With the benefit of six decades of hindsight, the 1930s seem to have been dominated by almost criminal blindness. How could most Western statesmen be so blind to the dangers of fascism? How could so many "useful idiots" on the left ignore the increasingly obvious nightmare of Stalin? How could members of the Catholic Church hierarchy, including Pope Pius XI, believe that Mussolini would "regenerate" Italy? This brilliant and utterly fascinating study valiantly re-creates the hopes, fears, and hatreds in the U.S., the major European powers, and Japan. Brendon, a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, masterfully reveals the tensions brought on by intolerable contradictions in each nation, such as glittering urban cultural showcases surrounded by the almost unbearable squalor of the Great Depression and political leaders mouthing platitudes about freedom while using brutal repression against internal opposition. All the while, the specter of World War I's unprecedented slaughter constantly haunted leaders and the general population. This book is an essential contribution to the understanding of the horrors of World War II and its legacy. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“A masterful survey of that troubled decade.”–Foreign Affairs
“Page by page this synoptic tour de force…propels the reader towards the inevitable cataclysms of the ‘40s.”–Time
“An innovative format, a wealth of detail gleaned from prodigious research, and stylistic gifts worthy of a great novelist…gives Brendon’s book a magisterial quality unmatched by other histories of the period.”–The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Brilliantly written and meticulously researched, The Dark Valley provides a depth of understanding of the misery of the Great Depression that few Americans alive today can grasp.” —The Denver Post
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Publisher
"The story of the 1930s has been told many times, but Brendon succeeds magnificently in breathing fresh life into the narrative . . . His text is a delight to read, a literary triumph sparkling with moments of real humour and compassion, sombre where it needs to be. Brendon is a master of the swift pen portrait, the telling anecdote, the curious footnotes to history that tell us more than a page of dusty scholarship."
-- The Sunday Telegraph
"Piers Brendon's long book has such brilliance and narrative power, and contains so much fascinating detail that reading it has all the excitement of novelty."
-- Evening Standard
"Historians are seldom thought of as elegant stylists, let alone as comic writers of the first rank. Piers Brendon is both . . . [He has] an eye for the telling detail that puts most novelists to shame."
-- Sunday Express
"Piers Brendon's book, let's say it at once, is a tour de force . . . The book could hardly be better."
-- The Scotsman
"Lively, fascinating . . . In telling his tale of the Thirties, Brendon paints a vivid and vigorous canvas . . . His character sketches of the principal players are sharp, perceptive, and often very funny."
-- The Observer
"Distinctive and enthralling . . . Brendon's sweep and range are breathtakingly global. His story takes in everything and everywhere that matters between the 20th century's two world wars, moving with knowledge, insight, and wit . . . His detail--brilliant, cinematic, utterly illuminating--is arranged with a canny storyteller's knack. No other historical account I know can rival this fluently possessive sequence."
-- Financial Times
"A cleverly sustained, and often moving account . . . familiar in its substance but fresh in its imagery."
-- The Sunday Times [London]
"[An] excellent survey of the Thirties . . . Brendon tells the story of this enormous and weighty subject with great skill and good humour."
-- Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad
"Endlessly fascinating."
-- Literary Review
About the Author
Piers Brendon, the author of eleven previous books, is Keeper of the Churchill Archives and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He lives in England.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I the harvest of armageddon
Well before dawn on 21 February 1916, when powdery snow lightened the darkness shrouding the lines of trenches gashed across the face of northern France, a 15-inch Krupp naval gun fired the first shot in the battle of Verdun. Its long barrel rising through the camouflage netting of its hiding-place in a wood near Loisin, it gave a full-throated roar and vomited a huge projectile 15 miles into the fortified city. The shell burst in the courtyard of the Bishop's Palace, "knocking a corner off the cathedral".
Others followed but not until sunrise did the main German bombardment begin. In the dead silence moments before the onslaught, French soldiers of the 56th and 59th Light Infantry Battalions, dug into a bosky hillside north of Verdun known as the Bois des Caures, saw snow fall from trembling branches. Then they were engulfed by a tornado of fire and steel. The barrage could be heard a hundred miles away in the Vosges Mountains, "an incessant rumble of drums, punctuated by the pounding of big basses."
Close at hand its impact was tremendous. One of the earliest victims was a water carrier who, with his horse and cart, was blown to smithereens by a direct hit from one of the 1,200 German guns. His comrades expected the same fate as they clung to the earth and, Jules Romains wrote, breathed "the smell of a tormented world, a smell like that of a planet in the process of being reduced to ashes."
The trenches of the First World War have been compared to the concentration camps of the Second. So they were, in the sense that they witnessed bestial suffering. By that analogy Verdun was Auschwitz.
Actually Verdun was not the bloodiest battle of the war--that grisly distinction belongs to the Somme. Moreover, the carnage was so unspeakable elsewhere, notably on the Eastern Front, that governments sought refuge in censorship and lies, reporters dealt in euphemisms like "baptism of fire" and even poets felt lost for words. In every sector the combatants saw a new vision of hell, experienced an "iron nightmare."
They occupied killing fields in which the quick and the dead were buried in the same stretch of tortured soil, men gouging holes in the ground like the rats which fed on corpses regularly exhumed by scorching metal. Amid the stench and squalor of a gigantic shambles, legions of doomed youth emerged to be scythed down by machine-guns and crucified on barbed wire. They endured an inferno of shells: shrapnel which tore flesh to pieces and high explosive which pulverised bone and stone alike. They encountered the hideous inventions of perverted technology: flame-throwers and poison gas. Even in so-called "quiet sectors" of the line, those in which (one French officer complained) generals "plague us with their visits."
A 2nd lieutenant's commission was, as Wyndham Lewis said, tantamount to a death warrant. Yet, even taking Passchendaele into account, Verdun was the most terrible battle of the war. This was because of time and space: it lasted longest and was most concentrated. It continued at maximum intensity for much of 1916 and erupted sporadically until the armistice. And the kind of fighting which no one chronicled with more Zolaesque vehemence than Henri Barbusse was aimed at a single target on the narrowest of fronts: the woods are sliced down like cornfields, the dug-outs marked and burst in even when they've three thicknesses of beams . . . all the roads blown into the air and changed into long heaps of smashed convoys and wrecked guns, corpses twisted together as though shovelled up. You could see thirty chaps laid out by one shot at the crossroads; you could see fellows whirling around as they went up, always about fifteen yards, and bits of trousers caught and stuck on the tops of the trees that were left . . . And that went on for months on end, months on end!
Probably more soldiers were killed per square yard in defence of Verdun, symbol of French honour, than in any other conflict before or since. The figures are difficult to compute, but nearly 300,000 Frenchmen and Germans died and another 450,000 were wounded. The German commander, General Erich von Falkenhayn, thus fulfilled his ambition to bleed the enemy white. Admittedly, his own forces paid an almost equally horrifying price. But the French armies, most of which were sooner or later dragged into the charnel-house of Verdun, suffered more. They were crushed by a weight of artillery "against which courage had no resource."
Soon hopes of glory gave way to talk of butchery. French soldiers had entered the war with sublime faith in the offensive, symbolised by their red képis and pantaloons (where the British wore khaki and the Germans grey). Now some began to think in terms of a defensive strategy whereby casualties would be kept to a minimum. The embodiment of this philosophy was General Philippe Pétain. Pétain was given command at Verdun when a German breakthrough seemed imminent. A peasant's son with a patrician's air, he looked every inch a general--always an important consideration with the military. He was a large, impassive man with icy blue eyes, a sweeping white moustache and pale, marmoreal features. As Pétain himself acknowledged, "I have a chilling mask."
Coldness, indeed, was the characteristic which this stoical soldier presented to the world: he treated politicians with glacial disdain and adopted a frigid formality with his staff. But passions seethed beneath Pétain's arctic exterior. He had many love affairs, often with other men's wives and once with a woman apparently procured for him by the Germans. When summoned to Verdun he was nowhere to be found; his ADC finally tracked him down in the Hotel Terminus at the Gare du Nord in Paris. Outside a bedroom door he was able to identify "the great commander's yellowish boots with the long leggings, which, however, on that evening were agreeably accompanied by some charming little molière slippers, utterly feminine."
Being, as a friend once said, more of a slave to his flesh than to his duty, Pétain insisted on finishing the business of the night. But once at Verdun he showed a stern regard for the flesh of the French poilu. He limited losses, relying on matériel rather than men. He acted defensively, reorganising the artillery and keeping it well supplied with ammunition. He constantly sent fresh troops to relieve those exhausted by the attrition of the firing line. He visited casualty clearing stations--unlike the British Commander-in-Chief, Douglas Haig, who felt it his duty not to sicken himself by such experiences. Eventually Pétain became the "saviour of Verdun." He thus earned himself lasting fame and popularity. In 1935 he came top of a newspaper poll conducted to find a dictator for France. However, Pétain's methods were anathema to the offensive-minded high command. So, in April 1917, General Robert Nivelle was permitted to launch another frontal attack, this time against well-protected German lines on the Aisne. It was a disaster. Though incurring a modest loss compared to the hecatombs of Verdun, it broke the fighting spirit of the French armies. Two-thirds of their units were now affected by mutinies. These ranged from minor acts of indiscipline to violent disturbances. Some troops sang the "Internationale" and proposed to march on Paris. But most were protesting against the slaughter caused by futile assaults on heavily fortified positions. The authorities effectively hushed up the mutinies, punishing the ring-leaders (50 of whom were executed) and making concessions (more leave, better food) to the rest. But this spontaneous insurrection terrified the leaders of France, because it raised the twin ghouls of defeat and revolution. Pétain himself, infected by a pessimism that amounted to defeatism, muttered that France should begin peace negotiations. As it happened, all belligerent nations experienced mutinies or considered peace proposals in 1917. But it was in France, whose poignant war memorials would record the loss of 1.3 million soldiers (over a quarter of all men aged between 18 and 27), that the mood of war-weariness was overwhelming. That mood was prophetically expressed by a character in Barbusse's Under Fire who exclaimed: The future, the future! The work of the future will be to wipe out the present, to wipe it out more than we can imagine, to wipe it out like something abominable and shameful . . . Shame on military glory, shame on armies, shame on the soldier's calling that changes men by turns into stupid victims and ignoble brutes.
Looking forward to the arrival of the Americans, French poilus were for the present prepared at least to defend the motherland. And defence was later to be elevated to the status of a cult, its fetish being the Maginot Line, modelled on the fortresses which had protected Verdun. But hostility to war and, by extension, to the military, became so widespread during the 1920s and '30s that cadets at St. Cyr were advised to doff their uniforms and go out wearing civilian clothes. Verdun spawned a feeling in France, so passionate as to be palpable, that this must be the war to end war. As a young lieutenant wrote in his diary just before his death in that battle, "They will not be able to make us do it again."
The Great War invaded the mind of mankind, becoming "the essential condition of consciousness in the twentieth century."
The pain and grief of Verdun, in particular, seared the French psyche like phosgene gas in a soldier's lungs. People had their own recurring nightmares: of men drowning in shell-holes; or walking on corpses during an attack; or going mad in the underground fighting in Forts Vaux and Douaumont; or being more anguished by their horses' suffering than by their own; or collapsing from hunger, thirst and exhaustion when supplies failed to reach the front line; or weeping ju...
