Trench Warfare 1914-18: The Live and Let Live System (Pan Grand Strategy) [Unabridged] [Paperback]

Mr Ashworth has written what he intends to be a scholarly study of ways in which soldiers on opposite sides of No Man's Land made life a little more peaceful for themselves by refraining from active warfare. There is very little in the way of first- or second-hand description of trench life, and instead the book concentrates on a dry, quasi-academic analysis of the live and let live phenomenon.

The style, however, is more schoolmaster than scholar and after a few chapters it becomes quite grating. The book is also far longer than is necessary (not that it is particularly long anyway - 226 pages) and I am quite sure that what he has to say could have been covered in half the space. More of a long essay than a book. To achieve this supposedly more respectable length, the author seems to have taken the old trainer's adage to heart - "Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you've told them". Just to be on the safe side, he has then added "tell them again, and again".

Stripped down to essentials, the book does make one or two interesting observations.... Live and let live, where it existed, was essentially maintained by way of three different mechanisms - outright truce (the most famous instance being the unofficial ceasefire at Christmas 1914), "inertia" (deliberate avoidance of aggressive activity) and ritualised aggression (only firing at one particular target, for example, and only at the same time of day, so that the persons under fire would know to avoid that area at that time). The way in which live and let live became progressively more difficult to maintain, as a direct result of Haig's decision to require regular raids on enemy positions (a decision followed by his opposite numbers in the French and German armies), is also moderately interesing, but again Mr Ashworth insists on over-egging the pudding and, by his constant repetitions, rapidly dulled what interest I had in his views.

Where Mr Ashworth does quote from original sources he seems to value some quite well-known works, several of which are known to be less than reliable. In particular, he makes frequent reference to Robert Graves' "Goodbye to All That", an excellent read in itself but notorious for being a long way from accurate in its portrayal of events. Similarly with Blunden and Remarque, whose works were intended more as impressions rather than factual descriptions of their war experiences. (But perhaps I am just sniping here, to vent a little of my frustration at this book.)

Sadly, then, this book is not to be recommended. Anybody with a passing interest in the Great War, who would like to know a little more about what life in the trenches was like, will be bored stiff. Anybody who, like me, devours just about anything they can lay their hands on about the war, will also be greatly disappointed - one or two nuggets of information, which many will have already come across in other works, are insufficient reward for the drudgery of plowing through Mr Ashworth's tedious prose. Read more ›