“Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I”, by Stephen O’Shea

 

Walker Books, 216 pages, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0802713292

How does one forget a war? The First World War – or The Great War, The War to End All Wars, The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy, The War of the Nations – recently celebrated (?) its centennial and nobody noticed. Can you imagine? A war that, in the words of our author, “caused some 67 million men to don uniforms and go fight. One in every six of these men was killed. Of the remainder, approximately half were wounded. On the Western Front alone, more than 4 million died in their ditches”. It also caused the fall of empires and monarchies that had lasted for centuries and was the catalyst for the rise of three of the most God-awful “isms” – Communism, Fascism and Nazism – to ever curse an already benighted humanity.

Yet the centennial came and went with hardly a mutter from most. The war that saw in the bloodiest and most oppressive century in the history of Man has been all but subsumed by its infinitely worst successor to the point where many can’t be bothered to remember what it was all about. Thankfully, some do remember, like Stephen O’Shea who, during the 1980s and 90s, took to touring the battlefields of WWI in an attempt to come to grips with the needless slaughter and suffering and recorded what he thinks he learned in Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I, an awesome history-cum-travelogue in which he recounts the gruesome battles of the Western Front: Passchendaele; The Somme; The Argonne; Verdun.

Throughout, he offers an impassioned perspective on the war, the state of the land and the cultivation of memory. His consummate skill with words and details brings alive the players, famous and faceless, on that horrific stage and makes us aware why the Great War, indeed history itself, still matters. For O’Shea, the legacy of The Great War is both personal (his grandfathers, maternal and paternal, fought on the front lines) and cultural. Stunned by viewing the “immense wound” still visible on the battlefield of The Somme, and feeling that “history is too important to be left to the professionals” – ain’t dat de truff – he set out to walk the entire 450 miles through no-man’s-land to discover for himself, and for his generation, the meaning of The War.

As O’Shea shows, while World War I is beyond the memory of almost everyone alive today it has yet left as deep a scar on the imaginative landscape of the 20^th Century, as it has on the land where it was fought. Nowhere is that more evident than on the Western Front, the sinuous, deadly line of trenches that stretched from the coast of Belgium to the border of France and Switzerland, a narrow swath of land in which so many millions of lives were (needlessly) lost. And all for naught, for all of the belligerents in The War to End All Wars were at it once again a mere 21-years later (no wonder some too-clever historians sometimes refer to both WWI & WWII as the Second Thirty Years’ War, never mind that the reasons for the wars differed so dramatically).

Having traversed countless American Civil and Revolutionary War battlefields over the length of my youth (thanks, Dad!), O’Shea’s experiences traversing the ordnance-and-relic filled trenches and forests to the many memorials of WWI are truly insightful and differ greatly from the kind of lionization of American Civil War battlefields that is so prevalent today; indeed, the battlefields of The War to End All Wars seem to lie in a weird sort of isolation as O’Shea frequently stumbles from one long-deserted village to another with the experience becoming ever-more discomforting. Its as if Europe collectively has decided to forget this conflict that began their slow decline into the bureaucratic moribund sick man of the world they have become.

While O’Shea can’t restrain himself from over-moralizing the futility of war, the evidence he presents conveys the true waste of war better than any memorial can. Back to the Front teaches a lesson that all too-few people will ever learn, especially those who make the decision to send young men off to die knowing they themselves will never suffer the consequences of their actions.