The Great War was an obscene and futile conflict laying waste a generation and toppling emperors. Yet here are two books that situate the horrors of trench warfare within a much larger perspective. One argues that the war had a forgotten ‘human face’. The other that it might all have had a very different outcome.
Henry James described the 1914 plunge of civilisation into blood and darkness as ‘too tragic for any words’ — and about tragedy there is always some air of inevitability, of sailing Titanic-like towards a foredoomed catastrophe. This air of unstoppable fatality has solidified over the intervening century.
During the famous 1914 Christmas truce the Tommies were struck by how many of the German soldiers that they met in no-man’s-land spoke excellent English: some could even have passed for Britons. This was because Germans constituted the third largest immigrant community in the pre-war UK, after the Irish and Russian Jews. Germans worked as waiters in London hotels, barbers in Manchester and pork butchers in Hull; German brass-band players were surely also popular, though Richard van Emden in Meeting the Enemy doesn’t mention these.
In any case social, cultural and military ties were strong. There were 43 German students graduating from Oxford University in 1912 compared to just three from France. Conversely, British students went to Göttingen, Tübingen and Freiburg universities to study and British businessmen, including my grandfather, went to learn the language and business ethos of this important trading rival. George V and Kaiser Wilhelm were first cousins, each a grandson of Queen Victoria, and each an honorary admiral in the other’s navy. Wilhelm was also Colonel-in-Chief of the 1st (Royal) Dragoons, in whose dress uniform he liked to be photographed.
Van Emden, who has written 14 previous books on the Great War, had a paternal grandmother who was German-born, and has an interesting chapter on what happened to those in mixed Anglo-German marriages: the wives tended to be given their husbands’ nationalities and then to be variously maltreated.
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