Starving Dreamlessly or Sensemaking on the Western Front?
Making Sense of the Great War: Crisis, Englishness, and Morale on the Western Front by Alex Mayhew (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
A central question surrounding World War II, among academics and everyday people, is how ordinary Germans could become perpetrators. This is the subject of the classic rival works Ordinary Men (1992) by Christopher Browning and Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) by Daniel Goldhagen, and many other books. In contrast, the perceived pointlessness of the Great War has made the persistence of its combatants a constant topic in the war’s historiography. How and why did men keep fighting in the Great War? Alex Mayhew’s new book, Making Sense of the Great War: Crisis, Englishness, and Morale on the Western Front, “explores how servicemen endured the Western Front during the Great War, what underpinned their morale, and how they perceived crises such as that which was brewing in late 1917 and early 1918” (xxi).
Vachel Lindsay’s poem “The Leaden-Eyed” can easily be transposed onto the common understanding of the Great War experience. The poem reads:
Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve; but starve so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.
We could consider the “lions led by donkeys” to resemble the “limp and leaden-eyed,” especially if we see them through the famous cover of Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. The war’s soldiers seemed to have starved “dreamlessly.” We can think of the war dead as having died “like sheep.” But the combatants of the Great War were not solely victims and neither were they always leaden-eyed. Alex Mayhew’s book argues that English soldiers’ “endurance and perceptions of crises were conditioned by their psychologies and their relationship with their surroundings” (xxi). That sounds simple, but Mayhew’s analysis productively draws on methodology from a variety of disciplines.
Making Sense of the Great War is a history book that engages anthropology, social psychology, and sociology to better understand morale on the Western Front. Part One covers the environment and how men made sense of it. This includes the familiar, despair-inducing scenes and smells, the oppressive weather, and introduces the ways that men made sense of it all. For example, Mayhew illustrates the significance of narratives and place-naming in orienting soldiers to their surroundings. Chapter three does very well examining winter as a time with special challenges and relating those challenges to changes in morale. Part Two explores morale. Mayhew argues that “soldiers’ identities fed their sensemaking, but morale rested, at least in part, on their imaginative impulses” (163). This part of the book restores agency to the men in the trenches, making them anything but dreamless sheep. It also emphasizes what seemed particularly English about the endurance of English soldiers in the trenches.
Making Sense of the Great War excels at linking analysis to specific events and settings. Mayhew presents a Western Front which features time and space. Part Three looks at short-term and chronic crises. Each affected morale and not always in ways that readers might expect. Mayhew argues that “men’s sense of crisis was deflected, in part, by their belief in the proximity of victorious peace” (208). A sense of hope buoyed men through chronic crises especially and that was not tested to the breaking point until 1917. Paradoxically, the acute crisis of 1917-1918 and the last German offensive actually improved morale by distracting people from the chronic crises which had worn them down by that stage of the war. Even then, Mayhew finds that “after Passchendaele, it was difficult to see battle as a pathway to peace” (235).
The topic of morale on the Western Front, with its horrible conditions, is not new. But Making Sense of the Great War does bring some new things to the table. The interdisciplinary methodology brings something new to the recurring topic of morale and men’s ability to keep fighting. This book reflects a great deal of research in other disciplines and familiarity with many primary and secondary historical sources. Leonard Smith has influenced this book, as he has the entire discourse on the topic of wartime soldiers’ morale, but this text is more than an echo of earlier works.
Not only does Making Sense of the Great War argue for agency among English soldiers at the front, it emphasizes the importance of hope. The presence of hope in the trenches does not fit well with the idea of the “lost generation” or the “lions led by donkeys,” but it does fit the primary sources. Mayhew’s work shows the significance of hope in the trenches. “Hope for victorious peace” is the subject of chapter five is about the “hope for victorious peace” and its importance (198). It is one of the book’s strongest chapters.
If we often make too much of pessimism in the Great War, it’s possible we make too little of the fact that English soldiers were subjects rather than citizens. Mayhew emphasizes that a great deal in Making Sense of the Great War. He writes, “this was not a citizen army. Officers (and their men) pledged allegiance to the monarch, not to the state nor to Parliament” (124). According to Mayhew, this may have a direct link to morale which sustained the war effort and may also be related to the relative lack of rebellions in the English Army. He suggests that “English soldiers’ choice architecture may have been constrained by their very different relationship with politics and military service. These were subject soldiers who owed their allegiance to the King. Their membership of the armed forces had less to do with active citizenship and patriotic impulses” (293-294). This difference from the citizen armies may be what made the difference in acceptance of wartime conditions and orders. Mayhew writes, “Once in khaki, citizenship, sovereignty, and suffrage mattered less than home, survival, and respectability, and perhaps this parochial patriotism was more resilient to change” (294).
Who should read this book? The obvious audience for this book is people already interested in the Great War. It offers insights to scholars and could be used well in the classroom. It could serve a non-academic audience, because it is highly readable and may be of use to people who study morale in fields like leadership and management. A workplace could benefit from a boss reading this book. Conditions may be quite different at your job (hopefully so), but war is not the only context in which people need to make sense of their work and can use encouragement to push through challenges. People were taken down by bullets, but morale was more often negatively affected by mud. Leaders who better understand the strain of chronic crises will be better leaders.
Making Sense of the Great War takes on a familiar topic in a familiar setting. It examines morale on the Western Front. But this book offers fresh analysis and adds nicely to the discourse around wartime morale. Those who want to know how and why English soldiers endured the Great War ought to read Making Sense of the Great War.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
