This is the Battle of the Marne, in the early autumn of 1914, as seen by Maurice Genevoix, a 24-year-old French infantry lieutenant:
Clack! Clack! Pebbles leap up, clods of dry earth, clouds of dust; weâve been seen, and targeted. Forward! I run in front, looking for a fold in the ground, a bank of earth, a ditch where I can shelter my men after the leap forward, or just the edge of a field which will make them less visible to the Huns. An arm gesture sets off half the line; I hear the thud of the footsteps, the crunch of the ears of corn crushed by their movement. While they run, the comrades still in the line fire quickly, without rushing. Then, when I lift my cap, they too get up and rush forward while around me the Lebels [rifles] spit out their load.A strangled shout on my left; I have the time to see the man, thrown onto his back, twice push his legs out forwards; one second then his body goes stiff; then it relaxes, and it is just something inert⊠(Genevoix 1916: 40â1)
The following is the same battle as experienced by General von Kluck, commander of the German First Army:
At about midday on the 7th September the corps on the Ourcq came into action under the general command of General von LissingenâŠas followsâŠ[what follows is a long list of unit numbers and the places where they were located]. This formation of groups had become unavoidable because, owing to the increasing gravity of the situation, the divisions had to be thrown into the fighting as they became available. At 12.15 General von Lissingen ordered an attack⊠This offensive was planned as a wheel pivoting on the left flank, against which the weight of the enemyâs attack was being directed and which was suffering heavily from the enfilade fire of hostile artilleryâŠThe attackâŠmade good progressâŠthough a decision was by no means arrived atâŠIn order to give as much support as possible to the left wing, which was being severely cut up by the enemyâs artillery fireâŠthe following operational order was issued at 1.15 p.m. ⊠(von Kluck 1920: 125â6)
These two accounts of the battle are so distinct in their tone of voice, in their focus, and in the implied attitude of the writer towards the events described, that they could well be describing entirely different phenomena rather than the same battle. They represent two clearly distinct ways of experiencing and remembering war.
The quotations about war on the title page also represent radically different conceptions of what war is; their focus is not the experience of war but is rather the purpose, or meaning of war.
For Heraclitus, war is a beginning, creative chaos: a radical break with everything that precedes it and the foundation of the new; not only does war in fact create everything, it is also right that it should, for âstrife is justiceâ and âall things happen according to strife and necessityâ. His analysis is done in primarily individualistic terms: war creates leaders, who acquire divine status; and followers, who are only men. But it also creates both freedom and slavery: collective outcomes. 1 In short, all the fundamental elements of the social structure derive from war: war determines the nature of the collective.
For Clausewitz, war is an extension of the political relationship between nation states. As such, it is fundamentally a rational instrument, designed to achieve a particular policy end, even if human passions may play a part in motive. And the politics never goes away: the political aim is an integral element in the means/end calculations. War is never the total end of everything previous, nor the birth of something radically new; it just achieves a modification in the relationship between states, which will continue to have some relationship or other. Moreover, to say that war is the continuation of politics implies that it is as much a part of the normal conduct of a nationâs affairs as any other political action. In this sense, for Clausewitz, as for most pre-1914 statesmen, war is a normal part of international relations (Lieven 2015: 9).
The parody of Auld Lang Syne simply says: there is no purpose. As such, it marks a break with previous assumptions about war; by breaking with a long tradition in which war was defined by its purposes, it proposes a new way of looking at warâwar seen from below, defined by the intimate experience of those who are in the frontline, which may have little connection to the reasons that led political and military leaders to put them where they are.
Of course, these narrations of experienceâlike the innumerable alternativesâare about a particular war, not warfare in general. There are good reasons, as we shall see, why it should be this war rather than any other war that was so massively recorded by participants, and why so many divergent accounts of its conduct have been passed on to following generations. Indeed, the two divergent accounts we have just seen, in fact only represent one type of experience of the war, as they are both accounts by combatants, even if one of the accounts is not directly a frontline version. War profoundly affected the lives of non-combatants too, many of whom also gave their own accounts of the experience of war: soldiers in supporting roles, men and women close to, but not in the frontline, such as refugees, doctors, nurses and almoners, and of course journalists. And innumerable men and women, combatant and non-combatant, near or far from the actual fighting, kept diaries, wrote letters, and took photographs, many of which have been preserved. In all of these documents there are versions of the war, all of them partial (in both senses of the word); all of them equally worthy of attention both as a record of an experience and as a part of the circulation of meanings attached to the war through the recording and distribution of different experiences.
The experience of war by women wasâfor the vast majorityâsubstantially different from the experience of frontline soldiers. However, substantial numbers of women were employed as nurses in military hospitals, and saw at first-hand the results of combat, especially those employed in frontline hospitals. Moreover, as refugees, as victims, as the wives, daughters and mothers of soldiers, many other women had an intimate knowledge of the results of warfare. My own mother was born in 1909. Sometime in 1916, she told me many years later, she found her mother in floods of tears, being comforted by her father. She asked what had happened and was told to leave her mother alone as she was upset because âyour brotherâs been killedâ. Some 80 years later, when she told me this for the first time, the shock she had received was still apparent. This experienceâor something close to itâmust have been shared by literally millions of women.
Lucie Cousturier was a painter who lived near FrĂ©jus, on the CĂŽte dâAzur. It was here that the French military authorities built a training camp for the Senegalese soldiers recruited in large numbers to fight in Europe. She recorded her experiences in her book Des Inconnus Chez Moi (Unknown Men in my Home) (Cousturier 1920), which enjoyed considerable success at the time: it was widely discussed as a candidate for two of the most prestigious French literary prizes: the Femina and the Goncourt; its commercial success was sufficient to bring two further books about her friendships with Senegalese soldiers in its wake.
The war is rarely directly present in the text, figuring only in occasional remarks by the soldiers and the deaths that she records. Indeed, the first thing that she notes about the Senegalese is how un-martial they lookâtheir movements look more to her like dancing than military movementsâand she ironises about French military bearing and gestures (head thrown back, chest thrust out); later she comments that the stupidity of the pidgin invented by the military authorities to communicate with the Senegalese is âtypical of the genius of the men to whom we owe the posture of standing at attentionâ (1920: 105). The book is essentially an account of how this accidental proximity brought her into relationships that changed her life for the better:
Sandré and Saër Gueye lacked wisdom. Their behaviour in life was like that of the naïf who takes his watch out of his pocket at midnight, at the request of the first passer-by. They opened their hearts to us from the first moment we met. They gifted us with an immense tenderness for which the world is heavily indebted since their deaths. (1920: 34)
In this, as in innumerable other passages, she shows us how the contact with these âunknown menâ as she calls themâpreferring this term to the pejorative ânegroâ or âSenegalese skirmisherâ commonly used in contemporary journalismâhas enlarged and illuminated her own experience of the world. Yet it is also a narrative about the experience of the Great War, which is intermittently present through references to men leaving for the front, letters received from them while at the front, and the records of their deaths. However, for Cousturier it is not the military nature of the war that inspires her to write a memoir, but the human contacts, unexpected and illuminating, that the war provokes. In the wider history of the war and its effects in Europe, no doubt this experienceâdespite its obvious personal richnessâis transient and relatively marginal in its impact; nonetheless, it represents the war as it was lived by one person. 2
In the brief memoir extracts quoted aboveâtaken from a choice of hundreds if not thousands of othersâwe find divergent ways of understanding and representing the war. In the quotations from the title page, we see different understandings of the purpose and overall meaning of war, independent of individual experiences of it. We shall see that these divergences underlie both the memoirs to be analysed, and the public responses to them by their contemporaries.
The Great War has been subjected to efforts of public memory that must equal, if not surpass, the efforts of memory of any war in history. In large measure, this is due to the extent of national involvement in it: its duration, its geographical extension, the number of people involved, the loss of life. In particular, the level of conscription meant that direct involvement in the war spread further and deeper into the population than before. Although previous wars had ravaged great swathes of Europe and involved large armies, such a massive mobilisation of the population was unprecedented, as was the resulting death toll. It was also due to the sense that it was a radically new form of warfare, dominated by industrial products to an extent never seen before. An often quoted example is the use of artillery at Verdun in 1916: during the peak of the fighting, which lasted roughly 300 days, a total of 26 million shells were fired; this equates to six shells per square metre of ground and one shell per second. 3 In particular, the advances in firepower had a fundamental impact upon military strategy. As Sir John Frenchâthe first Western Front British commanderânoted in his memoirs, generals failed to understand that the destructive power of artillery, of rapid-fire rifles and especially machine guns radically altered the traditional balance between defence and attack (French 1919: n.p.). This is probably the single most important basis of the common complaint that the generals sent thousands of men to needless deaths.
In all three nations, one other feature of the public memories of the war is significant, especially where published memoirs are concerned: the role of the Western Front. This war was, in fact, fought on multiple fro...