Blood, Mud and Futility? Patrick MacGill and the Experience of the Great War

Taylor, David (2006) Blood, Mud and Futility? Patrick MacGill and the Experience of the Great War. European Review of History, 13 (2). pp. 229-250. ISSN 13507486

Abstract

Despite a growing body of detailed studies of key aspects of the Great War, there remains a dominant image of the war as a major tragedy in which the idealism of a generation of young men was exploited by their incompetent and callous elders and out of which there emerged a profound disillusionment and rejection of past values. Such an interpretation rests on the evidence of a small, and untypical, number of 'soldier-writers'. By exploring the contemporaneous writings of a relatively unknown figure, Patrick MacGill, this article offers an alternative perspective that recognises both the well-known horrors of the Great War but also the persistence of certain 'heroic' values that have been misleadingly obscured by the well-known retrospective accounts of the war.

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