It might seem a truism, even if a slightly pious one, that historians should be dispassionate and objective practitioners of their craft. Yet is that actually desirable? Or even possible? The debate on the role of historians and how they should approach their subject goes back a long way. In the early nineteenth century Leopold von Ranke, widely regarded as the founder of modern source-based history, contended that before you committed anything to paper, you should be sure you had the evidence to show that what you were writing was not just accurate, but also provable.[1] This brought an early forensic approach to history writing.
However, even forensic detectives are not solely concerned with gathering facts. They don’t go into a crime scene and simply record everything they see. They are selective. They are unlikely to be interested in the titles of the books on the shelves, the colour of the carpet or the age of the rococo plasterwork in the library where Colonel Mustard was killed; murder weapon, fingerprints and the smashed window are more likely to yield information which aids their work. Similarly, historians make choices about what to include in their studies, and how much emphasis each factor should be given. Indeed, while detectives have their task clearly assigned – the solving of a particular crime – historians more often than not have to define for themselves what their aim is in the midst of a mountain of factors and facts.
E.H. Carr
The elusiveness of facts was addressed by E.H. Carr who analysed the relationship between historians and facts. He rejected the apparently common-sense idea that there is a discoverable body of facts in any situation which are available “like fish on the fishmonger’s slab”.[2] He argued that there exist “facts of history” which are different from “other facts about the past”.[3] Facts don’t become historical facts until they have been judged as historically relevant and significant by selection and interpretation.
The facts only speak when the historian calls on them; it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context… It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar’s crossing of that pretty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossings of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all.[4]
Carr was arguing that it is not just the selection of facts, but also the choice of focus which produces narratives, analyses and theories. Furthermore, the use of judgement extends also to how historians select, rank, present and interpret facts, something which is determined by their intentions, experiences and beliefs. He also stressed that history writing is a process which involves interaction between facts and interpretation. These must be considered together without one dominating the other. During this dialogue, historians must be ready to change their opinions if the facts contradict their initial thesis.[5] Judgement is therefore a continuing and never-ending phenomenon for the writer of history.
It can be argued that judgement is in our very nature as human beings. From making up your mind whether Poldark is worth watching to deciding whether Donald Trump is a trustworthy individual, we make judgements all the time. The oft-quoted injunction to “Judge not, lest ye be judged” in St Matthew’s gospel is one of the most misunderstood of all biblical texts. Taken in the full context of the next two verses, it is a warning against hypocrisy and to be aware that judgement is always reciprocal. In fact even further into the chapter, it becomes clear that Jesus thought judgement was actually a good and necessary thing, but must be well-informed.[6]
Carr’s analysis has much in common with Benedetto Croce who asserted that the main job of historians is not to record the events of the past – that is mere chronicling – but to evaluate them. How can a historian know what is worth recording if s/he does not first evaluate it?[7] If judgement is an essential tool of the historian, then it makes problematic one of Ranke’s most famous sayings, that historical writing should “show how it really was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen). This was the guiding principle of the nineteenth and early twentieth century school-of-thought called positivism, pioneered by Ranke, which aimed to make history a science rather than an art. This produced an illusion of objectivity which could be false, conceited and sometimes dishonest.[8] Writers with distinctly political viewpoints, such as Lewis Namier and John Wheeler Bennett who professed to be wholly objective, could pass themselves off as ideologically neutral while promoting very conservative interpretations of history.[9]
It can be difficult to accept that two historians might observe the same historical events and see something different from each other, yet their differing interpretations need not necessarily be wrong just because they do not concur. This can be illustrated by imagining a mountain viewed from varying angles producing differing descriptions.[10] Thus, the Battle of Gettysburg can be described as that glorious engagement which signalled the end of slavery in the USA, or the tragic slaughter of young farm-boys on both sides who had no stake in the slave system – each description is correct, but they convey different perspectives.
It is important to recognise that objectivity and truthfulness are not synonymous. While complete objectivity is an impossibility in writing history, it does not mean historians have licence to be one-sided or deliberately omit inconvenient elements from their analyses. Nor should they try to compare factors with no equivalence and claim that this is “balance”. The British internment camps in South Africa during the Boer War were not the same as the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. As long as it is clear from what perspective the historian is interpreting their work, then opinion and judgement are valid tools in the methodology of the discipline. As Michael Oakeshott, a conservative historian, wrote, “History is the historian’s experience. It is made by nobody save the historian: to write history is the only way of making it.”[11] At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Richard Evans agrees with this:
Whether we like it not, there is always a subjective element in historical writing, for historians are individuals, people of their time, with views and assumptions about the world that they cannot eliminate from their writing and research, even if they can hope to restrain them, subordinate them to the intractabilities of the material with which they are working, and enable readers to study their work critically by making these views and assumptions explicit.[12]
The postmodernist historical school of thought takes the rejection of objectivity even further, sometimes to absurd lengths. Keith Jenkins, for example, sees history writing not only as subjective, but as fabricated. He argues that it is actually impossible to bridge the gap between the present and the past, that the past is fundamentally unknowable, and that history writers are essentially creating fiction to suit their own agendas. The ultimate position which he ends up asserting is that historical writing is not just inaccurate, it is futile and the world would be a better place if it were not treated as something from which we might learn anything of use.[13] However, his is an extreme case, presenting a philosophical nihilism which obscures an important contribution that postmodernism has contributed to the methodology of history. It has made us aware that the writings of historians are themselves useful as primary documents. They can tell us much about the historian him/herself, and are useful for illustrating the values and concerns of the age in which they were written. This builds on Croce’s observation that all history is “contemporary history”, meaning that it is always portrayed through the world-view of the writer’s present.[14] Another of postmodernism’s suggestions is that all discourses or narratives are equally valid. If that means that Holocaust-deniers should be granted equivalence with serious scholars of Nazi history, then all judgement is rendered dead and the world is a meaningless place.
Eric Hobsbawm, a committed socialist, and Niall Ferguson, a dyed-in-the-wool right-winger, have both written about the history of the British Empire but from polar-opposite political stand-points. Yet both have created illuminating insights and interesting interpretations of the same phenomena while producing history writing of the highest calibre. They have chosen to emphasise different features of empire, to rank various aspects as more significant than others, and to interpret cause and effect differently. Yet almost nowhere do they disagree on facts and data – there are no arguments over the amount of opium which was trafficked to China by the Jardine Matheson company, or the length of railway-line built in India by the British. They simply employ these facts differently, using their respective judgements.[15] Both writers are also unabashed about letting it be known what their political viewpoints are. This is good and honest history.
Judging the value of historical factors leads almost inevitably to value judgement, an issue which vexes many theorists of history. While the former type of evaluation seems to pass muster, the latter is seen as not the job of the historian.[16] However, there seems to be uncertainty whether value judgement refers only to moral judgements, even less agreement over what constitutes the field of morality, and still more dispute over what is and what is not morally positive or morally bad.
Political opinion is perhaps the most common form of value judgement to be found in historical writing, but personal morality also figures in much biographical history. A classic example of both is whether Henry VIII was a bad husband but a good king. If approached with the argument that his shabby treatment of his wives arose from his sense of entitlement which in turn was the result of an ideological belief in his right to absolute power, then the personal is (at least in part) explained by the political.[17] It does, of course, tend to lead to the conclusion that he was in fact also a bad king. Some people however, and certainly not just historians, believe that morality and political opinions can be separated and compartmentalised. Donald Trump suggested to the Mormon voters of Utah that he was a very moral person because he did not smoke or drink (but neither did Adolf Hitler…). Others tie morality to sexual practices. Such views narrow the concept of morality dramatically, often for quite obvious ideological (whether political or religious) reasons.
Bad, worse and worst… or good, better and best?
It is frequently argued that historical figures should be judged by the standards, mores and values of their own age, an idea originating with Ranke and still going strong.[18] This is, however, problematic. Firstly, if we turn our attention to the leadership of Nazi Germany, we could suggest that Albert Speer was less evil because he was less racially fanatical than most. However, that is not judging him by the values of the Third Reich, because Hitler, Goering and Goebbels embodied more strongly its Zeitgeist, so these were, in Nazi terms, the better men. We are still evaluating Speer by our own standards if we judge him as better. Secondly, how representative of wider values were leaders such as Hitler or Henry VIII – do we judge them against contemporaries of similar rank, or against wider social samples of their age, or against people from other countries or cultures? Thirdly, what is wrong with judging by our own moral standards as long as historians demonstrate the values of the age being studied and show how individuals or groups fitted into them or challenged them? To be able to evaluate what happened in the past in a way meaningful to ourselves in our own age, we need a set of values against which to measure those bygone events and people. We all judge as we read – oh, what a terrible man that Grigori Rasputin was – so it is only natural that writers will also be judging, even if only subconsciously. Because of that innate aspect of human behaviour, integrity requires that writers should make clear their own values and opinions, so that we know through what kind of filter their narrative has passed.
Fruitful history like that which Hobsbawm and Ferguson produce is, in good measure, the result of value judgements infusing their methodology. Ferguson would almost certainly not agree with the view of his fellow-right-wing historian, G.R. Elton, who said that history has a “dead reality independent of the inquiry” and that there is “truth to be discovered if only we can find it.”[19] Ferguson relishes debate, nowhere more so than in his views on the First World War.
In April 2014, he appeared in a BBC2 broadcast called The Pity of War in which he restated the central theme of his book of the same name before a panel of distinguished historians. Gary Sheffield and Hew Strachan, two accomplished military historians, were scathing and openly scornful of Ferguson’s presentation of an alternative 1914 scenario where Britain had chosen to stand back from the conflict. He suggested that it might have been a much shorter, limited European war of the sort which had occurred on the continent many times in the past. He argued it was a mistake for Britain to become involved, and that the cost far outweighed any benefits which occurred.[20] Much of the criticism he received was based on a dismissal of counterfactual history, of speculation about what might have happened had events unfolded differently. Counterfactual history is often condemned as unsophisticated or “bad history”. However, all historians who defend participation in the Great War as the right thing to have done must, somewhere in their mind, have the idea that any alternative outcome would have been even worse. In other words they too are engaging in counterfactual speculation and making a judgement on what they believe was the better outcome.
Ruth Henig has referred to a WWI “balance sheet”, suggesting it would need a truly dreadful alternative scenario to be worse than 10 million dead young men, the devouring of huge amounts of finances and resources, a “peace” based on ethnic divisions which created a time-bomb of resentments and hatred, the Bolshevik Revolution which led to the nightmare of Stalinism, the division of the Middle East into arbitrary states whose legacy is still wreaking havoc, and, last but certainly not least, conditions which encouraged German National Socialism and similar extremist regimes to take power across Europe, culminating in another massive war killing 60-80 million people. Henig makes no bones about castigating the statesmen of pre-WWI for bringing about the disaster of the Great War, judging the elites of every country to have been culpable because of the values to which they were beholden.[21]
It is often argued by those such as Sheffield, Strachan and John Terraine that Britain went to war to defend liberal democracy, a view which is seriously suspect since the British electoral franchise was narrower than that of Germany, while a principal ally, tsarist Russia, was the most autocratic state in Europe in 1914. Nevertheless, it is still a valid position to argue by recourse to evidence and the use of judgement. Sheffield in particular cites convincing sources showing that most of the volunteers of 1914 and those who enlisted afterwards in the British forces went to war willingly, believing in the rightness of their cause. This is almost certainly true, but why does that mean that such a belief was not misguided? Why would it not be valid for historians with the benefit of hindsight to judge that they were labouring under a misapprehension about what they were fighting for? Most historians agree that Germans who went to war on the orders of Adolf Hitler were misled, and that Napoleon’s troops were unwitting cannon-fodder for a megalomaniac’s lust for power. So why not British volunteers in 1914?
However there is one line of argument which is not valid at all because, rather than involving judgement, merely invokes assertion and attempts to shut down competing interpretations through moral intimidation. In 2014 Michael Gove, the former Education Secretary, wrote an article about the Great War in the Daily Mail which accused anyone not agreeing that Britain had been fighting a just and justifiable war of being unpatriotic left-wing propaganda-mongers whose opinions were “designed to belittle Britain and its leaders.” He caricatured their case as a “misbegotten shambles” and a puerile Blackadder approach to history.[22] This was polemic, and not very convincing polemic since, as we have seen, one of the loudest voices arguing that entry into the First World War was a mistake was Niall Ferguson, a fellow Conservative.
Gove seemed to be insisting that it would dishonour the sacrifice of those who died, or were wounded or lost their youth if it was said they fought for a less-than-noble cause. Such an assertion suggests you can only honour your dead if they were fighting for morally righteous reasons. Does that imply that dead Germans, Austrians and Turks should be less honoured? Does it also mean we should believe in and sustain what might be a falsehood rather than admit that our nation or leaders could have made a grave mistake? Is that how to avoid repeating errors? This uncomfortable notion is not just confined to WWI, but troubled the United States in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. There were unseemly rows about the erection of a memorial in Washington to the Americans who died in a war which came to be seen as futile and morally tainted.[23]
The exhortation that history should be studied for no reason other than the sake of knowledge is essentially part of that discourse which says historians need to strive for total objectivity. This is an unrealistic demand. People study and write history for purposes of their own, and their interpretations are invariably coloured by their opinions, moral code, loyalties, ideology or for practical purposes. The last of these is particularly relevant to military history, an especially illuminating area of study because this field clearly has real-world applications and a purpose beyond being a purely academic exercise.
The most obvious benefit it offers is that it “can save us from making mistakes.”[24] It is vitally important to be able to judge who were good generals and who were bad ones. There are lessons to be learned from commanders who operated in eras where the technology of war is now wholly obsolete, because there are underlying principles which remain relevant today. Alexander the Great is still valuable for demonstrating the importance of manoeuvre, Napoleon for the importance of wide vision, Erich von Manstein for speed and concentration of force, Bill Slim for adapting logistics and operational practices to suit the conditions of terrain and theatre.
Equally, there are lessons to be taken from the study of poor commanders. The incompetence of British generals during the Crimean War and the startling ineptitude of many on both sides during the American Civil War demonstrated the need for a professional officer corps drawn from all strata of society and based wholly on ability and merit rather than patronage. Similarly, analyses of the martial abilities of Tsar Nicholas II, Chiang Kai Shek and Hitler show how dangerous it is for powerful political figures to try to direct military affairs. Stalin may have been a psychopathic monster, but he was wise enough to leave the strategy for the Red Army to Marshal Zhukov and other competent commanders. Mere description of what these soldiers did in their time is insufficient for drawing from their actions effective lessons on leadership, strategy, tactics, logistics or operational methods – penetrating assessment, criticism and judgement are essential for those purposes.
Returning once more to the First World War, the debate about the futility or otherwise of the conflict frequently goes hand-in-hand with the debate about the competence of the commanders who struggled to break out of the stalemate of the Western Front. Nowhere is this more focussed than upon Field Marshal Douglas Haig, and no battle is more scrutinised than the Somme. David Lloyd George was among the first to criticise Haig’s conduct of the war, concentrating on the period after the Somme when he became Prime Minister. He castigated Haig as second-rate, unimaginative, dogmatic and inflexible, blaming him for ineffective attritional frontal attacks repeated over and again despite the opposition of many in the General Staff. He coined the memorable put-down that Haig was “brilliant to the top of his army boots.”[25] He claimed that Haig surrounded himself with yes-men and would not tolerate warnings or reports which challenged his preconceived plans. It is often said that Lloyd George criticised Haig in order to deflect blame away from himself for the deaths of so many British soldiers. However much truth there may be in that, Lloyd George’s scathing judgement was supported by a tremendous amount of documentary evidence to which he had unrivalled access as an ex-Prime Minister.[26] Basil Liddell Hart also criticised Haig’s strategy, tactics and leadership in his writings, and as a military historian, former officer and wounded veteran of the Somme, his views carried considerable weight.[27]
John Terraine attempted to rehabilitate Haig’s reputation in a great number of books he wrote on WWI, but his largest audience was gained as a scriptwriter for the BBC’s hugely successful 26-part series, The Great War, aired in 1964. However, his line of argument that there was no alternative but a war of attrition and that Haig orchestrated this well enough to enable the British Army to win its decisive victories in late 1918 actually had the opposite effect to that intended. Public perception became more convinced of the futility of the war and the ineptitude of Haig if that was the kind of thinking which prevailed.[28] While imagining that his interpretation would change perceptions suggests that Terraine’s judgement was poor, it additionally demonstrates that critical judgement is also a faculty employed by the readers (or viewers) of history who can arrive at a very different conclusion from the author. Around the same time, Joan Littlewood’s musical Oh! What a Lovely War did far more to capture and amplify the public perception of WWI as pointless and the generals as callous idiots than did academic historians, the majority of whom actually agreed with Terraine’s interpretation.[29]
Gary Sheffield has been one of Haig’s staunchest rehabilitators over the course of several books. His position is well summed up in describing the first day of the Somme, when 60,000 British casualties were incurred, a number unsurpassed in any other engagement before or since:
The popular image of British military ineptitude in the First World War is very largely drawn from that day, but the notoriety of the ‘First Day on the Somme’ should not be allowed to overshadow the fact that it represented an important point on a learning curve.[30]
Using the concept of the “learning curve”, Sheffield bases his judgement on the end justifying the means. There is very little other way to validate the massive, repetitive slaughter other than to say it was worth it in the long run. This is also the central thesis of other revisionist works such as William Philpott’s 2009 book, Bloody Victory, and is little different from the argument put forward by Terraine. Sheffield’s learning curve may seem superficially reasonable, but is it not just as callous as some have accused Haig of being? The 95,000 British soldiers who died during the whole Somme offensive learned nothing and you cannot make use of experience when you are dead. What he is really saying is that Haig used these lower-rank deaths to learn by trial and error.
If there was any learning, then it was terribly slow because Haig continued to launch mass frontal infantry assaults throughout the whole five months of the Somme.[31] It is arguable that Haig never really grasped an appropriate battlefield strategy at all. Repeatedly he allowed himself to be lured into assaulting defence-in-depth positions carefully prepared by the Germans. He never seemed to recognise that the enemy was deliberately giving ground to suck him in, something which occurred over and over at Arras in 1917.[32] Even the argument that the Somme was a strategic victory because it tied down German troops to the Western Front is not accurate. In September at the height of the battle, the Germans moved considerable numbers eastwards to defeat the Romanians.[33] When the great victories towards the end of 1918 occurred, they were against Germans whose morale was now severely depleted and who surrendered more willingly and in larger numbers than they ever did before summer 1918.[34]
So much is known about the Somme, and yet the interpretations range across the spectrum from unmitigated disaster to heroic strategic victory. This suggests that not only is judgement something which ought to be part of the historian’s craft, but is something which is inevitable and intrinsic to it. History is fundamentally an art, not a science. Although its methodology has improved and expanded enormously since the days of Ranke, employing techniques from other disciplines such as economics, sociology, anthropology and psychology, nevertheless it is still an interpretive discipline. It requires judgement – judgement of individuals, ideologies, political actions and much else – to make it comprehensible, meaningful and, not least, pleasurably readable.
Bibliography
Ashabranner, Brent K. Their Names to Live: What the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Means to America. Brookfield, CT: Twenty-first Century Press, 1998.
Barton, Peter. “The Somme 1916 – From Both Sides of the Wire [TV Documentary].” London: BBC, 2016.
Carr, E.H. What Is History? 2nd ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.
Charters, David A., Marc Milner, and J. Brent Wilson, . Military History and the Military Profession. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992.
Clare, John D. Lloyd George’s Haig: A Planomaniac. 2002/2014. http://www.johndclare.net/wwi3_LG_WarMemoirs.htm .
Cooper, Stephen. “Taking Sides on the Great War.” History Today 64, no. 3 (2014): 19-22.
Croce, Benedetto. History as the Story of Liberty. Translated by S. Sprigge. New York: Norton, 1941.
Elton, Geoffrey R. The Practice of History. London: Fontana, 1967.
Evans, Richard J. “Postmodernism and the Study of History.” History Review 32 (1998).
—. The Two Faces of E.H. Carr. Institute of Historical Research. 2001. http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Whatishistory/evans10.html.
Ferguson, Niall. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. London: Allen Lane, 2003.
—. The Pity of War: 1914-1918. London: Penguin, 1998.
Gove, Michael. “Why does the Left insist on belittling true British heroes?” Daily Mail. 2 January 2014.
Harris, John. The Somme: Death of a Generation. London: Zenith Books, 1966.
Henig, Ruth. The Origins of the First World War. London: Routledge, 1989.
Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Empire 1875-1914. Oxford: Sphere Books, 1989.
Hughes-Warrington, Marnie. Fifty Key Thinkers on History. London: Routledge, 2000.
Lipscomb, Suzannah. “A Matter of Judgement.” History Today 64, no. 6 (2014): 30.
Macfie, Alexander. Keith Jenkins Retrospective. 2012. http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1266 (accessed November 30, 2016).
Oakeshott, Michael. Experience and its Modes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933.
Philpott, William. Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme. London: Little, Brown, 2009.
Prior, Robin, and Trevor Wilson. The Somme. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.
Sheffield, Gary. Forgotten Victory. The First World War: Myths and Reality. London: Endeavour Press, 2001.
Staples, Jason A. “Judge not, lest you be judged”: Misinterpreted Bible Passages #3. 2016. http://www.jasonstaples.com/bible/misinterpreted/misinterpreted-bible-passages-3-judge-not-lest-you-be-judged/.
Stern, Fritz. The Varieties of History. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.
Watson, Alexander. “Stabbed in the Front.” History Today 58, no. 11 (2008): 21-27.
[1] Fritz Stern, The Varieties of History (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 54.
[2] E.H. Carr, What Is History? 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 9.
[3] Carr, What Is History?, 10.
[4] Carr, What Is History?, 11.
[5] Carr, What Is History?, 29.
[6] Jason A. Staples, “Judge not, lest you be judged”: Misinterpreted Bible Passages #3, 2016. http://www.jasonstaples.com/bible/misinterpreted/misinterpreted-bible-passages-3-judge-not-lest-you-be-judged/.
[7] Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, translated by S. Sprigge (New York: Norton, 1941), 19-20.
[8] Carr, What Is History?, 8-9.
[9] Richard J. Evans, The Two Faces of E.H. Carr, Institute of Historical Research, 2001, http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Whatishistory/evans10.html.
[10] Richard J. Evans, “Postmodernism and the Study of History”, in History Review 32, 1998.
[11] Michael Oakeshott, Experience and its Mode (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 33.
[12] Evans, Two Faces.
[13] Alexander Macfie, Keith Jenkins Retrospective, 2012. http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1266 .
[14] Croce, History, 19.
[15] Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (Oxford: Sphere Books, 1989); Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003).
[16] Suzannah Lipscomb, “A Matter of Judgement” in History Today 64, no. 6 (2014), 30.
[17] Lipscomb, “Judgement”, 30.
[18] Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Fifty Key Thinkers on History (London: Routledge, 2000), 260: Lipscomb, “Judgement”, 30.
[19] G. R. Elton, The Practice of History (London: Fontana, 1967), 73-74.
[20] Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: 1914-1918, (London: Penguin, 1998).
[21] Ruth Henig, The Origins of the First World War (London: Routledge, 1989), 46-48.
[22] Michael Gove, “Why does the Left insist on belittling true British heroes?” Daily Mail (2 January 2014).
[23] Brent K. Ashabranner, Their Names to Live: What the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Means to America (Brookfield, CT: Twenty-first Century Press, 1998).
[24] David A. Charters, Marc Milner, and J. Brent Wilson, Military History and the Military Profession (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), viii.
[25] William Philpott, Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme (London: Little, Brown, 2009), 420.
[26] John D. Clare, Lloyd George’s Haig: A Planomaniac (2002/2014). http://www.johndclare.net/wwi3_LG_WarMemoirs.htm (accessed December 1, 2016)
[27] Stephen Cooper, “Taking Sides on the Great War” in History Today 64, no. 3 (2014), 21.
[28] Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory. The First World War: Myths and Reality (London: Endeavour Press, 2001) Kindle Location 629-48.
[29] Ferguson, The Pity, xxxi-xxxiii.
[30] Sheffield, Forgotten Victory, Kindle Location 3115-17.
[31] Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, The Somme (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 305-07.
[32] Peter Barton, “The Somme 1916 – From Both Sides of the Wire [TV Documentary]” (London: BBC, 2016).
[33] John Harris, The Somme: Death of a Generation (London: Zenith Books, 1966), 119.
[34] Alexander Watson, “Stabbed in the Front” in History Today 58, no. 11 (2008), 21-27.
