Reprinted articles Montague wrote during and after WW1, mostly for the Manchester Guardian, in which he harshly condemns the judgment and obliviousness of British politicians and military leaders in the early months of war. He enlisted in 1914, even though he was 47 years old, and recorded the entirety of the conflict through Armistice Day. In he initial chapters he castigates military leaders for following rules of engagement they learned 30 years ago, but the Germans had long since abandoned.

" While the appointed brains of our army were still swearing hard by the rifle, and nothing but it, as the infantry's friend, a more saving truth had entered in at the door of the infantry's mind." "...they contumaciously saw that so long as you stand in a hole deeper than you are tall you never will hit with a rifle bullet another man standing in just such another hole twenty yards off. But also -- divine idea! -- that you can throw a tin can from your hole into his."

"It was the fault of the war, the outlandish, innovatory war that did not conform to the proper text-books as it ought to have done; an unimagined war of flankless armies scratching each other's faces across an endless thorn hedge, not dreamt of in Staff College philosophy; a war that was always putting out of date the best that had been known and thought and invented, always sending everyone to school again."

Writing from Cologne following Armistice Day, he expresses his anger at the spiteful attitude of the Allies at Versailles, predicting it would come back to haunt them (it did, as we discovered 20 years later).

"Now all was done that man could do, and all was done in vain. The old spirit of Prussia was blowing anew, from strange mouths. From several species of men who passed for English -- as mongrels, curs, shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are all clept by the name of dogs -- there was rising chorus of shrill yelps for the outdoing of all the base folly committed by Prussia when drunk with her old conquest of France."

""So we had failed -- had won the fight and lost the prize; the garland of the war was withered before it was gained. The lost years, the broken youth, the dead friends, the women's overshadowed lives at home, the agony and bloody sweat -- all had gone to darken the stains which most of us had thought to scour out of the world that our children would live in. Many men felt, and said to each other, that they had been fooled."

It was the men in the trenches who pulled England through (and the Americans coming in 1917), Montague says, not the hide-bound Old Army generals sitting with cigars and brandy at GHQ.

He regrets the involvement of the British press in developing propaganda and misinformation campaigns, because by the time the war ended people in England didn't believe anything they read.

There are extensive passages in which Montague examines the morality of war and the effect it had on the participants, referencing classical sources such as Thucydides and Virgil, and occasionally quoting lines from Shakespeare, not in a pedagogical manner, but in personal efforts to make sense of the stupidity and waste of life he saw.

This was first published in 1923 and I had read an extract from it online. I thought it would be interesting as it was published so early, before the accepted view of the Great War as a horrible waste had become part of popular culture. Sadly, I think the online extract I read was the best bit of the book. Montague is long winded in the extreme, to the extent that he can be quite hard to read. At least it was short. ( )