By Hugh Sebag-Montefiore
Viking, £25
Hugh Sebag-Montefiore has written a curiously old-fashioned book. Its sub-title, Into the Breach, is a not-quite quotation from the Agincourt speech in Shakespeare's Henry V, the heroic triumphalism of which is surely at odds with the almost universal view of this battle as the epitome of futility, waste and bad leadership.
The first two chapters are called Great Expectations and Paradise Lost but thereafter the literary theme rather dries up and the chapter headings take on a more comic-book quality - Hunter-Bunter's Folly and Can't See the Wood for the Trees and so on (although, towards the end, we get Hard Times and The Human Factor).
One chapter is called Neither Fish Nor Fowl, and this more or less sums up my view of the book. It seems unclear what its purpose is - are we celebrating the pluck of Tommy Atkins and his chums, and condemning the horrid Boche, or are we trying to understand a key moment in the unfolding of the Great War, which led inexorably, if not quite inevitably, to the Second World War?
Certainly, there are good things. The author quotes extensively from diaries and letters, and these voices are intensely poignant, especially when they try to mask the appalling realities and dress them up for the sake of wives and children back home.
But there are weaknesses. Among these are the rather unbalanced judgments of decisions taken by British and German military leaders respectively. When the German General Falkenhayn does something stupid he is dismissed as having "taken leave of his senses". But when Britain's General Haig is dumb, we are told: "perhaps that is a criticism which can only be made with the benefit of hindsight" (100 years later, hindsight is quite hard to escape). When a German interrogation of a captured, wounded British soldier is described, there are hints, but no evidence, that medical assistance was withheld and crimes committed. An account of a British interrogation, on the other hand, is accepted at face value.
That said, the account starts with a bang (the huge mine placed by the British under the Germans at Hawthorn Redoubt) and moves briskly and grippingly along to its concluding whimper in the rain and the mud. If you merely want to immerse yourself in the drama, and the sorrow and the pity, the book will serve you well enough.
But is that really enough, a century on? Britain's complex and currently negative relations with Europe have, lurking behind them, abundant traces of attitudes originating in the era of the First World War - attitudes reinforced lastingly by its propaganda campaigns.
These should surely be stripped away rather than replayed. The Great War's relationship to the Second World War is important, but its relationship to Britain today seems to me profound and in need of reflection. To explore this, I recommend Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers and Margaret MacMillan's The War That Ended Peace with, perhaps, the present volume adding detail and colour as supplementary reading.
