Debunking WW1 Myths

This is fascinating: a historian (Dan Snow - for it is he) debunks popular myths about WW1 and receives hate mail from people because the truth does not match up with their own preconceptions/illusions/handed down family stories:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-one/10931918/Historian-Dan-Snow-received-hate-mail-for-debunking-World-War-I-myths.html

The only one that really surprised me was "Lions led by Donkeys": it was only recently that I read that Alan Clark (of Diaries fame) admitted making this up for his otherwise excellent book The Donkeys.

It's proably why I never got on with religion: I always want to corroborate my sources, or at least evaluate the authors as objective observers - always a vain hope when it comes to matters spiritual.

Once again we're back to Alan Bennett: that's not how it was; that's just how he thinks it was.

And tomorrow the July crisis begins in earnest...

The centenary proper starts today

Today is the centenary of the assassination of the Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo: not in itself the cause of WW1, but certainly the starting point for the series of events over the next month that led to the outbreak of war.

At moments like this it's good to turn to Alan Bennett who touched on this period in Forty Years On.

One of the characters in the play within the play is remembering the period before the war, and another debunks his memory:

"Tempest: ...One boat on the wan, listless waters of the lake and nothing stirring in Europe for years and years and years.

Hugh: That's not how it was. That's only how he thinks it was. Really it was wars and rumours of wars, jut like any other time."

Bizarre historical coincidence: my copy of the script is now just over forty years old.

 

Europe 1914 - 2014

This is amazing: an interactive map showing the changes in the map of Europe between 1914 and 2014:

http://www.rferl.org/contentinfographics/infographics/25427811.html

#fallofempires
 

Adlestrop

We're getting near to the start of the main centenary season, but before we do so I heard on the radiothis morning that today is the centenary of the unscheduled stop that Edward Thomas's train made in Adlestrop.

Here's the poem:

Yes, I remember Adlestrop --
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop -- only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.         

 I think we read it in school, but I've never studied it and the discussion on the radio was fascinating. Thomas did not write the poem until 1915 when he was at war, and with that knowledge you immediately see that incredible pause -  "No one left and no one came" - as if there is a vast holding of breath before the start of the July Crisis and everything that followed on from it.