For example, when he states that, ‘without the war of attrition on the Western Front, Britain’s manpower, its economy and its vastly superior financial resources could not have been brought to bear on Germany sufficiently to ensure victory’ (p457) is stated as an absolute with a counter-factual offered as the alternative - Britain would have had to compromise rather than fight on in any other way.įerguson offers a myriad of factors: people, nationhood, economic growth, the Press and railways, burgeoning democracies, the weakness of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empires and the extend of the British Empire. Ferguson doesn’t sit on the fence, he has an opinion and makes it forcefully. Ferguson strips out the facts and attacks each in turn often in meticulous detail, all referenced and from a single perspective. The ‘war poets’ are one aspect of the misconceptions that have developed around the First World War, hijacking how people felt about the war at the time with a post-war negative and sentimentalised view.įerguson picks out ten questions to scrutinise, myths to unwind, misconceptions to set straight, as well as original views of his own. The words are not those of the author, but rather taken from one of the war poets. The title ‘The Pity of War’ says little about the book’s contents.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |