Despite periodic outbursts of renewed interest and fascination with the First
World War, like last year’s 90th anniversary commemoration of the Battle of
the Somme, there seems to be a strange sense of disconnection from it in
ways which go far beyond the simple passage of time. I suspect this is
because we can’t quite comprehend the scale of it, and we still haven’t really
come to terms with the trauma it wrought. Even forty years ago, when many,
if not most, people then living had had personal experience of the War, it all
seemed impossibly distant, unlike the Second World War, which still seems
far more recent, and certainly by more than just a couple of decades. Partly, I
suppose, this is because World War II not only cast an enormous shadow over
the second half of the 20th century, but also largely overshadowed its first half
too. But it’s also to do with the way our knowledge of those two wars comes
through the media which reported them. World War II inhabits a media age
we can immediately recognise, thanks to film and radio. The First World War
doesn’t, and even though its reality and the propaganda and drama that flowed
from it were recorded on film, it’s the wrong kind of film: it’s too jerky, or too
fast, and most of all it has no sound. The only noises from the First World War
we tend to hear now - and for that matter could ever hear through the media -
aren’t the speeches of Lloyd George or Clemenceau or even the Kaiser, or the
cacophonous carnage of Passchendaele or the Somme, but a scratchy record of
someone singing "It’s a Long Way to Tipperrary".
All of this is a bit weird, because in many ways the First World War was a
thoroughly modern media war, using cutting edge media technology to
advance the war effort on all sides. That included film, but also newspapers,
which by then, give or take advances in lay out, were clearly recognisable in
the form we all know today. And in the newspapers, they used another
medium, much much older but still familiar to us now, and that was cartoons.
In "World War I in Cartoons" (Grub Street, £15.99), Mark Bryant follows up
his magisterial "World War II in Cartoons" by using the same template to tell
the story of the Great War through the work of cartoonists of the combatant
and neutral nations. And, like its predecessor, it is both brilliantly realised and
often revelatory.
The depths to which the propagandists on both sides in the War sunk are
notorious, and are said to have seriously compromised attempts to alert the
World to the crimes of the Nazis because many people in England simply
didn’t believe true reports of German atrocities, having been caught out 20
years before by false reports in the previous war. That said, this book has its
fair share of brutal propaganda, with the standard voodoo of depicting the
enemy as bestial, mad and murderous.
But between the cartoons of simian monsters eating babies (and there’s a lot
of those) there is also some surprisingly light-hearted and even affectionate
material. A lot of this is just plain silly, like William Heath Robinson’s "First
lessons in the Goose Step" from 1915, showing a brigade of portly German
recruits being instructed in how to march by being chained to a gosling, or a
1914 Townsend cartoon for the Punch Almanack for 1915 showing the horrors
of life in London under the Kaiser (sausages and beer at the renamed
"Saveloy", choruses of fat frauleins raising foaming steins of lager at the
Opera). Even much later in the War, when no one could be ignorant of the
horrors of the Western Front, H.M. Bateman was producing fundamentally
silly cartoons speculating on the Kaiser’s future after the war (playing golf,
selling moustache medicine or becoming a Robey-esque Music Hall turn). Nor
is this startling joviality limited to British cartoonists, but is seen in cartoons
from every combatant nation.
Another revelation is the eclecticism of style, which again crosses front lines
with insouciance. Cartoons published more or less simultaneously span the
spectrum from over-wrought, over cross-hatched stuff that wouldn’t have
looked out of place 70 years previously, to images on the cusp of every strand
of European Modernism you can think of. In retrospect, it now seems rather
odd that most of these are German, drawn for Simplicissimus.
Although that fact alone underlines how artificial the kutlurkampf these
cartoons illustrate actually was, it also reinforces that sense of detachment
from the Great War I mentioned at the beginning of this review. What is really
surprising about "World War I in Cartoons" is just how few genuinely iconic
cartoons the war inspired. Part of our understanding of World War II comes
from the cartoons we remember from it, whether it’s Low or Zec’s political
cartoons or Fougasse’s posters for the Ministry of Information. But World
War II was by no means unique in its capacity to inspire cartoonists into
producing images which took on an immortality of their own. Just think of
Gillray’s "The Plum Pudding in Danger" or Tenniel’s "Dropping the Pilot".
And yet (and this is no fault of Mark Bryant’s) I can think of only two
cartoonists from the Great War who’ve succeeded in entering our collective
consciousness in anything approaching the same way. The first in Bruce
Bainsfather, whose Old Bill cartoons put a humourous gloss on life for the
average tommy in the trenches. His "If you know a better ‘ole, go to it" is
rightly and enduringly celebrated as one of the defining cartoons of the
conflict, brilliantly doing the job cartoons do best, which is to subvert horror
with sardonic bathos. But the best cartoon of the war, which, significantly,
Will Dyson produced for the Daily Herald 6 months after the Armistice, is
"Peace and Future Canon Fodder", depicting Clemenceau, Wilson, Lloyd
George and Orlando of Italy coming out of the Versailles Peace Conference,
with Clemenceau saying, "Curious! I seem to hear a child weeping." Behind a
pillar, a naked child is weeping over the Peace Treaty, with the words "1940
Class" above its head. Appropriately enough, this is very last cartoon
reproduced in this brilliant book.