A great deal has been made in our media today of the commemoration taking place in France of the centenary of the Battle of Amiens. Bearing in mind the military significance of that particular phase of the Great War I have been surprised by the general ignorance of it in Britain. Quite a lot of people appear never to have heard of it before, and it is almost certainly the case that whereas the names of Passchendaele and The Somme will be familiar to almost everybody, Amiens is generally unfamiliar. It was at this battle, in 1918, that the final blow was administered to German forces by the Allies, assuring final victory. I have not been able to shake out of my mind today the question of why there might be that particular gap in general knowledge.*
The explanations I have been able to come up with are all speculative, and cover a range of factors. Almost the first thing that came to mind was the possible importance of the biographies of the celebrated “War Poets”. Several of those most widely celebrated today as contributing to general cultural awareness of the Great War were dead by the time Amiens took place. Rupert Brooke died in 1915, Edward Thomas in 1917, and Owen and Rosenberg in 1918. Robert Graves, I gather, suppressed a large proportion of his own war poetry, believing that it wasn’t very good. David Jones didn’t publish his own reflections on his war experience (In Parentheses) until many years later, when apparently interest in the “war poets” had waned. I’m not convinced, however, that this can be the only reason.
The second possible explanation that came to mind had to do with typical British ethnocentrism. My mind was set off in this direction by the fact that the occasion is being celebrated in France, but not in the UK. Commemoration of The Somme, for example, was by way of contrast, widespread throughout this country. Of course, French troops played a major role in the events of the summer of 1918, and a very large proportion of the English-speaking contingents involved were Australian and Canadian troops. The part played by British regiments was, however, very significant, especially in that tank units were crucial to Allied success, and these were supplied by the British Army. One should never underestimate British insularity, but on this occasion I don’t think that this is a sufficient explanation for our general ignorance of Amiens.
One probable contributory factor here is the relatively small number of Allied losses on this front. In comparison with the 456,000 British losses on the Somme, there were only 22,000 such at Amiens. Understandably the impact on public awareness of the war was far less, and in any case rapidly overshadowed by the victory that followed shortly afterwards.
Finally, it did occur to me that a part might have been played in this unfortunate minimisation of the significance of Amiens by the almost complete absence from the artistic record of pictures dealing with this particular phase of there conflict. C. R. W. Nevinson returned to France as an official war artist in 1917, but his work from this period received strong official disapproval because it was deemed to be too horrific, and was censored. Stanley Spencer, by then, had his attention fixed off Macedonia. Paul Nash also returned to the UK before the Battle of Amiens. It is interesting, in the light of my previous point, that the Australian artist Will Longstaff is one of the few whose work reflected on Amiens.
I do believe that art has had an extremely important part to play in Britain in directing and forming public consciousness of the Great War. Consequently, I ask myself whether one significant factor making for general ignorance of the Battle of Amiens might have been its general absence as a theme in the work of artists.
*I have to admit that my own knowledge of the conflicts in Macedonia and on the Isonzo front is far greater than my knowledge of Amiens.