Alexander Watson. Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918. Cambridge Military History Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xv + 288 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-88101-2.
Reviewed by Jesse Kauffman (Stanford University)
Published on H-German (May, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
Optimism in Hell, or: The Power of Positive Thinking
It is remarkably easy to take for granted the simple fact the First World War went on for as long as it did because every day for four years, millions of ordinary men not only endured unimaginable horrors, terrible tedium, and abysmal living conditions, they also continued amidst all this to do the hard work of soldiering--and, quite often, to do it well. The men in the trenches not only held on to their sanity as the war raged around them, but continued to pick up their rifles and go "over the top," to emerge from their dugouts after having tons of high explosives rained down upon them, and to expose themselves to danger in countless other ways, despite having seen up-close what shrapnel, machine gun rounds, and rifle bullets could do to the human body.
Alexander Watson did not take these matters for granted. He set out to explore how British and German soldiers withstood the stresses of war and continued to fight on the western front. The result is this prize-winning work. The explanation Watson offers for this remarkable endurance is suitably complex. Deploying British and German archival sources, including combatants' letters, and mustering an impressive mastery of the secondary literature not only on each army, but on combat motivation and military cohesion in general, Watson argues that a complicated variety of factors kept men on both sides going: religious belief, a sense that their cause was just and their side destined for victory, the influence of formal and more subtle, informal coercion, and the leadership of able and concerned junior officers. While much of this has been argued before, Watson gracefully pulls it all together in a seamless synthesis, enlivened by well chosen quotes from his sources, that is all the more impressive for the clarity of Watson's prose. Watson stakes his main claim to innovation on his incorporation of modern-day psychological research. He argues, based on this research and on contemporary wartime accounts, that unrealistic optimism is a natural component of human nature, a component particularly helpful to people dealing with highly stressful situations (like combat). Thus, Watson argues, British and German soldiers not only kept sane, but kept fighting because they believed, despite highly suggestive evidence to the contrary, that they would emerge from the conflict unharmed. This conclusion seems plausible, and is a welcome addition to the literature on morale and motivation.
Also innovative is Watson's resolutely comparative approach, adopted to "avoid the cultural biases which may have crept into some of the existing almost exclusively national historiography" (p. 7). Enduring the Great War both testifies to the great potential of transnational and comparative work on the war and demonstrates the limitations of such an approach. At its finest, Watson's work reveals the shared human experience of the war. For example, he emphasizes that dark soldiers' humor (including the bestowing of silly nicknames on deadly instruments of war) played a role in helping combatants deal with the horrors on both sides of the front line; this point may seem minor, but in fact moves the discussion a long way from the images of German soldiers as Nietzsche-crazed, war-hungry madmen that still tend to surface in Anglophone scholarship on the war. Watson is also emphatic in his insistence that a strong belief in the defensive nature of the war drew men on both sides to the colors when war erupted. His analysis thus rejects the idea that a slavish, mindless obedience to authority led German men to serve, while British men joined the ranks out of a desire to take a principled stand in favor of Belgium. Still, Watson's insistence that cultural and social factors specific to each army were not as important as their shared essential humanity occasionally leads him to minimize some obviously important differences. The question of religion is one instance of this tendency. Watson notes that the German army was more deeply steeped in religious belief than the British. That these convictions had a major effect on combat motivation is strongly suggested by one of Watson's central sources, a questionnaire-based study conducted by a veteran combat officer, Walter Ludwig, who asked soldiers what they thought about in order to overcome their fears in the face of violent death. Religious belief is by far the predominant answer, suggesting that it should play a greater role in any attempt to analyze the morale and combat effectiveness of the German army. In addition, Watson himself admits that the British regimental system and the intense loyalties it could foster heavily influenced how the British army fought. This system had no real counterpart in Germany.
One intriguing, and possibly enormously consequential, difference between the German and British armies that Watson highlights is the differing targets of soldiers' bitterness. On the British side of the trenches, anger at war profiteers rarely escalated into a wholesale indictment of the British political system. In contrast, Watson finds, similar anger in the German ranks quickly escalated into wholesale condemnation of the German social and political order. "We all know," one soldier from Berlin noted in his diary in March 1916, "that we are being sacrificed for the interests of a clique. We fight for the Prussian Junker economy.... This clique has become the ruin of the German people" (pp. 75-76). This information strongly suggests that German soldiers did not feel themselves as tightly bound to the institutions that had ordered them into battle as British soldiers did, a contrast that goes some way towards explaining the phenomenon Watson focuses on in his last chapter, "The German Collapse in 1918." One of the book's strongest, the chapter combines narrative elegance with a clear, well-supported challenge to the reigning historiographical consensus. Watson trains his sights most clearly on Wilhelm Deist and his argument that a "covert strike" by German soldiers brought the war to an end. Watson offers the more plausible argument that exhausted German soldiers gradually but inexorably lost both the will and the ability to fight a war that, at they end, they finally understood they could not win.
Watson further insists that the role of Germany's officers in bringing about the surrender of German troops on the western front in 1918 be made a central part of the story of the end of Germany's war. He is absolutely right; the part played by Germany's officers has been overlooked and needs to be examined. But Watson overextends himself here by arguing that Germany's officers expressly ordered their men to surrender in 1918. Watson bases this claim mainly on the fact that the officer/man ratio of Germans taken prisoner by the British from August to November 1918 was equal to the officer/man ratio of the German field army in July 1918. This data is certainly compelling, but doesn't quite support the argument. Watson shows indisputably that officers did indeed surrender; in addition, he uses contemporary accounts to highlight that officers were often crucial for carrying out the process of surrender. But, as he himself concedes, it is possible that these officers were forced to do so by their men. In any event, Watson has firmly implicated the officer corps in the steady erosion of the German army's effectiveness as a fighting force. We can hope that future research will elaborate on this still fairly mysterious chapter in the history of the German war effort.
This style of argumentation is symptomatic of a recurring flaw in this book; it is highly ambitious and seeks to overturn our understanding of the war on virtually every point it touches on. As a result, sometimes the evidence is asked to support a greater revisionist load than it is really capable of bearing. Still, with its impressive use of archival evidence, its mastery of the relevant secondary literature, and its scrupulously fair-minded treatment of the German army, this book is well worth reading for anyone who seeks a glimpse inside the minds of the men, both British and German, who fought the Great War.
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Citation:
Jesse Kauffman. Review of Watson, Alexander, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24061
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