Countertfactual History - or Unhistorical Shit

I've always been a fan of counter factual history: from Robert Harris's brilliant debut novel Fatherland which takes as its starting point the fact that Hitler did not win WW2 to Keith Robert's stately Pavane, which although set in the twentieth century, assumes that the Reformation did not happen.  All of these work brilliantly as fiction, with the historical setting providing a fascinating context to an exciting story.

However in the run up to Christmas I was completely bowled over by this brilliant article by Martin Kettle which tries to work out how modern European history would have worked out if Germany had won the First World War - a very real possibility in the chaos of the battles of the first few months:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/25/if-germans-won-first-world-war

It might be possible to take a snapshot of a particular period and populate it with characters thatt we know from "real" history and imagine them in a different context, as C J Samsom  did with Enoch Powell, Oswald Mosley and others in Dominion, but the premise that he outlines does not offer such a memorable story as the last hundred years that we have lived through.

Perhaps somewhere in a parallel universe the Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand enjoyed his trip to Sarajevo, went safely back to Vienna and finally became Emperor of Austria.

Christmas Wishlist

If I receive any booktokens for Christmas then this will be my first choice:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/13/long-shadow-great-war-david-reynolds-review

Books written in 1913

It was my mistake: the books published in 1913 were of course written several years earlier.

And then by one of the wonderful serendipitous chances that seems to come my way quite often I discovered the attached articel about the letter that Ezra Pound wrote to James Joyce in December 1913:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/15/the-letter-that-changed-the-course-of-modern-fiction.html#url=/articles/2013/12/15/the-letter-that-changed-the-course-of-modern-fiction.html

The letter changed the course of literature by launching the literary career of James Joyce and setting him on course to spend the First World War writing Ulysses.

Of course the other major artistic revolution that took place earlier in 1913 was the first performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, one of the greatest pieces of twentith century music:

Books published in 1913

I had an idea that a list of books first published in 1913 might illustrate something about the impending catastrophe that was about to engulf the world - but it was not the case.

it did not take me long to find a list of books:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/popular_by_date/1913/

Although I have read other stories by some of the authors, ie Conan Doyle, and have heard of others, ie Marcel Proust and Edith Wharton, the only book I've actually read is Sons and Lovers. 

I'm not sure if this proves anything, as these are books that have lasted rather than were popular at the time.  However the same website produces similar lists for subsequent years and it is interesting to see which writers across Europe were contemporaries: Kafka, Proust and Joyce.

The History Boys

The History Boys has just topped a poll for the most popular British play - beating even The Importance of Being Earnest, Death of a Salesman and all of Shakespeare.

The characters discuss the First World War as the students prepare for the Oxbridge Exam and Irwin, ever the contrarian, suggests a different view of the war:

Let's go back to 1914 and I'll put you a different case.

Try this for size.

Germany does not want war and if there is an arms race it is Britain who is leading it. Though there's no reason why we should want war. Nothing in it for us.  Better stand back and let Germany and Russia fight it out while we take the imperial pickings.

These are facts.

Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don't like to admit the war was our fault because so many of our people died. a photograph on every mantelpiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It's not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise that so far as the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there's no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.

The number of books appearing in print about the First World War all need an angle to sell themselves.  In my view commemoration should be in and celebration should be out.

Blame the Liberals for Britain's entry into WW1

In December 1913 HH Asquith was in the midst of the the political manoeuvring that would lead ultimately to Home Rule forIreland.

As Prime Mister since 1906 his government had introduced the Peoples Budget which laid the foundations of the Welfare State and, as a consequence of Conservative opposition, led to further legislation that effectively ended the right of the unelected house of Lords to veto bills that the House of Commons had passed.  The Parliament Act would ensure that the legislation for Irish Home Rule would finally be passed.

Throughout history the Liberals have never been a party that supported war, and so it is one of the ironies of modern history that it was the last (and greatest) Liberal prime minster that took the country into the First World War.  As Max Hastings comments in Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 Asquith was able to secure the support of some, but not all, of his party to support the declaration of war in 1914.  If the Liberals had been in opposition then their opposition would likely have been unanimous.

And so we can blame the Liberals for Britain's entry into the First World War!

History and Autobiography

It's a bit of a cliche but I shall have to blame my parents for what happened next.  They were keen members of a local theatre and one night returned with a leaflet about a play to be performed next year that needed schoolboy actors and musicians: it was Forty Years On by Alan Bennett.

I'd been learning to play the clarinet since I was 11, but had no experience of acting beyond the Sunday School Nativity Play.  I had found Sunday School a bore - one bit of mythology is just like another - but the acting bit had been OK, so I went along for an audition.

The theatre struggled to cast the schoolboys, so rather than playing in the band I ended up on stage with a small speaking part.  This was long before Alan Bennett attained his national treasure status : Forty Years On was his first play after the success of Beyond the Fringe.  It was my first involvement in "proper" theatre, so I read the script without any knowledge of what was to come.

I was totally immersed with it from the first scene: the whole play was about British History and English Literature, with a whole series of revue-like sketches with some dreadful jokes. Inevitably - especially in the context of Bennett's later work - the First World War was a major theme and the following speech always drew some horrified laughs from the audience:

"If the ten million dead of the 1914-18 War were to march in columns of four into the gates of dearth, they would take eighty days and eighty night to pass through, and for eighty days the marchers would be the British dead."  In the light of that information I want you to calculate (1) the width of the gates of death to the nearest centimetre and (2) the speed in miles per hour at which the column was marching."

I'd never realised that it was possible (allowable?) to make jokes on a subject like this.  Shortly afterwards the BBC screened Bennett's film A Day Out, set just before and after the Great War, and I decided that Alan Bennett's work was always worth watching.

And by the time The History Boys came along I had a strange sense of deja vu.

  

First World War Propaganda

There's an interesting article about WW1 propaganda in the BBC History Magazine:

http://www.historyextra.com/news/first-world-war-propaganda-material-digitised-first-time

There must be some kind of big anniversary coming soon to give them a reason for this exhibition.

Origins

The First World War has always been there - an event that marked the real beginning of what Eric Hobsbawn called the short twentieth century.  As the centenary of the start of the war approaches I started thinking about how I first heard about it and how I learnt about it.

I've always had a fascination for history - and subsequently studied it at university.  I'd always been fascinated by the modern period, the 19th and 20th centuries and inevitably the two World Wars are major events that dominate any study of British or European history. But I'd known about the wars long before I'd studied them, and so it was within my own family that I'd first heard the war mentioned: a paternal grandfather who had served in the Army in West Africa (after also taking part in the Boer War) and a widowed great aunt whose first husband had been killed in Flanders - it was only much later that he's been killed on the Somme.

Outside of the family my first encounter with the war was via the War Poets: our history syllabus at this time was still stuck in the 19th century.  We studied the usual suspects and then our teacher took us of to the local film theatre to see Richard Attenborough's film of Oh! What A Lovely War.  I had never seen anything like it, and it was this that also launched my lifelong fascination with film.

The film is full of brilliant images - the constant cutting between Brighton pier and the Western Front is superb.  Subsequently I've seen it on stage several times, but nothing has ever matched the emotional punch of seeing the final sequence for the first time:

My aim with this blog is to track the history of the First World War - but one hundred years on.  There are other websites where you can track the major event on a day to day basis, but I want to write about the less well known events and to share the way that writers (historians and/or novelists) , film makers and musicians have reacted to the war.

I also want to make it clear that this is not in any way a celebration of the war.  I've been collecting material (articles and quotations) on the War for some time, and the one that best sums up my fascination with the period comes from novelist Pat Barker:

The Somme is like the Holocaust: it revealed things we cannot come to terms with and cannot forget.  It never becomes the past.