As We Were: the First World War; Tales from a Broken World, Week-by-Week

One Lucky British Soldier

Review by Dominic Sandbrook from The Times, 28 March 2021 

How do you tell the story of something as bewilderingly vast as the First World War? How do you convey the sweep of such an enormous global drama without losing sight of the human factor? And how do you capture the weight and pace of events, day after day of misery and bloodshed, without oppressing the reader with interminable detail?

These were the questions facing two retired teachers, David Hargreaves and Margaret-Louise O’Keeffe, in the summer of 2014, when they began an online project to tell the story of the First World War, week by week. For the next four years they kept it up, never missing a week. Their project became more ambitious: originally based largely on British newspapers, it became increasingly international, weaving together letters, diaries, and memoirs. And now they have turned it into four thick paperback volumes, handsomely self-published in a smart slipcase. If nothing else, it represents a tremendous feat of dedication.

Is it any good, though? That’s a slightly different question. After all, telling the story of the war in a weekly narrative makes it very hard to tease out underlying patterns. To some extent, this is history as one damned thing after another: men die, battles are won and lost, the wheel turns, the seasons come and go. And to their credit, the authors know it. “Nothing out of the ordinary this week, according to the archives,” begins a characteristic entry in June 1915. “No great offensives and certainly no breakthroughs, East or West.” So what, then?

Yet this apparently random entry perfectly captures the project’s strengths. The next paragraph tells the story of Lance Corporal William Angus, who won the Victoria Cross for bringing back his injured lieutenant under fire, suffering 40 separate wounds in the process. Then the poet and soldier Roland Leighton, engaged to the feminist Vera Brittain, writes home to ask for a large wooden rattle. He needs it, he says, because he and his men spend so much time in gas masks now, and he wants “to call the attention of respirator-swathed men” when he needs to give an order.

A few lines later, the prime minister’s wife, the vinegary Margot Asquith, complains that the Mail (“a foul paper”) has accused her of playing tennis with German prisoners of war. Then we are in the offices of Country Life, which has produced a special summer edition celebrating “the bird life of the fields and the flower life of the garden,” so that readers on the Western Front can be “wafted back in imagination to the fields and lanes of home.”

The entry ends with the troops at Gallipoli, clinging on under a blazing sun and punishing Turkish fire. “We set to work to bury people,” one survivor writes. “We pushed them into the sides of the trench but bits of them kept getting uncovered and sticking out, like people in a badly made bed. Hands were the worst: they would escape from the sand, pointing, begging—even waving! There was one which we all shook as we passed, saying ‘Good morning’ in a posh voice. Everybody did it.”

In essence, then, this entry is the entire project in miniature. The arbitrariness, the unpredictability, the lack of pattern is the point. “Sometimes it is the pity of war that overwhelms, and sometimes the stoicism and loneliness,” another entry begins, a few weeks later. “This week, it was its randomness and folly.”

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. . . Hargreaves and O’Keeffe’s labour of love has two outstanding qualities, which few academic histories can match. First, the week-by-week style gives a rare sense of total immersion. On and on the war continues, for hundreds and thousands of pages. You get a real sense of time stretching endlessly out, as day follows day in the trenches. Things happen, but often they have no meaning beyond the individual tragedy. And yet, as one entry puts it: “What is tragedy if it is not personal?”

And second, it is gloriously readable. All human life is here: courage and cowardice, heroism and horror. It may cost £100 [$120 USD, $65 Kindle], but it’s worth every penny.