Anne James analyses the poignant Great War exhibition at the Bodleian

The personal stories exhibition at the Bodleian makes an important and very specific contribution to the onset of and the pursuit of the Great War with a particular emphasis on its first two years and the trajectory this set for the whole bloody operation. It is based on the papers of politicians, civilians and the military: both British and German.

Central to the exhibition are letters, documents and sketches from the Asquith archives. Herbert Henry Asquith was the Prime Minister of a Liberal Government between 1908 and 1915 and a coalition from May 1915 to December 1916. It makes clear how Asquith used his private circle to help manage the enormity of becoming a military rather than a civilian leader. It charts his irritations and difficulties with particular colleagues: colleagues such as Winston Churchill (WSC), as illustrated in the note he wrote about Churchill’s loquacious behaviour in Cabinet. And a sketch of the Cabinet seating plan, Table of Coalition in May 1915, illustrated above, provides an insight into the tense dynamics around that particular table.

Also included are Asquith’s notes of his self-debate about the rationale for war. Dated August 2, 1914, just two days before Britain entered the war, they include obligations to France and Belgium and a clearly-held belief that the Germans could not be allowed to use the Channel as a ‘hostile base’. The papers also include Margot, his wife’s, diaries and letters to two confidants: Venetia Stanley and later her older sister Sylvia Henry, after Stanley ended their relationship by marrying one of Asquith’s less favourite Cabinet colleagues.

The pictures these all paint are grim and particularly grim in 1916, for the military, for civilians and for the PM himself. When the attrition of the war offensive culminated in the Battle of the Somme which raged from July to November resulted in enormous casualties and the abject failure to achieve a decisive victory.

Prior to this there had been the Easter Uprising in Ireland, which Asquith confided in a letter came as ‘a bolt from the blue’, corroborated by an entry in Margot Asquith’s diary, ‘none of us had any idea of .... how serious it was’.

By the end of 1916 conscription became “essential” to keep up the necessary weekly inflow of 25,000-30,000 recruits, as volunteering had declined sharply.

And on a personal level, in September 1916, Asquith’s son, Raymond, was killed in action. Asquith wrote: ‘“He was the thing of which I was truly proud... in him and his future, I invested all my hope. That is all gone for the moment. I feel bankrupt”. It is shown alongside a transcription of the text of Raymond’s last letter to his mother lovingly copied by her into her diary and describing “a stink of death and corruption which was quite supernaturally beastly”.

On the same day, Harold Macmillan, also a Grenadier Guard, but a survivor, was wounded, and in a tiny pencilled note to his mother he tells her he is “not wounded badly” and that he will “be home soon”. And in another letter he describes the war as “noble and glorious... and revolting and horrid”.

On the home front, war propaganda persisted in promoting the nobility and the cause as in the Recruiting Office Poster, Step into Your Place, where the figures in the foreground, still in civvies, contain a clear mix of those from privileged backgrounds rubbing shoulders with the working classes, as distinguished by a pickaxe, a pitchfork and carpenter’s tools: one nation united regardless of background who morph into uniformed figures marching into the distance with instant camaraderie and a clear enthusiasm.

The contemporaneous power struggle with the Ottoman Empire is also inclu-ded, a struggle that led to the disastrous defeats at Gallipoli and in the Dardanelles and collaboration with the Arabs against the Ottoman.

In letters to his mother, T. E. Lawrence tells her that he could not wait to leave his desk in Cairo where he declared that “I am sick of pens” as he sat and decoded telegrams, a tedium from which he was finally released when he was able to join and develop an Arab revolt into a full-blown rebellion against the Ottoman.

The Great War: Personal Stories from Downing Street to the Trenches 1914-1916
Bodleian, Oxford
Until November 2