ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My first debt in writing this book is to a man whom I have never met, the father of Alan Clements. He had the good sense to give his son, on the occasion of his fortieth birthday, the first volume in my planned trilogy on the First World War. To Arms was published by Oxford University Press in 2001, and it prompted Alan to ask me whether I thought the First World War could be the subject of a new television documentary series. This is a book born in Glasgow: Alan’s production company, Wark Clements, is based in the city, and Alan himself is a history graduate of its university, whose professor of modern history I then had the privilege to be.

Alan was not the first representative of a television production company to raise the idea with me, but he was the first to accept that it might be possible to do it as I felt it should be done. The problems that any documentary of the First World War confronts are uncertainty about the authenticity of footage and in particular the lack of sufficient surviving film from the first half of the war. The pioneering series made by the BBC in 1964, The Great War, often got round these two difficulties by ignoring them; forty years on we have more regard for the evidence. My solutions were threefold. First, we should not exaggerate the problem: there were fresh sources of film, particularly those in eastern Europe and Russia opened with the end of the Cold War, yet to be exploited. Secondly, we had to be ready to fill gaps by using the feature films made in the immediate aftermath of the war, provided we told the audience exactly what we were doing. In this way, the Gallipoli landings — for example — could be shown on screen. Thirdly, I argued that it was possible to go back to the battlefields today and to inter-cut freshly-shot film of the landscape with stills of the events that took place there in 1914-18. This was not an original idea: Ken Burns did it to great effect in his series on the American Civil War. He conveyed movement and action through the sound-track - which combined music and the noise of battle with the words of participants.

That final point carried a further consequence. As far as possible this series should convey the realities of war in phrases uttered at the time not in the memories of surviving veterans, however powerful. Mediated by the intervening events of the twentieth century, such testimony can create not an immediacy but a distance between us and the First World War. Those who fought in 1914-18 who still survived in 2001 no longer saw the world as they saw it as young men. Interviews of another sort too were banned. Television history has become addicted to a cult of the historian as personality: by contrast, this series would have no presenter and no debates between competing interpretations. It has a strong authorial line, but that is conveyed solely in its commentary.

Alan asked me how a series of ten parts should be divided. My opinion was that its framework should be a narrative provided by the military and political, not the social and cultural, history of the war. Thus somebody who viewed the entire ten programmes would have some grasp of the war’s overall sweep and shape. There have been modifications, but in general terms the ten programmes reflect the ten topics that I suggested then. They have also been used as the basis of the ten chapters of this book. The titles of each are identical, the precise contents not so. In some cases ideas that worked well for one programme belonged in another chapter, and in others themes which could be explored in words made less sense visually — or vice versa.

Both the book and the series have been shaped by two over-arching considerations. First, this war was a global war, even if it began as a local Balkan conflict. In particular the aim has been to offset the Anglophone emphasis on the western front and Britain’s participation in it, so central to popular conceptions of the war. Second, we have sought to recover the views of the war that prevailed before it fell into the hands of the writers and novelists of the late 1920s. Much of the war was futile, and it was also wasteful — of treasure as well as of lives. But it was fought because big issues were at stake, some of them concepts that continue to shape our values and views of the world. Moreover, the fact that other ideas and ideologies now seem foreign to us does not deny their charge for those who went to war in 1914. Hindsight of this sort fosters arrogance, not understanding.

Readers of To Arms will recognise its role in shaping the first third of this book, but the remainder has had to anticipate in a brief compass what I plan to say in the subsequent two volumes in greater detail. Given the range of reading on which that study has been based, it seemed otiose to provide a bibliography for this book. Instead, I have used its notes not only to convey immediate sources but also to give guidance as to some of the best secondary reading.

Alan and Janice Hadlow of Channel 4 told me that the key to the project’s success was the relationship I would forge with the series producer. They were right. Undoubtedly, the series is Jonathan Lewis’s much more than it is mine, but it is one to which I remain proud to put my name. Not all historians can say as much. Jonathan told me at the outset that I must not go native, not compromise on my academic standards because I felt that the medium of television required me to do so. There was never a danger of this happening, principally because of Jonathan’s own standards, which comfortably exceed those of even the most scrupulous historian. Script and footage were revisited scores of times. But what impressed me even more was Jonathan’s ability to turn complex ideas, often involving the usual academic vice of spurning the simplistic generalisation for something more even-handed, into clear and arresting commentary. He put the humanity into the story, and made sure that the final product was not just military history for other military historians. If my prose style in this book is different from anything I have written before it is a consequence of late nights with Jonathan searching for forms of words that possess pace but retain veracity. I have been immensely fortunate to work with a man of intelligence, honesty, wisdom and wit.

Individual programme production was in the hands of a team of five producers, each of whom took charge of two films. Marcus Kiggell, Simon Rock ell, Emma Wallace, Ben Steele and Corinna Sturmer, and their assistant producers, Milan Grba, Gregor Murbach, Andrea Laux, Martina Caviccholi and Ross Harper, prompted me to rethink some of my assumptions, and also turned up fresh sources. So too did Sarah Wallis and Svetlana Palmer, whose search for what the production team dubbed ‘biscuits’ (the testimony of participants), has resulted in their own book, A War in Words. Alison McAllan headed the film archive team and delivered on the promise of my first two solutions to the problem of footage. The illustrations for this book only occasionally duplicate those used in the series. The initial research for both was undertaken by Isobel Hinshelwood, whose rapid illness and sudden death left a huge hole. It might have been even bigger but for Gregor Murbach. Gregor is one of the principal creators of this book. He has located images that are fresh, and has brought an aesthetic as well as a historical judgement to bear as we have wrestled with the final selection.

Gregor has read and commented on the text, as have my other principal supporters, Andrew Gordon of Simon and Schuster, Anthony Goff of David Higham Associates, my agents, and of course Jonathan Lewis. Evan Mawdsley, Jürgen Förster, Donald Bloxham, Roy Foster, Michael Hochedlinger and John Gooch have helped with specific queries. Kath Steedman, Kate Cotter and Su- sanna Posnett, all of Wark Clements, have provided tremendous back-up over a hectic eighteen months.

The principal casualties of this particular war have been, once again, my family. My wife, Pamela, has provided unswerving love, and kept better track of my movements and papers than I have. She and Mungo, the only one of our children still at home, have had not one but two family holidays cancelled to meet the deadlines of series and book. My only response is love and gratitude.