How should we remember? - Telegraph Already, the books are rolling into the shops. Charles Emmerson's 1913 - The World Before the Great War has been on the shelves for several weeks. Jeremy Paxman and Max Hastings are both bringing out new histories, too. As the tide and variety of publications shows, the First World War is really too big, complex and unclear in its effects to commemorate with one unified response. Over the weekend, Maria Miller, the Culture Secretary, said the anniversary would be celebrated with both "sorrow and pride." But is that really ever possible? "Never the twain shall meet," says Mark Bostridge, author of The Loss of Innocence, published next year, which looks at England shortly before the outbreak of war and the opening months of the conflict. Military historians and literary historians have opposed views on the whole thing - you see them at conferences not talking to each other, glaring at each other. The military historians want to say that the German desire for European hegemony was so worrying that we had to go to war; that British generals weren't so terrible. The literary historians have a perspective that's much more influenced by the war poets - that the whole thing was a disaster. The opposing positions - triumph and disaster, and the pride and sorrow they brought - continue to vie with each other. It's disaster, sorrow and the war poets" view that prevail at the moment, but we forget that views of the First World War have shifted ever since the Armistice, and we infect our own modern opinions with the benefit of hindsight. It's true that Vera Brittain published her bleak memoir of the war - Testament of Youth, about to be made into a feature film - as early as 1933. It's near impossible to read the book, which is about the death of Brittain's brother, fiancé and two closest male friends, and not cleave to the "futile disaster" theory of the First World War, particularly if you read the war poets, too. But we didn't always follow the lions-led-by-donkeys orthodoxy. In this country, Brittain's take was very much a minority, middle-class view before the Second World War. Throughout the Twenties, there were regular celebrations of the 10th anniversary of the great victories; contrary as it sounds, lots of servicemen even enjoyed the war - often the first time they'd been outside their home town, let alone abroad. The war poets, too, only built up real popularity after the Second World War, not least Wilfred Owen, whose star didn't really shine until the Sixties. Since then, they have become the staple diet of classroom history; no wonder that we look back at the war with greater and greater gloom. The horrors of Vietnam and the messy, nebulous nature of modern warfare - not least in Iraq and Afghanistan - also add to the confusion. Modern generations have started to look at all wars through whatever the opposite of rose-tinted spectacles is. Only the Second World War - with the Nazis, the ultimate no-nonsense baddies, and their Holocaust, the ultimate in evil acts - is allowed the no-strings-attached status of a just war. All other conflicts, particularly the Second World War's immediate predecessor, lose honour in the comparison. Other conventions, too, have emerged in recent decades that will be recycled for the anniversary coverage, but which we should be careful before swallowing hook, line and sinker. The popular view of the outbreak of war is that our lads rushed down the street to the recruiting office, whistling as they ran, only to be engulfed by disillusionment as the realities of war hit home. In fact, it was a lot more complicated than that. There was an early surge in recruitment in the first fortnight of August 1914, it's true, but then there was a sudden drop in the figures; and in certain areas, particularly Devon and Cornwall, recruiting numbers weren't nearly as high as in London. It was only towards the end of the month, with the Amiens Dispatch in The Times on August 30 revealing terrible losses, that there was another surge. It is the natural progress of history that it tends towards over-simplification the further you get from the time of the real events, until it reaches its ultimate, cryogenised 1066 and All That state - a date, a war, a straightforward division between goodies and baddies. When it comes to the First World War, we should do our best to resist that tendency. We should resist, too, the temptation to group its commemoration with the Diamond Jubilee, the Royal Wedding and the Olympics, as one government source suggested we should. Certainly, we should emulate the magnificence and prominence of those occasions - but the war's commemoration will need to draw on more complex, sometimes clashing emotions. "The war to end all wars" proved to be a tragically misguided term for the First World War. Similar easy classifications won't do it justice today, either.