Alexander Watson . Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 . (Cambridge Military Histories.) New York : Cambridge University Press . 2008 . Pp. xv, 288. $99.00.

Abstract

That soldiers proved capable of withstanding the enormous physical and mental pressures of trench warfare on the Western Front during World War I is a source of wonder. In assessing combat motivation Alexander Watson is travelling along a familiar road—he is far from the first historian to attempt to answer the question of how soldiers coped in this “war of endurance”—but building on the work of his predecessors, he has produced a deeply researched and in many ways genuinely original study. In brief, Watson argues that human robustness was the key to why the armies stuck it out so long; and ultimately British Empire troops proved more resilient than their German opponents. Generally, his British material, while sound, is less innovative than his arguments about the German army. Watson devotes an important chapter to examining mental coping strategies among soldiers. These include religious observance and superstition, which were sometimes extremely bizarre: he cites the case of a German soldier who decided that his survival depended on offering the gods a “blood sacrifice” of thirteen flies. Perhaps more important was self-deception, soldiers managing blithely to ignore the evidence of their own eyes and persuade themselves that they would survive. While this is not a new insight, Watson brings a wealth of detail and analysis to the topic.