World War

'Everybody knows' what World War One was like and what it meant. Modern Britons think of the war as a muddy, bloody mess - a futile massacre in which a generation of young men were slaughtered at the behest of asinine generals.

Those who survived barbed wire and machine gun bullets went mad or wrote poetry. Their sacrifice achieved nothing, succeeding only in laying down the foundations for another bloody conflict 20 years later. World War One has become a byword for how awful, stupid and useless war can be.

The positive meanings ascribed to the war have been all but forgotten

Yet these modern beliefs bear only a passing resemblance to the ways the war was experienced at the time. During and immediately after the conflict, Britons built a wide range of different meanings out of the war years.

Notwithstanding the enormous casualty lists, in 1918 many Britons thought they had achieved a miraculous deliverance from an evil enemy. They celebrated a remarkable military victory and national survival. For those who had served in the trenches, and for those left at home, the war experience encompassed not only horror, frustration and sorrow, but also triumph, pride, camaraderie and even enjoyment, as well as boredom and apathy.

For most, it was capable of being all these things, often at the same time. We should not make value judgements about how individuals come to understand their wars, but we do need to recognise the variety and ambiguity of that understanding.

Some aspects of how the war is now remembered have been constant. The shock of three-quarters-of-a-million dead men still lingers in British culture. Other aspects - particularly the positive meanings which could be ascribed to the war - have been all but forgotten.