In this groundbreaking and impressive work, Adrian Gregory challenges the present perception of the Great War as “stupid, tragic and futile” (3), which shapes both popular memory and professional histories. Gregory argues that the revisionist war narrative of mass enthusiasm in 1914 transformed into loss of meaning and cynicism by the war's end in 1918 is a product of hindsight resulting from overreliance on a narrow band of postwar sources, which tell the story as “more tragic poetry than history” (4). While this criticism has been made before, Gregory sets out with an original and ambitious goal: to return to contemporary sources and “penetrate the minds of those who actually experienced what we now call the ‘First World War’” (5).

Gregory's analysis of the memory of the First World War emphasizes the paramount importance of the Second. He argues that the latter's iconic place in British memory as the “good” war, in which soldiers sacrificed their lives to preserve British freedom, has led to the shaping of the Great War as a “negative counterpoint” in which the lives of soldiers were squandered in vain. The fact that the “War to End All Wars” could not prevent a second conflict twenty years later has made its military defeats seem meaningless, while the many defeats in the Second World War are conveniently forgotten. Here he points to the importance of victory in changing perceptions; in the immediate postwar years, victory smoothed out the British resentment at unequal wartime sacrifices, but in the long run the failure of these sacrifices to maintain a European peace made victory seem hollow.

Gregory's impressive array of sources is one of The Last Great War's many triumphs. A survey of contemporary attitudes to various facets of the war necessitates research that is both broad and deep, and this includes published and unpublished diaries, letters and memoirs, poetry, fiction and film, Honour Rolls, monuments, sermons, local government records, local war histories of the 1920s, pamphlets, local and national newspapers, and government documents from the Cabinet Office and various ministries. Gregory's great strength is that he does not simply use the sources to paint a picture of life “as it really was” during the war but subjects each document's reliability and content to a rigorous analysis.

The book is divided into three chronological periods. The first two chapters deal with the opening acts of war in 1914–15, beginning with an attempt to examine why the population consented to war. Gregory questions the generalized view of a uniform enthusiastic response, which he argues owed more to contemporary beliefs of the excitability of mass society than to empirical evidence. Gregory's analysis is subtle and thorough: he examines sources that register public and private reactions in detail, breaking down “British” responses into particular regional and class-based groups. For example, he points out the ambivalent reactions to the outbreak of war in Wales, through the actions of unions such as the South Wales’ Miner's Federation, who refused on 3 August 1914 to cut short the annual holiday, through editorials in Welsh language newspapers, and public responses to speeches by pacifist Independent Labour Party leader James Keir Hardie. The next chapter examines the role of propaganda in sustaining enthusiasm for war, arguing that the postwar image of cynical propagandist “manipulatively demonising the enemy” (40) is itself a propaganda lie. By using letters and diaries of British civilians discussing atrocity stories of rapes and mutilations before they appeared in the press, Gregory demonstrates that the culture of hatred was more organic and less artificially imposed than has been acknowledged.

The middle chapters examine how the war was waged at home, focusing on the development of what Gregory calls “an economy of sacrifice” (113). Here he explores the phenomenon of voluntarism, arguing that its limits, along with concerns with fairness, led to the civilian demand for and acceptance of a degree of compulsion. The next chapter examines how the demands for sacrifice, though in theory universal, were in practice inequitable, leading to divisions along religious, class, and occupational lines. For example, he analyzes the unusually detailed Honour Roll produced in Croydon to assess the occupational death toll of 997 of 2,504 casualties. The disproportionate number of middle-class dead, between 14.7 and 37.5 percent, highlights the inequalities of sacrifice and the potential for social tensions during and after the war. This concept of “sacrifice” is expanded in the fifth chapter as Gregory reflects on the role of religious ideas in underpinning the popular understanding of war.

The third section deals with the painful final two years of war, as ideals of sacrifice and fairness came under increasing pressure, eroding idealistic concepts of sacrifice and sharpening resentments and class and ethnic antagonisms. The last chapter turns to the legacy of victory. Once the war was won, the language of sacrifice was remade in order to stress a universal grief as the common experience of war. To a certain extent, Gregory argues, this was a mythology designed to cover up the social tensions resulting from the costs of war: “The luxury of victory was that it minimised the searching for scapegoats and instead stressed universalism” (270). Yet this very universalism began to alter the memory of the war from the 1920s. The larger spirit of reconciliation with Germany, speeded by the publication of All Quiet on the Western Front in English in 1930, led the British to reconstruct the Great War as “unjustifiable” (294), a verdict that Gregory dismisses as mistaken on almost every count and which his work does a great deal to overturn.

The book's main strength, its richly textured local detail, can in some spots also be considered a minor weakness. By his own admission Gregory had to leave out major strands of inquiry: gender history, military history, and Ireland, so that his narrative did not become unbearably unwieldy. But the shifts between particular examples can be confusing at times, and the criteria for the choice of illustrative sources should be more clearly foregrounded.

Gregory's work is authoritative, provocative, and engaging. Perhaps its greatest contribution is the rehabilitation of the reputation of the British people during the Great War. Gregory's analysis dispels the myth of civilians as weak-minded victims of mass enthusiasm, manipulated by propaganda and atrocity stories and compelled through conscription and rationing to contribute to the war effort, and restores the rationality, autonomy, and fortitude of British civilians who lived through the war.