HISTORY

untrained volunteers and, later, with conscripted raw troops, along with the urgent need to take pressure off the French, which took decisions over timing out of his hands. But there were few solid British successes before the summer of 1918 when, at last, Haig and his generals perfected the technique of the creeping barrage. Even the supposedly invincible Royal Navy took more losses than the Germans at Jutland, the greatest naval battle of the war. The French army learnt more quickly than the British, after a disastrous beginning. Britain was badly prepared. Before 1914, she saw herself as an imperial power, dependent on the navy for protection, holding aloof from European commitments. By engaging in an unofficial entente with France before 1914, without accompanying it with adequate military preparations, and by failing to take a tougher line over German sabre-rattling, politicians like Asquith and his foreign minister Grey were arguably as responsible as the Generals for the slaughter that followed. What saved the allies was German blundering: the unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann telegram that brought an infuriated United States into the war. Once that happened, the result was inevitable, even after the Russian Revolution and the German victory in the east. What makes Norman Stone’s book so successful is not any startling variation on a familiar story but the way he tells it, with wit and unfamiliar anecdote, all the way to the wretched end as the peacemakers assembled in Paris. For Germany still had not been obviously defeated in the field and lay open to the myth, disastrously exploited by Hitler, that the politicians had betrayed her armed forces. Of the discovering of war poets, there is no end, or so it sometimes seems. The latest to be published, or republished, is Arthur Graeme West, who also kept a diary of his time on the western front before he was killed in 1917. Comparable in some ways to Siegfried Sassoon (although not as remarkable a writer), West felt elation at the war’s start, then disillusion, then rebelliousness, urged on by the philosopher C E M Joad, his pacifist friend. It was Joad who supervised the initial posthumous publication, seeing West’s story as an aid to the anti-war cause. This edition has a good introduction by Nigel Jones and, as with almost everything to do with the First War, is often moving. One wishes, however, that West had not allowed his observation of other people and situations to be blunted so much by his own fierce feelings. The poems are bitter, sometimes violent, yet, unlike Sassoon, seem dated through archaic language. But it is the archaisms, coupled with an intense, emotional awkwardness, that show the dislocation which that generation – especially those, like West, who were fresh out of narrow Edwardian public schools – suffered when their pre-1914 ideals collided with the terrible reality of the trenches. To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007