The Great War Analysis

The Great War was the first occurrence in written history to produce such an outpouring of first person testimony about the events of the war by first person observers. For many years, historians distanced themselves from analyzing and questioning the documents produced by these observers of history and just left them at their word. It was not until more recent history that historians have started to question the accounts provided in a scholastic manner of examination. Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker argue that these first person accounts should be taken with a grain of salt because the reader, and the historian for that matter, must remember that trauma such as war has a profound effect on memory, thus these accounts should not necessarily be taken

He claims that the long held notion that the war was a tragedy and the soldier it’s victim is not necessarily true. He claims that the men consented to fight in the war and that they were not coerced into this action like many would have you believe. Furthermore, Smith contends that during the war, the soldiers were incredibly invested in wining the war and fighting it to the bitter end. The question is, does this concept only apply to the French, who held the idea of republic dear to their hearts and were attached to the idea of a nation a “an emotional and geographic space” , or does this notion apply to a larger scale and to all republics for that

In the beginning, there were other methods soldiers used to understand and describe the events they witnessed during the Great War, i.e. rites of passage, mastery of survival, and the notion of consent, and eventually the story evolved into the metanarrative in place today. Smith limits these concepts only to the French, but close examination shows that some of these notions could apply to other nationalities fighting during the Great War. Through Cude’s eyes and voice, the reader is able to see the ideas of rites of passage and consent to the war, even if it was not specifically he that held such ideologies. Furthermore, although this was just the examination of one man’s diaries and accounts of the war, the concepts that Smith lays out is easily observed in other cultures and times. For example, the theology of joining the military and fighting in a war in order to make one a man is a notion that has long been in the national mind, which in a way is a rite of passage. It marks the transition of a boy to a man, a civilian to a soldier, which in a way is similar to what Smith was trying to say. Overall, Smith argues that these are just other examples of metanarratives that were in place before the concept of war as tragedy and soldier as the victim , which is a worthy concept to