I was very excited to interview Dr Seán Lang, author of First World War For Dummies. Dr Lang has written a great book, you can read our review here. He also gives great answers in the interview below. Enjoy!
How long did it take to research and write the book?
Not easy to say, because in a sense I have been reading up on the FWW for years, and teaching it to university students for the past four or five years. There was a tight turn-round schedule for the book, especially as the “for Dummies” process involves submitting chapters as you write them, rather than submitting a whole manuscript. The writing itself took about six months.
What is your writing process?
It’s different for the “For Dummies” series because of the very close process of collaboration with the editor. Then not only are there always some academic experts who review your text, but with this book, because of the partnership with the Imperial War Museum, their experts vetted it too. So you have to get a balance between what is academically respectable and what is comprehensible to a wide readership.
The readership is very different from that of a standard academic article or even a textbook: you’re writing for people who might not normally pick up a book, or who might even be a bit scared of them. I’ve seen people taking FD history books off the shelves in bookshops like WH Smith (ie a shop where they might not have gone in to buy a book) and hesitating a long time before deciding whether to buy it or to put it back – and I’ve seen people do both. So I think of the book not in terms of something primarily for people who already know a lot about the war, but rather in terms of the sort of book I would turn to if I needed a quick briefing on something about which I know nothing and of which I have scary memories from school – physics, say, or fairly advanced mathematics. You have to go to where people are and take them forward, not stand where you are and expect them to come to you.
Being a lecturer obviously helps, but did you learn anything that surprised you when writing the book?
There are always part of the narrative which you didn’t know much about before starting to read up for the book – elements of the war in Africa, for example, or the epic journey of the crew of the German raider “Emden”. But I think the greatest surprises lay in some of the images in the IWM’s collection, which we used for the illustrations. We tend to see only a limited range of types of photos from the war – trenches, recruits, women in factories and so on – so it was very refreshing to see images from around the world, some of them quite dramatic.
In the parts of tens you list First World War poets and writers, do you have a personal favourite?
I think probably RC Sherriff, author of “Journey’s End”. Joan Littlewood, who devised and directed “Oh! What a Lovely War” in 1964, loathed the play and wouldn’t allow anyone to mention it in her presence, but I think it is a much more authentic voice from the front line than she managed. It’s a play about a group of officers in 1918 and it captures that loss of schoolboy ideals we associate with the trenches. Sherriff went to the grammar school in Kingston across the road from the one I went to, so maybe there’s a sense in which I see him as the First World War equivalent of me.
A lot of women got their first taste of real work during the first world war, do you think that had a lasting difference?
There’s a lot of debate about this one among historians, because the liberation and emancipation of war work very quickly disappeared when the men came back home and resumed their old jobs, so some people say that the change for women was illusory. There’s also a certain irony in the fact the sort of work that women did in the FWW was often the very sort of work Victorian social reformers had been trying to rescue them from. But yes, I do think the change was long lasting, even if it wasn’t immediate. It made it clear that men and women were all part of the same fighting nation, and that women, whether they were in the factories or whether they were bringing up children at home, had a part to play in the national war effort just as the men had. That idea swung back into action in the Second World War, of course. That in itself effectively smashed the old Victorian idea that men and women inhabited “separate spheres”, both metaphysically and in reality. That idea has never revived, at least not in British society, so yes, I think the war made a lasting difference for women.
What can be learned from World War I?
That’s too big a question to answer fully, so I’ll give just a couple of things that can be learned from it, though I ought to start with a lesson that can’t be learned: I heard someone during this year’s centenary commemorations saying something like “We must learn from this war so it never happens again”, and I thought “Have you never heard that there was a Second World War? It has happened again”. I think the lessons that can be learned include: a) political leaders must avoid playing games of bluff, because that is effectively what was happening in 1914, and everybody’s bluff got called, with disastrous results. b) People always go into war assuming it will be like the Last One (whichever that one is) and it never is, but seldom have expectations about the likely nature of a war been so completely wrong as they were in 1914. So, if you go to war, assume it will be a hundred times worse than you expect. And remember that your decision will mean that a lot of people now alive will soon be dead.
What do you think is the lasting legacy of World War I?
There’s no strict hierarchy about these things, of course, but I would rank the First World War’s legacy as even greater and longer-lasting than the Second’s – after all, the SWW was itself a legacy of the FWW. For example, all the problems that blew up in the Balkans in the 1990s were almost directly a legacy of the FWW. So is the continuing and growing crisis in the Middle East, including Israel-Palestine, resurgent Islam etc. The Middle East (itself a European term) was a backwater before the FWW, when the Europeans carved it up, with all the consequences we are still living with. Ireland’s troubles go back a long way, but the specific issue of Northern Ireland – an issue which never quite goes away – is a direct legacy of the FWW. Above all, a) the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Soviet Union were both precipitated by the FWW (it is arguable that Russia would have had a revolution without the FWW, but there’s also a good case for saying that it wouldn’t have happened without a war to bring things to a head), and b) it was the FWW that first got the United States acting as a Great Power, well outside its own back yard, starting the process of American global action which still dominates the world.
D-Day just had its 70th Anniversary, as time goes by is there a danger of people forgetting what happened, and the lessons learned?
Yes, there is such a danger. Schools and local communities do a very good job of keeping the memory of the FWW alive at the moment, but we can’t assume that will go on for ever: firstly, it is noticeable that Islamist protests against western involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to have taken the form of assaults against FWW symbols – desecrating war memorials, burning poppies, and so on. That might indicate that the commemoration of the FWW could become divisive in future, rather than welding the nation together, as it has done so far. But even if it doesn’t, just think of the children currently going on school trips to the trenches. Their teachers are old enough, except perhaps the very youngest, to have known people who lived through the war – grandparents and so on – so the human link is still there. But in forty years’ time, in 2054, those pupils will be the teachers and parents: they won’t have that direct link, and their children and pupils will be even further removed from it. The FWW will be about as close to them as the American Civil War or the Crimean War are to us. Now, okay we still acknowledge the losses and suffering in those wars, so it may well be that the memory of the FWW will still be kept alive, but it won’t be on anything like the scale of current commemorations. Lastly – and I hate to point this out – future generations may well have wars and disasters of their own to commemorate, which will push the 20th century world wars out of the picture.
Do you think the first World War was avoidable?
Yes. Totally. I think the fall into war in 1914 was entirely avoidable. There are some wars in history which probably had to be fought – the SWW, civil wars, wars against revolutionary regimes, for example – and others which were entirely avoidable, like the US/British ‘War of 1812’, or the Crimean War, but the FWW is the worst. The crisis that provoked it was entirely solvable – assassinations, even of Archdukes, do not usually provoke wars – and the Great Powers HAD solved far more dangerous crises in the years before 1914. But among some statesmen in 1914 there was a certain eagerness that this time they should get a war out of it, and among some – notably in Berlin but also in Vienna – there was a determination that nothing should get in the way of their desire to have a war. You remember that Israeli Eurovision song, “A Little Peace?” Or even John Lennon’s “GIve Peace a Chance?” Well, in 1914 there were some statesmen who thought in terms of having “A Little War” or wanted to “Give War a Chance”. They had no idea of exactly what that war would be like, but they bear a very heavy responsibility nevertheless.
What’s next?
I’m also a playwright. A short play of mine called “The Road Less Travelled” which is set in 1914 and is a reflection on the outbreak of the war has been picking up good reviews and awards recently and will be published soon; I’m also writing a play called “1914: Assassination Before Lunch” which will be performed in Cambridge in October.
