Alan Pulverness

Norwich Institute for Language Education

The conflict has, for many, been seen through the fictional prism of dramas such as Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder, as a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite. Even to this day there are Left-wing academics all too happy to feed those myths.

Michael Gove, The Daily Mail 3 January 2014

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.At the going down of the sun and in the morningWe will remember them.

“a special effort to direct the pious intentions of bereaved relatives into the proper channels” (Church Crafts League 1915)

“simplicity of statement … so that the gazer can see at once that the matter recorded is great and significant, and desires to know more” (Cornhill Magazine 1916)

“to secure combined instead of isolated efforts in erecting memorials and to protect churches and public buildings from unsuitable treatment in setting up monuments of the war” (meeting at the Royal Academy, June 1917)

“Year by year their numbers get fewer; some day no one will march there at all”(Eric Bogle, The Green Fields of France)

I have often tried to imagine myself what he went though, but now I know, and I shall never forget

(Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George’s secretary)

I am 13 and agree entirely with the girl who said “he means more to me than the Beatles” (letter to Radio Times)A montage of images that resonated with ideas about

the war already embedded in British modern memory(Tony Essex, BBC producer)

– 1964

1998 –

1914-18 has become a literary war, detached from its moorings in historical events.

Despite the efforts of revisionist military historians, in Britain the Great War has remained a saga of personal tragedies, illuminated by poetry not history, a subject for remembrance rather than understanding.

…some military historians [have] complained that there were virtually two Western Fronts – the literary and the historical – each self-contained, with the former still dominating the public imagination

David Reynolds The Long Shadow: The Great War and the 20th century

Anyone putting forward in public the idea that the war had been an incompetently run and colossally futile waste of life, unmitigated by any redeeming heroism, would have been chased from the street in the early 1920s. By 1998, to say anything else was to arouse ridicule and anger.

The rise to dominance of a set of largely negative myths about the First World War in the 1970s derived less from rehearsed narratives of family experience than from the selective recasting and recycling of national myths to fit a new cultural, political, demographic and emotional context.

Dan Todman The Great War: Myth and memory

Lazare Ponticelli1897-2008

1: The parents of those who fought and died

2: Those who experienced the war , especially those who saw military service

3: The children of those who served

4: The grandchildren of those who served

5: The great-grandchildren of those who served

Five generations

1: The parents of those who fought and died

2: Those who experienced the war , especially those who saw military service

3: The children of those who servedcreated many of the books, plays & TV programmes

which inform the ways we think about the war

4: The grandchildren of those who served

5: The great-grandchildren of those who served

Five generations

still in contact with first-hand experience

voices that have reinforced - and been affected by –the modern myth of the war

many whose sons died

grown up with the myth, but with no direct, personal connection

EVERMORE, they said, and she wanted to hear: for all future time … She didn’t believe them. Soon – in fifty years or so –everyone who had served in the war would be dead; and at some point after that, everyone who had known anyone who served would also be dead.

Then the great forgetting could begin, the fading into the landscape. The war would be levelled to a couple of museums, a set of demonstration trenches, and a few names, shorthand for pointless sacrifice.

Might there be one last fiery glow of remembering? … Might there not be, at some point in the first decades of the twenty-first century, one final moment, lit by evening sun, before the whole thing was handed back to the archivists? … Then, in the space of a wet blink, the gap in the trees would close and the mown grass disappear, a violent indigo cloud would cover the sun, and history, gross history, daily history, would forget. Is this how it would be?

Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes Evermore (Penguin 1996)

Geoff Dyer The Missing of the Somme (Hamish Hamilton 1994)

Sebastian Faulks Birdsong

David Reynolds The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century (Simon and Schuster 2013)

Theatre Workshop Oh, what a lovely war (Methuen 1967)

Dan Todman The geat War: Myth and memory (Hambledon Continuum 2005)

1914-1918: The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century (BBC 1998 / 2005)

All Quiet ion the Western Front (Universal 1930 / 2007)

The Battle of the Somme (Imperial War Museum 1916 / 2008)

Blackadder Goes Forth (BBC 1989 / 2001)

The Great War: The story of WW1 1914-1918 DVD (BBC 1964 / 2003)

King and Country (British Home Entertainment 1964 / 2014)

The Monocled Mutineer (BBC 1986 / 2007)

Oh, what a lovely war (Paramount 1969 / 2007)

Paths of Glory (Twentieth Century Fox 1957 /

War Horse (Buena Vista Home Entertainment 2011 / 2012)

alan@nile-elt.com