The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century
The ramifications of WWI, profound and persisting to this centennial year of its outbreak, have been so contested that it takes an accessible, perceptive historian like Reynolds to interpret them fairly. To simplify the task, he divides WWI’s effects into two periods, the 1920s–30s, when political and economic consequences were pressing postwar imperatives to victors and vanquished, and the time since WWII, whose even greater destructiveness compelled reconceptualization of the meaning of the war now rebranded as the First World War. Reynolds alights upon the major combatants of WWI, with special emphasis on Britain. Keen to test the validity of the popular impression of the war as futile slaughter, Reynolds examines popular attitudes at the time as expressed in reactions to newsreels and, later, in the 1920s, to literature and war memorials. Public sentiment cannot, in Reynold’s presentation, be called antiwar. Such a view became widespread mainly through television productions, documentaries, and historical studies made since the 1960s. Concluding with his analysis of that cultural output, Reynolds demonstrates with authoritative acuity how malleable an object the history of 1914–18 has been. --Gilbert Taylor