During the First World War, in a vast area from northern France to Flanders, Belgium, the British Expeditionary Force fought repeatedly with the Germans, and a series of bloody battles such as the Battle of Ypres and the Battle of Parschonne broke out here. Among them, for the British people, the Battle of the Somme is their national memory and has become a microcosm of their memories of the war in the First World War. On July 1, 1916, the first day of the battle was tantamount to a massacre, the British infantry stepped out of the trenches in dense formations, and under the intensive German artillery fire, nearly 60,000 casualties were lost in one day. The day has been called "the darkest day in British military history". This battle vividly illustrates the horrors of war. By the end of the war, ten percent of the country's men under the age of 45 had disappeared, and the heavy casualties left deep scars on the hearts of the British people.
Jeff Dyer has been hailed as "probably the best British writer of our day", and his maternal grandfather was a member of the British Army serving in the French voivodeship of somme during World War I, so the First World War is also part of his family's memory. Jeff Dyer revisits the old battlefield with his friends, records his revisits to the old battlefields and war memorials, analyzes images, poems, and texts related to the war, and shows the reader his thoughts on the First World War.
Today, as the generation that fought in the First World War gradually withered away, the memory of the First World War slowly faded. Back in the years when the First World War was just over, memorial ceremonies were held all over Britain to mourn the dead. Today, when people pass by the war memorials, these are no longer as strong emotional impacts as they were at the beginning of construction, but have become inconspicuous everyday buildings. So as time goes by, will the memory of this war disappear? For Jeff Dyer, "the question is not just how the war makes memories, but also how the memories of the war, now or in the future, then determine the meaning of the war."
Jeff Dyer reviews the works that appeared during the war, as well as the post-war literary works on the subject of The First World War, the memorial sculpture in the city, telling the flow of the historical memory of the First World War after the war.
At the end of the war, the huge losses left the whole of Britain "covered with a thick curtain of death", and everything about the war remains to be explained. For Sasson, Owen and others who have experienced war, war is an evil thing. In the years of the truce, anti-war sentiment was so high that George Orwell once said: "At that time, in a way, even those who were slaughtered could not be blamed." In the historical memory of this period, the war is gray, and even the memory of the 1914 conscription is gray. In the descriptions of some poets, these conscripts joined the ranks of death before boarding the train.
However, under the influence of official organized commemorations after the war, and after the renewed tensions in Europe in the late 1920s, the public began to feel the new threat of war, so the reflection on the war gradually stopped, and the truth of the war was forgotten. Jeff Dyer does not agree with the statement on some war memorials that "the sacrifice of one's life for the country is so sweet and glorious", in his view, these "memorials" are precisely a kind of "forgetting", when in fact, everything that happened in the war is immeasurable, whether it is "horror", "killing", or "regret", which cannot include the experience of war, that is, the desolation of the no-man's land on the Western Front, the numbness of soldiers, the bones of tired corpses, and the long grave. It was a "war of utter waste and futility.".
Unlike World War II, when the bones of the death camps were found and the Nazi regime's genocide was made public, the reason for the war was no longer a question. Paradoxically, however, even today, there is still disagreement as to why and what it meant when World War I broke out. Jeff Dyer's book represents the view that the war was meaningless, which had arisen since world war I.
Indeed, the First World War was different from all the wars that preceded and followed. The rapid progress of the weapons, with far more lethality than before, but not enough progress, so that the two sides eventually fell into trench warfare. Commanders who failed to adapt to the tactics of the new era experimented with their own operational thinking, and it was ordinary officers and soldiers who paid the price. The battlefield mortality rate in World War I was even higher than that in World War II. For many soldiers, there was no decent fighting at all, just feces, lice, rats, and endless shelling in the mud of the trenches. There is not even a decent sacrifice, life is simply consumed monotonously. This caused disillusionment among many soldiers. The sheer scale of the deaths – nearly 750,000 in the UK – raises questions about whether it is worth sacrificing so many lives. This is why the British are still reluctant to talk about the First World War today.
War is just an unspeakable disaster, if meaningful, it is peace, "people begin to love each other", this is what Jeff Dyer got in the cemetery.