Abstract
Despite a century of studies on how men endured and fought amid the horrors of the First World War, the dynamics of morale on and off the battlefield are still hard to fully comprehend. This fine monograph from Alex Mayhew, based on his doctoral research, both advances our understanding of morale and highlights the fundamental difficulties which remain at the heart of this endeavour, which seeks to understand the motivations, emotions and actions of millions of people.
Mayhew draws effectively on the established historiography not only on the British army but its European contemporaries, which implicitly raises an important point: how far was the functioning of morale rooted in universal dynamics, and how far did specific national (or even sub-national) circumstances create different mechanisms for the creation of meaning and the development of psychological endurance? Mayhew's choice to focus on Englishness – or perhaps more accurately on English soldiers – is interesting, not least since some important previous work has been based exclusively on Irish or Scottish regiments. At the same time the functional differences between Englishness and Britishness in the context of the war itself could usefully have been fleshed out further. Many of the dynamics here outlined are strikingly similar to the German, French or Italian cases, showing that many features of the First World War experience were indeed universal. Consequently, the choice to focus exclusively on the Western Front perhaps deserves more explanation: did the dynamics outlined here also apply elsewhere among the English?
Like other scholars before him, Mayhew is concerned with the fluctuating circumstances of life under arms and the effects on morale. The idea that the First World War meant ‘months of boredom interspersed with moments of terror’ obscures the more complex shifts between different seasons, between offensive, defensive and ‘holding’ operations, and between different phases of the war itself. To explore these changes carefully, Mayhew employs the notion of ‘crisis’ as an affliction with both chronic and acute variants. This useful innovation allows for a more systematic comparison of the multiple challenges which men faced – from bad weather to intense shelling, from exhaustion to retreat. Less successful, perhaps, is the book's effort to draw on psychology to interpret soldiers’ coping mechanisms. Though occasionally useful, this methodology felt rather like an afterthought within each chapter, and was not consistently convincing.
Making Sense of the Great War follows a clear and logical structure, considering in turn troops’ external stimuli – first physical and then social – before turning to their personal and internal concerns. This final section of the book is the most interesting and innovative. Mayhew shows the importance of hopes for peace and ongoing commitment to victory, and argues convincingly that retreat, setbacks or even (temporary) defeat need not weaken these coping mechanisms. Given the ongoing debate over the relationship between morale and battlefield performance, this framing – which relies on his model of chronic vs acute crisis – is original and stimulating. Since this problem lies at the heart of the debate over just how important morale really is, Mayhew's contribution is significant.
Mayhew is interested less in the policies that the armed forces adopted for the management of morale than the ways men sought to essentially manage their own morale, through a coherent programme of meaning-making. His nuanced and thoughtful presentation distinguishes carefully between regular, reserve, volunteer and conscript soldiers, is always attentive to issues of class and education, and scrupulously considers the effects of change over time. Whether deliberate or quite unconscious, it was through the systematic attribution of meaning to their experiences that English soldiers were able to endure the war, Mayhew proposes. In support of this idea he presents a sometimes overwhelming barrage of detail drawn from the letters and diaries of English soldiers on the Western front, which show how each of these areas in turn – the environment, the social group and internal psychology – presented its own unique challenges. At times the thread of the argument risks getting lost in the wealth of quotations and case-studies, which is unfortunate since the analysis is otherwise convincing.
Mayhew emphasises English soldiers’ agency: it was their own intellectual and psychological processes that facilitated their resilience. Men did their own internal work to understand and interpret the challenges of the Western Front, slotting hardship, duty, fear, combat, grief and hopes for peace into a complex nexus of meaning which ultimately enabled them to endure both battle and warfare.