Michael Gove and the re-writing of history

How to celebrate, if that's the word, the centenary of 1914?  Michael Gove seems to think our perspective on the Great War has been skewed by pacifist nonsense like the famous episode of Blackadder, one only of a number of fictions, from Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That to Oh What a Lovely War, which have peddled the "lions led by donkeys" line.

It so happens that I am in the middle of reading Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War and am therefore slightly less ill-informed than usual on this topic.

Ferguson is a strange writer.  His principal motive seems not to be to find out what happened, but to point out where earlier historians got it wrong.  This contrarianism can be a tiresome end in itself, and moreover its methods sometimes seem strained.  Here he is on events in 1918:

"It was not Allied tactical superiority which ended the war . . . it was a crisis of German morale"(p.313).  "A tired and sick man after the failure of his offensives, Ludendorff jumped to the conclusion that the army would collapse if he did not secure an armistice; it seems more likely that his desire for an armistice was what made it collapse".  

The neat paradoxical inversion is typical of the style.  But Ferguson doesn't show how Ludendorff's personal troubles communicated themselves to rank and file German soldiers many miles away.  It seems unlikely that the figurehead of Germany's Junker class was articulating his personal troubles to subordinates in the touchy-feely Californian manner.

Then there is the vexed issue of surrender.  Ferguson shows that after the failure of Ludendorff's 1918 offensive, German troops began to surrender in large numbers.  He attributes this partly to the dawning realisation that it was safe to do so.  This may seem surprising, since we fondly imagine the British treated their prisoners well, but Ferguson sets out in some detail how the killing of prisoners was routinely carried out on both sides.  What he does not do however is show whether there was any policy change in 1918 by the British and French towards prisoners, and if so how that change was communicated to the Germans. Strange.

As Ferguson must know, asserting something without evidence is OK for a blogger but not good enough for a historian.

Where Ferguson really does score is in showing just how much better Germans were at killing our chaps than the reverse.  Undoubtedly we started the war badly and slowly got better as it went on (developing the tank, learning how to co-ordinate artillery and infantry), but even then the Germans were still better than we were.  They lost because their ordinary soldiers weren't in the end willing to put up with the horrendous conditions any more, preferring to surrender than fight.

Does this make the Great War a glorious episode in British history?  Well no.  To read yourself back into the mind of politicians a hundred years ago is to find that the great European powers were punch-drunk on territorial expansionism.  The conflict was as much about Imperial ambitions as about Gavriol Princip and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.  The Germans wanted ports on the Channel coast of France.  Had Britain stayed aloof France would have been overrun.  You can argue until you're blue in the face that such an outcome might have been better than the Nazism which followed Versailles, but politicians have to deal with the way things are now.  They are not gifted with foresight.  Britain's involvement was bungled, but also understandable and even necessary.

As for Blackadder, I watched the offending episode again the other night.  I have always loved it.  But Rowan Atkinson's dead-eyed and doomed soldier is an attempt to impose today's values and knowledge on an era which had the luxury of neither.