The Great War still has the power to move us, 100 years on from the start of the Battle of the Somme. Listening to the coverage of the events and the memorial ceremonies (including this evocative report by Allan Little) sent me back to Paul Fussell’s outstanding 1975 book, [amazon_link id=”0199971951″ target=”_blank” ]The Great War and Modern Memory[/amazon_link]. The book is an exploration of that lasting emotional hold, traced through the wartime and post-war writing and culture which mythologized the conflict.

[amazon_image id=”0199971951″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Great War and Modern Memory[/amazon_image]

This section on Marc Bloch’s description of the pervasive scepticism among the soldiers seemed particularly resonant, for obvious reasons, when the book fell open at these pages this morning. Fussell quotes Bloch: ” ‘The prevailing opinion in the trenches,’ he wrote, ‘was that anything might be true, except what was printed. … governments reduced the front-line soldier to the means of information and the mental state of olden times before journals, before news sheets, before books.’ The result was an approximation of the popular psychological atmosphere of the Middle Ages, where rumour was borne by itinerant ‘peddlars, jugglers, pilgrims, beggars’. ”

Unfortunately we seem to be again in a world of rumours and lies peddled by mountebank politicians. And yet, as Zola insisted in the context of a different crisis: “La vérité est en marche….”