Mourning and mirth
In the years after the war, Britons commemorated it in print, on stage, in stone and in ceremonies.
Although we now remember the production of a few classic ‘war books’ in the late 1920s – such as those by Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves – in fact these were just part of an enormous outpouring of writing, much of which described the war in traditional terms of valour and victory.
Different meanings for the war co-existed uneasily. It was widely feared that veterans who wished to celebrate survival, camaraderie and victory would upset bereaved families. The presumed emotional needs of bereaved parents in particular also exercised a powerful social taboo against saying that the war lacked meaning, even for those who were tempted to term it ‘futile’.
'What everybody could agree on was what the war had been like - horrible'
What everybody could agree on was what the war had been like - horrible. A sometimes sensationalist emphasis on the horror of war, particularly evident during the late 1920s, could be used both by those who wished to prevent any future conflict, and by those who wanted to stress the heroism of the soldiers who had struggled through.
How the war had been fought remained a subject of controversy, with many wartime debates being carried on in post-war memoirs by leading politicians and generals.
Not least because of his post-war work for veterans’ pensions, however, Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force Sir Douglas Haig was widely seen as an heroic figure, despite his close association with the bloody struggles of the Somme and Passchendaele.
When he died, in early 1928, the streets of London and Edinburgh were lined with huge crowds of mourners. If the sheer size of such crowds is any measure of grief, the British people cared more about losing Haig than they did about losing Diana, princess of Wales.
Published: 2006-06-19
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