Dan Dimancescu |
Review of Max Arthur, The Faces of World War
I: The Great War in Words and Pictures. London: Cassell
Illustrated, 2007. Pp. 288. ISBN 978-1-84403-561-8. |
As war
books go, this one excels. It is purely and simply a powerful
photographic statement of the human experience of war―or
rather the inhumanity of war. It doesn't moralize. It skillfully and
unabashedly presents the evidence. The flow, chronological from
pre-WWI to its aftermath, is organized in yearly sections each given historical context through short, well-written
descriptive texts. One opens with the widespread and naive euphoria
of a "quick" end and closes with a human nightmare of unprecedented
proportions.
The author, Max Arthur, a
Londoner, journalist, historian, bestselling author known for his
Forgotten Voices volumes of both world wars,[1]
has drawn his materials largely from the rich trove of the Imperial
War Museum's archives. His widely respected skill as an oral
historian, a crucial contribution to this book, is used to bring
(200+) expertly edited black-and-white images to life through the
words of those who were there.
As Ian Hislop writes in a short but incisive introduction, "we are
not to be protected from pictures of the dead" (7). Indeed, they are
raw. But this is not just a book about death at war. It is also
about men―mostly British Empire soldiers
on the Western Front―in all their
guises. Dirty. Anxious. Playful. Wounded. Proud. Traumatized.
Victorious. Despairing, in many cases, when returned home to hunger
and joblessness.
By
carefully editing short quotations to accompany relevant photos, the
author lets individuals speak for themselves. In many
cases it takes only a few words or a simple look into the camera. The author,
expert in gathering oral histories, shows his unvarnished sense of
the "everyman's" voice. Below an image of six Germans manning a
machine gun, a British a soldier, Sgt. James Payne, recounts: "We
were attacking the last German trench. We were all knocked out.
Their machine guns were waiting for us. We didn't get through. None
of us. The whole battalion was wiped out. There was a big shell hole
full of dead men and dying and blinded. Tall men got it through the
jaw, shorter men through the eyes. I was walking along and a bullet
blew all my teeth out" (147).
In one
image a short, wounded British soldier, his nose and mouth crudely
bandaged, his helmet askew, one arm wrapped in gauze, walks
arm-in-arm through a muddy field with his "prisoner," a tall
bespectacled German with a half-smoked cigarette between his
fingers. They have just escaped the savagery of war. Do we think of them
as friends or enemies?
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The Ravages of War |
While
the reader will undoubtedly find some images more jarring than
others, the well-edited visual sequences reveal the
author's keen understanding of the human side of war. The impact is
cumulative and powerful. One sees a man preparing to leave for war,
sitting naked in a small water basin in his modest, dark, London
home, his back being washed by his wife. Alongside is an image of
top-hatted gentleman and elegantly dressed lady at an Eton-Harrow
cricket game. One-third of the twenty-two players in that game would
later die in the war. In another image, soldiers struggle ankle-deep
in oozing mud to draw a cannon forward, its wheels themselves sunk deep into the same thick ooze. In another, entitled by the author
"The Ravages of War," a lone soldier tugs at the uniform of a dead
comrade astride a water-filled shell hole to recover personal
objects. Behind him extends a horrific view familiar to the Western
Front of a shell-torn forest with blackened tree stumps in a sea of
convulsed mud. Then there's John (Barney) Hines staring at the
camera, his hands full of money drawn from enemy soldiers and varied
found objects lying about his feet. Known as the "souvenir king," he
had the distinction of being singled out on the Kaiser's
"personal" wanted list for his grim treatment of German
corpses.
Faces is a perfect
companion volume to John Keegan's Illustrated History of The
First World War.[2]
This work balances factual history with maps and diverse
color and black-and-white images to document the war. And while the
two are coincidentally exactly the same in format, Max Arthur's book
is highly Anglocentric. And by this is meant no criticism. It is
only mentioned to recall the obvious: that the Great War extended to
both the Western and Eastern Fronts, where the experiences were akin
and equally tragic for all concerned. Most probably, it is the sheer
senselessness of the stalemated trench warfare and the enormous
human toll it exacted that bring us back, again and again, to the
Western Front as symbolic of the whole War. It induced its own
special mental torment in those asked to enter the killing fields.
By this call to duty, vast numbers of a whole young male generation
were decimated. The emotion was long ago captured in Erich Maria
Remarque's 1929 epic WWI novel, All Quiet on the Western Front
(Im Westen nichts Neues / "Nothing New in the West"). An
immediate bestseller worldwide, it was turned a year later into an
Oscar-winning film by American director Lewis Milestone. As with
Faces, it left an indelible impression of the tragedy of war.
But within a decade the horror was repeated on a vaster scale with
unimaginable violence now extended to civilian populations. And
since that time, it has been calculated, the cumulative military-
and battle-related civilian casualties worldwide have exceeded those
of World War II: in Vietnam at least 1.5 million, in Cambodia
several million, in Iraq and Iran at least one million, not to
mention Biafra, Uganda, Darfur, and Chechnya. Do we not know how to
learn?
Perhaps the best compliment I can render Faces is to say one cannot close it
without being overwhelmed by the unromantic day-to-day rituals of
war―especially at a time when countless computer games turn the
human suffering and despair of war into soulless digital encounters.
Sadly, this book may not reach that audience.
This
book is beautifully crafted. The design, layout, quality
of paper, and choice of typefaces are credited to Carole Ash and the
printing and binding in China to Toppan Ltd. In that respect, it
joins the best of the coffee-table books albeit with a grim message.
Honorary Consulate of Romania (Boston, MA)
tsgdd@mac.com
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