Starving Dreamlessly or Sensemaking on the Western Front?
Making Sense of the Great War: Crisis, Englishness, and Morale on the Western Front by Alex Mayhew (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
A central question surrounding World War II, among academics and everyday people, is how ordinary Germans could become perpetrators. This is the subject of the classic rival works Ordinary Men (1992) by Christopher Browning and Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) by Daniel Goldhagen, and many other books. In contrast, the common belief in the futility of the Great War has made the persistence of its combatants something of a riddle and a consistent theme in the war’s historiography. How and why did men endure the Great War? Alex Mayhew’s new book, Making Sense of the Great War: Crisis, Englishness, and Morale on the Western Front, “explores how servicemen endured the Western Front during the Great War, what underpinned their morale, and how they perceived crises such as that which was brewing in late 1917 and early 1918” (xxi).
Vachel Lindsay’s poem “The Leaden-Eyed” can easily be transposed onto the common understanding of the Great War experience. The poem reads:
Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve; but starve so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.
We could consider the “lions led by donkeys” to resemble the “limp and leaden-eyed,” especially if we see them through the famous cover of Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. The war’s soldiers seemed to have starved “dreamlessly.” We can think of the war dead as having died “like sheep.” But the combatants of the Great War were not solely victims and neither were they always leaden-eyed. Alex Mayhew’s book argues that English soldiers’ “endurance and perceptions of crises were conditioned by their psychologies and their relationship with their surroundings” (xxi). That sounds straightforward, but the analysis is wide-ranging.
Making Sense of the Great War employs a methodology that draws on history, anthropology, social psychology, and sociology to better understand morale on the Western Front. In Part One, Mayhew reviews the environment of the Western Front and the ways that men made sense of it. These chapters describe the horrific scenes, the smells, and the bad weather, while also explaining how men made sense of these surroundings and built sustaining attachments within them, through things like place-naming and narratives. Chapter three does very well examining winter as a time with special challenges and relating those challenges to changes in morale.
Part Two covers the relationship between social groups and morale. Mayhew revisits understandings of duty among English soldiers and the ways in which people maintained and projected Englishness in the trenches. Mayhew argues that “soldiers’ identities fed their sensemaking, but morale rested, at least in part, on their imaginative impulses” (163). This part of the book restores agency to the men in the trenches, making them anything but dreamless sheep. It also emphasizes what seemed particularly English about the endurance of English soldiers in the trenches.
One strength of Making Sense of the Great War is Mayhew’s ability to tie his analysis to specific events and settings. This book does not describe a Western Front undifferentiated by time and space. Part Three looks specifically at crises—chronic and acute—and their impact on morale. Mayhew argues that “men’s sense of crisis was deflected, in part, by their belief in the proximity of victorious peace” (208). A sense of hope buoyed men through chronic crises especially and that was not tested to the breaking point until 1917. Paradoxically, the acute crisis of 1917-1918 and the last German offensive actually improved morale by distracting people from the chronic crises which had worn them down by that stage of the war. Even then, Mayhew finds that “after Passchendaele, it was difficult to see battle as a pathway to piece” (235).
The topic of morale on the Western Front, with its horrible conditions, is not new. But Making Sense of the Great War does bring some new things to the table. The methodology is genuinely interdisciplinary in a helpful way, bringing some new perspective to the persistent question about morale. Not only has Mayhew read in other disciplines, he has read and cited extensively in primary and secondary history sources. Like every other book on this topic, this one has a debt to Leonard Smith, but this text has an exceptional level of support from sources and demonstrates remarkable familiarity with existing scholarship.
Not only does Making Sense of the Great War argue for agency among English soldiers at the front, it emphasizes the importance of hope. So much scholarship surrounding the Great War is colored by the coming of the Second World War that it can seem strange to reference hope in the trenches. But as Mayhew has shown, it was there and it was important. Scholars and history buffs can be so caught up in what happened in the future after the war that we forget that soldiers had mentally filled the future themselves while they waited for it to arrive. Chapter five is about the “hope for victorious peace,” the role it played in morale, and what threatened that hope (198). This chapter is one of the book’s strongest.
One topic in the book which could be explored more is the contrast between officers and enlisted men. The disparity in material and leave conditions and social class is not a new topic. But Mayhew’s exploration of how officers and enlisted men understood honor and duty differently in chapter three is very interesting. It would be nice to see that analysis of differences between officers and enlisted men brought into other chapters more. Was there a significant contrast in hope between officers and enlisted men? Did they perceive the crisis of 1917-1918 the same way? The distinctions between regulars and new recruits, and between veterans and new recruits, is also acknowledged in places, but could be more developed as an angle of analysis. However, that would present a challenge while trying to incorporate perspectives from a variety of regiments.
One interesting aspect of Making Sense of the Great War is Mayhew’s emphasis on English soldiers as subjects rather than citizens. In several passages, he reminds readers that English soldiers had a loyalty to the king and not the state. As he writes, “this was not a citizen army. Officers (and their men) pledged allegiance to the monarch, not to the state nor to Parliament” (124). Mayhew is doing more than distinguishing English soldiers from the French, for example. He argues that it may even have maintained morale or limited the kind of rebellions experienced in other armies toward the end of the war. He writes “English soldiers’ choice architecture may have been constrained by their very different relationship with politics and military service. These were subject soldiers who owed their allegiance to the King. Their membership of the armed forces had less to do with active citizenship and patriotic impulses” (293-294). Perhaps English soldiers had less of a sense of their rights and their ability to affect political outcomes. Mayhew continues, “Once in khaki, citizenship, sovereignty, and suffrage mattered less than home, survival, and respectability, and perhaps this parochial patriotism was more resilient to change” (294). This perspective grows from Mayhew’s earlier work and suggests the possibility of interesting ongoing analysis.
Who should read this book? The obvious audience for this book is people already interested in the Great War. It offers insights to scholars and could be used well in the classroom. It could serve a non-academic audience, because it is highly readable. Yet another audience might be anyone interested in morale. Many of the observations are relevant to regular workplaces, not just the Western Front. Conditions may be quite different at your job (hopefully so), but sensemaking takes place everywhere and any type of leader could benefit from better understanding what allows people to endure hard times and even encourages them to cooperate in facing seemingly overwhelming challenges. Many leaders might benefit from considering the fact that mud was more commonly disparaged than battle at some points of the war. The differences in expectations depending on rank also seem worth reflecting on.
Making Sense of the Great War takes place on familiar ground—the muddy trenches of the Western Front. The characters are also familiar, English soldiers who carry pastoral landscapes in their mind and nickname everything they cannot pronounce in Belgium and France. But this book is a fresh look at that familiar ground and a welcome addition to the conversation surrounding morale. Those who want to know how and why English soldiers endured the Great War ought to read Making Sense of the Great War.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
