The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War Book

I studied under Gregory, so take this with several pinches of salt, but this book is stunning. It leaves just about every preceding account of First World War Britain--Ferguson, Sheffield, Winter, Hynes, Marwick, even Todman--in the dust.

Gregory's thesis has clear roots in his earlier work on interwar Britain. The Cliffs Notes version is that far from being "alienated" from their indifferent families and friends on the home front, the way the mythology of the war suggests, soldiers became the bedrock of identity for all British civilians during this period, and the soldier's sacrifice (meaning his life) the way everyone else came to measure their relative virtue. Britons found innovative ways--through religion, public policy and economic incentive--to believe that military service was personal salvation. Moreover, they found ways to believe that everyone could achieve something equivalent in civilian life, overcoming, for a time, the resentment that stems from the UNEQUAL way that war deaths were distributed across the country. In other words, they created a myth of social salvation too.

The book is structured thematically, addressing civilian reaction to the outbreak, the role of propaganda, military recruitment, military fundraising, the role of religion, the role of unions, the treatment of widows and veterans and the way the myth of sacrifice/salvation played out in the post-war memorials (Gregory has a separate book, Silence of Memory, that is all about this last theme).

The genius of the book is that this broad thematic take on wartime Britain allows Gregory to more or less encompass the arguments made by all his predecessors without truly "choosing" a school. Everyone else who has written on the war has one factor, from religion to class to culture, they deem paramount as an explanatory tool; Gregory's organizing tool of sacrifice/salvation can be applied to each of those factors. That is not to say that Gregory doesn't take on, and disagree forcefully, with his peers and predecessors. Rather, he earns the credibility to call someone's argument rubbish by taking them on within a multi-faceted argument--he cannot be dismissed as having a one-track mind or one axe to grind of his own. That is perhaps a mark of his maturity. Gregory has worked on this subject and this period for several decades and this book is the culmination of that lifelong research.

Gregory's academic temperament also helps: in each chapter, he takes on the prevailing arguments about that factor or theme, and uses sacrifice/salvation to either corroborate, complicate or debunk it. In almost all cases, he comes down somewhere in the middle, finding merits and flaws in everyone's approach. His language is cautious and hesitant, always "we should not be too quick to generalize from X data." This too increases the weight of his words when in some chapters he lashes out unequivocally against one particular myth. It is refreshing to see this tone in academia, which seems so often polarized between people who have too much agenda and those who have no real ideas at all.

There are bones to pick, to be sure, mostly that despite what appear to be the author's best efforts, the books sometimes falls into certain knee-jerk British patriotic cliches. But these moments are far outweighed by passages that astound with their analytic honesty.

You may think this book is not for everyone since it's serious academic writing, not general interest nonfiction (and does require some background). But to be frank, it often reads easier than much modern fiction. That's because Gregory brings alive the characters of individuals--men, and loads of women--on the street through lengthy quotations from letters, diaries, court and press records. Gregory puts it best himself: he sees social history as "collective biography," an approach that, whatever its academic implications, works as a narrative style.

If you know even a smidge about the First World War or British history and society, this is worth a read.