history – Page 6 – Wis[s]e Words

Ivan’s War — Catherine Merridale

Published on January 25, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of Ivan's War

Ivan’s War
Catherine Merridale
396 pages including index
published in 2005

Though things have improved a lot since the end of the Cold War, the Eastern Front is still underrepresented in western histories of World War II. Quite naturally British and American historians have focused mostly on their own countries’ experiences in the war but even so the Russian experience is still under-represented. And often when the Eastern Front is looked at, it is from a German rather than a Russian perspective. German historians, generals and others were quite quick in putting forward their experiences in order to put the record straight in their favour, German sources were much more available to western historians than Russian sources, stuck behind the Iron Curtain as they were. So we got plenty of Konsalik novels talking about poor, intelligent middle class German officers stuck in the hell of the Ostfront facing the Slavic hordes, not so much about the poor Russian soldiers trying to liberate their homelands. What’s more, Cold War ideology, which presented an outnumbered NATO alliance trying to defend itself against the vast communist tank armies poised to overrun Western Europe at any moment, quite easily identified itself with the German experience and was fed by the same German generals that had been defeated by the Russians on how best to fight the bolshevik menace.

So it’s good to see a book like Ivan’s War be published. It’s the first book I’ve read about the Eastern Front that looks at the war there not just through a Russian perspective, but looks at the ordinary soldier’s experiences, somewhat comparable to e.g. Stud Terkel’s “The Good War” about American experiences of WWII. Catherine Merridale went to Russia not just to look at archives long inaccessible to western scholars, but also to talk to the veterans themselves and get their stories. What’s more, she didn’t just show the stories of the common soldiers, but also those of their officers and political commissars too and does so without editorialising. It’s important to hear those stories, to get an idea of what the Great Patriotic War was really like for those who fought it, without seeing it filtered through American or Western European, let alone German eyes for a change.

War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559 — Steven Gunn, David Grummitt & Hans Cools

Published on January 21, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559

War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559
Steven Gunn, David Grummitt & Hans Cools
395 pages including index
published in 2007

Everything the authors tried to achieve with this book is in the title, but whether they succeeded is another question. Based on a massive research project that was carried out between 1999 and 2002, what the book was intended to be was a comparative study of two roughly similar countries in a period critical to Early Modern European history, to determine the impact of war both on society and the (semi-modern) state. As the authors argue, both England and the Netherlands (meaning what we would now call the Low Countries) were sort of outliers in Europe, neither quite fitting in “conventional narratives of the growth of state power”, not as centralised as other countries and with a greater level of democracy. For English historians, an added advantage of this comparison is that it puts England back into an European context by showing the simularities and differences between the two countries’ experiences.

War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559 is impressive and interesting but what it lacks is that comparative aspect that the title and introduction promises. It’s more a parallel than a comparative history, with developments in the two countries looked at side by side. So you’d have a section on the defence of towns looking first at how English towns dealt with fortifications, then at how Dutch towns did the same, but nothing much on how they differed or why they did. This lack of analysis wasn’t that big a problem for me personally because I found the subject interesting enough already.

Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army 1610-1715 — John A. Lynn

Published on January 14, 2012Leave a comment

Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army 1610-1715

Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army 1610-1715
John A. Lynn
652 pages including index
published in 1997

I keep safe the memory of an invisible giant. The Son of kings, this armed colossus once towered above his foes to bestride a continent. He ate an mountain of bread and drank a river of wine at each meal. Yet historians renowned for being the mot forward looking and sophisticated in skill and interpretation, fail to see him; they write as if he never existed. He must be invisible. Otherwie, how could something so big, so costly, and so powerful remain so long unnoticed? This book is a portrait of that giant, the French army of the grand siècle, made visible again.

A historian who opens his book with these words obviously has an axe to grind and once again I had the feeling of coming into an argument without knowing the particulars or the people involved. It’s a feeling I’ve gotten used to in the past few years as I’ve been reading the more serious history books rather than sticking to pop hitory. The more history you need, the more you realise that there are no certainties in history, but many historians can be quite certain about a colleague’s flawed theories…

Singled Out — Virginia Nicholson

Published on January 2, 2012Leave a comment

Singled Out

Singled Out
Virginia Nicholson
312 pages including index
published in 2007

I found Singled Out in the Middelburg library and picked it up because it looked like the sort of book Sandra would’ve enjoyed reading. She had always been interested in social history, especially of Britain between the wars and of the role women played in these years. Sandra had actually been the one who first pointed out to me why there were so many spinsters in twenties and thirties detective stories, all those women living alone in bedsit rooms or sharing a cottage together. That was something I had noticed but assumed just to have been some sort of convention of the genre, rather than something real reflected in fiction.

But that was exactly what it was, as the interwar period was the period of the “Surplus Women”, two million women for whom there was no and would be no husbands, with the “flower of British manhood” cut down in the mud of Flanders. The First World War had left hundreds of thousands British men dead and many more crippled for life and a whole generation of women without enough husbands to go around. Granted, as the raw statistics prove this was not a new situation, as in Victorian times too this had been the case, but this was the first time this gender imbalance was both large and out in the open. This time it had hit the middle and upper classes disproportionally and therefore was widely commented on in the media and felt by those women themselves. What’s more, it came at a time of huge societal changes and anxiety and, as Nicholson shows, these socalled “surplus women” played a huge role in making British society more equal to women in general.

We also walk dogs…

Published on December 30, 2011Leave a comment

So I’ve been reading Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out, a social history of the post-WWI “surplus women”, the two million women whose (potential) husbands had died at the front and how they coped and had to find their own way in the world since the traditional role of wife and mother was denied them. It has a lot of moving stories of how individual women coped and by doing so, changed Britain. One of those women was Getrude MacLean, who had long been the devoted aunt to her brothers’ and sisters’ children, caring for them when her siblings had been scattered all through the Empire due to the war. But now they were back and if she could no longer be an aunt, what could she be?

One elderly uncle had the answer:

“why not do for others as you have been doing for your family?” Gertie’s reply was instantaneous, “and be a universal aunt?” She decided to offer a personal service with the motto “Anything for anyone at any time.”

Having found a partner, Miss Emily Faulder, she started her business in a little room behind a bootmaker’s in Chelsea. Their lease did not allow them to work in the afternoons, so they went, with their papers in a capacious knitting bag, to Harrods’ Ladies’ Rest Room where they received clients and applicants on a sofa in the corner.

And so Universal Aunts was born and became a huge succes according to Singled Out. I found this interested so I googled it. Guess what? They still exist. That’s a brilliant bit of social history still alive today, like something out of the background to a Heinlein novel, if one co-written by P. G. Wodehouse. But it’s also the sort of consequence of a big historical event that is difficult to get right in science fiction, right up there with Isaac Asimov’s quip about that an intelligent person in 1900 might have foreseen the mass adaptation of the car as the primary transportation of America, even foreseen traffic jams and oil shortage, but that it would’ve taken a genius to have foreseen the drive in movie and backseat romances…