The Great War by Les Carlyon
Sydney: Picador, 2007 (First published 2006) ISBN 9781405037990
It's only after finishing this book that I have realized why I have been feeling melancholy for the last week. The Great War is a distillation of tragedy and waste: 800 pages of sadness. Les Carlyon used all of his skill to portray the story of the Australian Army on the Western Front, both from the view of the soldier at the front, and the commanders behind the lines, while also including vignettes that explain how the Australian experience fitted into the wider experience of War.
By the time Carlyon came to writing this book, he had already written a book about the Gallipoli Campaign. I do wonder about the choice of title: The Great War to my mind, is somewhat misleading given the subject matter. For this book is strictly a campaign history of the Australian forces from Fromelles - their first foray on the Western front - to the final act of the AIF, the taking of Montbrehain in October 1918. For many people my age Carlyon is better remembered as a journalist who mostly wrote about horse racing. The cognitive dissonance of who I thought Carlyon was and the misleading title of this book took me a little time to overcome. While not a pedant (well maybe a bit), I think the title was poorly chosen, especially as there is no blurb or any other material to alert the reader to the fact that this book is not actually a history of the whole of World War One.
Once I understood the limits of this book, I found it a good read. Carlyon not only writes well about the battles that the Australians fought, but uses his journalistic skill to provide a flavour of what it must have been like, using extracts from diaries and letters to give the reader a sense of the horrors, but also of the personalities of the Australian troops. He has ended most chapters with a view of the battlefields in the present day, contrasting the generally bucolic countryside of the 21st century with the vision of hell that most of it was in 1916-1918.
Like all histories of Australian exploits in the Great War, Carlyon is following in the footsteps of Charles Bean. While Carlyon is not a doe-eyed admirer of the official historian, quite often criticizing his conclusions and his distaste for General Monash, he is influenced as all writers have been by Bean's magnum opus. The Great War is mostly a history from the Battalion level, a narrative of small actions within the wider War.
Carlyon is more readable than Bean, and does try to provide some context for the Australian battles. He intersperses his battlefield descriptions with short essays on the strategic outlook and the political intrigues that swirled around the British forces during the War. He has much to say about Haig, Gough, Plumer, Lloyd George, Nivelle, Foch and Clemenceau. Most of it is not very flattering, and suited to Carlyon's story of the war. This causes him some problems during the book: Plumer is a genius at modern battle, until he isn't, Haig is a tongue-tied nincompoop until he is a rock of determination, and so on. The wish to characterize people simply is something that Carlyon tries to avoid throughout the book, but sometimes he can't help himself and his journalistic desire for a good story overwhelms the more nuanced narrative that may be closer to the truth.
The one character he does map with some complexity is Monash. Carlyon shows us that he was almost certainly the ablest officer in the Australian forces, but also points out clearly that there were others, both British and Colonial, who were his equal. Not only did he lead masterstrokes such as Hamel but there were also times when he pushed his men too far with too little support. What Carlyon shows is that Monash not only had a great tactical mind, he also had the ruthlessness required to sacrifice lives when he felt is was necessary.
While Carlyon describes battles well, there is very little in The Great War about the lives of the troops behind the lines, except when it can add an amusing anecdote to bring out the nature of the troops. Carlyon's descriptions of the AIF tend to follow the template of an army that was short on barrack-room discipline, but good at fighting - the mythical Aussie digger. There is a kernel of truth to all myths, and there is no doubt that the AIF had a more democratic nature than the British army as a whole, but sometimes the good story takes over from the duller reality.
I feel like I'm writing a bad review for this book, which is not my intention. The Great War is a very well written account of the Australian battlefield experience on the Western Front. Carlyon does well to bring out the waste and horror of war, and his trope of ending the chapters with a description of the countryside as it is today, perhaps also describing the cemeteries in which some of the soldiers he writes about lay, evokes the pity of war as well as any book I have read.
The advantage, if I can call it that, of writing a book from the battalion view is that the writer does not have to linger too much on what it was all for. The final few pages lay out the Australian achievement on the Western Front - considerable territory captured, some vital battles, and an honorable part played in a bigger picture. By the end of the war, the AIF was dangerously low on numbers (Carlyon writes pithily and well on the two conscription campaigns run in Australia during the war, as he also does more generally on the machinations of Billy Hughes as Prime Minister, and Keith Murdoch as stirrer), but as one of the most experienced corps of troops on the front, was in demand as a shock force. By the time of its last battle it was spent - the war ended not a moment too soon for the Australians.
If, as a reader, you would like to know about the battles Australia fought on the Western Front, I can recommend The Great War. It's well-written, and gives just enough context to what was going on so that the uninitiated can understand where the Australians fitted into the bigger picture. The maps included in this paperback edition were at best adequate, but there are endnotes, bibliography and a reasonable index.
The strength of the book is in Carlyon's evocation of the average soldier: he is successful in helping the reader get into - as much as one can - the shoes of those who were there. While Gallipoli has become the overarching military myth of Australia, most Australians who died in World War One did so on the Western Front - even the term "digger" was coined on that front in 1917. The lasting effects of the War trickle down to the present day: my Great-Grandfather was killed at Menin Road, one of his brothers was invalided home to Australia in the same year, another had already been killed at Lone Pine, and his other brother, one of the original ANZACS, and someone who participated in every battle listed in this book except the last, was sent home early, one of only 6,000 left from those men who landed at ANZAC Cove in 1915. Their memory, and the memory of the trauma that they suffered, lingered in the minds of the family they had left, and has been passed down to the present day.
I can recommend this book.
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