‘The Evidence of Our Senses‪’‬

The book examines the confection of a British sense of national identity during the second half of the nineteenth century and relates this to the illogicality and irrationality of the British decision to intervene in the European war that broke out in 1914. It examines the language of English poetry of the war, avoiding the sterile labels of ‘pro-war’ and ‘anti-war’. It gives the most thorough account of Siegfried Sassoon’s 1917 protest against the continuation of the conflict, demonstrating that the incoherence of that protest is attributable to the incoherence of the war itself (i.e. there was nothing identifiable against which to protest). The book reviews British military conduct of the war, indicating that the shortcomings of senior British commanders are attributable to their subscription to the meretricious value-system confected in the nineteenth century. The book examines the Treaty of Versailles, confirming both that it was an improvisation and that the tenets of economic orthodoxy are incompatible with a world-view that accepts the possibility of war. To conclude, ‘The Evidence of Our Senses’ reviews the factitious war-books controversy of 1930 and shows that latter-day attempts to attribute negative British perceptions of the First World War to the influence of a handful of literary works manifest the type of thinking that created the war itself. In this sense, the book is an allegory of the contemporary Zeitgeist.