War beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present by Jay Winter is a study of how our view of war has changed in art and the media. Winter is Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, Connecticut. He won an Emmy award as co-producer of the BBC/PBS television series 'The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century and is a founder of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, an international museum of the Great War inaugurated in 1992.

War, for the most part, does not age well. When a country goes to war, it is always for the right reasons. No nation enters an unpopular war to start with but many leave an unpopular war. World War I, for Americans, was fought for high ideals. World War II was also fought to end a threat and self-defense against the Japanese. Korea and Vietnam never gained that popularity. Time changes many ideas of war.

Winter uses various forms of media to examine how war is portrayed. There are three divisions he makes: World War I, 1933-1970, and 1970 to present. There was an interesting break, particularly in the cinema in the 1970s. War films in earlier times like The Sands of Iwo Jima paint a positive example of the war. Later films like Full Metal Jacket and Jarhead paint a different image of war, even though the service branch is the same.

Photography made a change in WWI, although still photography was taken in the 19th century, it was expensive. Starting in WWI Kodak made a vest post camera which puts photography in the hands of the common soldier changed the way war was seen. Newspapers were anxious to but photos from men in the trenches. Later official photographers and censorship limited what the public saw of war. This lockdown seemed to hold for the most part until Abu Ghraib. Digital photography and the internet are much harder to censor.

War changes society and how the artist sees war. Paintings and sculptures have evolved and changed since industrial scale warfare was launched. Gone were the British war poets. The scale of death created a faceless version of war. Nations lost so many people so quickly that mass graves became the norm (although not photographed). Nations created monuments to the unknown soldier. The Vietnam Memorial captures none of the glory of war. Below ground level, it simply lists the names of the dead. Although Anne Franks's face is well known, there is no face for the Holocaust. Modern war created death on a scale that became faceless. Picasso's Guernica is a symbol the horror of war, although faces are present in the painting, they are unrecognizable. War has become the mass production of death.

It was said that after WWI the use of words like honor, glory, and duty carried with them a tone of mockery. Modern War changed mankind. Stiles captures this evolution of change in 20th-century art and media. Although not covered in the book, perhaps there is even a lesson in television. In the television series MASH, Father Mulcahy attempts to write a rally song for the Korean War and ends up writing:

There's no one singing war songs now like people used to do,
No "Over There," no "Praise the Lord," no "Glory Hallelu."
Perhaps at last we've asked ourselves what we should have asked before,
With the pain and death this madness brings, what were we ever singing for?

A well written and researched book that shows how war and the effects of war on soldiers, races, ethnic groups, the military, and civilians. War is not confined to the battlefield. It affects more than those in uniform.

The last known surviving British serviceman of the carnage of the First World War passed away when Henry John "Harry" Patch died, at the age of 111, in 2009. His death raises the question whether Remembrance Sunday has become, or is in the process of becoming, redundant, in the sense that at one level you can only really have a meaningful Remembrance Sunday for those who can remember. The ceremony was, after all, originally devised so that survivors of the Great War could publicly remember their fallen comrades, whilst those who had been bereaved also had the opportunity publicly to express their pride-tinged grief.

But as time marches inexorably onward, the ranks of those who served are thinning out. Already, in 2015, the Remembrance Sunday ceremony in central London was slightly shortened in deference to the advancing years of the World War Two veterans present, and the prospect of a time when there will be no such veterans is no longer so very far distant. Subsequent wars yield their own survivors and bystanders but none of these wars can compete with the world wars not just in terms of scale but also as archetypes of military futility (the First World War) or ‘goodness’ (the Second).

How war is remembered, from the Great War to the present, is the subject of Jay Winter’s ‘War Beyond Words’. It draws on his earlier publications and lectures on the subject but is much more comprehensive in scope, not only in examining the Shoah but also in going beyond the British, French and German sources which underpinned his 1995 ’Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning’.

The current book is, says Winter, “more a series of reflections in cultural history than an authoritative and exhaustive study of any one of its branches.” There are, nevertheless, two problems - one minor and one major - with Winter’s book. The first, and minor, one is that he often sounds like Miranda’s mother.

By this I mean that he sounds like Penelope, the eponymous heroine’s mother, in the BBC TV comedy programme ‘Miranda’, starring Miranda Hart. Penelope has a catchphrase, namely, “What I call …” followed by some mundane word or phrase actually in everyday use. Not all of the words or phrases Winter employs are commonplace but he seems to exhibit this same verbal tic: “what Jan and Aleida Assmann term the ‘cultural memory’ of war … Here I use the term ‘language’ … what I term frameworks of memory … what Samuel Hynes termed our ‘war in the head’ … what I term the arts of memory … what Judith Butler terms the ‘frames of war’ … what we now term ‘memory studies’ …” and so on.

Of course one needs to be precise in how one uses language but there’s a lot to be said for using words and phrases that are immediately accessible to the reader rather than erecting a stockade around one’s research of newly defined or redefined words and phrases.

The second problem is the absence of any substantial discussion of the role of television. Thus there’s no discussion of Vietnam as the first televised war and the way in which news coverage helped undermine support for the war (and possibly war in general) on the American home front; no discussion of how politicians and generals in later wars strove to learn the lessons of Vietnam and tightly censored what was broadcast; and no discussion of the impact of documentaries like ‘The Great War’ or ‘The World at War’, miniseries like ‘Band of Brothers’ or ‘Holocaust’ (which for all its many faults raised Holocaust awareness in several countries) or even comedies like ‘M*A*S*H’ or ‘Blackadder’.

Winter excuses himself from any discussion of music on the reasonable grounds that he is not qualified to discuss it but he can hardly claim the same of television when he has written a chapter on war films which successfully moves from 1915’s ‘The Birth of a Nation’ to 2011’s ‘War Horse’ (although the film, like the stage production of ‘Oh! What a Lovely War’ is a notable omission).

In short, Winter has written a thought-provoking book based on very extensive research on an important subject in which he has already demonstrated his expertise. He has useful things to say about how war has been commemorated in language, silence, literature, sculpture, painting, photography and film. However, in privileging consideration of the likes of installation artist Anselm Kiefer, for example, over the 1978 American miniseries ‘Holocaust’ in analysing remembrance of the Shoah, Winter comes close to presenting himself as an ivory tower academic and certainly severely limits the validity of his claims regarding shifting popular attitudes towards war in the West.