This art icle was downloaded by: [ Edward Madigan] On: 20 March 2012, At : 01: 24 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK First World War Studies Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ rfww20 Enduring the great war: combat, morale and collapse in the German and British armies, 1914–1918 Edward Madigan a a Commonwealt h War Graces Commission Available online: 19 Mar 2012 To cite this article: Edward Madigan (2012): Enduring t he great war: combat , morale and collapse in t he German and Brit ish armies, 1914–1918, First World War St udies, 3:1, 110-112 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 19475020.2012.652449 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Full t erm s and condit ions of use: ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- andcondit ions This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, redist ribut ion, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, syst em at ic supply, or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warrant y express or im plied or m ake any represent at ion t hat t he cont ent s will be com plet e or accurat e or up t o dat e. The accuracy of any inst ruct ions, form ulae, and drug doses should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, act ions, claim s, proceedings, dem and, or cost s or dam ages what soever or howsoever caused arising direct ly or indirect ly in connect ion wit h or arising out of t he use of t his m at erial. 110 Book reviews Downloaded by [Edward Madigan] at 01:24 20 March 2012 individuals invested it with meaning that could contradict official versions of mourning, or used it as the platform for stinging political critique. The conflict between official and familial forms of remembrance was also evident in the decision of many American families to repatriate the remains of their relatives from the battlefields and inter them in their home communities, rather than have them remain in bombastic American military cemeteries in France. Throughout, Trout shows a graceful and engrossing sensitivity to the multiple investments embedded in memorial fictions, monuments and art. These function as mediums for articulating life narratives, schemas for remembering loved ones, or maps for a nation’s political direction and sensibility. In so doing, he reminds us that how wars are remembered is as politically and socially formative as how they are fought, and provides us with the richest account available of how ‘the battlefield of memory’ determined this moment of American life. Mark Whalan University of Oregon, USA whalan@uoregon.edu Ó 2012, Mark Whalan Enduring the great war: combat, morale and collapse in the German and British armies, 1914–1918, by Alexander Watson, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 288 pp., US$99.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-521-88101-2 At the risk of stating the obvious, the First World War was an international conflict. Yet, despite its clearly international character, in the decades since the Armistice much of the commentary on the war has tended to focus on the experiences of individual national communities. In one sense, this nation-centric approach is both valid and quite understandable. Making conclusive statements about any one of the extremely complex societies that mobilized for war is a challenging enough prospect in itself, and historians who do decide to adopt a 50/50 comparative approach run the risk of giving neither group the scrutiny it deserves. It should also be emphasized that some of the most ground-breaking and insightful histories of the First World War are devoted entirely to a particular national group. At the level of the battlefield, however, where the belligerent states were at their most intensely interactive, a comparative approach allows the historian to determine what phenomena were common to all combatants and, perhaps more importantly, to shed light on what was distinctively ‘British’, ‘French’, ‘German’ or ‘Russian’ about the experiences of soldiers who belonged to different national communities. In focusing on the British and German soldiers who served on the Western Front, Alexander Watson joins the small but growing number of scholars who are prepared to take on the daunting methodological and linguistic challenges inherent in considering an aspect of the First World War in a comparative framework. In examining the combat motivation, morale and resilience of these men, he faces the additional burden of commenting coherently on themes that are central to the history of combat but notoriously complex, intangible and difficult to gauge. Enduring the Great War essentially concentrates on three deceptively simple questions: Why did soldiers and armies in the First World War fight for such a long Downloaded by [Edward Madigan] at 01:24 20 March 2012 First World War Studies 111 time? How were they able to cope psychologically with conditions at the front? And why did they eventually stop fighting? Watson addresses all three persuasively, but he is particularly insightful on the psychological dimension of trench warfare. He emphasizes the fact that although trenches provided protection from artillery and machine gun fire and therefore saved lives, the confining lack of mobility that characterized active service on the Western Front made the experience of coming under enemy fire intensely disempowering, stressful and psychologically disturbing for front-line troops. He is at pains to point out, however, that while there were significant numbers of psychiatric casualties in both armies and that morale fluctuated considerably, most soldiers retained their capacity to fight and managed to cope remarkably well with the often horrific conditions that prevailed at the front. Thus, ‘resilience not collapse was the norm on the Western Front.’ Applying modern psychological research retroactively and drawing on a wide variety of personal narrative sources, Watson presents us with a picture of men who survived the ordeal of trench warfare by employing coping mechanisms that enabled them to interpret their predicament in a subjective and surprisingly optimistic light. British and German soldiers adapted to the chaos and danger of their environment by convincing themselves, against all evidence to the contrary, that their chances of survival were reasonably high. Indeed, one of the more striking aspects of Watson’s research is the degree to which the human capacity for hope and optimism appears to have survived in the face of almost absurd levels of adversity. The author’s assessment of the crucial role played by junior officers in the maintenance of troop morale is also noteworthy. Watson is by no means the first historian to comment on the leadership qualities of British and German officers, but by considering these groups in tandem he brings new light to the debate. The traditional historiographical view is that the deeply ingrained paternalism of both British society and the British armed forces allowed for a greater degree of trust, mutual support and combat-readiness in the British army than in its aristocratically controlled German counterpart. Watson’s comparative survey suggests, however, that both groups continued to prioritize the welfare of ordinary rank-and-file troops as the conflict wore on and that junior officers acted as the linchpin of combatant resilience on either side of no man’s land. The fundamental influence that front-line officers exerted over the morale of the men they commanded is quite clearly illustrated in the final chapter of the book, which deals with the collapse of the German will to fight in the summer of 1918. His treatment of this particular theme reflects the author’s general willingness to engage robustly with the existing secondary literature. Perhaps inevitably, given the ambition of the task Watson has set himself, certain salient features of each army are overlooked or downplayed. While the issues of class and social relations are explored in some detail, for example, there is little acknowledgement of the significant national, regional, religious, professional and ethnic diversity in the British and German ranks. Some potentially revealing sources have also been neglected. The author’s refusal to engage with the poetry written by the rarefied elites of the British and German officers corps is understandable, even admirable, but the ‘low-diction’ of the many trench journals produced by and for front-line soldiers on both sides could have been usefully incorporated. The title is also somewhat misleading as the book focuses exclusively on the Western Front. These are relatively minor complaints, however, and Watson has produced an exemplary work of analysis and reconstruction that makes a major contribution to 112 Book reviews our understanding of the experience of combat during the First World War. First published in 2008, Enduring the Great War has already become a key reference point in discourse on morale and combat motivation in modern warfare. Edward Madigan Commonwealth War Graces Commission edward.madigan@cwgc.org Ó 2012, Edward Madigan Downloaded by [Edward Madigan] at 01:24 20 March 2012 The final battle: soldiers of the western front and the German revolution of 1918, by Scott Stephenson, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 354 pp., US$102 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-521-5-946-5 My uncle was a veteran of World War I. I still remember his story of watching a German column withdrawing towards the Rhine after the armistice. Every rifle was clean; every man marching ‘eyes front.’ And he heard someone say ‘in twenty years we’ll be back. Those – ain’t been whipped enough!’ Stephenson’s monograph, winner of the 2011 Tomlinson Prize of the Western Front Association-USA, admirably evaluates the doughboy’s observation. Stephenson begins by reiterating a familiar point. The Revolution of 1918 acted as a solvent on the German army everywhere except the front-line troops in the West. The overwhelming number of these marched home under arms, under discipline and under orders. Stephenson then goes on to reestablish a distinction that has been widely challenged in recent years. He affirms that even in 1918 a fundamental difference existed between the German army’s front-line troops and its rear echelons. The latter were far more numerous, partly because of the increasing complexity of a modern army’s administrative system, and partly due to the hundreds of thousands of men in occupied Eastern Europe supporting Germany’s allies. The distinction between Frontschweine and Etappenhengsten (‘front-hogs’ and ‘rear studs’) was further exacerbated because many rear-echelon slots were filled not by specialist formations as would be the case in World War II, but by men subtracted from combat units. As late as the summer of 1918, a single infantry battalion had 10% of its nominal strength detached for duty somewhere in the rear. Few companies did not have members luckier, less scrupulous or more egocentric than their former comrades, who had wangled a job sorting mail or guarding a supply dump. Far from being ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ they were all too visible to any front-line outfit temporarily rotated for retraining, reinforcement and recreation. Those facts contributed to what Stephenson describes as the ‘amazingly anomalous’ behaviour of the front-fighters after Germany’s defeat and during its revolution. The ordeals endured by German soldiers on the front lines of the Western Front, especially in the war’s final months of undeniable defeat, set them apart from the remainder of the army and established the matrix of their seemingly aberrant response to the events of 1918–18. Stephenson offers a convincing list of checkpoints marking a distinctive front-line identity in the crisis period of 1918. Exhaustion, isolation, alienation are the obvious