Why Jeremy Paxman’s Great War deserves a place on your bookshelf

The Great War involved the civilian population like no previous conflict. ‘Men, women and children, factory, workshop and army — are organised in one complete unity of social resistance, to defend themselves both by offence and by ordinary defence,’ said Ramsay MacDonald. Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, the popular army padre nicknamed ‘Woodbine Willie’, declared ‘There are no non-combatants.’

This premise underpins both these books. While Kate Adie specifically addresses ‘the legacy of women in World War One’, Jeremy Paxman discusses more generally the state of the embattled nation, its press, its political, industrial and social life, its assumptions and priorities. The strengths and weaknesses of both offerings are surprisingly similar.

Both are of a similarly manageable length; and both are eminently readable. Both marshal a procession of fascinating details culled mainly from secondary sources, but both also puff an enlivening blaze of individuality to catch the reader’s interest.

Paxman uses the story, or non-story, of his Uncle Charlie, one of many thousands of recruits whose lives were lost (in Charlie’s case, at Gallipoli) and whose brief biographies are contained in small bundles of effects. A ‘broken-sided cigar box’ holds all that remains of Uncle Charlie: the army form reporting his death, a mass-produced letter of condolence, the ‘Dead Man’s Penny’, a bronze plaque announcing that ‘he died for freedom and honour’. Maybe, maybe not — but how, exactly, did he die? The family were never told.

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Paxman doesn’t, as they say, ‘milk’ his great-uncle’s sadly unrecorded fate. He posits him as an exemplar of the loss that affected virtually every British family, and surely he is right to do so; it’s all those old cigar boxes, all our Uncle Charlies, that keep our communal memory enthralled to the unparalleled trauma of the Great War.