Read an extract from Margaret MacMillan’s introduction to 14-18 NOW:
Contemporary arts commissions for the First World War Centenary.
Anniversaries of great events are never easy to commemorate. We in the present look back and ask ourselves what did it mean: the birth of Mozart or Mohammad? Luther nailing his theses to the church door or Einstein discovering the theory of relativity? The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans or the German surrender at Stalingrad? The greater the consequences or the horror, the more difficult it becomes. How do we think now about the Holocaust without trivialising it? How can we — or should we — avoid bringing our own concerns and preoccupations as we try to grasp the meaning of past events? And, after all, who are ‘we’? Governments often want to tidy up the past and impose a single unified version of what happened back then — at Waterloo, say, or the Battle of the Somme. But there can be no one view. Women, men, diverse ethnic groups, religions or social classes, start from different viewpoints, and what they see in the past may be guided by that.
So marking the 100th anniversary of the First World War, that vast and destructive struggle from 1914 to 1918, was never going to be easy. We can agree that it was a catastrophe that destroyed the old confident Europe and left a strangely and irrevocably altered world. Beyond that there are, and always have been, profound differences over how we remember and commemorate that war. We still cannot agree on how it started or why it went on for so long, and we still debate its meaning and its legacy a century later. For most of the 1920s, the British — and many in the Empire — thought of the war as a necessary and just one. The war memorials talked of ‘our glorious dead’, while veterans met, as they continued to do until they passed from the scene by the 1960s, to reminisce and sing the songs they had learned in their war service.
It was only in the 1930s, with the publication of some of the great critical memoirs and novels, that doubts started to take hold. After the Second World War, which seemed to be more of a clear-cut victory of good over evil, the First World War became much more problematic in the public memory. The loss of lives, the waste of resources, the exhausting of British power in that earlier war now seemed pointless rather than a noble sacrifice. The overwhelming image of the 1914–18 war has come to be the mud, the shattered landscapes and the corpses of the Western Front, with the single most important event in all four years for the British being the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Yet that later picture leaves out so much. It does not take into account the other battlefields, in the Middle East or Africa, and it only notices in passing that there were soldiers from all over the British Empire fighting, too, from Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, the Antipodes — and a million Indians. And in our remembering, we have not always paid much attention to the home front, to the involvement of women in what had been considered men’s work, or the lasting effects of the losses of loved ones on their families and friends.
14-18 NOW did an extraordinary job and a great service in reminding us of the complexity of the First World War’s impact. It did not impose a single narrative. Rather, its many and varied projects opened up the possibility of many stories and many ways of reacting to the past. It was left to each of us to decide how we wanted to think and feel about the war. And For most of the 1920s, the British — and many in the Empire — thought of the war as a necessary and just one. The war memorials talked of ‘our glorious dead’, while veterans met, as they continued to do until they contemporary concerns and issues, far from being kept at arm’s length, were very much part of the enterprise.