Transcript: Interview with Professor Heather Jones (WW1 Series, Ep 1 - 100 Years On)

Music: Erik Satie's Je Te Veux (piano/vocal) 0:00

Michael Baker 0:48

There’s a war memorial in Cambridge that stands just outside the Botanic Garden on Hills Road. It's called ‘The Homecoming’ and depicts, on a carved stone plinth, a slightly larger than life-size bronze figure of a young British Tommy of the Cambridge Regiment. Tommy is in mid-stride, bare-headed, his helmet in his hand, rifle slung casually over his shoulder. On his back, beside his knapsack, a laurel wreath of victory hangs, encircling a German helmet, a trophy of war. Our soldier looks quietly confident and purposeful, and his head is turned to one side, his gaze directed towards the nearby railway station where, one imagines, he has just returned from the war. That look back is also perhaps a solemn acknowledgement of those who have not returned to the station with him.

Satie's Je Te Veux 1:46

Michael Baker 2:06

‘The Homecoming’ was unveiled in 1922, four years after the First World War's end, and it's a memorial not to the fallen but, as the inscription puts it, to those who served in the war. It's a celebration, frankly, of victory, and reminds us that for the generation who fought the Great War, this was a conflict that ended in 1918 with the Allied defeat of the Central Powers - Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The armistice of that year was followed by three days of street celebrations all over Britain. In July 1919, shortly after the signing of the Versailles Peace Treaty, a huge victory parade was held in London. Captured German guns were shown off and the day culminated with a lavish firework display in Hyde Park. It was only in the later 1920s that Armistice Day gradually lost its celebratory flavour and became a date of sombre remembrance for the fallen.

Satie’s Je Te Veux 3:14

Michael Baker 3:29

I’m not, of course, trying to impress on you that we won the First World War.The point is rather that today's dominant British narrative of 1914-18 is a very particular one, that tends to focus on the dead and the waste of it all, portraying a generation as hapless victims rather than people of their own time and place. Even the recent centenary, imaginative as it often was, found it difficult to get away from these traditional resonances, but they bear increasingly little relation to what professional historians now know and understand about the conflict. Many of them produced new books for the centenary, which, based on years of research and fresh sources, showed that the First World War was altogether stranger, more complex, and more modern in every sense than we've been led to believe. These books were often weighty, usually expensive, and mostly had a limited reach. Mostly, they came and went. This seems to me a terrible waste. They deserve a wider audience. In this ten-part podcast series, I talk to some of these centenary historians to find out how they've breathed new life into the First World War. I make no claims to a definitive account, my chosen topics are pretty eclectic, but they cover a broad range. What emerges is a very different picture of this first global conflict from the one we/ve been used to for so long.

In this first podcast, I spoke to Heather Jones, Professor in Modern and Contemporary European History at University College London. Her major research speciality is the First World War, and her knowledge of what's been written on the subject is encyclopedic. I asked Heather first, what was the background to current work on the war? How, broadly, had historians viewed the conflict from the 1960s onwards? That is, from around the time of the 50th anniversary, when serious academic research into the subject began to take off in Britain.

Heather Jones 6:20

In the UK the debate is really revolving around the role of the generals in the 60s. So particularly the role of Hague, what his room for manoeuvre really was during the war in terms of the strategic decisions he made, whether it really was a case of 'lions led by donkeys'. That would be the key discussion in the UK, and it's quite interesting that that is not parallel to other European countries.

Michael Baker 6:44

General Sir Douglas Haig was British Commander-in-Chief on the Western Front from December 1915 until the end of the war. He's been a controversial figure because of the high British casualties suffered at key offensives such as the Somme and Passchendaele. In 1961, Alan Clark’s book The Donkeys, a scathing attack on British command on the Western Front, gave renewed currency to the notion that British Tommies were 'lions led by donkeys'.

Heather Jones 7:15

Britain continues to be obsessed with the role of its generals in the First World War in a way that we really don't see for France or for Germany or Italy. It's very much still an ongoing discussion in British military history, and that again would have been something very much present in the 60s debate. In the 60s and 70s, you have a very strong turn towards social history, particularly in Germany of history from below, so the history of the ordinary soldier becomes a really prominent part of the discussion. In the UK, figures like John Keegan are doing something similar with his book The Face of Battle - one of the battles it looks at is the Somme - and people like Martin Middlebrook. So you've had this shift towards social history. The other key element that's coming to the fore in the '60s and also in the '70s is this discussion around the War Poets' role in the UK. There's a very strong revival of interest in figures like Wilfred Owen in this period, partly linked with the anti-war movement, the anti-Vietnam movement, social changes that are happening more broadly in society around issues such as nuclear weapons. Out of that discussion, at the international level, you also have voices like Paul Fussell's work, The Great War and Modern Memory. In the '60s/'70s period you start seeing the origins of this idea of looking at the memory of the war and how the war is remembered and what that actually means for societies. That's again something that has marked our centenary and our centenary discussions because memory studies and the idea of how the First World War is remembered and commemorated has become a huge field of interest for historians since the 1990s. So many of the origins of our actual current debates exist in the ‘60s. It's not that it's all been surpassed, it's that those debates began at that point and have evolved now into the present.

Michael Baker 9:02

One of the key ongoing debates about the war relates to its origins: how did it start and who started it?

Heather Jones 9:10

The Fritz Fischer debate had kicked off in 1961 with Fritz Fischer's book on German culpability effectively in the outbreak of the First World War, having used previously inaccessible archives in East Germany. And that was really in full swing in the mid-60s. Fischer was very much being resisted by the German historical establishment, many of whom felt it was inaccurate for him to look to Germany as having played a key role in causing the First World War, only accepting that Germany was responsible for the Second. By the time we got to the early 2000s, the consensus was that it was an Austro-Hungarian and German action that caused the First World War. There's some debate about how you would attribute responsibility between those two states, but they were very much seen as the guilty parties, with a particular emphasis on Germany, the work of figures like Annika Mombauer highlighting the role of Helmut von Moltker in causing the First World War to happen.

Michael Baker 10:15

Helmut von Moltker was the chief of the German General Staff in the years leading up to the outbreak of war in August 1914. Annika Mombauer's work shows that von Moltker encouraged a belligerent and confrontational approach that decisively influenced events.

Heather Jones 10:35

And then we had the work of Christopher Clark, which brought back into the picture really the role of Serbia, the role of Russia, of Serbia as a very fractured state, and that question mark over Russia. We've also had new work by Dominic Lieven on Russia and this sense of Russia as something of a mystery, that historians had really overlooked Russia, partly because of access to archives and other issues, but really bringing in that Russian decision for partial mobilisation and what that does to radicalise the German decision-making process. I think that's now also come back into the picture. So I think where we're at now is something of a division of opinions amongst historians as to what precisely is the culpability of each individual state, but everyone agreeing that we now need to look again in much more detail at decision-makers and at that July moment. I think there's very much a consensus that the war is not the product of long-term structural problems anymore. That old argument there was about imperialism and the rise of the alliance system etc etc. I think a lot of that has now died down. There's a real focus now on mistakes that are made by decision-makers or deliberate choices for war that happened in July 1914, and that's where I think the real attention of everyone has moved.

Michael Baker 11:49

And, more broadly, historians are now looking much more closely at the kind of cultural assumptions, the contemporary mindsets if you like, that lay behind the decision-making of 1914.

Heather Jones 12:00

Yes, I think there's been a renewed interest in things like social Darwinism and attitudes to racial hegemony, and also mindsets around the idea of war as a kind of existential fight for survival for states. So William Mulligan has done a lot of good work on the origins of the First World War, and maybe the mindsets not just in 1914 but for way back before that, and how we're getting this idea of a kind of need to expand and need to accumulate more territory, to try and reduce the rise of nationalism by incorporating fractious and national minorities in the borderlands around one's own state. That sense that that is a way of dealing with the rise of nationalism. So some really interesting work on how domestic states like Austria-Hungry, which is based on the dynastic principle, non-nation state principle, try to resist the idea of nationalism as a way to unify the people, because it has so many different nations living within it, and how they cope with an era where actually war is now being waged and termed purely on nationalist rationales. And there's lots of really interesting work on how the dynastic principle is in decline and nationalism’s on the rise in this period and how that's affecting decision-makers.

Michael Baker 13:05

More specifically, historians are starting to examine powerful and influential group cultures within a broader national culture. German militarism and its related values are a particular focus.

Heather Jones 13:21

There has been some really valuable work done on militarism and I think particularly of figures like Ute Prevert, looking at barracks culture in Germany and this idea of a kind of military masculinity as central to status within Germany has been very important. She's also looked at honour culture, so the idea that your military masculinity was based around ideas of honour, ideas of the duel, ideas of saving face, which help us to understand July 1914 as a kind of stand-off for German militarists which they couldn't step back from. Also the work of Isabel Hull has been really important in talking about this German idea of having models of how war should be waged: so the idea of the concentric battle of annihilation as being the model for the Schlieffen Plan, something that is tried out in German south-west Africa before the First World War and then in 1914 is moved to the European theatre.

Michael Baker 14:09

The Schlieffen Plan was the German military's response to an envisaged war on two fronts, in the West against France, in the East against Russia. Using a rapid pre-emptive strike, the aim was to knock out France in six weeks and so allow time to transfer German forces east to face the Russians before they fully mobilised. In the event, in September 1914 the plan failed when British and French armies held the Germans at the River Marne, halting their advance on Paris.

Heather Jones 14:47

We have a really strong sense from Hull's work of the rigidity of mindsets of German militarists and that sense of how that identity and that kind of belief system in German militarism is driving decision-making. In a way we can see that some of these actors in 1914 are already acting out behaviours that are learned behaviours from organisational cultures within the German military.

Michael Baker 15:10

A long-held popular notion about the war has been that its outbreak in 1914 was greeted in the combatant nations with universal enthusiasm and patriotic fervour. All those photographs of cheering crowds, long queues outside recruiting offices and soldiers waving from crowded troop trains. This image of widespread jingoism is now firmly discredited.

Heather Jones 15:38

I don't think any historians really now accept the idea that European populations rushed into war and delighted to have war or were pushing for a war. What we now see is a better understanding of which parts of populations wanted war. So if you look at somewhere like Germany, there's a very large working-class social-democratic movement - the Social Democrats are the biggest party in the Reichstag. They're a party of the Workers International, they're a party of 'workers of the world unite!'. War is a capitalist endeavour. War is used to slaughter the working-class by the elites, the employers. In 1914 they support war, they believe that Germany is being invaded by a tyrannical absolutist Russia that offers its workers no rights. So we have a sense now of a real reluctance amongst the German working-class population to accept war, and they only accept it with a kind of resignation that this has to be fought because Germany's been invaded by Russia. The part of the population in Germany that we see is actually quite gung-ho for war are young male students. So the reasons historians thought there was war enthusiasm in Germany, and argued that in the past, was because they were looking at images, photographs of crowds of young middle-class men waving their hats, delighted at the outbreak of war. This is a very unrepresentative group of the German population. Young male students were a tiny fraction of the population and they saw the outbreak of war as a chance to basically stick it to the socialists. They go marching around socialist parts of town, waving flags and jubilant at the fact that now suddenly all these socialists are going to have to actually fight for their country, and this is a chance for them to show what true Germany is. Those sources do show enthusiasm but only for a small number of people. German peasants and German workers are horrified. Same thing for France. In France the government was expecting that much of the population would actually not show up when they issued the draft orders. They were really quite worried that conscription wouldn't work if there was a war. In 1914 that doesn't happen. The conscription process goes very smoothly because the vast majority of French citizens feel that France has been invaded. It's an aggressive war by Germany, therefore with resignation again, with reluctance, they rally to support their state, they believe they must defend the Republic. The French population's majority are peasants. August 1914 is harvest time. No one wants to leave their harvest, leave the women and children and the elderly to bring in the harvest, and let the farm go to rack and ruin while they go off to war. It's very much a reluctant thing. School teachers' reports from across France, particularly across rural France, tell us this story of people who are really devastated that war has come but who believe it must be fought. And that's the reason, I think, why you end up with such a huge war in 1914. But populations really see this as something that has to be done rather than something they're enthusiastic for. Again, in the British case, tens of thousands of people demonstrate in Trafalgar Square in the week before Britain enters the war - against going to war. Mainly non-conformist church members and Labour supporters. Once war breaks out, that dissent largely disappears because, again, there's a sense that Belgium has been invaded, this is a war about righteous and just causes. So in Britain the enthusiasm is the young male students and a certain section of the kind of lower-middle class who see it as a bit of an adventure. But it's very limited. Most people are really horrified at war.

Michael Baker 18:49

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Western Front has always been central to the British view of the First World War. But the popular focus has tended to be on perceived British defeats, especially the Somme and Passchendaele, on high casualties and on the generals held responsible. Almost as if the Allied victory in the autumn of 1918 didn't happen. I wondered if there had been any shift in these perspectives in recent years.

Heather Jones 19:20

I think what we have now is a better understanding of the constraints within which generals were actually working on the Western Front. I think there is some more empathy actually for their position and also a stronger attempt to try and reconstruct their mindsets, their understanding of the geo-political situation, their world view. For example, how did they understand attrition, how did they cope with mass casualties, did they really see soldiers' sacrifice as such a glorious thing that it negated the horrors of the way these men were dying? So there is a lot of new work on how the generals actually understood the war itself in a kind of cultural and mentality sense. What were their other options militarily, looking at things like the development of the tank, looking at things like the development of air power, and actually seeing that from 1914 to 1918 there is quite a strong development, a learning curve, if you like. We no longer see the generals just doing the same thing over and over again, I mean that sort of Blackadder sketch. That's now being very much discredited with the work of Gary Sheffield, Jonathan Boff and others on this learning curve within armies. And we also know now because of the work of Amy Fox, that actually the learning curve is international. So it's very much dealing with learning curves in other armies too: there's a system of learning from one's allies.

Michael Baker 20:38

So what's the view now about Allied victory on the Western Front in 1918? Is there any consensus among historians about how this was achieved?

Heather Jones 20:48

There's a very strong debate about what actually leads to Allied Victory and it's ongoing, there isn't a consensus. The latest and most important work is that of David Stevenson - With Our Backs To The Wall - really looking at the ways in which the German collapse happens, particularly the importance of Germany's allies falling away, Bulgaria leaving the war as a key trigger in Allied success on the Western Front. So putting back in, if you like, that broader picture of what's happening elsewhere. So I think for the Western Front, what we see now is a number of hypotheses. There's the hypothesis about the learning curve, that in fact the distance that the armies travel between 1914 and 1918 is such that it enables them to fight better in 1918, thereby restoring the war of mobility. The second thing is that 1918 is a success story of coalition warfare. Once you get the German Spring Offensive, you end up with Haig finally being forced to accept an Allied generalissimo and a French Allied generalissimo, Ferdinand Foch. And that's absolutely key because suddenly you have someone who's coordinating the British, the Belgians, the French, and the Americans as they come into play in 1918. So you get an actual coordinated coalition effort, whereas before in the war you just had allies who were occasionally talking to each other, liaising at conferences, but nobody who was able to impose sending reserves from different armies to different places as they were needed along the whole Western Front. That joined-up thinking comes in in 1918 and there's an argument that that is the key to the Allies winning the war. There's another argument which is that we've overlooked the French contribution. The French Army has been effectively rested on the offensive following the mutinies of 1917. In 1918 it is now strong enough to come back in, with major counter-attacks at the end of July 1918 which predate the British counter-attacks in the first week of August 1918. And this French contribution is really key in setting up the British 'Hundred Days' offensive. And we also have an argument that this is the American impact. It's the psychological impact of the Americans really getting boots on the ground in summer 1918, really starting to make an impact, particularly in September. And that is really a key factor in why the Allies win because the German army can actually see this new resource that is virtually on tap that's just going to keep on funneling men and supplies into the Western Front. And there's also an argument that actually it's all about German army morale. And that's really the key work of Alexander Watson. not about winning the war in 1918 but about the Germans losing it, and losing it because they gamble with the spring offensives, lose so many men in those offensives that actually they lose the core of their military strength. And then when the counter-attacks come, with the French first in July and the British in August, the German army doesn't have anything to fall back on. Its resilience has been broken. From late July you see mass surrenders developing into the hundreds of thousands across August/September 1918. We haven't seen surrenders on this scale on the Western Front in the war at all. The French and the British take more prisoners in those months than they've taken in the entire previous years of the war. You see junior officers leading their men in orderly fashion into captivity because they don't want to fight anymore. The final argument is the blockade one. Actually, it's about what's happening on the German home front, no longer able to supply its army effectively with foodstuffs. Big debate about that. Not all historians would agree. We know from the work of Mary Cox that the blockade is very damaging on the home front, but actually German home front morale is pretty good until you get to September/October when they start getting information from their politicians that the war is lost. German home front morale is not bad given the really bad supply situation it's facing. So for me the argument is really the Spring Offensive as this big mistake, big gamble that doesn't pay off for the German army, and the impact that has on morale. And that's absolutely central. And then you have the calition warfare element. Those are the two key things. I think, that really help result in an allied victory at the end of 1918.

Michael Baker 24:39

The state of morale, how men coped over four long years in grim conditions on both sides of the Western Front, has always been an area of interest for professional historians. But now the approach is a much more nuanced one.

Heather Jones 24:56

Morale is a very interesting debate and I think there's a consensus now that morale is really multi-factorial, and that actually when we look at morale we need to use interdisciplinary techniques to understand it. So that would be the difference to how we do morale now and how it was done maybe 20-30 years ago. The basic needs of food, sleep, access to rest, some kind of basic living conditions, medical care, those are the key issues with morale. I think camaraderie is now something that is part of the picture, whereas before it was probably the key thing that was talked about a lot with regard to morale. That was how the veterans talked about the war, the comradeship that got them through. But some of that was a post-war projection back on their experiences and how they remembered the good bits. So I think that there's now a sense of camaraderie as one factor amongst many others that kept men going while they were at war. We also need to look at ideological factors. So to what extent did soldiers feel the war was worth fighting for, to what extent were they emotionally invested in the war? I've mentioned the work of Alexander Watson, who's obviously key on this for the British and German armies. But it's also important to mention the work of Annette Becker and Stefan Audoin-Rouzeau in France, who've looked at the idea of how soldiers, in some cases, believed in the war as a kind of crusade, a kind of crusade for their nation state, a sense that this was about national survival and about the defense of their culture at home and their peoples at home. So a sense of World War One as actually being really quite a deep ideological conflict and not just about conscripts who are doing a job and who are forced to be there, but also intimately linked to people's beliefs about the war, about whether it was worth fighting, whether it mattered and when those beliefs collapsed - those being the points where we see mutinies, mutinies in Russia, mutinies in France.

Michael Baker 26:34

The traditional narrative of the First World War, in contrast to the Second, is of a conflict that saw a separation between civilians and combatants, between the frontline and the home front. That division can no longer be sustained.

Heather Jones 26:48

In the 1920s, the memory of the war crystallizes around the fallen combatants and that becomes the thing that people remember because that is one of the most painful aspects of the war for many societies. That led to neglect and forgetting, if you like, of the extent to which civilians were actually caught up in the First World War, were killed in the First World War, were displaced by the First World War, and it really skewed our understanding of this conflict and gave this strange image of a war that was a soldier's war, rather than a war that encompassed whole societies, civilians on the home front maybe discussed in terms of munitions workers, but not really discussed in terms of actual victims of war. If we actually look at this conflict and consider the fact that, for example, vast swathes of Europe are occupied quite ruthlessly by the Central Powers - virtually all of Belgium, northern France, right through to cities like Warsaw in eastern Europe, the Baltic states. We're really seeing huge populations that are completely disrupted by this conflict. Those vast deportations during the war, vast numbers of people who are removed from where they live simply because of their ethnicity. In the case of the Russian empire, it removes a huge amount of its Jewish population, the Russian state has severely oppressed them. Some of these Jewish populations actually see the Germans as potential liberators in this conflict. So Russia brutally deports these people. World War One sees considerable air raids, nothing on the scale of World War Two, but you see the bombing of London, you see hundreds of people killed in June 1917. If you look at Germany, Karlsruhe's bombed; if you look at Paris, Paris is shelled, Parisians are killed at mass in Saint-Germaine. If we look at the role of internment camps, this is the first conflict where huge numbers of people are simply rounded up and interned, again on the basis of ethnicity, no other reason. In the case of Britain, all German civilians of military age are interned, simply locked up for an indefinite length of time until the conflict ends. The same thing happens in Germany. If we look at Austria-Hungary, it's even more ruthless, turning against its Italian-speaking subjects, people who are Austro-Hungarian subjects but who simply happen to speak Italian. 12 million refugees after the war, 12 million people who have been effectively displaced by the war and the subsequent conflicts that come out of it, like the Russian civil war. And even at the start of the war, this refugee process is very evident. So if we look at Britain, 250,000, that's a quarter of a million Belgians come to Britain in 1914, fleeing the German invasion. And they stay for virtually the whole of the war. That's a huge refugee experience for the United Kingdom, but it's virtually forgotten. And, obviously, the heart of the First World War that we're really starting to grapple with is genocide. So the Armenian genocide. What the Ottoman Empire starts to do, as it starts to collapse and implode, this genocide that is deliberately unleashed against the Armenian minority of the empire is a way of getting rid of them and effectively consolidating a nation state model. So the two world wars look much more connected when we bring the civilians back into the framework.

Michael Baker 29:36

And, indeed, it's hard to think any longer of 1918 as marking the end of the war. Conflict came to a close on the Western Front, but in many other parts of Europe and beyond, violence on a major scale continued well into the interwar period.

Heather Jones 29:51

What we have as a kind of popular memory is the memory of the the jubilation of the Armistice, the fact that this damn thing had ended, right? And that was a moment of relief. It was a moment of hope, it's French and British crowds out on the streets celebrating, and that's the moment before the failures of the armistice, before the failures of Versailles, before all the messy peace treaties that don't actually deliver in many ways what Europeans were hoping for. So those years that come after, the 1919, 1920, 1921, '22, '23 period, which is incredibly violent, it's also something we're now bringing back into the picture. What's happening in central-eastern Europe is states collapsing, dynasties collapsing, revolution, the spread of communism and the Russian civil war, and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Greco-Turkish War. So huge further displacement in that region, with Grees basically fleeing the collapsing Ottoman Empire, effectively ethnically cleansed in many cases from it. And Muslims exchanged out of modern-day Greece, half a million Muslims returned back the other way, for no other reason than the fact they were simply Muslims living in Greek territory - civilians whose lives are utterly torn apart. Powers like Britain are starting to use some of these ongoing violences as ways to try and aggrandise their own colonial positions, France as well as doing the same thing in the Ottoman Empire. Or powers are also looking to try and stop Communism, so they're allowing other forms of violence to take places So, for example, the Freikorps in the Baltic states running amok, committing mass violence against civilians after the First World War, including anti-Semitic violence: their argument is they're fighting Communism, their argument is they're protecting German minorities in the region.

Michael Baker 31:27

So can one say then that 1918 only really marked the end of the war for the victors?

Heather Jones 31:33

I think part of the problem is that at the end of the First World War, victory suddenly appears very, very hollow. The victory mood doesn't last very long at all, even in powers like Britain and France, because actually everything you originally wanted, which is the 1914 world, has fallen away. So even the victorious powers are at a loss about what they do next. What do they do with empire? What do they do with, you know, trying to take new colonial territories from the defeated states? What do they do with the rise of America, which has come out of the war? America's suddenly a global player with a powerful army. It hadn't been that in 1914. So even for the victor powers, there's this huge sense of disorientation. And if you look at somewhere like the United Kingdom, it ultimately loses more territory than Germany does after the First World War, because it loses the south of Ireland and Donegal. It loses 26 counties. It loses a huge swathe of what had been its pre-1914 territory as the United Kingdom, and it loses them in violent circumstances. So actually war continues within the UK as well: Britain has to send paramilitaries to Ireland to try and put down Republican violence in this period.

Michael Baker 32:30

One of the limitations of earlier histories of the First World War was their national, if not nationalistic, character. So British studies tended to focus almost exclusively on those areas which involved Britain - the Western Front, Gallipoli, the Middle East. And the same was broadly true of other nations' historiography. Today historians are starting to see this as truly a world war with far-reaching implications.

Heather Jones 33:02

One of the most interesting things to come out of the 1990s was the rise of, first of all, comparative history, and then trans-national history. So looking at this war and realizing that you can't actually tell a national story in isolation. Because to understand the war, you have to understand reciprocal phenomena. And that even goes for military history. So looking at something like the advent of the metal helmet as a protector for troops on the Western Front, that comes in in 1916. It comes in in all three armies very quickly. But they copy each other. And it's actually a junior officer-lead initiative where people are making helmets for themselves, trying to get the higher-ups to recognise that everybody needs to have some kind of head protection. You can't understand how armies adjust unless you look at them in reciprocity with each other. They learn from each other, they copy each other, they adapt very rapidly. Use of gas would be similar. One side does it, the others respond very quickly. Even at that level trans-national history has brought us so much. Trans-national history then evolved into global history. So we now have a sense of looking at the war's impact, particularly through the Empire system which existed at the time, and looking at how this war really relates to a moment in history where imperial state structures are coming under huge pressure and the impact of total war causes so many of them to completely collapse. Very, very interesting trends visible in multiple areas of the globe that actually mirror each other.

Michael Baker 34:21

Finally, where do we go from here? Where is the research heading? What are the aspects of the First World War that we still don't really understand?

Heather Jones 34:31

At the moment, the historiography is moving very much towards looking at the environmental history of the First World War. The impact that the war had on the landscape, the destruction of northern France, for example. And looking at the blockade, the impact of the blockade on societies. But I think, for me, the areas that are still gaps, we still don't know enough about religion in the First World War. It was a huge factor in day-to-day life and in the mindsets of people at the time. Global religions have barely been touched as a topic for the First World War and new work only being done now. So I think that's one key area for me where we need to know more. The other key area for me is the issue of race. The First World War is a very interesting moment between the kind of social-Darwinist late-19th century and the interwar period, where we see the rise of very rabid racialisations of European populations in nationalist cultures. The Germans are described as a race, and the Prussians particularly, the Prussian race in the British case, for example. In France, you talk about a German racial identity, about German bodies smelling different to French bodies, about Germans eating differently. I mean, really a kind of biological essentialism of the enemy starts happening in World War One. And that's particularly also the case for troops that aren't white. There's a real need for us to go back and do more work on what happens between 1914 and 1923, particularly on these ideas of race, because some of those languages then reappear in really violent ways in the interwar period and into the Second World War.

Michael Baker 35:57

I've been talking to Heather Jones, Professor of Modern and Contemporary European History at University College, London. The other podcasts in this series will examine in more depth some of the areas of the First World War that Heather touches on as well as others. Heather Jones's own writing on the subject as well as other works she mentions can be found on the Unknown Warriors website. In the next podcast, I talk to Professor Gary Sheffield, one of a handful of pioneering British historians of the Western Front whose work has profoundly changed our perspective on this key theatre of the conflict. I hope you'll rejoin me as I continue my exploration of the real First World War in Unknown Warriors.

Satie's Je Te Veux 37:22

[End]

Further transcripts of WW1 episodes will appear in due course.