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First World War Studies

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Enduring the great war: combat,

morale and collapse in the German and
British armies, 1914–1918
a
Edward Madigan
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

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 110 Book reviews

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
Downloaded by [Edward Madigan] at 01:24 20 March 2012

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
 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
Downloaded by [Edward Madigan] at 01:24 20 March 2012

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

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
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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