Antony Beevor: A century on, this bloody war still divides us

Perhaps in years to come historians will argue whether the great Gove-Hunt War was bound to break out before the anniversary of the First World War, or whether it could have been avoided. Some might say it is a futile conflict. I think it is not only a fascinating argument but a very important one.

I remember hearing from Professor Brian Bond some 10 years ago that Blackadder was being used in schools to teach the First World War. Horrified at this confusion of fact and fiction, I raised this during a talk to history teachers at a conference and suddenly realised that half of them were shifting uneasily in their seats. I love Blackadder, but history it certainly ain’t.

The revisionist version of First World War history began in 1961 with The Donkeys by Alan Clark (no Left-winger he). This savage attack on British generalship apparently inspired Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War. But what Clark and all the subsequent anti-Establishment and anti-militarist caricaturists did was to create two major distortions regardless of the facts. First, they implied that the First World War was totally unnecessary for Britain. Yet we could hardly have stayed out of the European conflict once the Germans invaded Belgium, whose neutrality we had guaranteed.

Second, they gave the impression that massive casualties could somehow have been avoided even when the opposing sides, having created trench systems from the Channel to the Swiss border, had no opportunity for subtle manoeuvre. It was bound to be an appalling war of attrition until the technology of attack (the tank) could outfight the technology of defence (barbed wire and machine guns). The antis of course concentrate on the horrors of the Somme while ignoring the considerable achievement under Field Marshal Haig of the great counter-offensive that finally brought the war to an end.

The debate over the origins of the war has raged for years. Was competition between the great powers bound to come to a head? Was it Germany’s fault, as the German historian Fritz Fischer argued in 1961? How large a part did the decline of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires play? Tristram Hunt seems to support Christopher Clark’s argument in The Sleepwalkers that Serbia was a rogue state, and Austria-Hungary was thus justified to go to war after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

Yet Conrad von Hötzendorf, the Austrian chief of the general staff, had long been determined to go to war at the first opportunity to impress his mistress. The tragic irony was that the only person who could have stopped him was the Archduke himself. Whether or not one agrees with either Clark or Margaret Macmillan’s more balanced version of events in The War that Ended Peace, there can be no doubt that Austria-Hungary, the Kaiser and Tsarist generals were far more responsible for the outbreak of the war than either France or Britain. And the Kaiser’s desire to starve all Russian prisoners of war to death, an idea not lost on Hitler, clearly demonstrates that such a regime had to be resisted.

Michael Gove rightly recognises that the war was “an unspeakable tragedy”, but he goes too far in trying to portray it as an entirely just war. It may have been seen as “a noble cause” in the opening weeks — but that was not to defend democracy, as he claims, but to fight German aggression. And the basic rule, which he seems to have forgotten, is that history should never be an exercise in patriotism. That is simply nationalist propaganda.

His other mistake is to believe that the distortions and myths are fostered uniquely by “Left-wing academics”. Anti-militarism and Left-wing convictions may well overlap but they are not necessarily the same. Much of the anti-militarism is a perfectly natural reaction against the earlier, collective versions of history depicting the story of country, army and regiment. In the past 20 years especially there has been a far greater emphasis on the individual. But at the same time there has also been a certain element of sentimentalisation, generalising tragedy from individual cases. The demands for a sweeping pardon for deserters overlooks the fact that a few were hardened criminals, not just sufferers from shellshock.

Tristram Hunt, on the other hand, is perfectly justified to say that the Left needs no lessons on “the virtues of patriotism, honour and courage”. But the anti-militarists certainly need some on the teaching of history. I was appalled when I heard from a historian who is a First World War battlefield tour guide that he had heard a teacher tell her school group that officers stayed in their trenches and forced the men forward. As a recent article in the New Statesman acknowledged, young officers died at twice the rate of ordinary soldiers. Such deliberate distortions tend to underline the way that intellectual honesty is the first casualty of moral outrage.

I have come across both inspiring teachers of history and deplorable ones over the years, so one cannot generalise, except perhaps to observe that the profession seems to encourage anti-militarist sentiments. Many object strongly to the armed forces recruiting anywhere near schools. This mindset, not surprisingly, shapes the teaching of the subject, using poetry and letters from the trenches, as well as contemporary novels, plays and fictional television productions, all emphasising the futile bloodshed. School-leavers unfortunately will come away thinking the First World War consisted simply of “going over the top” on the Western Front to slaughter in no-man’s-land, when the conflict extended so much further, to the collapse of four empires and numerous civil wars.