In 1920, the war correspondent Philip Gibbs published his account of The Realities of War. Although Gibbs assiduously denied that his reporting from the Front during the Great War had in any way been false, he conceded that it had been incomplete. Gibbs excused this apparent dereliction of duty with an appeal to a higher moral imperative – his obligation to spare his readers the full truth of the suffering and dangers faced by their loved ones on the battlefield.
It was thus no coincidence that the American edition of the book was entitled Now It Can Be Told. The book was one of the foundation stones in the building of a myth that survives to this day – the idea of a home front population utterly ignorant of the real nature of the war waged in their name. The power of this myth should not be underestimated; it was a myth that seemed to explain the inexplicable, the question any historian or layman asks – why was there so little resistance to the prosecution of a war that posterity has rendered seemingly so pointless? Ignorance was a vital part of the answer. Another was an appeal to abstraction: how the conflict had been represented. Histories of the war have often peddled the line that the war was socially constructed as ‘culture versus Kultur’, as a battle of mores between the civilised and the barbarians who ....
