Customer Reviews

The Unquiet Western Front: Britain's Role in Literature and History

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Brian Bond writes with blinders on. His revised edition has corrected errors in numbers of casualties, in the Vietnam War, for instance. He is adept at taking snippet quotes of, say, historian John Keegan, and turning it into a whitewashed revisionist position. Keegan, for instance, did not say that the best military leaders occurred during the Great War, as Bond implies. Bond is, after all, one of the new revisionist historians, who, despite showing some merit in examining some of the television and movie interpretations of the Great War, whines on consistently about the high moral leadership of the inept and self-righteous Alexander Haig, whilst undercutting more serious research/historians who have gathered the facts and presented them in a methodical way. Bond's 101 page diatribe (I omit his 5 page self-congratulation in being part of the Lees Knowles Lectures, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the main thesis of his book) of glossed-over facts, and poor research, is quickly read and poorly researched. Don't waste your time or money. He is the archetype of revisionist history.

Brian Bond (a protege of Sir Michael Howard and retired professor of military history in the War Studies Department of King's College, London) has written an essential contribution to the historiography of the First World War. The war has produced entire libraries of literature, plays, films and memoirs and Bond argues that these have come to dominate the study of the subject rather more than any serious investigation of the conduct of the fighting and the thinking that went behind the organisation of the opposing armies. It is only relatively recently that any serious study has been made of the fighting methods that were introduced (hyperbolic odes to the exploits of German stormtroopers notwithstanding), the levels of training and equipment and the serious thought processes that lay behind them.

Bond addresses several areas including;

- Whether the common perception that the Great War was an unnecessary and foolish war is correct.
- The impact of personal memoirs and especially the impact of the war poets on the historiography of the war.
- The extent to which the war became a totem of the left in the 1960s and the extent to which this has coloured the study of the subject.

Bond also addresses the ludicrously distorted image of the war that is posessed by the average "man on the street", a view which often bears next to no relation to reality. He deconstructs a number of areas which often combine to constitute the average person's knowledge of the war - Blackadder, Oh! What a Lovely War, the changing war in which history is studied in schools, opinion articles by ill informed tabloid newspapers and finds most of them dangerously distorting (and worryingly persistent) if we seek to realise any sort of balanced understanding of the conflict. He points to the fact that the war has become emotionalised like almost no other and tries to come to an explanation of why this is. He takes on much of the received wisdom and the results will no doubt infuriate many people who are incapable of moving outside the ridiculously emotionalised box in which the war is normally viewed. Above all, he tries to move the debate out of the field of social history and sociology where many of the best known works on the war have languished and into the field of serious military history and war studies, where it belongs. Sadly, it may well be that existing views are so heavily entrenched that the game isn't worth the candle.

This is a very important book and one which should be read by everybody with an interest in the First World War.