Q&A
The Great War: The
Soldier, the League,
the Imagination
Professor Patricia Clavin
Professor of International History, University of Oxford
Professor Alex Danchev
Professor of International Relations, University of St Andrews
Dr Helen McCartney
Senior Lecturer in Defence Studies, King’s College London
Michael St Maur Sheil
Photographer, ‘Fields of Battle: 1914-1918’
Chair: Dr Patricia Lewis
Research Director, International Security, Chatham House
20 March 2014
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Q&A: The Great War: The Soldier, the League, the Imagination
Question 1:
Having quoted the impression of the work of art Angelus Novus by Walter
Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, has Gershom Scholem written anything on
the subject?
Professor Alex Danchev
Yes. Good question. The question is did Scholem write anything, the other
co-conspirator - if you like - the other co-owner. He did. There are two things
to say: Scholem is the one who I think inspires the Benjamin version. It is
Scholem who knows all about angelology and Scholem who is in deep
dialogue with Benjamin throughout the inter-war period. In the theses On the
Concept of History from which I quoted the Benjamin passage there is an
epigraph, a little verse written by Scholem which was originally a poem written
by Scholem to Benjamin on his birthday. I will just quote you the one verse:
‘My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back,
If I stayed ever living time — I would still have little luck.’
This is a luckless angel, and that notion takes deep root in Benjamin’s
thought, and in the thought of others. The luckless angel recurs in German
thought and across continental Europe. Scholem is very influential.
Question 2:
The emphasis has been placed with regard to the soldier being seen as a
victim on trends post 1980, isn’t actually the reality that the position of the
solider as a victim was very much established during the war and immediately
after the First World War by people like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon?
Dr Helen McCartney
I think what we see during the war - both during the war and as you say
immediately afterwards - yes the soldier as a victim is an image that we see,
it’s just not the dominant image that we see. It’s one of a number of images
that we see. So I wouldn’t deny that there’s an image of the soldier as a victim
during the war. As the war went on people were debating is a war we want to
be part of, how important is this war. This was a debate that people didn’t just
accept it, it was a debate that went on throughout the war. And we can see
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Q&A: The Great War: The Soldier, the League, the Imagination
the beginnings of the idea of soldier as victim absolutely during that time, so I
wouldn’t deny that the image is there. What happens is by the 1960s and 70s
and possibly even a little bit before that, you start seeing the positive images
disappearing and you’re left with the negative images which lead us on to this
solider as victim image. And so there’s a diversity of images beforehand,
there’s a much more reductive script from the 1980s.
Question 3:
In the talk there was emphasis on how important Austria was perceived and
how help came in for it and so on, but why did it fail? It was the Austrian
financial collapse in 1931 that provoked nearly all the other financial problems
certainly of that year.
Professor Patricia Clavin
It’s a very good question. It’s partly why Austria was so important to this story
of the international economy and the interwar period. The way that Austria
was re-stabilized in 1922 is it’s the first country to return to the international
gold standard and the conditions of that meant that 50,000 Austrian civil
servants were sacked, taxes were cut, and Austria was put under a sort of
regime of international surveillance. But what wasn’t done was to explore the
fundamental character of the Austrian banking system. And instead Austria
like Germany became very dependent on a flow of international foreign
capital going into it on the one hand, and on the other, very hostile to an
international order that required Austria to be part of the international
economy. So the banking system wasn’t fundamentally reformed in any way
and the primacy and energy of the reconstruction effort was all about
reimposing the gold standard. And so Austria went first, Germany went next,
and all of the other countries that had been subject to that - the financial
regime of the League - also collapsed so that’s the real, there’s lots of sad
twists in the tale that follow on.
Question 4:
Regarding the theme of dominant views of soldiers is not the dominant view
of soldiers in World War One as victims or as heroes, or as however they may
be perceived just the normal compression of history: reducing what at the
time were surely a diverse bunch of humanity. All of which would have
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Q&A: The Great War: The Soldier, the League, the Imagination
different stories and different views of their own status. To worry about the
dominant
representation
in
culture
seems
somewhat
arbitrary
and
disrespectful in a sense.
Dr Helen McCartney
I think you’re right in terms that it is compression, it is reducing, the image of
the soldier to one thing or another and it is an extreme if you like - the image
of the solider as victim. Whether that is disrespectful, I don’t really quite where
that angle comes from. The only thing that’s necessarily disrespectful is to
look at why certain images of the soldier end up being pursued and other
images of the soldier that were around at the time are not pursued. I think
what’s interesting is why we have got to this image of the soldier, not whether
it is right or wrong, but what contemporary trends, or what trends throughout
th
the 20 century, have led us to actually think about the soldier in this way.
And that’s really what the article was trying to do. It wasn’t trying to say
whether the image was right or wrong, it was trying to say what has caused
this image or what has generated this image.
Question 5:
The three speakers have dealt in different ways with literature and visual arts,
but not one of them has mentioned music, and on one hand we have the
large number of patriotic songs emerging from World War One which of
course later on were so brilliantly parodied in ‘Oh What a Lovely War’ but also
if you take the art end of music, there was a substantial generation of British
composers, and no doubt on the other side as well, who lost their lives in the
war - people like George Butterworth for example. Vaughan Williams of
course served in the war and it marked him for life. In 1961 the broadcast of
Britain’s War Requiem was a work that had a huge impact and continues to
have a huge impact increasingly to this day so could you add some thoughts
on the musical aspect, because that would be of interest in Austria as well, as
what was happening in Vienna after the war with the development of the
Second Viennese School.
Professor Alex Danchev
If any of the others like me are panicking about having to address music in
about five minutes flat, you make a very good point. But we can safely refer
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Q&A: The Great War: The Soldier, the League, the Imagination
you to Kate Kennedy’s excellent article in this issue [of International Affairs]
which addresses exactly this. I think very much in the sprit in which you’ve
raised it. The quotation in her title is ‘A music of grief’, a very interesting
theme to explore. But I don’t mean to pre-empt anything but just to let us off
the hook if we need letting off.
Professor Patricia Clavin
There’s one thing I would like to add, is that part of the way that we think
about the grief after the First World War - well we think about music in relation
to grief but also patriotism and nationalism but at the same time there’s also a
whole music of internationalism, and not just the Internazionale from the
international communism, but actually there are five anthems penned for the
League of Nations. I’ve never actually heard any of them played, I wouldn’t
vouch for their quality. But it’s also that tension, that actually you see the
same construction of national identity in an international sense.
Professor Alex Danchev
We should do the five next time, don’t you think.
Professor Patricia Clavin
I’ll bring the sheet music
Patricia Lewis
There are so many themes and we are going to be covering them over the
next few years.
Question 6:
Was there an overall objective or desire to portray anything in particular to put
across a particular message perhaps in respect of the images that were
selected in the photography exhibition? What’s intended to happen to them at
the end of the series of exhibitions that are planned for the course of the
year? Are there plans to make the images widely available?
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Q&A: The Great War: The Soldier, the League, the Imagination
Michael St Maur Sheil
Yes. The purpose of the exhibition: Richard Holmes would tell you that he
was a military historian who loved to tell stories, so every picture has a story.
It was not – as I said – the war is now history and I think the time has come to
look at it as a photographer if you like, in a rather dispassionate way and not
to just stand in the middle of a battlefield and say this is a battlefield and I
ought to feel sorry and take depressing pictures. That’s why it was shot in
colour as a contrast to the old black and white. The theme, if you like, is about
reconciliation. The words of PJ Campbell – I’m sure many of you will know the
book – In the Cannon’s Mouth, he describes leaving the Somme and saying
there’s this terrible landscape, it’s been destroyed, I’m leaving many of our
comrades behind, they will always be part of the landscape and we will
always be part of them, so we will remember them but this landscape will
come back to life, the streams will flow, the birds will sing and it will get back
to that. So there is this theme of reconciliation running through it, that’s very
much part of what I was trying to do, was to do that. Yes there are relics of
the war, but they were there. Some of these places are really quite
outstandingly beautiful and this is a theme that comes through in a lot of
writing from the First World War. The men wanted to think about beauty, they
wanted to get away from the horror. There’s that quote from the battle of the
Somme listening to the larks and saying it was far too nice a day to have a
battle. So that is the feeling behind the photo, to try and be optimistic about it,
that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
As for what will happen to the pictures. Well, one set which is going to be in
France that is going to be going, will be held in the Peace Centre at Verdun,
they’ve asked for that already and that’s where those pictures will go to. The
pictures are available on the internet already; I have actually got to make
money to pay for the expense of this, because I’ve been working on this for
eight years. I’ve now been to every single theatre of war apart from Iraq, so it
is intended to embrace all the people that were involved from a global point of
view which is why - I think I’m right in saying and maybe someone will stop
me here - I do not know – apart from one Canadian venture - of any other
international exhibition underway for the 14-18. I think it’s very sad that the
participant countries haven’t got together in a more cooperative way, but it’s
one of the sad things is that it’s not happened. Because the governments are
probably just, from my dealings with government have been very disjointed, it
really has. Getting funding for this is quite a problem. To give you a classic
example: we opened in the Houses of Parliament, we went to give a sample
exhibition, Maria Miller, Secretary of State for Culture came along and gave a
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very warm speech and it was very well received, and Hew Strachan gave this
encouraging speech. And then the government announced the 5 million
pound funding for cultural events, and I thought fantastic, maybe this will
work. No. I was turned down, why? – Because I’d started. I could not have
completed this, it’s got to be done, and it’s one of those things. There is a lack
of strategic thinking about the government and about the way they’ve
approached this. One of the things we wanted with this exhibition is for it to
travel the country so that come 2016 people will say ‘the Somme – oh I know
about that, I can see what happened’. We’re trying to put some form of
context into it from an educational point of view. So that’s why this exhibition
here, and I really am very grateful to Chatham House who have actually paid
for this, because we couldn’t afford it they’ve paid for this, and this will now go
out to schools and I think that’s very important. And it’s something Richard
Holmes was passionate about, that there could be this outreach to the
younger generation and certainly I want these pictures to become part of a
collection at the end of the war centenary.
[Questions taken in a group towards the end of Q&A]
Question 7:
It’s certainly true that soldiers are seen as victim in contemporary British
culture, is the same true in German culture or indeed in Russian culture?
Question 8:
Bit of a counterfactual, how much different might the post-war and therefore
the interwar period have been if America had joined the League as proposed
by President Wilson
Question 9:
If you read Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon, the language is so precise, so
seductive it makes you think yes this is true, this is what the war was about,
this is what the war was like but there are historians who challenge this and
say it was not quite like that. So was the experience depicted by the painters,
by the poets a universal experience and the historians tend to question that
that was not the case? The best example of this in recent literature is Brian
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Q&A: The Great War: The Soldier, the League, the Imagination
Bonds book Survivors of a Kind, where he takes 12 or 15 leading figures who
went through the First World War whose experience was extraordinary. It
varied from excitement and joy at the fight to horror and sheer disillusion, so
how do you react to that view that what the poets and the painters said was
not necessarily true universally. There is a kind of tension isn’t there between
art, literature and painting and what historians 20-30 years later have to say.
This is very true as the historians have very rarely heard a shot fired in anger
so how seriously can you take them.
Question 10:
There’s a thread with two of the previous questions– in the United States
today there is a sense, particularly among the wounded warrior group, that
they are not traumatized, they are not victims, they are victors in a way.
Because despite what they suffered and despite the trauma of war they have
come back to the United States and they are productive citizens, they are
putting businesses together, they are having normal home lives, they are
dealing with their post-traumatic stress syndrome – if in fact they have it. Dr
McCartney, you take us from the First World War to today, and do that
comparison in a more intellectual way than I’ve seen analysed, at least in the
United States, about the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Professor Patricia Clavin
I’m tempted to say something about the way that soldiers are viewed in
Germany and Russia but I think Helen will know a lot more about that than
me so I’m going to steer clear. On the League, and whether it would have
been different without the United States in it. On one level its tempting for me
to say no because my own research has demonstrated how much the
Americans were actually involved in a lot of the technical work that they did so
the health agenda, the anti-slavery agenda, the economic and finance
agenda, sort of trading relations were all driven by Americans. So there were
in the organization’s lifetime about 350 Americans who worked for it.
However, in a fundamental way the Americans weren’t there to support
particularly French security and therefore also Britain’s link into French
security. And that meant France felt very vulnerable and that triggered, meant
that German and French relations never really improved, but it also meant
that the financial and economic settlement reached around reparations and
war debt were static. And actually the Americans and the British and the
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French needed to come to some kind of accommodation over that. Because
the Americans – and I talk about this in the article – the Americans often feel
as if they’re on the side of the Central Powers when it comes to reparations
and the financial settlement. So it would have made a huge difference
actually to the prospects of peace.
Dr Helen McCartney
I will take the point about horror first and the paintings and the poetry. That
was individuals’ experience of war, and there was a whole range of
experiences of war but I think perhaps most people who fought in the First
World War, whether they had horrific experiences of not, would not deny the
horror. They would not deny those conditions. What I think is really at the root
of this victim image is the fact that there is a perception now that the wars
were mismanaged that wasn’t necessarily there at the time. There was also a
perception, and perhaps a more important perception, that the objectives of
the war now are perceived as not worthwhile: that the First World War
perhaps wasn’t worth fighting if you look at it in hindsight. At the time people
felt it was worth fighting as they carried on and it became a total war, and as
more and more people were killed and casualties increased, therefore it kind
of has its own internal logic and people feel that it has to be worthwhile
fighting. So people don’t become seen as victims, people might say it’s a
horrible war but they don’t necessarily see the people who fought it as victims
as they see they’ve been fighting for something that’s been worthwhile, so I
think that’s where the victim image comes from. It’s how you view the war and
how worthwhile the war is, as well as what happens within that war. So
maybe that’s one way, a different way of looking at it. It’s not to deny the
poets’ experience but it is one experience, but we really need to really think
about the objectives of war as well.
The comment about soldiers coming back now and actually not wanting to be
seen as victims, I would agree. Certainly in the UK and the work I’ve done on
contemporary British soldiers and service personnel coming back, they don’t
want this victim image either. Yes they want support from the public but they
don’t want this victim image either. And it’s very interesting, Jessica Meyer
has written a book looking at people coming back after the First World War
and it was a similar thing. Actually people wanted to be portrayed as
honourable survivors from that war. They didn’t necessarily want charity they
wanted to be viewed as somebody who’d done something positive and not
somebody who was just merely a victim and so we can see this read across
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Q&A: The Great War: The Soldier, the League, the Imagination
from the First World War to now and I think that’s actually quite interesting.
But the fact that the public at the moment have the image of soldiers as
victims helps to reinforce the both that of the First World War and the image
of the soldiers today.
Professor Patricia Clavin
About German and Russian soldiers, the essay by Ulrich Krotz who talks
about Franco-German relations, actually partly structures his argument in this
volume [of International Affairs] around the way that soldiers are victims but
they are also agents, and partly the way France and Germany are reconciled
after 1945 is because soldiers recognise their own agency and want to
construct a different society. So it’s a very interesting theme in the way that
societies take a different path after 1945 to the way that they do after 1918.
Professor Alex Danchev
You make a very judicious statement. I think it’s a pity we pit history against
poetry to use that kind of categorisation, surely we need both, and we
shouldn’t exclude either. Speaking as a historian it seems to me that
historians spend far too much time bleating about the maligning effects of
poetry. I think that’s pretty much nonsense personally and that we should try
and embrace both. If I dare give you an example of that it is in a biography of
Basil Liddell Hart that I wrote once upon a time which dealt – among other
things – with his experience on the Somme, which is a very interesting
experience and one that is difficult to reconstruct, as is so often the case with
such experiences. It seems to me that the historical record gives out, but we
can use in this instance poetry, poetry by David Jones perhaps the greatest
poet of the western front in my opinion to help. So this is a concluding plea for
a kind of synthesis or synchronism where we use both not either-or.
Michael St Maur Sheil
One thing I would like to say is that there’s been all this mention about the
poets and what they thought about the First World War. As a battlefield guide
I read an awful lot of personal memoirs because they talk about the ground.
And there are a huge number of memoirs and some say ‘yeah I had a bad
time, I lost a lot of friends, but I was young, I was fit and I had a lot of good
mates’. There’s something that the army today will tell you about and it’s the
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Q&A: The Great War: The Soldier, the League, the Imagination
comradeship of soldiers and when we read the poets – because they write
very seductively – why should you trust them more than the ordinary soldier?
And I would suggest that this is very often neglected what the ordinary soldier
felt in the First World War. And it is only in the 1930s after all that the poets
start to be heard prior to that, and there are hundreds of personal memoirs,
which are hard to get hold of, but they really are a tremendous source and I
would suggest that sometimes we should include the ordinary writer along
with the poet to try to balance up the accounts.
Patricia Lewis
The Imperial War Museum is doing a great deal to bring a lot of these
accounts together, including accounts from people all over the world, the
different peoples who fought in the First World War and also people in
domestic situations as well.
We've run way over time and that’s just a sign of how engaging this whole
panel was. And I want to say that Chatham House – as you know - was
established as a result of the First World War and we’re coming up to our
100
th
anniversary following the final anniversary of the Great War and so
we’re going to be marking these few years with events, with some music at
times with some poetry, with some art of other types throughout these years,
and that will lead us up to the whole reason why Chatham House was
established and our centenary.
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