The Beauty and the Sorrow by Peter Englund - review

Can people who didn't experience the first world war ever know – really know – what it was like? The question troubled a French civil servant, Michel Corday, in 1917. Not that Corday ever smelled a trench or heard a shell explode; in Paris and far from the frontline, it seemed to him that even civilian life would be hard for a historian to reproduce accurately. So little of the evidence could be trusted. He knew from conversations overheard on trams and in the street that people had begun to long for peace. But the word was taboo: it could hardly be spoken aloud because it suggested defeatism and compromise when what the state wanted was victory. Newspapers were strictly censored and run by propagandists, warmongers and ideologues – their reporting would be an unreliable guide in the future to the public mood of the past. Photography couldn't be counted on either: "Vanity or shame prevents certain aspects of life from being reflected in our illustrated magazines." As for private correspondence, men who wrote from the front knew that their letters might be opened and therefore they gave "a false feeling about the war".
This wasn't just a problem for the years ahead. As Corday noted in his journal, it was the same combination of ignorance and denial that kept the catastrophe going so long. The French public never suspected for a moment they would be able to stop the war – "that its parasitic life depends on their acquiescence".
Nearly a hundred years later, we know that Corday's fears about our understanding of 1914-18 were to a great extent misplaced. Postwar revulsion throughout Europe quickly stripped away the thin layer of patriotism that had varnished terrible events. New historical approaches ranked the experience of private soldiers above that of generals. Wilfred Owen became a classroom favourite, as did the hard-to-contradict phrase "useless slaughter". The causes and consequences of the war have been endlessly unpicked and debated. Its presence as the first of the great shadows to be cast across the last century is there.

We know the thing generally: as sandbags, screaming shells, bodies hanging on the old barbed wire and poppies growing in the mud. And also particularly: in Britain, at least, the western front counts for most. Among the great merits of Peter Englund's book is its geographical scope, which takes in Mesopotamia, east Africa, the Dolomites, the Balkans and Russia as well the familiar imagery of Flanders and Verdun. We reach these places through the stories of 20 men and women of at least a dozen nationalities, which Englund has assembled from diaries, memories and journals (including Corday's). He wanted what he calls "a work of anti-history", which by taking 20 people and following them through the length of the war (or until they die in it) would try to transform a vast, cloudy event into a telling patchwork of particular experience.
His cast is tremendously various, ranging from a Venezuelan cavalryman who served in the Ottoman army to a German schoolgirl and a Scottish nurse. Their words form only a small part of each of the interwoven episodes, which Englund writes in a telegraphic present tense alive with detail. The technique invites suspicion – how does Englund know that on a particular day a particular place had "sun-warmed grass smelling of summer", unless the original text has bothered to tell him? But as he is both an academic historian and the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel for literature, he surely knows – and respects – the difference between a fact and a factoid. In any event, this reader could detect no false notes in the narratives, which make this a literary as well as historical achievement (well served by its English translator, Peter Graves).
Some things in it can never be forgotten. Fear, especially, is brought alive. When René Arnaud's infantry battalion hears that it's about to be sent again to Verdun, 50 or so men crowd around an army doctor citing anything – hernias, rheumatism, murmuring hearts – that will get them off the hook. As Arnaud records, men clung to him "like drowning men clinging to a life-buoy". Meanwhile in Paris troops seek out prostitutes who might give them venereal disease. There is even a trade in gonococcal pus, which soldiers buy and smear into their genitals in the hope of a long stay in hospital; according to Englund, the more desperate also smear it into their eyes and end up permanently blind.
How can a war be sustained when it provokes such dread in its combatants? In the Italian army, Paulo Monelli watches as two deserters are shot by members of their own unit. The condemned men scream, shout, weep and plead, and at first the firing squad refuses to fire. But at the third command they do – the Italian army believes in iron discipline and executes many more of its own men than either Britain or Germany (the figures are respectively 1,000, 361 and 48). "All armies," Englund writes, "function on a mixture of external compulsion and consent (spontaneous or orchestrated); indeed, this whole war originated in a meeting of those two concepts." But when consent goes completely and order depends on compulsion, "the whole edifice collapses".
In Germany come the autumn of 1918 this more or less happens. Seaman Richard Stumpf has spent his entire war on a battleship that rarely puts to sea and has never fired a gun in anger. We meet Stumpf in several episodes, complaining about the lack of action. But rather than the enemy, the people he has come to loathe are the ship's officers, who enjoy a life of privileged, drunken idleness. Refusing to obey orders becomes a routine event, leading to a mutiny when the fleet is ordered to sea for one last glorious battle. The mutiny becomes a revolutionary march through the port of Wilhelmshaven, unopposed by the officers. Somebody waves a red flag. Germany is starving, disillusioned and exhausted. A week later the war ends. The lucky survivors are not the people they were in 1914.