False WWI myths dispelled, war of ideas set adrift

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The descriptions of carnage are horrifying enough, yet somehow the matter-of-fact accumulation of detail in "Tommy," Richard Holmes' new study of the British soldier in World War I, is even more overwhelming.

So, we learn that at the Battle of Loos in 1915, the British army, in the course of being "very roughly handled" by the enemy machine-gunners, lost 8,000 officers and men in less than four hours. In the "impressive victory" at Messines Ridge two years later the British commander suffered losses of 25,000 men in the process of capturing 7,000 prisoners and killing or wounding another 13,000.

As we are learning all over again in Iraq, we measure victories in a very different way now. But Mr. Holmes -- one of the best and most prolific of military historians -- reminds us that the question of perception played just as significant a role in the era of the trenches as it does in the age of Al Jazeera.

Most of us with some vague knowledge of The Great War know, for instance, that the ultimate tragedy of the 1914-18 conflict was that the British army was a collection of "lions led by donkeys," to borrow the celebrated phrase used by the German high command.

Yet Mr. Holmes tells us that the words -- which later formed the basis of Alan Clark's acclaimed study, "The Donkeys" -- were taken from a conversation between the German field marshals Hindenburg and Ludendorff which apparently never even took place. "Sadly for historical accuracy," Mr. Holmes observes, "there is no evidence whatever for this: none. Not a jot or scintilla."

Nor is there much truth, he argues, in the traditional view that the top brass were incompetents who made a point of keeping at a safe distance from the battlefield. Far more, it seems, died in World War I than in the 1939-45 conflict: "The generals who died were actually more likely to be killed by small-arms fire than the men they commanded, which says much about their proximity to the front." Mr. Holmes even has a generous word to say for the supposedly remote staff officers who now serve as pathetic figures of fun in the television comedy "Blackadder Goes Forth."

Still, he makes no attempt to mimimize the terror and misery of everyday existence on the front line. His dry, unemotional approach in fact makes the horrors seem even more vivid.

By drawing on a mass of diaries and letters, he attempts to see the war through the eyes of the men who fought it rather than those historians, such as the arch-iconoclast A.J.P. Taylor, whom he accuses of re-assembling facts to "fit their own analytical framework."

Our armory of information technology does not necessarily help us to see events in Iraq with a great deal more clarity. If things seem bleak in Washington at the moment, imagine how much worse the climate is here, in a country that regards George W. Bush as only slightly less menacing than the pre-spider-hole incarnation of Saddam Hussein.

Thanks to the deplorable events at Abu Ghraib, the anti-war movement has been able to plunge the country into a fresh bout of self-flagellation, using rolled-up copies of the Daily Mirror newspaper. Even though it seems increasingly likely that the Mirror's initial batch of photographs showing British soldiers abusing prisoners in southern Iraq was faked, the damage was done.