wanted war, and Britain's security did not rely on Germany's defeat.

The next great landmark of British war studies - and in one respect the most frustrating - was the first volume of Sir Hew Strachan's The First World War, published in 2001. It is frustrating because this titanic volume (it is nearly 1,200 pages long and covers all theatres of the conflict) takes the story in Europe little beyond the opening phase of the war. But it concentrates on more than just the military angle, looking at the supply of munitions, the colonial questions and the means of financing the conflict. Sir Hew promises two more volumes, neither of which, sadly, is yet in sight. When finished, they will be what the war has always needed - a definitive, comprehensive and international history based on exhaustive and rigorous scholarship. For now, the centenary of the conflict approaches and the war still awaits the complete history it deserves.

IV
The anniversary has prompted not just more publications, but also a renewed argument about the necessity of fighting such a horrendous conflict. To generate publicity for their recently published populist works, Sir Max Hastings and Jeremy Paxman between them reopened the argument over whether the war had been necessary: and Sir Max and Ferguson had a two-part television battle about it, an unfair fight, given that Ferguson is a serious scholar who fits his conclusions to the evidence.

In a magisterial review in the Times Literary Supplement last autumn of Sir Max's and two other books - Professor Margaret MacMillan's bizarrely titled but widely acclaimed The War That Ended Peace and Brigadier Allan Mallinson's 1914: Fight the Good Fight - William Philpott, professor of the history of warfare in the world-renowned war studies department at King's College London, drew some distinctions between rigorous and populist history, and pointed to how high the standards now are, not least following Sir Hew's entry into the field. Philpott assessed the value that
MacMillan, as a scholar of international diplomacy, brings to the complex series of events that caused the war, and praised Mallinson's dissection of military questions with his "trained soldierly eye". Sir Max's work, by contrast, Philpott dismissed as "broad-brush and judgemental", something for which, a century after the events, there is no need if only a writer will look carefully at the wealth of documentary evidence available to him, and assess it free from received wisdom.

In taking our history more seriously, and demanding from historians evidence that prevents the presentation of fact from being recast as simple assertion, we have moved on from the Arthur Bryant school that still sets the model for populist history. The trouble with broad-brush is that it misses detail and the other side of a question, and sometimes commits worse sins - Philpott said Sir Max's confident descriptions of battle came "often at the expense of explaining it clearly and accurately", perhaps because of the author's reliance on what the professor waspishly, but with an appropriate choice of metaphor, called "his own army of research assistants". He condemned Sir Max for taking little notice of the detailed scholarship on the subject that has transformed and deepened perceptions of the war in the past 50 years. And he hinted at a weakness of basing judgements on accounts of those who were there: they did not see the bigger picture.

Of all the recent works of history, one stands far above all others, and should be regarded as an indispensable read for anyone who wishes to understand why the war happened: Christopher Clark's Sleepwalkers, published in 2012. Professor Clark is a German specialist, but also steeped in the international politics of the period before the Great War. He recently, and memorably, dismissed Sir Max by saying that "he is not a historian. He is a man who writes about the past" - a suitable essay subject for a degree examination if ever there was one.

Although he covers much of the same ground as MacMillan, whose scholarship is hardly meagre, Clark appears to have looked far more deeply and widely in archives than she has. Without an army of research assistants, but relying on a grasp of the main languages involved and a serious study of foreign archives, Clark gets to the heart of the two principal questions: why Gavrilo Princip felt moved to shoot Franz Ferdinand and his wife when they went to Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, and why the ensuing quarrel could not be contained to one between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. After much inquiry, presentation of evidence and discussion, he reaches a judgement: that the kaiser didn't want war, and that a war occurred was largely down to the bellicosity, incompetence and weaknesses of others.

As the historiography of the Great War enters its second century I suspect that Clark's view will gain more adherents, not least as a more nuanced and thoughtful understanding of this abominable conflict becomes more possible now that those who remember it are dead. We might even finally discover that the Germany of 1914 was nothing like the wicked and evil Nazi state we had to fight in 1939, and, unlike that later conflict, that nothing about the motivations behind it was simply black or white.

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Historians Fought About World War I the Moment It Began. They're Still Fighting.

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There is a significant difference between writing the history of a subject some of whose sources are still living and breathing, and that of a subject whose sources are only documentary. In the past decade or two the First World War has undergone a transition from one to the other.

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The Waste Land was written by T.S Eliot shortly after the wars end in 1922. Eilot is considered to be one of the great modernist poets for works such as this one. The Waste Land combines traditional literary elements with abstract imagery to convey the feeling of emptiness felt by returning veterans.

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I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,

My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

'They called me the hyacinth girl.'

-Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed' und leer das Meer.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

The lady of situations.

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,

Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:

One must be so careful these days.

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: 'Stetson!

'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

'Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,

'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!

'You! hypocrite lecteur!-mon semblable,-mon frère!"

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble, where the glass

Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines

From which a golden Cupidon peeped out

(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)

Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra

Reflecting light upon the table as

The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,

From satin cases poured in rich profusion;

In vials of ivory and coloured glass

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,

Unguent, powdered, or liquid-troubled, confused

And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air

That freshened from the window, these ascended

In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,

Flung their smoke into the laquearia,

Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.

Huge sea-wood fed with copper

Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,

In which sad light a carvéd dolphin swam.

Above the antique mantel was displayed

As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king

So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

'Jug Jug' to dirty ears.

And other withered stumps of time

Were told upon the walls; staring forms

Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.

Footsteps shuffled on the stair.

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair

Spread out in fiery points

Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

'My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.

Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.

What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

I never know what you are thinking. Think.'

I think we are in rats' alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.

The wind under the door.

'What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?'

'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

'Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?'

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag-

'What shall I do now? What shall I do?'

'I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street

'With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?

The hot water at ten.

And if it rains, a closed car at four.

And we shall play a game of chess,

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said-

I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,

Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you

To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,

He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you.

And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert,

He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time,

And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said.

Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said.

Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.

If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said.

Others can pick and choose if you can't.

But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling.

You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.

(And her only thirty-one.)

I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,

It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.

(She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.)

The chemist said it would be all right, but I've never been the same.

You are a proper fool, I said.

Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,

What you get married for if you don't want children?

Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,

And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot-

Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.

Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.

Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.

And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;

Departed, have left no addresses.

By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . .

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,

Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.

But at my back in a cold blast I hear

The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

A rat crept softly through the vegetation

Dragging its slimy belly on the bank

While I was fishing in the dull canal

On a winter evening round behind the gashouse

Musing upon the king my brother's wreck

And on the king my father's death before him.

White bodies naked on the low damp ground

And bones cast in a little low dry garret,

Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.

But at my back from time to time I hear

The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring

Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.

O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter

They wash their feet in soda water

Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

Under the brown fog of a winter noon

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

C.i.f. London: documents at sight,

Asked me in demotic French

To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel

Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting,

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Out of the window perilously spread

Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,

On the divan are piled (at night her bed)

Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest-

I too awaited the expected guest.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,

One of the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,

The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,

Endeavours to engage her in caresses

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defence;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference.

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.)

Bestows one final patronising kiss,

And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:

'Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over.'

When lovely woman stoops to folly and

Paces about her room again, alone,

She smooths her hair with automatic hand,

And puts a record on the gramophone.

'This music crept by me upon the waters'

And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.

O City city, I can sometimes hear

Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,

The pleasant whining of a mandoline

And a clatter and a chatter from within

Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls

Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.

Past the Isle of Dogs.

'Trams and dusty trees.

Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew

Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees

Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.'

'My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart

Under my feet. After the event

He wept. He promised a 'new start.'

I made no comment. What should I resent?'

The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

My people humble people who expect

Burning burning burning burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces

After the frosty silence in the gardens

After the agony in stony places

The shouting and the crying

Prison and palace and reverberation

Of thunder of spring over distant mountains

He who was living is now dead

We who were living are now dying

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses

If there were the sound of water only

But sound of water over a rock

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees

Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

-But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing

Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel

There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.

It has no windows, and the door swings,

Dry bones can harm no one.

Only a cock stood on the rooftree

In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds

Gathered far distant, over Himavant.

The jungle crouched, humped in silence.

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment's surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

Damyata: The boat responded

Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar

The sea was calm, your heart would have responded

Gaily, when invited, beating obedient

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon-O swallow swallow

Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih

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The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot | Poetry Foundation

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"The Donkeys" was a book written by Alan Clark around the 50th anniversary of the First World War. This book is famous for the phrase "Lions led by Donkeys" implying that the average soldier knew better than their commanding officers. Clark's book places the blame for the needless brutality of trench warfare squarely on the shoulders of the officers of the involved nations. This book is no longer seen as credible within the contemporary study of the conflict as major portions of Clark's argument as unsubstantiated with valid evidence.

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"Im Westen nichts Neues" or "'In the West Nothing New" was the first novel by German author Erich Maria Remarque. The novel is critical of the war and was widely read not only in Weimar Germany but the whole world. This book would go on to be adapted into the American film "All Quiet on the Western Front" in 1930. The book is one of the first pieces of World War One media to criticize the government, media, and larger attitude of European nations for glorifying warfare.