Great Britain. Army - Deaths men: soldiers of the Great War

In the Great War more than five million Britons wore military uniform and were involved, in various capacities, in the war effort, for varying periods. But, both during and after the war, the individual voices of the soldiers were lost in the collective picture. Men drew arrows on maps and talked of battles and campaigns, but what it felt like to be in the front line or in a base hospital they did not know. Civilians did not ask and soldiers did not write. Just as in the Napoleonic wars or in our own time, Vietnam or Northern Ireland, the experiences and inner lives of the other ranks were as private and unknown as those of Kalahari bushmen.

Just ten years after the end of the Great War it seemed that there might be a change. For five years, a number of memoirs were published, of which the works of Graves and Sassoon are the most widely read today. Then the public grew weary and moved on to think about unemployment or the dictators growing power. The war could surely not have been so black? There must have been invention and exaggeration. From Oxford Cyril Falls, the professor of war studies, warned civilians against even the most reputable of war memoirs. He pointed out that a popular war writer like Montague was over-sensitive and that Robert Graves, being an intellectual, had a mind less penetrating than that of the common man. Civilians came to agree with him in the thirties.

After thirty years of virtual silence, the fiftieth anniversaries brought renewed interest. This may have been due to the Great War series on television or perhaps to the need to find a moment in time when the fatal haemorrhage and the decline from power began. Again the books began to flow. Compared with the thirties, there was one big change: the memoirs of generals and fighting soldiers were replaced by descriptions of battles and whole campaigns. Their bibliographies were generally brief and made up of the Official History of the war plus regimental and divisional histories. This may well have been a matter of abbreviating research. Equally, it may have reflected that distrust of le menu peuple so common among British historians. One of our best military writers, Hubert Essame, remarked that poets are temperamentally unsuited for any form of service in the infantry; while soldier writers are exceptional and rare anyway; the majority of serving soldiers saw the war differently and so on. What emerges are works which enlarge our understanding of strategy, re-create battles chronologically using the wide brush of unit movements and throw in vivid, action-packed vignettes to speed the pace of the battle accounts. The soldiers war is at best relegated to a single chapter with colourful accounts of mud and vermin, bully beef and particular deaths in battle.