ABSTRACT
Edmonds’ first volume of Official History appeared in 1922 and was prefaced by the confident assurance that ‘no deviation from the truth nor misrepresentation will be found in the official histories on which my name appeared’.1 However, this assertion has been strongly challenged by a number of critics, both recent and contemporary. As a result of their endeavours the body of official work published between 1922 and 1948 has come to be almost universally regarded as at best a bland and sterile account of the military operations of the Great War and at worst a deliberately partial, misleading and self-justificatory account written in defence of the military establishment. John Keegan perpetuates the former view in his contention that:
the compilers of the British Official History of the First World War have achieved the remarkable feat of writing an exhaustive account of one of the world’s greatest tragedies without the display of any emotion at all.2
