Sarah Lonsdale

This is a guest post by Dr. Sarah Lonsdale.

By March 1917 Britain had her back against the wall in a way she had never dreamed, nor expected even at the outbreak of War in August 1914. Then, people said it would all be over by Christmas, with the Germans bloodied and suing for peace. By the spring of 1917, for the first time since 1066 the “sceptred Isle” with its great Empire, unequalled industrial muscle and naval strength was facing an existential threat. Tens of thousands of young men had already been killed in France and Belgium, thousands more returned mutilated, shell-shocked and disfigured by new industrial and chemical warfare. On the Home Front, Zeppelin air raids across east and southeast England were showering death from the skies upon women and children. After the first attack, over Great Yarmouth on 19 January 1915, people living under the flight path of those vast, silent whales “flying high with fins of silky grey”, as the writer Katherine Mansfield described, felt exposed as never before. Street lamps were dimmed, blackout curtains were put up and people shrank as shadows passed overhead. While rationing would not be brought in until 1918, already sugar and meat supplies were under Government control to feed the Army first. People were foraging for gulls’ eggs, songbirds and fern bracken roots as alternative food sources. Restaurants stopped providing sugar shakers: a small thing but hugely symbolic of the new bewildering reality. Nearly three years in, and there seemed no way out.

Poets had at first welcomed the war, revelling in this opportunity for glorious self-sacrifice in England’s cause as in Rupert Brooke’s 1914 sonnets. Ironically, Brooke was one of the first to die, making a small corner of the Greek island of Skyros “forever England”. His fellow ‘War Poets’ quickly changed their tone seeing it as their role to tell people the truth about the horrors of the trenches, since the Press was not doing its job. Robert Graves’ ‘A Dead Boche’ (1916) showing the stinking, scowling, green-hued unburied German corpse in horrible close-up provided sobering correction to the Daily Mail’s upbeat accounts of biffing ‘The Hun’.

Novelists too tried to make sense of the new reality but paper shortages and the novelist’s need for reflection meant that few British ‘War’ novels were actually published before the Armistice in 1918. H. G. Wells’ Mr Britling Sees it Through (1916) portrays the confusion of the civilian population who on the one hand read in newspapers that the Germans “had been mown down in heaps” but that in the same papers, these same defeated Germans were advancing on Paris. Mr Britling and his doomed son Hugh spend a desperate Sunday afternoon examining maps of France trying, yet failing to work out the confusing and contradictory information. Similarly, the Home Front civilians in Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others (1916) can barely tell the difference between truth and lies, sharing fake news about Russian soldiers landing in Scotland with snow on their boots, along with real news of babies being killed in Zeppelin raids. Readers would have to wait for Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1929), or Storm Jameson’s Company Parade (1934) for more fully worked out meditations on how we had got into this mess and what the War was doing to the national psyche. Yet there is one neglected novel, published in March 1917 at the War’s darkest hour, that is well worth reading for the light it sheds on English social and political life on the eve of War and during its first two years.

At its heart, Stephen McKenna’s Sonia: Between Two Worlds is a devastating critique of a spoiled, complacent and too-wealthy ruling class that partied through “the years of carnival”, as he calls them, before August 1914. Too busy drinking champagne, making money and gossiping about the latest unfortunate debutante who had failed to catch a man in her first season, these representatives of the governing class pay heavily for their complacency. But so do hundreds of thousands of young men who had no say in political decision-making, with many working-class men, as well as all women, still unable to vote. About halfway through the novel George Oakleigh, Liberal MP and the novel’s narrator, looks back to those years of plenty (for the ruling classes at least): “I look back to find an infinite littleness in the artificial round we trod during my idle early days in London,” he writes. The world was “clattering into ruins” but just months before the cataclysm, he and his peers, even those with seats in the Lords or Commons, were too busy writing their names on pretty girls’ dance cards to notice.

The novel follows the lives of a group of young men from their schooldays at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign through to the mid-point of the First World War. They are products of Melton, a fictional public school, the finest in the land, that produces future MPs and prime ministers, generals, Whitehall mandarins and captains of industry. Melton is Westminster School, McKenna’s own alma mater, transported to somewhere in Wessex, that quasi-mythical old English Kingdom, once ruled by Alfred the Great. Centuries of English history and legend weigh heavily on the weathered old stone. At Melton the boys learn discipline, loyalty, Greek and Latin but also the cruel system that permits older boys to enslave and beat younger ones who step out of line. They learn that, as the apex of the English social class system, they are inheritors of the Earth. Into this centuries-old world of cloisters and courtyards, well-stocked libraries and finely clipped cricket pitches steps David O’Rane, a youth endowed with epic gifts of intellect, physical strength and rebelliousness. He can recite, perfectly, 30,000 lines of Greek poetry and take on 10 older boys in a fist fight. The Irish surname is no accident. He’s also gorgeous, with large dark eyes, chiselled cheek bones and dark flowing Byronic locks. The other boys would all fall a little bit in love with him, although would never admit to such weakness: the closest they get is to describe him as looking “like a girl”. Receiving regular beatings for refusing to support the school football team, O’Rane forces the other boys to reflect on whether their system is in fact, fit for purpose at the dawn of the twentieth century.

They don’t reflect for long however, so keen are they to get to Oxford and spend the next four years punting, drinking and deciding whether they’ll go to the Bar or not before they become MPs or take up their hereditary seats in the House of Lords. McKenna, who also attended Oxford and whose uncle was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, was well placed to observe the ruling elite in its process of formation. There is also a great love story that runs through the novel and the roller coaster passion between Sonia Dainton and David O’Rane caught the nation’s imagination so much that in the autumn of 1917, there was, according to the Manchester Guardian something known as “Sonia Fever”, a “pleasant malady” that made McKenna briefly famous. The book inspired the film director Denison Clift to make a silent movie version starring Evelyn Brent as Sonia in 1921 although it has since been lost.

Sonia is not great literature: the characters are two-dimensional and O’Rane is simply unbelievable in his all-round perfection. There is an affecting moment towards the end of the novel though, that captures the horror of the time. O’Rane, once invincible, returns from the trenches a broken man, his blindness a metaphor for his generation’s lack of foresight. A door slams shut by an unfelt gust of wind: there is no clear way out; incoherent rustlings and mutterings could be the ghosts of all those lost young. It is this rare literary focus on the war in the midst of the cataclysm that makes Sonia both unusual and powerful. The Manchester Guardian reviewer at the time made the point that Sonia was perhaps a “rather irritating reminder of mistakes and futility” when everyone was getting on with the job of survival. But this is precisely Sonia’s great strength: it is as a critique of contemporary British society a full decade before the great postwar novels like Parade’s End ventured to tackle the subject. As well as the feckless aristocracy, McKenna blames the new mass media for leading the public to believe false stories of German atrocities and for encouraging hatred, rather than understanding of, the enemy. Written with passion at the point of maximum danger, it thoroughly deserves another outing.

Sonia Between Two Worlds, by Stephen McKenna
London: Methuen; New York: George H. Doran, 1917

Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.