I’m often asked how I find the books I write about. And no matter what I say, I know the only truthful answer is, “Serendipity.” It’s hard to look for something you don’t know about. Instead, you stumble across it. This is one reason I love a well-stocked used bookstore, particularly one that’s only loosely organized. I’m fortunate in living just down the road from one of the West’s hidden treasures, the Montana Valley Bookstore in Alberton. I’ve probably scoured its shelves at least twenty times over the years, but interesting things still pop up out of nowhere on every visit.
Most recently, I came across Soul Wounds, subtitled A Novel of the World War. That subtitle alone told me that it was published before world wars had to be numbered. But what intrigued me was the fact that it was published here in Missoula, Montana. This is not a hotbed of publishing and never was. The Missoulian Publishing Company devoted its energies to putting out the town’s newspaper and only rarely published books and then mostly local interest items. There was no information about the author and if there’d ever been a dustjacket, it was long gone. So this was an unknown quantity — but then, so was the very first neglected book I ever discovered, which was also a novel about World War One: W. V. Tilsley’s Other Ranks.
Like Other Ranks, Soul Wounds opens in media res. Hagen, an infantryman, is slogging through the mud and the dark as his company works its way up to take position in the front line of trenches just prior to an assault. It’s still winter, so this is one of the first American units to go into combat after America’s entry into the war. Aside from a few weeks’ stay in hospital to recover from a leg wound, Hagen will remain in or near the front lines almost continuously until the Armistice and take part in at least five major assaults.
The youngster in his company — still a teen and kept out of the brothels by the other men in his unit, Hagen will, by the end of the war, be considered one of the “old men,” one of the few from the original company to survive. He will endure shelling, gas attacks, relentless gunfire, and suicidal assaults across No Man’s Land, and even manage to overtake and capture a German machine gun nest.
Like many volunteers, Hagen comes to war with naive notions. Raised in a town on Flathead Lake in Montana, his one exposure to the military prior to joining up was when his mother sewed him a little soldier suit out of a cousin’s former uniform. Herrick, a poet who was living in Paris when the war broke out, tries to straighten him out: “You check your body, your mind, your soul, at the entrance, and you leave the check as a fee for admission. Once you get in you cannot get out.”
Herrick may have been a poet before the war, but there is no poetry in Soul Wounds. Schak writes in staccato, almost telegraphic prose:
A flash, a roar, beside him. His ears almost burst. The mud reeled as something pushed him over into it. There was a sting in his left knee, his forehead felt numb and heavy. He was faint. Another roar and flash, another, another, not so near him. A shot spat into the mud in front of him. His leg was burning. Shots struck, sput, sput, the parapet before him, flicked the mud near him. They’ll keep it up, he thought, and one of them’ll get me.
Only once does Hagen knowingly kill a man. In the final weeks of the war — not final to Hagen and his fellow Doughboys, for whom the Armistice comes as a surprise — he shoots a German who has come close enough to speak to him. By then, Hagen is numb with combat fatigue:
He did not think of it for a long time. Whether he was too utterly tired to fel anything, or whether the ceaseless horror and misery had calloused him, or whether he had become so dulled by the terrific pounding on his nerves and mind and body that he had lost some of the attributes of a human being, he never knew. He never found such questions entering his sickened mind. He was to completely overwhelmed by the front to wonder what was happening inside him.
When the war does end, however, the duty does not. Hagen’s unit is among the first Allied forces sent in to occupy the Rhineland. They spend months in a Germany town near Koblenz and Hagen is billeted with a German family. He sees the photo of a German soldier on the mantelpiece — an uncle killed in the war, he learns — and begins to see the human side of his former enemy while he awaits orders to return home.
Aside from the this final chapter about the initial occupation period after the war, there are many parallels between Other Ranks and Soul Wounds. Both focus on a single young infantryman, both stay tightly bound to the experience of being in the front lines, being in combat, with few and brief episodes of rest in the rear. Both are written in spare, artless prose. And both books are highly autobiographical with few nods to fiction aside from the change of names.
Al [Bernard Alfred] Schak was born in Minnesota in 1899 to Danish immigrant parents, one of five children. His family moved to Bigfork, Montana, when he was still young. He enlisted in the Montana National Guard in 1916, even though he was underage and slight of build, and was assigned to the 163rd Infantry Regiment. His older brother Walter also enlisted after the U.S. entered the war in 1917, and the two brothers sailed for France on the S. S. Leviathan in December 1917.
Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (L) and Al Schak, Missoula, Montana 1938.
Al served in the 163rd and later in the 26th Regiment under Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. He fought in six major engagements: Montidier, Cantigne, the Marne, St. Mihiel, the Argonne Forest, and the Meuse. He was wounded several times as well as missing in action, resulting in his mother twice being notified of his death in combat.
Sometime in the early fall of 1918, Al Schak felt the impulse to write a poem. As he later related, he borrowed a pencil, used the envelope of a letter from home, and wrote the following, which was published in the Literary Digest in October 1918:
NEAR NO MAN’S LAND
There wa’n’t no bugler there a-blowin’ taps; The regimental chaplain, tho, was ‘round; An’ I’m a tellin’ you as how I’m feelin’ blue, ‘Cause they put my rookie Buddy in the ground.
I showed ‘im how to do “right shoulder arms” An’ told him all a doughboy oughta know; We slept together, but to-day he sleeps Near “No Man’s Land,” beneath the mud an’ snow.
He said ‘is ma an’ sister back at home Kissed ‘im a dozen times in fond good-bys, An’ when ‘e talked about ’em I could see .” That look o’ longin’ shinin’ in his eyes.
I hate to think o’ how ‘is mother feels — A mother’s loneliness is worse ‘n mine. I’d write ‘is folks a letter, only that This writin’ business ain’t much in my line.
I don’t know what to do when I’m off post. My Buddy’s gone; an’ seems like all I know I’d like to put a flower on ‘is grave Near “No Man’s Land,” beneath the mud and snow.
Like Hagen, after the Armistice, Schak crossed into Germany and served with the occupation forces until he was repatriated in 1919. He had a difficult time adapting to civilian life at first and received relief from the Montana Veterans’ committee several times. He and his mother moved to Missoula around 1921 and he enrolled at the-then Montana State University (now University of Montana) as a special (i.e., not assigned to specific graduating class) student.
He seems to have thrived as a college student. He was the sports editor for the campus paper, The Sentinel, and published several stories in the university’s literary magazine, The Frontier. He joined the Sigma Phi Episilon fraternity and served as its chapter secretary. He graduated in 1924 with a degree in journalism.
Al Schak’s brother Walter was assigned as a motorcycle dispatch rider after the 163rd arrived in France, and he was wounded when a shell landed nearby as he was carrying orders just prior to the attack on Cantigny. Al Schak describes the incident in Soul Wounds:
It was late in the afternoon. The head of Hagen’s company was approaching a crossroads. A cloud of dust spurted out of the woods and a motorcycle with a sidecar zipped past the crossroads. It had not gone fifty yards past when a shell sent the driver hurtling into the field alongside the highway. Odds and ends of the machine flew up in a cloud of smoke and dust. The sidecar was obliterated.
In the novel, Hagen later learns that the motorcycle rider was his brother (also named Walter). Hagen is able to visit Walter at his field hospital, but his wounds are too severe and he dies and is buried in France. In reality, Walter Schak was returned to the U.S. and cared for in an Army hospital in Utah, but he died of complications in 1920 and was buried with honors in the town cemetery in Kalispell, Montana.
Al Schak worked as a reporter for the Missoulian after graduating from college, but he struggled with alcoholism and health problems — problems that would likely be diagnosed as symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder today. He worked for years on Soul Wounds (an apt euphemism for PTSD), which may have been published as a goodwill gesture by his old paper, for there appear to have been no reviews of it anywhere.
Twenty-seven years after the war, with France liberated and the French Army settling back into its pre-war routines, the paperwork for the award of the Croix de Guerre medal was located and Al Schak was finally decorated. The citation read in part,
Private Schak, still in his teens, came across a man from his unit shot in both hips and pulled him to cover. Unable to move him without help, he called to other members of the outfit. When they ignored him, he drew a .45 revolver and pointed it at the nearest men and told them to put the soldier on a litter and carry him back to comparative safety. Private Schak went with them, and when one of the litter bearers was killed, he grabbed one end of the litter and they took the wounded man to medical aid. He then rejoined his outfit and started forward through the bursting shells.
Headline from Missoulian article about Al Schak’s death, November 15, 1945.
He had little time to enjoy his belated recognition, however. During the night of November 14, 1945, a lit pipe he had forgotten in a living room chair caused a fire that destroyed his house. Firemen found his body in the kitchen. Luckily, his mother, who lived with him, was visiting a daughter in California. Al Schak was buried with military honors in Missoula, though his gravestone states a unit he never served with. He was 46.
Al Schak’s gravestone.
Soul Wounds, by Al Schak Missoula, Montana: Missoulian Publishing Co., 1934
Advertisement for Fortune Grass from the Daily Telegraph.
“Darling, are you sure it will not be too much for you?” Mabel Lethbridge’s first husband asks when she is pregnant and he learns his father has cut him off without a penny.
“Nothing is too much for me,” she replies. Which could well serve as this remarkable woman’s motto. Her portrait ought to be printed next to the word resilience in every English dictionary. Fortune Grass covers a little over ten years in her life, but what a lot she packed into those years!
Born in 1900, she lived an itinerant life as she, her sister, two brothers, and their mother trailed around the British Empire following her father, a soldier of fortune. When Mabel grew sickly (mirroring her parents’ marriage), her mother took the children to Ireland, where Mabel thrived in the quiet rural setting. Her mother then dispatched her to an archetypal horrible boarding school — a stay that was short-lived.
With the start of World War One, the family moved to Ealing and her sister and older brother headed off, one to be a nurse, the other into the Army. Though just 16, Mabel felt frustrated at having to wait two years to join the war effort. So, she lied. Mabel was nothing if not ruthlessly pragmatic and would, as we come to see, cheerfully wield a lie in service to what she considered a good cause.
Dismissed from nursing when the truth about her age comes out, she lies again — to both the recruiters and her mother, who thinks she is sewing uniforms — and volunteers for the dangerous work of assembling shells in a government munitions factory. No matter how many crude safety measures the Ministry of Defence tried to put in place, the women working there were never more than a stray spark away from death. “That’s the last shell, by the time you’ve done that the milk will be here,” one of her fellow workers says one afternoon when Mabel has been there for just over six weeks. “The last shell! The last shell!” she thinks. And then:
… a dull flash, a sharp deafening roaf and I felt myself being ’hurled through the air, falling down, down, down, into darkness. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. . . . Mother! . . . Mother! Leghe! Reggie! [Her brothers.] Wouldn’t someone come? Wouldn’t someone speak to me? I lay quietly on my side. Now a blinding flash and I felt my body being torn asunder. Darkness, that terrifying darkness, and the agonised cries of the workers pierced my consciousness.
When she comes to, Mabel reaches down and discovers her left leg below the knee has been blown off. Her whole body has been peppered with shrapnel and she is blind and almost deaf. Most of the other women in her hut are dead.
Evacuated from the scene, she wakens again in the hospital. A familiar voice, Tattie, one of her friends from the plant, is by her side. But Mabel’s greatest fear is for her mother: “Oh, Tattie, Tattie,” I sobbed, “I have lost my leg and I am blind, but you won’t tell Mother, will you?”
From the Daily Mirror, 18 May 1918.
For her sacrifice, Mabel is awarded the Order of the British Empire — at the time, the youngest person ever to win it. Because of her injury, the Viscount officiating, rather than she, had to get down on his knees to present it. The medal is not enough, however, to change how her family viewed her condition. “Don’t you realise you are a cripple?” her mother asks when Mabel declares her intent to go out and find work again. Other relatives give her the cheapest of hand-me-downs — a skirt with a large burn in the back: “That’ll do for Mabel, she never goes anywhere.”
But Mabel refuses to be a victim. She teaches herself to walk, first with crutches, then a cane. She stuffs some clothes into her purse, climbs aboard a bus, heads to Whitehall, and gets a job filling out for a ministry. After she finds a room she can afford in a miserable women’s hotel, she writes to inform her mother, begging her to stay away.
The squalor of the hotel and its older inhabitants — widows and spinsters who “exuded an air of tragedy” — combined with the tedium of her work and her still-weak condition and soon Mabel has to obtain a medical waiver and stop working. Stop working for ministry, that is, because what now commences is a whirlwind two years of jobs, relationships, and living arrangements.
Mabel washes dishes in a restaurant, sells matches at Tube stations, cleans stoops in Westminster and Knightsbridge, minds stalls in Borough Market, hawks newspapers, poses for art students, operates a crank organ, and works at least a half dozen other jobs. She sleeps in the bushes along the Embankment and works as a live-in companion. She co-habits with “Daddy,” the demobbed Army officer with whom she’d started a correspondence during the war — despite the fact that he’d married another woman in a mad moment — then falls in love with his cousin Noel, who moves in with them.
“Peggy the chair girl,” from the Sunday Pictorial, December 3, 1922.
In her own mad moment, she decides she and Noel must get married. And in nearly the same moment, she devises the scheme by which she makes her first fortune: renting folding chairs to people waiting in queues outside West End theaters. From offering a handful of chairs outside the Ambassador Theater, near the apartment she shares with Noel, “Peggy the Chair-Girl” expands her business in the space of a year to one involving thousands of chairs and several franchisees. She even finds herself in the midst of a turf way when a group of thugs attempts to take over her concession outside the wildly popular revival of Gilbert and Sullivan musicals in 1922.
Article about Noel Kalenberg’s failed suicide attempt, 1922.
Her marriage to Noel, however, proves a complete failure. Claiming to be studying for the bar, he is nothing but the polar opposite of Mabel: lazy, snobbish, and a drunkard. Mabel decides within the first month that she must leave and says so to Noel. She then marches out to manage the chair rentals at the Ambassador. Standing on the sidewalk outside the theater, she and the patrons hear two shots from the direction of her apartment. She rushes upstairs to find Noel has attempted suicide. There is a great hubbub and Mabel is briefly suspected of murder.
Like everything else he puts his hand to, suicide is yet another failure for Noel. He recovers and Mabel takes him back in. Mabel is carrying his child, but that doesn’t prevent him from knocking her around and drinking up her earnings. The situation only gets worse when he stops studying for the bar and his father cuts off his allowance.
Ad for Mabel Lethbridge, Estate Agent (1934).
Yet none of this gets Mabel down. Her water breaks as she’s vending chairs. She delivers the child and promptly goes back to work, carrying the baby in one arm and passing out chairs with the other. And she soon manages to dispatch Noel off to his family in Ceylon. As we leave our heroine at the end of Fortune Grass, she has just established herself as the first woman estate agent in England. And she’s just 28!
Mabel Lethbridge went on to write two more autobiographies and rack up another marriage and many more accomplishments, making herself a wealthy and widely popular woman in the process. By the time she died, she’d been the subject of a “This is Your Life” television show and included in the historic BBC “Great War Interviews” series.
Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, who knew her as “Granny Mabel” in the 1960s, just before her death, mentions Mabel in her book The Slow Train to Milan:
I was always frightened of cupboards, ever since the day in Cornwall at Granny Mabel’s when a leg sprang out and hit me, and it was her leg, with her thick stocking and built-up shoe, and I screamed and dropped it, and Granny Mabel laughed. I had been seven at the time, and I had never realised that Granny Mabel had only one leg. Mabel Lethbridge O.B.E., who didn’t like you to miss out the letters after her name, and who had worked in a munitions factory during the First World War when she was sixteen. The factory had been bombed, and a whole wing of the nearest hospital had been cleared for survivors, but Mabel alone had survived with one leg blown away, and the other ruined. She had received her O.B.E. in hospital from the King. Granny Mabel, who had been everywhere, and married a millionaire and who could swear more than any sailor on the quay at St Ives.
So, the next time you feel, as they say in Texas, like climbing aboard your pity pot, think what Mabel Lethbridge would do in your shoes — one of which had an artificial leg stuck in it!
Fortune Grass, by Mabel Lethbridge London: Geoffrey Bles, 1934
This was the most surprising book I’ve read in a long time. I was initially interested in The Woman’s Harvest because, having been published in 1916, it appeared to be the first English novel to deal with the situation of women on the home front in World War One. And at first, that’s what it proved to be.
Harvey Brunsdon is a floorwalker in a department store on Kensington High Street when the war breaks out in August 1914. Married and with an infant daughter at home, he decides it’s better not to volunteer for the Army out of purely practical concerns: how will his wife manage on 12 shillings a week when they’ve been living on £170 a year — or worse, on 9 shillings a week if he gets killed? After being shamed as a coward by a young woman presenting him with a white feather, though, he and his wife decide it’s better to do the patriotic thing.
Harvey enlists and his wife leaves the child in the care of her mother goes back to work. The independence and power of being an income earner seems to compensate for her loneliness — more than compensate for it, in fact: “If Elsie Brunsdon could have analyzed her tangled emotions during the autumn of 1914 she must have admitted that, contrary to all her expectations, she was enjoying every moment of her life.”
When Harvey is mustered out and returns, he finds it hard to return to the dressed-up interior work of the store and he seeks out the widow of his regimental commander, who has an estate in need of farm workers. Despite his lack of experience, he moves the family to the countryside. He takes to it like Oliver Wendell Douglas in Green Acres, while Elsie is less enthusiastic. In the course of a year, hard work and good old English pluck turn Harvey into a proven landsman.
Then, in Chapter IX, as Elsie is finally warming to rural life, Anna Floyd throws in this bombshell:
A disbanded regiment, nearly all young students and professional men, mustered in civilian clothes in Trafalgar Square, marched in silence down Whitehall, and hanged four members of the Cabinet on the lamp facing the entrance to Downing Street. The ringleaders, a major, two sergeants, and a private soldier, surrendered themselves and were arrested at once. They were sentenced to death, and on the evening of their trial four more prominent politicians dangled from the same lamp. The Prime Minister, arrested in his own official residence, was taken to see the bodies and informed that whilst the four men lay under sentence, four politicians would hang punctually every evening.
I did not see that coming.
Ad for The Woman’s Harvest by Anna Floyd.
Floyd goes on to tell us that England then experiences a renaissance of the land and within two years achieves near-total self-sufficiency in food production as thousands of veterans turn their swords into ploughshares, with commensurate benefits for Harvey Brunsdon as an early adopter, and we are back into his story, the most violent and tumultuous revolution since Oliver Cromwell having been introduced and passed over in the space of three pages.
But wait: there’s more.
At this point, we are precisely at the halfway point in the book and can be excused for wondering where this is all going.
And the answer is … polyamory.
Over the next 100-some pages, two of the local women disappear for months at a time — to France, to a clinic for “fatigue” — and return with infants of mysterious origin. A foundling. A dead cousin’s orphan. We learn that Harvey has been sowing his seeds in more than the land. In fact, there’s a third affair well underway. When Elsie finally figures this all out, Harvey chastises her. It was her own fault: “You’ve never offered me love of your own free will.” And it’s certainly not the fault of the other women: “They’re victims of the war. You ought to feel sorry for them. You are the fortunate one amongst your unfortunate sisters.” Elsie needs to understand that Harvey is merely doing his patriotic duty — and chill. Turn your head and think of England, in other words.
Though she was writing when the war had been raging for less than two full years, Anna Floyd seems to have been certain that it would result in the loss of a generation of English men and that her country’s future lay in a massive return to an agricultural economy and a massive embrace of sexual freedom … for men. And thus we discover what she meant by The Woman’s Harvest.
I was hoping this book would be a glimpse into how English women, recently emboldened by the Suffragette movement, responded to the early effects of the war. Silly me. The critic Gerald Gould called The Woman’s Harvest “unreadable.” I found it highly readable, blazing through in little more than a day. Highly readable — and highly ridiculous.
The Woman’s Harvest, by Anna Floyd London: T. Werner Laurie, Ltd., 1916
As a long-time student of early twentieth century novels, I must confess to at first being utterly confounded when I started reading Madam. I couldn’t make head or tale of the prose and the cast of characters that spun in dizzying speed before my eyes in the early sections was so bewildering that I had to draw a diagram of their relationships just to keep up.
Ethel Sidgwick makes great demands of her readers. Her meaning is like a will o’ the wisp, darting in the darkness of her elliptical prose. She is always several paces ahead of the reader, who feels as if they are dully plodding behind, in danger of losing their way completely. Even a contemporary Observer reviewer wrote that Sidgwick was “more elusive than Henry James” and that “she seems to overrate our powers of intellectual sympathy”, unaware that while she is racing ahead, her readers are stuck somewhere far behind her. But like a will o’ the wisp, one feels that if one might only grasp it, and bathe one’s mind in its light, it might illuminate a greater truth.
Advertisement for novels by Ethel Sidgwick published by Sidgwick & Jackson.
Sidgwick was once regarded as a brilliant writer, “drawing the picture in firm, fine lines: never losing our attention, or ceasing to charm…it is supreme art,” wrote Reginald Brimley Johnson in Some Contemporary Novelists (Women) (1920). Madam is one of several novels Ethel Sidgwick produced between 1910 and 1926, earning praise for their literariness, wit and truths to be discovered under the sparkling wit of her prose. These novels, many with single-word titles such as Promise (1910), Succession (1913) and Restoration (1923) offered sharp and often humorous criticism of the manners of the British upper classes. Sidgwick enjoyed a few years of fame and popularity: regularly compared with Henry James, in 1919-20 she was offered that most glittering of accolades for an English author: a lecture tour of the United States, during which time she kept a journal that is now with her other papers held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Afterwards she dedicated the US edition of Madam, “To America. If she will accept so poor a thing in memory and in gratitude”. Her later novels, however, received less critical acclaim, being more popular and romantic. Despite having made considerable impact on both British and US reading publics, after long before her death in 1970, Sidgwick quickly had disappeared, virtually without trace. If she is remembered at all, it is only for her 1938 biography of her aunt who was an early principal of Newnham College Cambridge: Mrs Henry Sidgwick: a memoir by her Niece.
Published in Spring 1921, Madam follows the lives of a large cast of characters, from stable lads to landed gentry, in a narrative beginning just before the First World War, “the golden days, before the world lost its innocence”, and ending in the months following the Armistice. In the second half of the novel the traumatic effects of the War haunt the men who returned from the trenches, and those who were too young to fight. They are dogged not only by physical injuries but suffer an almost obsessive need to seek “fellowship with the dead”, their survivors’ guilt destroying any honest or meaningful relationship with the living. Like out-of-control pinballs, they careen wildly through London and county society, causing varying degrees of damage, from wrecking motor cars to breaking young girls’ hearts. A haunting study of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) decades before the term was even coined, Madam is, as the contemporary Guardian reviewer urged, worth sticking with until the second half fully reveals itself.
The novel’s main characters are the jovial country squire Henry Wicken, who has lost a hand in the fighting and who gently subsides into what today would be called a nervous breakdown, and his former stable boy Mott Lane, who was too young to join up but who lost all five of his older brothers in the fighting. The effects of the war on Mott are more atrocious than on Henry: he suffers from a split personality, ruins everything he goes near: bicycles, motor cars, horses and young ladies. That is, until he meets Caroline, ‘Lina’ Astley, the ‘Madam’ of the title. She recognises Mott is damaged and through her patience and courage saves him from his demons and his desire only to be with the dead. Far from the dreary cliché of the angelic feminine, Lina helps Mott in a shockingly physical and criminal way. She confronts Mott’s at once cruel and pious mother (who used to interrupt her beating of him to read out verses from the Bible), slapping her hard on the face and stealing from her a memento of Mott’s beloved brother Christopher.
In meting out criminal and physical harm, fighting fire with fire, Caroline at once fractures the idealised image of herself as the gentle angel and smashes the tomb within which Mott has buried himself alongside his dead brothers. It is one of the few sharply defined moments of a novel swathed in obliquities and ellipses, a narrative style described by one contemporary reviewer as “typically feminine” and “liable to cause irritation”.
Such assertions call for evidence, so here we go:
Advertisement for Madam by Ethel Sidgwick.
Because he simply longed to kill Mr Forrest with Miss Astley, last edition. The poor old surgeon really thought he knew her, that was the creamy part. She was probably sitting, every day, with her despatch-case, under his eye, just as usual; even though Lancaster had kissed her, and she had – No: it must be laid up in lavender for Forrest; for Miss Astley, final edition, was simply the sequel of all the other tales. Tell one, and you found yourself telling the others, inevitably wherever you were: it all followed on.
The novel is written entirely in this style and such questions as “what does ‘laid up in lavender’ mean?” and “what are earbobs?” and “why is the horse Titus starting to speak human language?” chase each other through the frantic reader’s mind. It is “a thing heavy with lightness”, as Sidgwick wrote of a character’s argument in the novel, but it could easily be applied to her own words, tricky to pin down “because there was nothing in it anywhere to grasp.” While pointing out her difficult style, contemporary reviewers nevertheless encouraged readers to persevere. “Through the greater part of his first perusal the reader has the sensation of being lost in a maze, or endeavouring (sic) to fit together the jumbled parts of a picture puzzle, or trying to work out the meaning of a code message without the key,” confessed a New York Times reviewer of Jamesie (1918). But those who stuck with the novel, even giving it a second reading, would be rewarded with its “fine literary quality” and “piquant character drawing”.
There is indeed something deeply resonant at the heart of this war novel. The male characters emerge from the smoke of Flanders so wounded and damaged that the question of how to make sure there is never again another war would be the contemporary reader’s chief conclusion. This was Sidgwick’s aim: born in 1877 into a progressive, literary and feminist family, she wrote for the pacifist Cambridge Magazine and was a lifelong supporter of the Save the Children fund founded by her friend Eglantyne Jebb. Sidgwick also lost her own brother, Arthur, killed in action at Ypres in 1917.
Because of its difficult style, Madam will not be brought triumphantly back into publication to enjoy a second literary life as have recently the works of her contemporaries Rose Macaulay and Elizabeth von Arnim. But if ever the curious reader were to chase its oblique meaning through the prose, they will be rewarded with moments of shuddering recognition of those early, shattered months after the Great War.
Madam, by Ethel Sidgwick London: , 1921
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.
I stumbled across a brief item about this book some months ago that so intrigued me that I tracked down and read it, despite the fact that it’s in French and my reading ability in French is passable at best. Silhouettes crépusculaires is a memoir of a remarkable journey that Carola Ernst undertook in the fall of 1914. Working as a volunteer in a Belgian hospital in Charleroi whose wards were filled with wounded French, Belgian, and English soldiers, she came to know André Sinclair, a French artillery captain blinded in combat. She was able to convince the city’s German garrison commander that Sinclair’s condition effectively made him a noncombatant and therefore that he ought to be exempt from being treated as a prisoner of war. Even more astonishing, she got him to agree to issue an order directing other German units to allow Ernst and Sinclair to make their way back to France so that he could rejoin his family.
The journey recounted in Silhouettes crépusculaires took place at an exceptional moment, as the two sides were just beginning to dig themselves — literally as well as psychologically — into the 500-mile line of trenches that came to be the Western Front for the next four years. Having raced through Belgium, pushing the Allies nearly to the gates of Paris, the German Army was still organizing itself to serve as an occupying power. Policies and procedures were still being put in place, and Ernst benefited from the fact that no one had yet declared that what she was proposing was prohibited.
Within a few months, perhaps weeks, the restrictions would be set in place to make movement of just about any sort by Belgian civilians, let alone enemy soldiers, fit or not, just about impossible. At several points along their way, in fact, the German officer in charge of the garrison controlling a town they had to pass through calls a halt to their travel out of sheer dismay that there wasn’t a rule for or against what they were doing. To avoid extending their authority too far into unknown territory, however, each commander only goes so far as to sign an order allowing them to go on to the next garrison down the road. Even without official restrictions, however, their journey wasn’t easy. There were almost no automobiles that hadn’t been confiscated for military use, let alone fuel. Several legs of their route through Belgium involve riding for hours in the back of a horse-drawn wagon.
Once they arrived in Germany, the situation changed dramatically. Although Germany was by then effectively under military government, the attitudes of the military authorities responsible hadn’t had time to set in their prejudices. As Ernst, who was fluent in German, and Sinclair, who spoke none, made their way from Aachen to Cologne and then down along the Rhine to the border with Switzerland, the German officers they encountered were mostly amused by the novelty of the pair’s venture and treated Sinclair with full military courtesies.
And they were still willing to look the other way rather than attempt to seek direction on how to deal with a situation no one had yet anticipated [the translations are mine]:
“I am only saying that a French officer in Germany now is a prisoner of war, and that there is no exception to the rule.” “Here is one though.” “Get to the point: what do you want?” “That you allow us to leave Cologne tomorrow, without going through the police.” “I allow nothing at all, nothing at all. Allow! But, see! … Is he in uniform, your Frenchman?” “No, in civilian clothes. There were German officers who advised us to cover the uniform so as not to not attract attention.” “Has your case been submitted to the Kommandantur in Aachen?” “Yes; and here is a note addressed to the Commandant of Fribourg, to facilitate our proceedings at the Swiss frontier. If you want to see it?” “It’s useless.” “So you give me your permission?” “Well! … Let’s say I haven’t seen you. Otherwise, I should arrest you.” A pause. “No, it’s good,” he declared gruffly. “We shall say that I am unaware of your presence here. Now, take advantage of it!”
They make their way from Cologne to a German town across the Rhine from Basel in the course of a single day. There, a garrison sergeant sets them up in a hotel room while he arranges for a car to take them into Switzerland. The hotel’s chef exclaims in dismay when he encounters Sinclair: “‘Good Lord!’ he shouted, raising his arms excitedly. ‘What happened! You are not going to tell me that it was the war that did this!’ and he pointed to the blindfold.” The reality of the war’s cost in dead and wounded had not set in.
Their passage through Switzerland goes even more quickly, despite the delay from the desire of the Swiss Army regiment in Basel to take in the spectacle of an actual casualty of the war they would take no part in.
“Captain,” said one of the officers who had received us on arrival, as he entered, “our colonel will be happy to greet you; he’s downstairs, by the car; when you allow it, I will lead you to him.” “Whenever you want, sir.” There was a coming and going of uniforms and a clanking of weapons: our departure set everyone in motion. On both sides of the staircase, the people had massed. Everyone was trying to see; they jostled each other, stretched their necks to see us.
Within another day, Ernst and Sinclair have made their way to Normandy, where Sinclair is reunited with his family.
Then the most difficult part of the journey begins. As a Belgian with parents in Brussels, Ernst does not want to linger in France. Retracing her steps, however, is not an option: she has no letters of passage, no reason why any German authority would allow her to even set foot across the border again. She is forced to take a circuitous route, from France to England and then, via the Netherlands, back to Belgium. Now there is no longer novelty or the bewilderment of bureaucrats to provide comic relief. She is merely a civilian attempting to do something for which almost all enabling mechanisms have been dismantled. Over the course of several weeks, she manages to get back to the hospital in Charleroi, but it is a journey marked by frequent unexpected stops and endless hours of waiting for transportation whose existence is often only speculative.
If there is one predominant mood to Silhouettes crépusculaires, it is one that has become all too rare in today’s world: courtesy. Ernst wrote the book soon after her return to Belgium in 1915, but she chose not to publish it until 1921, when, as she writes in her introduction, it had become a “sketch of an autumn twilight, of an end of civilization”: “It evokes the smile of the isolated individual, of the simply good man who holds out his hand to the passing stranger, without ostentation, without pay.” Ernst offers to take Captain Sinclair back to his family as a simple act of one human helping another. No matter how pleasantly or unpleasantly disconcerted are the various officials of different nations she encountered, Ernst was treated with respect and deferment. It was a mood that would not survive the war.
Silhouettes crépusculaires, by Carola Ernst Brussels: Maurice Lamertin, 1921
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.
Stephen McKenna, from Authors of the Day by Grant Overton (1924).
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.
Daily Mail review of Sonia from 7 March 1917.
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.
Back in the 1990s, I was browsing my way through an independent bookstore in Saskatoon (now, sadly, defunct) and came across a title I hadn’t heard of, by an author whose name was unfamiliar to me.
I’ve always been drawn to war novels (I’m something of a history buff) and this one had, as its backdrop, the grim, bloody trenches of the First World War. I read a few paragraphs and decided to purchase The Poppy Factory, a leap of faith that paid big dividends as the book remains a favorite to this day.
It impressed me to such an extent that, some years afterward, when I was guest at a science fiction convention in Vancouver, I brought up The Poppy Factory during a panel of on “Neglected Books” that also included my Canadian colleague Spider Robinson.
No one in the audience recognized the book, so I stoutly defended its literary qualities, at one point cracking open The Poppy Factory, reading an excerpt from about thirty-five pages into the novel. The protagonist, Captain Adrian Garrard, is lying in “no man’s land” after an abortive attack. Wounded, semi-delirious, at first he can scarcely credit his senses:
I shall never find peace in the moonlight again, only fear, because it was then I saw the first of them.
It appeared over the lip of the crater, crouching on all fours, its black head twitching rapidly from side to side, sensing danger, scenting prey. It began to crawl through the mud toward me…
… I heard the sickening, sucking sound as its legs drove it closer and closer through the clinging mud and could not look. And then I heard laughter. Harsh, grating, wild, only just recognizable, but laughter.
I forced my eyes open.
The creature had risen onto its rear legs and, still bent forward, was clutching my revolver between its forepaws. Only they weren’t paws, they were earth-blackened hands, and the creature was not an animal but a man, his head shrouded in a cowl of filthy sacking, his clothes blackened rags…
…I lay still, feigning death. The claw-like hands ripped at my clothes. Perhaps this was death….
The reaction to that reading was most gratifying. I could see people writing the title down for future reference.
William Fairchild, with Simone Simon (L) and George Baker (R) on the set of The Extra Day in 1955.
My investigations over the years uncovered some biographical details about The Poppy Factory’s author, William Fairchild. He served in British Naval Intelligence during World War II, and subsequently enjoyed a fairly lengthy and successful tenure in the British film industry, scripting and directing a number of movies. His best-known efforts were Malta Story, featuring Jack Hawkins, and Star!, with Julie Andrews.
So, it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a strong cinematic feel to The Poppy Factory; visually it’s quite evocative and compelling. As part of his research, Fairchild personally toured the Ypres battlefield in Belgium, spurred by a rumor (I’ve never been able to confirm its veracity) that at one point in the conflict two hundred men from both armies lived underground between enemy lines.
William Fairchild died in 2000 at the ripe, old age of eighty-two.
Sadly, he never lived to see his novel translated to the big screen.
But it’s never too late to rectify that oversight….
Cliff Burns has been a professional author since 1985, with 15 books and scores of published short stories, essays, reviews and poems to his credit. He lives in western Canada with his wife, artist and educator Sherron Burns. He also writes the Beautiful Desolation blog.
The Poppy Factory, by William Fairchild London and Toronto: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1987 Also published as No Man’s Land in the U.S. by Bantam Books, 1988
Cover of UK edition of Parachute by Ramon Guthrie.
Ramon Guthrie’s 1928 novel Parachute is a story about PTSD. The term post-traumatic stress disorder hadn’t been invented then, and the fact that the novel is full of pilots, airplanes, and people jumping out of them led its publishers to sell it as a story about aviation. Coming out a year after Charles Lindbergh’s record-breaking solo flight across the Atlantic, Parachute seemed guaranteed to hit a bullseye with the reading public.
The fact that its author was credited with downing four German aircraft (as an observer/gunner, mind, not a pilot) and awarded the Silver Star for his exploits didn’t hurt. But the actual fact was that Ramon Guthrie was by then, almost ten years after the war, anything but a stereotype of the heroic military aviator. He wrote the book, his second novel, while living in France, having returned in late 1921 to rejoin Marguerite Maurey, the woman with whom he’d fallen in love just before being repatriated to the United States as a casualty in early 1919. He’d taken a degree at the university in Tours and become interested in poetry, publishing several collections with expat publishers and writing a first novel, Marcabrun, about a 12th century troubadour.
The wounds for which Guthrie was brought home weren’t physical. He’d survived several crashes while serving with the U.S. Army Signal Corps’s Aviation Section on the Western front. Worst that those, however, was the ill-conceived raid in which a flight of 10 DH-4 “Liberty” bombers took off on 18 September 1918 to attack Mars-la-Tour, a town just seven miles inside the German lines. Three planes dropped out due to mechanical problems. The Liberties were plagued with mechanical problems. A fourth turned back when the formation encountered clouds. The pilots, mostly inexperienced, had little experience flying and trying to navigating in clouds.
Ramon Guthrie (arrow) and members of the 11th Aero Squadron.
About half an hour into their mission, the remaining six planes were attacked by German fighters. Three were quickly shot down, killing all six pilots and observers. Two others were damaged and force into crash landings. Only Guthrie and his pilot, Vincent Oatis, made it back safely, Guthrie managing to shoot down one of the German Fokkers. Guthrie later recalled the experience in the poem “Death with Pants On” in his last book Maximum Security War (1970):
I think of others Chapin, Sayre, Comygies, Nick Carter whom I last saw spinning down in flames toward La Chaussee. Their first fight — if you can call it that. Unmatched for unreality: as we straggled out of clouds into a well of open sky, the red-nosed hornets swooped. Most of us never found a chance to fire a shot. There were others. I forget their names.
A few days after that raid, Guthrie’s helmet and goggles came off while they were flying at a relatively high altitude and he suffered burns to his face and eyes from the freezing air until Oatis got the plane down. Guthrie continued to fly, usually with Oatis, until less than a week before the Armistice.
Guthrie had been in France since the end of 1916, when he arrived in a contingent of the American Field Service ambulance corps, a now legendary unit that included such future writers as John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and E. E. Cummings. Guthrie’s section of the service operated with the French Army in both France and the Balkans. When American entered the war in 1917, Guthrie enlisted as an aviation observer, thinking it would take too long for him to qualify as a pilot.
Even before the war ended, however, Guthrie already began to suffer psychological effects from his combat experiences. He had bouts of amnesia and his behavior off duty began to concern his fellow flyers. As in World War Two, air combat in the First quickly gained a romantic mystique that covered up the ugly reality that war was even more of a meat grinder in the air than it was on the ground. Doughboys in the trenches had better chances of survival than the airmen they envied for their “luxurious” billets behind the lines. Life at a typical aerodrome was certainly more comfortable than it was in a front line trench, but you had to avoid being killed, wounded, or captured to enjoy it.
Newspaper article about establishment of a “Nervous” hospital for aviators in Cooperstown, NY.
Even though psychiatry was still in its early days and looked on with some suspicion by other medical practitioners, the U.S. Army had begun to recognize that not all wounds were physical, and it sought to provide suitable rehabilitation for at least some of its returning veterans. For flyers like Guthrie, however, it was sheer luck that Stephen Carlton Clark, a wealthy philanthropist who later founded the Baseball Hall of Fame, had decided to offer the services of a brand-new hospital he was building on part of his estate in Cooperstown, New York. Clark had some snobbish stipulations, though. He preferred to limit the patients to aviators and even then only to those not requiring surgery or physical therapy. The hospital would specialize in “nervous shock” cases.
The hospital opened just in time to receive the first airmen arriving back in the U.S. in early 1919. In Parachute, the fictional town of Berkenmeer takes the place of Cooperstown and an only-partly-philanthropist named Alfred Banning takes the place of Clark. Among the hundred or so flyers assigned to the hospital are Tony Rickey, an ace and crack fighter pilot, and Harvey Sayles, who served entirely behind the lines as a ferry pilot.
Of the two, it’s Harvey who is the more damaged, however. He’s had three planes crack up on him, and after the third crash, he went AWOL for weeks before being caught by the military police. Unwilling to go through the trouble of organizing a court-martial, though, his commanding officer persuades the medical officer to diagnose Harvey with dementia praecox — or schizophrenia as it’s usually termed today.
Tony and Harvey find themselves outsiders at the hospital. From an Italian family in Peoria, Tony is considered lowbrow by the other pilots, most of them Ivy Leaguers from “better” families. Harvey, on the other hand, is seen as the only patient in the place truly in need of its care. “I’m plagued the by insanity label,” he complains. The rest of the men are just enjoying a few months of rest and recreation at the Army’s expense.
Tony isn’t bothered by the insanity label — or rather, it helps him accept Harvey’s idiosyncracies:
Tony didn’t mind listening to Sayles, because he knew that Sayles was crazy and couldn’t help talking that way; and occasionally as he listened he would become aware of a deep current of sense running through the babble. Once his ear had distinguished it, it was like singling out the notes of one instrument in an orchestra until it dominated everything else. Sometimes Tony would even wonder why more people didn’t talk that way, and if it wouldn’t be a good idea for more people to be insane.
Tony soon meets and begins an affair with Natalie, Alfred Banning’s beautiful young Russian wife. Managing to deceive the older man, he also persuades Banning to support a hare-brained scheme he concocts of establishing an airline based in Berkenmeer. Boston – Berkenmeer – Chicago, he fantasizes. Tony revs up the Chamber of Commerce and soon raises enough money to buy an old Curtiss Jenny and turn a local field into a runway.
His entrerpeneurial dreams get mixed up with his passion for Natalie, and soon the two have run off as Tony scrapes by with barnstorming jobs and joy-rides at county fairs. Meanwhile, Harvey decides it’s time to return to civilian life and travels to New York City in search of work. Instead, he encounters scenes more hellish than anything he’d seen during the war:
Miles of sidewalks and people flickering by, young men, old men, women, girls, and all with dead, distorted faces, horribly obscene, like gargoyles worn by the rain, the same faces that make the ghastly fresco of the Subway, blotchy, bloated, idiot faces with evil squints and apathetic leers. Subway Faces. Subway Faces crawling out into the air. He forced his pace to pass them more quickly and, as he met them, turned his eyes away with sickened dread.
While in New York, however, he witnesses a demonstration of parachuting and gets the idea to buy one and join Tony on his barnstorming travels. In addition to the stunts and rides, Harvey will do parachute jumps, giving most of the people on the ground their first sight of a falling from a plane in flight and surviving.
Guthrie understands that both Tony and Harvey are avoiding their inevitable return to the routines and small dramas of peacetime life. Flying, adultery, and skydiving are attempts to recreate the intensity of wartime experiences without recognizing their psychological costs. Harvey begins to worry that his trip to New York was proof that he was, indeed, insane — incapable of fitting back into normal life. As winter approaches, bringing an end to the barnstorming season, Harvey thinks that winter will also “terminate his life with Tony.” Harvey’s response is suicidal; Tony’s is merely rash and reckless. In the end, neither manages to put the war behind him.
Ramon Guthrie in 1928, a portrait by Stella Bowen (from the Hood Museum at Dartmouth).
Guthrie’s choice of title is ironic: neither Tony nor Harvey finds a way to break their fall from the heightened experience of war. Guthrie himself fared better, perhaps with the help of his wife, perhaps because of his return to France, or perhaps because of a simple resilience of spirit. He and Marguerite left France in 1929, driven out by the failing economy, and Guthrie landed a job at Dartmouth. He stayed there for over thirty years, writing little and concentrating on teaching and translation. He served briefly with the Office of Special Services, the forerunner of the CIA, to help coordinate between Allied forces and the French Resistance, earning the Legion d’Honneur, then returned to Dartmouth.
He was diagnosed with bladder cancer in the mid-1960s and had to curtail his teaching activities. His fight with the disease seemed to reinvigorate his creative energies, however, and he began writing poetry again. He was unwilling to condone further military operations, though, and he mailed his Silver Star to President Johnson in 1965 to protest the American involvement in Vietnam. He also began work on his best-known book Maximum Security Ward, which was published in 1970. By the time the book was published, however, the disease had seriously debilitated him and he spent his last years in pain, much of the time hospitalized. He managed to arrange his release in late November 1973 and took his life with an overdose of phenobarbital soon after returning home.
Parachute, by Ramon Guthrie New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company London: Gerald Howe
I’ve been collecting neglected books for decades and writing about them here for over 15 years and I still get surprised by books I’ve never heard of. I first came across a mention of It’s a Great War! in a 1935 newspaper article reporting on a talk about novels of World War One. The speaker, a professor at an Illinois university, singled it out as one of the “truest, most powerful” books written about the war and noteworthy for having been written by a woman: Mary Lee.
I quickly Googled it and was stunned to learn that Robert Lovett, one of the three judges for the 1930 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, considered it that year’s best book: “It is the biggest piece of fiction I have read, and comes nearest to satisfying the last conditions of which I was notified, i.e., ‘preferably a novel presenting the whole atmosphere of American life.’” Lovett ended up supporting the decision to award the prize to Oliver La Farge’s novel of Navaho life, Laughing Boy. It was not the only award Lee was short-changed on.
Mary Lee in her YMCA uniform.
Daughter of an old Boston Brahmin family (she once informed a Boston College student that the Lees arrived in Boston two hundred years before the College), Lee was caught up in the fervor that accompanied America’s decision to enter the war in 1917. A recent graduate from Radcliffe College, she responded to an Army call for women to serve in administrative positions and sailed for France in the fall of that year as part of the staff of a field hospital. The hospital deployed near Bordeaux and Lee worked there for some months before being enticed to take a secretarial job with an Army Air Corps office in Paris. Then, growing uncomfortable with the relatively luxurious conditions in Paris, she joined the YMCA and took a post running a field canteen for an aviation unit near the front. She decided to stay on after the Armistice and set up and ran several canteens serving American Army units in occupied Germany, returning home to Massachusetts in late 1919.
Lee later said she wrote the book to tell women the truth about the war. “They think that war is a pure, wonderful crusade,” she told reporter Eleanor Early. “Fine young men and women, fighting for Justice…. If people really knew what it was like — if women knew –.” Following her own experiences with few fictional variations, her story took 200,00 words to tell. And when she finished it, she found no one interested in publishing it. So she put the manuscript on the shelf.
Then, in 1928, to mark the tenth anniversary of Armistice Day, Houghton Mifflin and the American Legion sponsored a contest offering $25,000 for the best novel about the war. Lee retyped the manuscript, leaving off her name as the rules required, and submitted it.
Most of the contest judges — all of the civilian judges, that is — considered Lee’s novel by far the best of the candidates. Retired Major General James Harbord, Pershing’s head of supply at the war’s end, however, thought the book “unseemly” in its content and inappropriate for an award sponsored by the Legion. Unwilling to go against the general, the other four judges agreed to a compromise and split the award between Lee and William T. Scanlon, who’d submitted a more conventional novel about combat during the battle of Belleau Wood, God Have Mercy on Us!. Scanlon and Lee each took home $12,500.
Rank and file Legionnaires objected to this compromise. Or rather, they objected to Lee’s selection. Ten years after the fact, veterans appeared, like General Harbord, to chafe at Lee’s mention of such unheroic aspects of the doughboys’ time overseas as prophylactic stations, drunkenness, and the abandonment of children they fathered with French women. Several Legionnaire posts, including one near her hometown of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts wrote letters demanding she forfeit the award, criticizing the book for its “frivolity”.
Ad for syndicated version of It’s a Great War! from the San Francisco Examiner.
Ironically, this was exactly the sort of thing Lee intended to document. “War is not a romance,” she protested. “As long as romances are fabricated about war, it will remain a noble, worthy, beautiful adventure for youth. As long as war is made romantic, it will go on.”
Nevertheless, there is a certain air of romance in the early chapters of It’s a Great War!. Anne Wentworth, Lee’s fictional counterpart, departs for France, she is full of idealism: “Wasn’t it a noble gesture…? They were starting out to make the world safe again…. This was a War to End War, –”
That idealism begins to fade as soon as her ship docks in Le Havre. There, all along the quai, lie stretchers with the British casualties being loaded onto a transport headed for England. “There was nowhere you couldn’t hear them…. See them…. Logs of wood, going slowly, one after another.”
And the reality of the women’s quarters at the hospital in Bordeaux are not the sort of thing mentioned in the recruitment literature: “Black fleas hopped…. Women taking clothes off. Hideous underwear. Fat legs and thin ones. Hairs…. How could anyone ever choose to look at women’s bare limbs…?” The expression “It’s a great war!” quickly turns from enthusiasm into sarcasm. It becomes a running joke. Anytime conditions are lousy, supplies are short, or Army bureaucracy infuriatingly pig-headed, someone will quip, “It’s a great war!”
Even more disheartening is Anne’s realization that she, a bright, intelligent young woman, is just as much a faceless number expected to keep quiet and follow orders as any soldier. “They thought you couldn’t be trusted, did they…. Sent you out here, fed you on horse meat, and then refused to trust you.” Though she enjoys a brief reunion with her brother, a lieutenant serving with an infantry unit, the hospital proves too dreary and too dull, being too far from the front. When Anne is offered a position with an Air Corps staff office in Paris, she jumps at the opportunity.
Paris seems a different world after the rural isolation of the field hospital. “Dresses, in shop windows, — soft and colored…. Through the glass, handkerchiefs, diaphanous, frail things with colored borders….” In the staff office, officers in smartly tailored uniforms and shining Sam Browne belts and boots rush in and out of meetings, trying to obtain airplanes from the French, supplies from America, and most importantly, attention from Pershing’s staff. Anne stays at the home of a French noblewoman, is invited out to restaurants and the Opéra Comique, goes for rides into the country in a general’s staff car.
There are occasional German air raids to dispel the illusion, of course. “Men, up there, in the darkness, trying to kill you…. Others trying to kill them….” Lee reminds us that air warfare was a grim novelty back then: “The sky, no longer an empty place you didn’t have to think of…. Human beings, skimming through the great dome….” She stoops to pick up a piece of shrapnel that falls at her feet. Her friend quickly ushers her under the arch of a bridge for safety.
Ad for It’s a Great War! from the Guardian.
The samples I’ve offered so far demonstrate an aspect of Lee’s prose that many found hard to take. One British reviewer compared the experience of reading It’s a Great War! to “riding in an obsolete bus with solid tires, bumping eternally over tramway lines or other excrescences.” “A book about war cannot move smoothly, swiftly,” Lee later countered. “War moves in jerks.”
Now that we have seen many more writers work in such fragmented, impressionistic prose (Céline most obviously comes to mind), however, we should not be put off by Lee’s style. Instead, we should recognize the mastery with which she uses it to capture the fragmentary nature of intense experiences. This excerpt, describing Anne’s first flight in an airplane, seems a perfect example of what makes this book as palpable, as immediate, as some of the finest scenes in Tolstoy:
She held her breath, mouth open. The bumping earth, falling away below you…. Falling, falling…. Wind, filling your mouth, blowing furiously against you…. But you weren’t moving…. Moving means things that rush past…. Here there was nothing…. Nothing but that furious, high wind…. And the old earth, a purple map below there, sinking, sinking…. The great wing tipping, tipping…. You’d fall out. A great, swirling dip, — the earth going from one wing to the other, — God, you were upside down…. Breathless…. The world whirling…. Down, down….
As the fall of 1918 approaches, Anne grows concerned about her brother, whose unit fought in the battle of Château-Thierry. She scans casualty reports and asks anyone she meets who’s been to the front, but it is only a month later that she receives a letter from a nurse she knows: “The regiment was frightfully shot to pieces, but no one will be a greater loss than Geoffrey.”
Her brother’s death causes Anne to question the value of her work in comfortable Paris, and she decides to take a post with the YMCA where she can serve close to the front. The work seems trivial — every evening, she cooks up great batches of cocoa and bread and butter that she serves up to the soldiers and airmen who come into her canteen. It seems “like throwing things into a bottomless pit.” Yet she soon learns of its importance for morale — and health. Her little YMCA cafe provides the men with an alternative to getting drunk, sleeping with prostitutes, or simply lying in their bunk going mad with boredom.
And she gives the men an illusion of home. “Men will tell you that you remind them of their wife,” her first supervisor cautions her. In most cases, this is just a harmless flirtation. But Anne learns not to take her safety for granted. Lee recounts a scene in which Anne walks to her quarters late one night after closing the canteen. She spots a drunk American soldier staggering out of an estaminet. The man begins to follow her down the dark street. Though Lee doesn’t use the word, the possibility of being raped takes over Anne’s thoughts and she rushes in fear to the safety of her doorway.
Feature story by Eleanor Early on It’s a Great War!.
Among the many aspects of this book that impressed me was Lee’s candor in dealing with the realities of sex and violence in war. She not only mentions the presence of brothels near the front and the prophylactic stations run by the Army to deal with the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases, but also the number of children fathered by soldiers who seduced local women. “I’d like to see people start saying, ‘Johnny, this is a photography of the French girl your father had an affair with,'” she later told Evelyn Early.
She also writes of the threat of sexual assault that always hovered around any woman serving around large numbers of men. At one of her posts in occupied Germany, several junior officers conspire to ensure that Anne is never left alone with their unit commander, a colonel they recognize as a violent sexual predator. “This town’s no place for a decent woman,” one warns her, encouraging her to seek a different posting.
A book of over 600 pages can pack in a lot of detail, and I must pass over many for the sake of brevity, but the range of material Lee covers in this book is extraordinary. In some ways, the variety of her postings during and after the war exposed her to more than any typical soldier would have seen. It’s a Great War! may be the first novel to have captured one of the realities of 20th Century warfare: namely, that much of the activity in war has little to do with actual combat: “For every day at the front, three or four were spent at the rear,” she later remarked. “For every man at the front, seven or eight were at the rear.” She writes of the impact of the influenza pandemic, of seeing more soldiers buried from the flu than from wounds. And she devotes over a hundred pages to Anne’s time during the US occupation of the Rhineland following the Armistice, an operation few Americans today are aware of.
And she records the difficulties faced by those who return home after months or years away. When the train pulls into her hometown’s station, Anne is startled to realize that it was “entirely unchanged.” “Stations,” she thinks, recalling all those she saw in her journeys around wartime France (and post-war Germany), “were places with great holes blown in plaster, and roofs half fallen off.” Serving “Mr. Wilson’s cause” in the war, she also lost contact with the fundamental motivators of peacetime life: “Money. We forgot in France how life revolves round money.”
Her many months living in tents, working with make-shift cafes, walking miles from villages to encampments, made her wary of spending her days sitting in some office. “God, Life must have fresh air, and movement in it, — you mustn’t get tied to jobs that kept you indoors,” she thinks as she flees an interview at an insurance firm.
In her first months home, Anne struggles to adapt to these forces. Without the relentless pressure of her daily tasks serving the troops, she begins to suffer anxiety attacks — what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. She considers seeking medical advice — a Boston doctor she knew from the hospital in Bordeaux. But as she approaches his door, the grim prospect of what that age could offer in the way of psychological treatment chills her. “This thing might mean two years of sagging…. Limping…. Sanitariums…. Two years of being pitied…. Spilling your soul….” Anne turns around. “Soul, still her own, — thank God. Unspilled.”
The book ends with the election of Harding — and the mass rejection of those Wilsonian ideals she so believed in. If her future remains unclear, she has at least come to understand that there was no more chain of command to decide it for her.
Mary Lee in 1930.
Like Anne, Mary Lee rejected office work and the possibility of marriage to return to Radcliffe and take her master’s degree. She spent several years as a reporter for the New York Evening Post, one of the few women then on its staff, then went out at a freelancer for the New York Times and others, covering everything from society balls to sports events to a stint in Italy and Greece. Sometime during this period, she also wrote — and failed to interest publishers in — this novel.
By the time Lee won the American Legion contest and managed to get the book published, she appears to have settled back in her hometown of Chestnut Hill, living in her parents’ home. Though she did write another book, a history of Chestnut Hill, in the mid-1930s, she seems have devoted herself mostly to charitable causes, such as a fund to help Greek refugees during World War Two. Over forty years after It’s a Great War! was published, a reporter from the Boston College campus paper found her busy supervising a handyman working on her family home, which was now a rooming house for graduate students. She was reluctant to talk much about herself and refused to have her picture taken. “It seemed she had spent many of her productive years caring for her aging mother,” the reporter wrote. “Her life had grown quiet.” She died at the age of 90 in 1982, having left her home in Chestnut Hill only in her final months due to ill health.
Though Lee had to share the American Legion-Houghton Mifflin award, It’s a Great War! received considerable publicity. Most major US papers and all the national English papers mentioned and/or reviewed the book. As the sample below shows, most reviews were enthusiastic and a few agreed with the Illinois professor that it was one of the best, if not THE best, American novel about the war published until then. Of the reviewers who disliked the book, most were put off by the then-novelty of Lee’s prose style. After that, the most common criticism was that the book was too long and particularly that the final section, about Anne’s adjustments to peacetime life, were extraneous. Personally, I think the final section is one of the book’s best parts in that it’s one of the earliest examples of the kind of challenges we’re now accustomed to associate with the experiences of returning veterans.
It’s a Great War! sold well enough that both Houghton Mifflin and the English publisher George Allen & Unwin ran second impressions and the book was syndicated in abbreviated form in a number of US newspapers, including the San Francisco Examiner. The American Legion’s backlash against Lee only proved once again that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Legionnaires’ distaste for the book piqued book buyers’ interest and improved its sales.
The book’s hold on the attention of both readers and critics was brief, however. It’s never been reissued and is rarely mentioned in discussions of First World War literary. I suspect that Paul Fussell, whose The Great War and Modern Memory remains the best-known survey of literature from the war, wasn’t even aware of it. In the dozen-plus studies of literature and women’s role in the war published in the last twenty years that even mention the book, most give it no more than a sentence or two.
The one exception is Stephen Trout’s 2010 book On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–1941. Trout focuses on the American Legion’s attempts to dismiss It’s a Great War! and positions this response in a cultural context. “The novel’s avalanche of details and modernist fragmentation,” he argues “suggests disconcertingly that the war had no center of meaning — the last thing that an organization built around collective memory wished to hear.” His literary judgment, though, is qualified: “For a World War I scholar, her text offers a treasure trove of details that few other writers bothered to recovered. However, as a novel, it is rough going.”
Yet It’s a Great War! is no longer and no more detail-filled than Vera Brittain’s memoir Testament of Youth. (Brittain, coincidentally, was perhaps Lee’s most vocal defender against English critics.) And its style is certainly far more accessible to today’s readers, accustomed to sound-bite driven media. I was also reminded many times of another modernist, immersive masterpiece that was being published around the same time: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, which I covered at length back in 2016.
While Pilgrimage has held its place in literary history, it’s suffered in terms of readership from its length and relative obscurity. Although I personally consider Pilgrimage far more interesting and accessible than Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, one in a hundred people who know Proust’s work are even aware that Richardson’s exists. To compare Testament of Youth and It’s a Great War! in the same way is laughable: hundreds of thousands or millions have seen the recent film version of Brittain’s book; for Mary Lee’s book, there are … well, me, a few First World War specialists — and now you.
American literature has its share of one-book wonders. John Leggett’s fine book Ross and Tom: Two American Tragedies deal with two post-World War Two examples, Ross Lockridge of Raintree County and Thomas Heggen of Mister Roberts. In many cases, these authors’ lives and careers flame out early and destructively. Mary Lee, on the other hand, seems to have this one book burning to be written and by the time it finally came out, had already decided — or been forced by family circumstances — to focus on other things. Whether those things represented a compromise or a cause, only she could have said. But It’s a Great War! deserves as much as Raintree County and Mister Roberts to be remembered as a work of substance and importance. It may, arguably, be the best American novel to come out of the First World War.
Contemporary Reviews
“… the book conveys the sense of war’s horrible waste, its aimless, blundering stupidity, as powerfully as any novel I can recall, with the single exception of Remarque’s great book [All Quiet on the Western Front]. As an indictment of everything that war means it stands in the front rank.” — Bruce Catton, syndicated reviewer
“Those who can accustom themselves to the staccato style of the authoress, with her herky phrases, will realise that the novel is a sincere attempt to present the uncensored truth. Necessarily this is not all, or mostly, attractice. It treats of the obscenities of billet life, the contrasts between gay life in Paris and the misery and despair in the fighting lines, the disillusionments leading to an embittering cynicism.” — The Age, Melbourne, Australia
“It would be unbecoming in us to defend American soldiers against the humble opinion which Miss Lee formed of much of their conduct. But when it comes about that she or her heroine pretends that the British Army lacked the services and the solace of genteel womanhood, that the young women of France sat with idle fingers, we dare to say that she talks through her hat. As Count Schuksen might put it, in the politest manner in the world, the damned impudence of such pretenses, based on so trivial an experience, takes our breath away.” — The Morning Post, London
“Staccato in style, these impressions make reading somewhat of a nervous strain. At the end, however, they piece into a kaleidoscopic design which service men and women will recognize at once as war in its infinite detail.” — Maxwell Benson, syndicated reviewer
“It seems to me one of the really good books that have come out of the war. It makes absorbing reading, and what a glorious lot of bunk-exploding goes on in its half a thousand pages.” — Herschel Brickell, New York Herald Tribune
“It gives a wider view of the work back of the front than any book so far written. The style is so unique that it literally carries the reader through a moving picture of the war behind the lines…. The reader is made to realize what the service man had to undergo. He is conscious of the reason why so many men do not and will not talk of their experiences ‘over there’.” — Barend Beek, Miami News
“Frankly speaking, It’s a Great War! proved a vast disappointment. After reading the first few chapters the story, as a whole, becomes dull and monotonous. It was recommended to us with great gusto, and perhaps that is why we didn’t like it.” — The Burlington (Vermont) Daily News
“We recommend this book to you as the greatest and frankest panoramic view of the war that has yet been published, not even excepting All Quiet on the Western Front. If you were in the war, you will sigh with relief at reading the truth. If you were not an active part of the army in France and at the front, you will probably be very much hurt at the picture Miss Lee paints — hurt and rebellious and incredulous, because you won’t believe what your read…. Get your courage up and procure the book from somewhere. You will be sorry all your life if you miss it.” — Eleanor Evans Wing, Appleton (Wisconsin) Post-Crescent
“It’s a Great War! is a long book — over 500 pages [the UK edition was 690] — but it is easy reading. Miss Lee has hit upon a style that perfectly fits her material — disjointed, staccato sentences for facts that presented themselves more of less disjointedly, in flashes…. It is a fine book that leaves one much enlightened and with much food for reflection.” — Philadelphia Inquirer
“In a staccato and rather confused style Miss Lee has managed to convey something of the gigantic bewilderment of those days in France, the seamy and sordid and disillusioning side of war, the bitterness and waste of life. She relies for her effect upon the diligent piling up of instantaneous and detached impressions.’ It is almost as if she had attempted a literal rendition of those vivid and disordered days. It’s a Great War is a powerful book, but it is too amorphous to be accounted a literary masterpiece.” — The Bookman (US)
“By far the majority of these six hundred and ninety pages are written in that manner, giving the reader the impression of riding in an obsolete bus with solid tires, bumping eternally over tramway lines or other excrescences.” — The Bookman (UK)
“[Lee] writes in the historic present participle … she, writing … a style, very irritating … using jerks and dots…. Mr. Wyndham Lewis says somewhere that this is done by feminine types who wish to appear virile.” — Nation and Athenaeum
“I may as well say at the outset that it is one of the most irritating books I have ever read through to a tedious end. The author is a journalist, but she appears to have the vaguest grasp of the ordinary rules of rhythm in words, as well as of punctuation. Four dots appear to be the quota for each ejaculation. There must be ten million dots in this book…. Every step of this long narrative of events is recorded in a series of ejaculations. Most carefully of all are are set down the coarsest of details the heroine observes during her enforced contact with soldiers…. The whole book is an impertinence. To call it a novel is an impertinence. It is no more a novel than the columns of a sensational newspaper, slapped together, could be called a novel. As for the war — a little WAAC, swabbing canteen floors at Dover during an air raid, is as qualified to write about it.” — “Tobias Trott,” The Graphic (UK) [This and similar comments led Vera Brittain to write the following to the editors of Time and Tide: “Mary Lee’s gigantic novel, It’s a Great War!, seems to me to have been more unfairly treated by reviewers than any important book for a long time… I suggest, therefore, that women are not … bored with war-books, but that their, real interest has not yet been aroused. And it will not be aroused until a war-book is published which removes the impression that one sex only played an active part in war, and one sex only experienced its deepest emotions.”]
“In my judgment she has accomplished a masterpiece. In the last analysis the least part of war is the actual fighting. The great part of it is the effect it produces on the souls of those engaged in it. The former can be ably written by any little war correspondent sitting on a safe hilltop. The latter can only be written by one who has lived it and nearly died of it — whether that death be physical or spiritual. It is this latter and more important aspect of war with which Miss Lee deals; and in all the literature of the war which I have read — English, French, German — no one has succeeded better in recreating the gradual descent into hell which is the inevitable fate of the man who goes to war…. Miss Lee has been to hell. Because of it, every page of her book is the truth — terrible, heart-breaking, discouraging, if you like, but, so help me God, the truth!” — Hamilton Gibbs, letter to the New York Times
It’s a Great War!, by Mary Lee New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 1929 London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930
When Eliza Marian Butler, who published as E. M. Butler, died in November 1959, her Times obituary noted, among her many accomplishments, that “She also published two not very good novels.” Daylight in a Dream was the first, and I hope here to demonstrate that the Times writer was not only tactless but wrong.
The story in Daylight in a Dream reminded me a bit of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Solder and Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. In all three books, a character is confronted by the uncomfortable fact that they’ve fundamentally misunderstood some key aspect of their past — the kind of realization that shakes a person to the roots. In this case, however, the fiction is also an attempt by its author to look back on her experiences — in particular Butler’s experiences during World War One — through the eyes of an alter ego.
Butler’s fictional self, Miss Rawlinson, is known and feared among the other faculty at Arcady Teaching College as “Old Raw.” “Her behaviour, her silences, her very pronunciation and choice of words implied a tacit criticism of their standards of conduct.” When they all relapse “one and all into mental undress” at the end of a hard day, she holds herself erect and aloof. She refuses to engage in gossip or impugn the good character and motives of the Principal, Miss Cardigan. “You ought to be governess to the Vere de Veres, that’s what you should be,” one of them snips sarcastically. [The Vere de Veres refers to a family of stratospheric nobility invented in a Tennyson poem, the source of the line “Kind hearts are more than coronets/and simple faith than Norman blood.”]
The very qualities that alienate “Old Raw” from her common room peers were what endeared her to the women’s nursing unit she served with on the Eastern Front in Russia in 1916-17. They were “fascinated by her phraseology, by her excessive personal modesty, by her manners, by her morals, by everything that was hers.” Soon after her arrival, someone refers to her as “Heart of Oak” and this quickly becomes her universal pet-name, “Oakey Darling.” Her Red Cross commander recommends her to Dr. Everet, the head of the unit, as “a capable mechanic, as steady as a rock, hasn’t a nerve in her body or one flighty thought in her head.”
Dr. Elsie Inglis in the uniform of the Scottish Woman’s Hospital
Dr. Everet is Butler’s fictional substitute for Dr. Elsie Inglis, the Scottish surgeon and suffragette who established the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service at the start of World War One. The SWFHS organized and deployed field hospitals manned by women volunteers near the front lines in France, Romania, Russia, Macedonia, and Serbia. Inglis led the mission to Russia, which E. M. Butler joined as a translator and driver in 1916.
Already fluent in German and French and working as an assistant lecturer at Newnham College, Butler added a third language to make herself useful in the war effort. As she later wrote in her autobiography Paper Boats (1959) (available on the Open Library), “I set about learning Russian as a first step to getting out to Russia with the Red Cross or in any other way.” The Red Cross took her word that she could speak Russian and assigned her to escort four nurses down to the SWH unit already in place in Bessarabia (now part of Moldova), traveling via Norway, Sweden, Finland and down through much of White Russia and the Ukraine.
Along the way, she had an unsettling encounter with a seer while waiting to change trains in St. Petersburg. “Kakoe narod? (What people?),” the woman asked Butler. “Angliski,” she replied. “Ah,” the woman exclaimed, “Haroshi narod! (A fine people).” The woman told her to listen, then recited this list of names: “Kathleen Theresa Blake, Maude Juhemie, Rose Georgina, Theobald Blake, Fitzwalter, Francis James.” Despite the mispronunciation, Butler recognized the names of her six brothers and sisters. Butler, who later wrote an influential book on Ritual and Magic (1949), was always open to supernatural phenomena and accepted the woman’s instruction to “Go where you are waited for,” despite the warnings of the nurses accompanying her. Butler later claimed that the ghost of her first biographical subject Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau came to her while she was studying his papers and promised to make his handwriting decipherable.
Butler described her time at the front as “the happiest in my life.” In Paper Boats, she recalled odd mix of the grim and the sublime she experienced there:
At least twice every night it was my duty to collect all the bed-pans in the hospital and all the blood-stained dressings, empty them into so-called sanitary pails and stagger with them for about a quarter of a mile across the steppe to the so-called sanitary trench. It was noisome work, and frightening too, for I was nearly always accompanied by a savage pack of pariah dogs snapping and snarling at my heels. On the way back, I used to pause, drink in great gulps of air and look up at the stars. I would then become conscious of a sound never heard in the daytime. It was as if the steppe were sighing, softly, hopelessly, uncomplainingly. It was in fact the subdued chorus of the wounded men, hundreds of them, moaning in the night. They were heroically silent under suffering by day; but nature spoke at nightfall.
The dynamo powering the SWH unit in Russia was the organization’s founder, Dr. Inglis. Butler pays eloquent tribute to Inglis in Daylight in a Dream:
There was a driving-power in her fragile body which would have put a Rolls-Royce to shame, a genius for getting miracles to happen, and administrative gifts hardly distinguishable from statesmanship; for she refused to recognise impossibilities, and the hearts of her subordinates often sank like lead when she issued orders which must be obeyed and yet seemed impossible to fulfil.
A description that makes one long for such leadership today’s pandemic. In her book, British Women of the Eastern Front: War, Writing and Experience in Serbia and Russia, 1914-20, Angela K. Smith calls the SWH units “one of the most successful women’s organisations of the war”: “Of primary importance, they enabled women doctors to get to the heart of the action and save lives.” Inglis continued to work with the unit even after it became clear she was dying from cancer.
In October 1917, recognizing the increasing instability of the situation in Russia as the war was being overtaken by revolution, Dr. Inglis was ordered to evacuate her unit and take it by train to Archangel, from where it would sail home to England to be reorganized and sent to support the Serbian army fighting in Macedonia. Butler vividly recalls the long and difficult journey all the way from Odessa to the port in the Arctic north.
At one point, the driver takes the train through Moscow at high speed to avoid being stopped and attacked by rioting mobs. “Outside was the unknown and the unknowable,” she writes. “Inside, crowded together in fourth-class compartments, eating what little bully-beef there was out of battered tins, sharing knives, forks, and spoons and their inmost thoughts a handful of girls and women were living with an intensity which perhaps comes to few in a lifetime; and one of them with equal intensity was dying.”
This train journey is at the heart of the crucial revelation that comes to Miss Rawlinson. She encounters another former member of the unit, Miss Pearson, and they dine together, sharing memories. Pearson makes a passing comment to the unit’s almost losing all its supplies just before sailing from Archangel. Rawlinson is mystified and Pearson recounts a long and complicated tale of how Brook, the woman charged with getting the equipment on board, battled with recalcitrant rail officials and customs officers and managed, despite speaking almost no Russian and the imminent start of a nationwide strike, to prevent its being abandoned miles outside Archangel on a lonely siding.
This forces Rawlinson to remember the task given her at the start of the trip from Odessa: “You will place yourself unreservedly at Brook’s disposal on the journey whenever she needs help with the equipment.” When Brook had been asked who she wanted as an assistant, she had specifically picked “Oakey Darling.” Though Oakey Darling had accompanied Brook in checking on the cars holding the unit’s supplies at every stop along the way, when they arrived at Archangel she thoughtlessly boarded the freighter with the rest of the group, leaving Brook in the lurch. This, Rawlinson suddenly realizes, was why she had been ostracized — suddenly and without explanation, on the voyage back to England and thereafter. “There must be a blind spot in her somewhere,” she thinks. “That blind spot was her heart.”
E. M. Butler in her library at Cambridge
In reality, it was Butler who saved the equipment. After pleading fruitlessly with the Archangel station master to shift the cars so the equipment could be loaded, she sought Dr. Inglis in her cabin on the Porto Lisboa. “She opened eyes which looked enormous in her small, white, freckled face, and whispered: ‘You must either get the equipment on board before we sail, or stay behind to guard it. Your duty is to the equipment.” Butler returned to the rail yard, where she spotted a last lone engine being returned to its depot in preparation for the strike. “In much more fluent Russian than I have ever commanded,” she recalled, “I told him what lay in store for me if those vans weren’t shifted immediately; and to my horror and dismay I found myself pulling out the vox humana stop. That did it. Without a word said on his side, the engine was driven up to the vans, coupled to them and driven up to the quay.”
Rawlinson leaves the unit when it arrives back in England. As with the real Elsie Inglis, Dr. Everet survives long enough to salute the Serbian troops accompanying the unit as they debark in Newcastle, only to retire to a nearby hotel and die in her sleep. Butler herself stayed with the SWH through its time in Serbia, returning to England in December 1918, whereupon she was hospitalized for nearly a year with malaria.
She went back to lecturing at Newnham in 1921 and remained until 1935, when she took a full professorship at the University of Manchester. She then returned to Cambridge in glory in 1945 as the Schroeder Professor, the pre-eminent faculty post in German language and literature. Her partner, Isaline Blew Horner, was a leading scholar of Pali literature, the canon of religious writings at the core of Theravada Buddhism. In keeping with the discretion of Butler’s time, Horner names appears just once, and in an innocuous context, in Butler’s autobiography. When he reviewed Paper Boats for the Telegraph, Anthony Powell wrote, “There is nowhere else in the world except these islands where women of Miss Butler’s kind are produced, scholarly and daring lades, never wholly out of touch with a kind of Jane Austen primness even at their most rebellious and outspoken, and in the midst of unlikely adventures.”
Daylight in a Dream is a slight novel, more of a novella at a mere 125 pages. But the Times did it and Butler a disservice by calling it “not very good.” In reality, it’s the kind of book that can only be written late in life, when the blacks and whites of youth and idealism have shaded and grown subtle with age and perspective. A book of the quality of A River Runs Through It or H. L. Davis’s The Winds of Morning — books in which, as I once wrote, the author’s voice is “spare, ironic, experienced but never claiming to be wise, with a soft-spoken good humor.” It’s also a book where you get the sense that by waiting so long to tell the story, the author was able to make it as short as possible.
Daylight in a Dream, by E. M. Butler London: The Hogarth Press, 1951
I feel a little trepidation in writing about My Heart for Hostage. It may be the closest thing to a perfect book that I’ve come across in nearly 13 years of working on this site. It’s so good that early in reading it, I felt a frisson of fear that Robert Hillyer would not be able to sustain its quality, that the style, the story, or the narrative voice would give way and leave me frustrated and disappointed. Instead, I feel it’s I who will end up letting this book down.
My Heart for Hostage is the story of a romance doomed from the start — but not for the reason you might think at first. Edward Reynolds, freshly discharged from the U.S. Army after time in combat on the Western Front and afterward as a courier for the U.S. delegation at the Peace Conference, meets Germaine, a beautiful 19 year-old girl from Nantes enjoying her first freedom in Paris. Strongly attracted to each other from the start, they are soon sleeping together in what both take at first as nothing but a fling. Edward, son of a fine New England family, talks of marriage but Germaine brushes him off.
They encounter a variety of early American expats, including a dowager still carrying a torch for Edward’s father and a flamboyant painter proud of his notoriety as a décadent. They escape to Brittany, where they spent an idyllic few late summer weeks swimming and sailing off a small fishing village, and Germaine finally admits she could marry Edward. When the first storm of autumn arrives, they return to Paris to plan for their marriage and the trip back to Edward’s home in the U.S..
In Paris, however, single incident sparks Edward’s simmering sense of jealousy, and it all blows up. Edward is hospitalized, and when he recovers, he travels to Nantes to locate Germaine. He finds her about to wed an older man to whom she had been promised by her parents years before, and he quickly flees, taking the first passage to the U.S. he can book. There, on board, he meets a fellow ex-officer who reveals a few facts that transform his entire understanding of Germaine — indeed, that reveal to Edward how little he understands people at all.
My Heart for Hostage could be written off as just another American in Paris story, but everything about this book takes it to a level that puts everything else in this genre in the shade (with perhaps the exception of Henry James’ The Ambassadors, a peak I haven’t attempted myself). From his social status, upbringing, education, and experience, Hillyer was already encountering France with considerable sophistication, but what’s refreshing here is his insistence on bringing things back to an immediate and personal level:
The trouble was, he said, that people in America who pose generally had some goal in view; they wanted to impress some advantageous person to get on in the world. Whereas in France, people just posed for the fun of it.
No, she decided, people in France who posed also had some goal in view; but the goal was just to show off. You see, the French wanted to puff themselves up in their own eyes by making other people notice them, even if they had to behave very queerly like the silly artists on the Boulevard St. Michel. Americans wanted to overreach other people. If a Frenchman were posing, he’d look seriously in a mirror to see if he were acting the part properly; an American would wink at his reflection to show he was not fooling himself at any rate. Sometimes Americans seemed to her much more mature than the French. But in love they are very banal. “Take, for example, yourself, Edouard. You never believe at the right time and you always doubt at the wrong time. Isn’t that true?”
Edward had been thinking that she knew altogether too much about Americans in love. “I don’t know,” he said, and suddenly buried his face in his hands.
“But you do know,” she persisted, “because you never really trust me. You will never believe if we live together in joy until our death. That doubt will poison whatever you think of me — oh, even at our best times together — and it will bite, drop by drop, like acid into you, into your deep nature, until all you will have to say to me will be Bonjour, cherie, and Cherie, dors bien.”
Robert Hillyer 1942Just how much of My Heart for Hostage is autobiographical is hard to tell. Like Edward Reynolds, Robert Hillyer served in the U.S. Army during World War One and remained on active duty after the war, working like Edward as a courier for the Peace Conference. Like his more famous Harvard classmates e.e. cummings, John Dos Passos, and Malcolm Cowley, he came to France first as a volunteer ambulance driver, and became, like Edward, fluent in French. And like Edward, he returned to the U.S. in late 1919. Edward’s story ends on board the freighter taking him home; Hillyer became a professor of English at Harvard. Best known as a poet, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1934 for his Collected Verse.
Hillyer wrote My Heart for Hostage, the second of his two novels, at a distance of over twenty years from his time in Paris and in the midst of another World War. From its dust jacket illustration, one can imagine that My Heart for Hostage was being aimed by Random House for a sentimental, mainly female audience, but in reality, this is a book that would have appealed to G.I.s if they’d made it past the title page. Hillyer’s soldiers carry some scars with them they little understand and can’t control. They find relief in sex and drink, and feel a distance between themselves and the folks back home they can’t quite express. And they have a sense that the only true relationships have to be founded on trust — which, unfortunately, their experiences have shown to be something not given lightly. But I suspect that few G.I.s ever got their hands on My Heart for Hostage, and so it soon slipped into obscurity: too late for the veterans of WWI, too early for the veterans of WWII. I hope it will not take another war for it to be rediscovered.
I’ve covered plenty of books well-deserving of rediscovery on this site. But if it’s not going too far out onto a limb, I have to say that My Heart for Hostage is perhaps the closest thing to a neglected masterpiece I’ve come across. I cannot recommend it too highly. There are less than a dozen copies available for sale at the moment: Grab a copy now!
My Heart for Hostage, by Robert Hillyer New York: Random House, 1942
“This book tells of the experiences of a German civilian interned in England,” wrote Paul Cohen-Portheim in the preface to Time Stood Still: My Internment in England 1914-1918, “and it is the author’s aim to describe nothing except what he actually saw and experienced.”
This understatement is both typical of Cohen-Portheim’s remarkable humility and an utterly inadequate synopsis of this remarkable book, for Time Stood Still is, in its way, a monument of humanism–the cosmopolitan, cultured, enlightened humanism exemplified by Stefan Zweig, Jules Romains, Thomas Mann and others–that flourished in Europe until exiled or exterminated by fascism. Countless times while reading this book I was awed by the depth and character of the author’s perspective.
Born in Berlin of Austrian parents, Paul Cohen-Portheim was educated in Geneva, took up painting, and was living in Paris when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in June 1914. Despite the increasing rumors of war, he carried on with his life and traveled to England to spend a few weeks with friends in Devonshire. When England declared war on August 4th, 1914, he found himself stranded: “My flat and my belongings were in France, my relations in Austria and Germany, I myself with summer clothes, painting materials, and £10 in an England one could not leave.” The next day, he discovered he was now an “enemy alien.”
For the next ten months, he lived in a sort of limbo, unable to leave England, unable to move from one location to another without official permission, unable to hold a job legally. He joined with other expatriates to form a makeshift opera company and busied himself with sets and costumes until, on May 24th, 1915, he received notice to report to the local police station the next morning to be interned.
“What shall I pack?,” he asked the policeman. “I would pack as if you were going for a holiday,” the man replied. And so Cohen-Portheim loaded his luggage with “white flannels, bathing things, evening dress, etc..”
He and several hundred other German and Austro-Hungarian men between the ages of 18 and 65 were loaded into railway cars and then ferried to the Isle of Man, where they were interned at Knockaloe, which was the largest camp set up in England during World War One. A few months later, however, he and about sixty other inmates, considered by the British to be “gentlmen” were transported to a new camp in Lofthouse Park, near Wakefield in West Yorkshire. Here he was to remain until mid-1918, when he was sent to the Netherlands to await the end of the war in another form of limbo.
To the authorities responsible for setting up Lofthouse Park, “a gentleman was a man prepared to pay ten shillings a week to them for the privilege of being there.” Cohen-Portheim had been able to contact his mother in Vienna and set up a weekly allotment while at Knockaloe, so, like the other inmates of the camp, he was able to order books and art supplies and to pay for sundries at the camp store. He was able to obtain more suitable clothing, and, as this picture from the Wakefield libraries collection shows, to dress in a manner befitting a gentleman. Other than being confined to the camp, served tasteless but adequate food, and mustered multiple times a day to be counted, he was largely left alone by the authorities and guards.
“Were you treated well?” friends asked him after the war. Cohen-Portheim’s response was carefully qualified: “I am not prepared to say what British treatment of prisoners of war or of interned civilians was–fair, correct, brutal, inhuman, indifferent–I can only speak of my own experience,” and that was that the treatment was “standardized.” He understood that internment was politically motivated, moderated entirely by public perceptions of the treatment of British internees in Germany, and bureaucratically administered.
This was the first war in which there was large-scale confinement of enemy civilians, and the lot of those in England was far better than that of their counterparts in France (as recorded in Aladar Kuncz’s 1934 book, Black Monastery). But, in Cohen-Portheim’s analysis, it was still a brutal and cruel system. Its inhumanity was not based on physical abuse or deliberate psychological mistreatment, but on a more fundamental truth: this was not how humans are meant to live.
Take, for example, the factor of time. Cohen-Portheim chose his title carefully: “One must remember that there was absolutely no limit to be foreseen to the duration of the war and of my imprisonment, not could one know to what one would then return, if one lived to return to anything.” The inmates were well aware of the events going on outside the camp, the progress and set-backs of each side in combat, but they were frozen in time. “The past was dead, the future, if there should be a future, was a blank, there was nothing left but the present, and my present was the life of a prisoner.” This condition was, in his view, unnatural: “where there is no aim, no object, no sense, there is no time.”
Yet it was not the fact of being imprisoned that made the experience horrible. “What was horrible was that one had ceased to be an individual and had become a number.” Any decisions made about the conditions in the camp were made based on an abstract concept of the enemy alien prisoner, and not on any aspect of his individual actions or nature. Cohen-Portheim saw this as a fundamental effect of war: it creates “an abnormal state in which no one can be honestly considered responsible for his actions.”
The obliteration of personal responsibility “undoes what education has built up in years of struggle, or rather in many centuries of effort.” This observation illustrates the particular perspective evident throughout the book. Cohen-Portheim upheld the humanist ideal of man as a rational being with a free will moderated by morality and empathy. And the fundamental crime of internment is that it is inhuman. The fact that the camp population was of such a narrow demographic–male, upper class, German or Austrian, adult, with no women, no children, no other nationalities or classes–by itself made the situation inherently abnormal.
But there was also, “no privacy, no possibility of being alone, no possibility of finding quietude.” The men were cooped up together 24 hours a day, day in and day out, with no end in sight. Because of this, “The worst tortures of camp life were due to the small failings of one’s fellow creatures everlastingly in evidence, and to unimportant little tricks endlessly repeated”:
It is not the men of bad character or morals you begin to hate, but the men who draw their soup through their teeth, clean their ears with their fingers at dinner, hiccough unavoidably when they get up from their meal (a moment awaited with trembling fury by the others), the men with dirty hands, the man who will invariably make the same remark (every day, year after year) as he sits down–and who is quite an inoffensive good-natured soft of creature otherwise–the man who lisps, the man who brags,, the man who has no matter what small defect or habit you happen to object to. You go on objecting quietly, for one does not quarrel about such silly trifles, and the thing gets on your nerves, becomes unbearable by the simple process of endless repetition, until you hate the cause of your torture with a deadly hatred.
“Such an atmosphere is thoroughly poisoned,” he concluded.
What is most impressive about Cohen-Portheim’s account of his experience, however, is that despite all of these wrongs, he could write, “I cannot honestly say that it has harmed me.” Indeed, his time at Lofthouse Park turned his passion from painting to writing, and one of his books, The Message of Asia (1934), was based on material began in the camp. He saw himself as an exception case, though, and was careful to caution in his preface that this must not “induce my readers to think that I call good what in itself is evil.”
After the war, he became a journalist and travel writer, and published such books as England, the Unknown Isle, The Spirit of France, and The Discovery of Europe. Time Stood Still was published in 1931, and like W. V. Tilsley’s outstanding novel, Other Ranks, published the same year, suffered from critical and popular weariness over war memoirs. The Saturday Review’s reviewer dismissed the book as “a ‘document’–by which I mean a piece of writing what has not quite succeeded in becoming literature.” Looking back on Time Stood Still from a distance of eighty years, however, I would place it on a shelf with some of the finest pieces of writing about life behind barbed wire.
The works of Leo Perutz have been praised by such diverse writers as Ian Fleming, Jorge Luis Borges, and Graham Greene, compared to the works of everyone from Franz Kafka to Victor Hugo to Agatha Christie, and utterly unlucky in gaining the lasting attention of English readers. Over the course of a forty-year career, Perutz wrote over a dozen novels, some of which were translated and published in English within a year or two of their first appearance in German, others that were published by Arcade (and Harvill in the U. K.) in a fine effort back in the early 1990s. Arcade is taking up the torch again later this year, promising to re-release three of Perutz’s novels later this year.
Perutz was a contemporary of Kafka and Stefan Zweig, one of that remarkable generation of secular Jews that grew up under the Austro-Hungarian empire and whose world was utterly wiped out by Hitler. Born in Prague like Kafka, Perutz, in fact, worked for the same insurance company as Kafka, Generali, although in Trieste. Recruited into the army during World War One, he served on the Russian Front and was wounded.
Perutz’s experiences during and immediately after the war are reflected in the pages of Little Apple (original title “Wohin rollst du, Äpfelchen…?”), which was originally published in 1928. The title comes from a Russian song popular just after the war, when Red and White forces were rolling back and forth across the land and territory changed hands as much as a dozen times in the course of a year.
Little Apple takes place during this period. Vittorin and a group of fellow Austrian soldiers are travelling back to Vienna after being released from a Russian prison camp. During the long, slow train ride home, they talk about life in the camp, and about its brutal commandant, Staff Captain Selyukov. They all agree that they must return to Russia, hunt down Selyukov, and make him pay for the pain and torture he inflicted upon the inmates.
Only Vittorin, however, holds onto this obsession after he returns to his family in Vienna. The other men refuse him when he tries to organize a revenge expedition, and he heads off on his own. Vittorin plunges headlong into the chaos of the Russian Civil War, and finds himself at various times a soldier, a prisoner, a refugee, an entertainer, a manual laborer, and a thief. In the fluctating circumstances of the Civil War, he can never be too sure of which side he’s on–geographically or politically.
Throughout it all, however, he never loses focus on his goal: to find and punish Selyukov. The comparisons between Perutz and Victor Hugo are not due solely to the fact that Perutz translated a number of Hugo’s novels into German. In his monomaniacal obsession to bring Selyukov to justice, Vittorin shares the same ability to tune out his surrounding circumstances, no matter how threatening to his survival, as Hugo’s Inspector Javert:
He no longer saw selyukov as an arrogant Russian officer who had insulted him. Selyukov was the evil personification of a degenerate age. He was the medium through which Vittorin hated everything sordid that met his eye–all the crooks, currency speculators and human predators that had shared out the world between them…. They haggled, they cheated, they supplied both Whites and Reds with saddlery, horseshoe nails, revolver holsters, cleaning rag, axle grease, cans of tainted bully beef. They belonged to the highest bidder, and champagne flowed wherever they did business.
They were numerous, invulnerable, and ubiquitous–in Paris, in Bucharest, in Vladivostock. Vittorin could avenge the humanity they were betraying, the world they had polluted, by exterminating just one of them, and his name was Selyukov.
There is a timeless quality to Perutz’s books. Some are set in the past–the Thirty Years’ War, the Renaissance–and some in his present, but all share one thing in common: the power and fascination of a pure narrative. There is always something pulling the reader along but not quite within reach–rather like the image of Selyukov in Vittorin’s mind. His prose–at least as translated–is clean, spare and full of momentum, and his books brief–usually under 200 pages. Perutz’s power as a storyteller can be seen by the number of his novels that remain in print in German, French, Italian and Spanish. I can only hope that more English readers will discover that power when Arcade releases Little Apple, Master of the Day of Judgment, and By Night Under the Stone Bridge in a few months.
Little Apple, by Leo Perutz, translated by John Brownjohn New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992
I ordered a copy of Maxence van der Meersch’s 700-page novel, Invasion, after reading Tom Leonard’s review of the book on Amazon, but having recently devoted a considerable amount of time to another very long–but very great–novel (Fortunata and Jacinta), I intended to stow it away in the nightstand for later.
I sat down to read a few pages to get a sense of the book. An hour later, I was on page 50 and committed to finish it.
Invasion (originally titled Invasion 14 in French) would not, at first glance, seem the sort of book that can pull you in and make you want to stay. Set in Roubaix, a French industrial town just a few miles from the border with Belgium, Invasion is the record of over four years’ occupation by the German army as experienced by dozens of the local inhabitants. Even on a good day, Roubaix is a pretty grim place: a town of mills and mines, full of streets of grey shuttered houses, much of the year under a grey a dreary sky. Trapped behind German lines, the people of the town had no choice but to remain, but today’s reader is free to leave their story gathering dust on the shelf.
However, Van der Meersch’s style (in translation, at least) is simple and immediately accessible, like Tolstoy’s, and like the great master, he has a viewpoint that seems able to get inside the head and heart of any character. In the course of the novel, Van der Meersch follows dozens of the town’s residents, from wealthy mill owners to shopkeepers and farmers to petty criminals and little children. As with a Russian novel, there are times when one gets lost in the flurry of names (I kept confusing the Fontcroix with the Laubigiers).
Yet despite the bleakness of the novel’s setting and subject and the constant shifting from character to character, Van der Meersch maintains a remarkable level of narrative tension. Put any group of people in an extreme situation and their responses will vary widely. This has been a basic formula of story-tellers for millenia. But in this case, the strain seems to increase relentlessly. No one–not even the Germans–expects the occupation to wear on for months and then years. The faint, muffled sound of shelling–the front is never more than twenty miles away–goes on and on, and the sense of hopelessness grinds away at even the strongest.
The Laubigiers, an ordinary working class family, for example, offer shelter to three French soldiers separated from their unit in the first retreat. It’s a simple gesture of charity in response to a request from the local priest. Civilian clothes and forged papers are arranged to aid their escape. But then the time wears on:
For the first few weeks an atmosphere of mutual toleration prevailed, but then a certain amount of friction began to develop. The men were bound to the Laubigiers by no real ties, and became irritable under pressure of forced seclusion. Their minds turned to their own people, and the necessity of learning new trades in order to keep themselves occupied and to earn enough to pay for their keep, of becoming cobblers, harness-makers, and chair-menders, began to get on their nerves. Quarrels started. Disputes arose over the sharing of coal and food. The carelessness and messiness of her three lodgers did violence to Félicie’s naturally tidy nature.
“Seen in its stark reality,” van der Meersch concludes, “the situation was one in which a group of people remained bound together by necessity, while all the time they grew daily to hate one another more and more violently.”
One reason I was interested in Invasion is that I wanted to explore the effects of a prolonged occupation on a people. Twice in the course of thirty years, the people of Belgium, where I live now, and parts of France, lived for years under the rule of an occupying power. This is an experience unknown in American history, and I have a theory that this is one reason why people in this part of Europe view good and evil as lying along a spectrum of infinitely subtle gradations and no clear-cut distinctions.
In the first months of the occupation, a few in the town display true heroism. A priest and a local schoolteacher manage to produce a newsheet telling about local incidents of German brutality and calling for resistance. A mill owner rallies his workers to refuse to make cloth for German uniforms. But they are all soon rounded up and shot, imprisoned or sent off to forced labor. Even the rich find their possessions confiscated and their savings eaten away by black market prices.
Some collaborate quickly and with little sense of guilt. Others give in only when their means or willpower have been exhausted. Some develop genuine friendships, as the Laubigiers do for a German cook billeted with them, that inevitably come with complications that verge or veer into collaboration.
By the time the severe winter of 1917-18 comes around, the hardships have worn away almost all sense of hope and dignity. The extent to which the experience leads inevitably to self-destruction is symbolized by peoples’ pillaging of their own homes:
Gradually, and rather fearfully, folk began to remove the banisters from staircases, trap-doors from lofts, everything that was of no immediate, or only of secondary, use. Boards were taken from the backs of cupboards, shelves for keeping food fresh in the cellars, doors and woodwork from lavatories, the seats themselves, the roofs. A futher step involved the shutters of windows, rabbit hutches, tool-sheds, coal boxes. After a further week or two the doors of the rooms had to go, attic floors, gutters, and drain pips. Finally, life came to be lived in the strangest apologies for houses, bare walls open to the air, with a mattress of the ground and a fire in one corner.
The occupation does end, however. Two hours after the last German leaves, the English arrive, and the retribution begins almost as soon as the celebrations. “Realizing that life in France would be impossible for them,” women who have taken German lovers “made up their minds to see whether they could not start afresh in Germany.” When they catch up with retreating troops, though, they are sent back to be branded and beaten.
The men, on the other hand, soon reach “a sort of tacit agreement to cease fire…. It was very much better to form a mutual admiration society than to rake up uncomfortable truths and start hitting blindly at the expense of all and sundry.” “Those who stumbled on the truth,” writes van der Meersch, “took fright and avoided it like poison.”
A native of Roubaix, van der Meersch was just seven years old when the German occupation began, but his novel is informed by a rich network of friends, relatives and neighbors and years of hearing their recollections. Trained as a lawyer, his advice was often sought out even though he never actually practiced. The historian Richard Cobb, who met van der Meersch when he was evacuated to Roubaix as an internee during the German occupation of 1940-44, described the novelist as “the magician who had pulled the front off so many corons [villages], to introduce me, de plein pied, into the kitchen and the smell of coffee and boiling potatoes.”
In an essay in his book, Paris and Elsewhere–reissued as a New York Review Classic–Cobb calls van der Meersch “a regionalist who had written almost exclusively about Roubaix and who had brought honour to the town by winning the Prix Goncourt. He was, in fact, a clumsy stylist, a Christian-Socialist Zola, who wrote off an accumulated stock of fiches [files].” Invasion does, at times, give the sense of being an accumulation of fiches–primarily because no single character dominates the narrative.
Van der Meersch wrote around a dozen novels, all of them set in and around Roubaix, in the space of about as many years. He was 27 when Invasion was published, and two years later he won the Prix Goncourt for L’Empreinte du dieu, translated into English as Hath Not the Potter. By the time Cobb met him, “He was tubercular and had fallen under the influence of a medical eccentric who preached under-nourishment as a cure for tuberculosis; his most recent novel [Corps et âmes, translated as Bodies and Souls] was an attack on orthodox medicine.” He died of the disease in 1951 at the age of 43. Although several of his novels are still in print in France, as well as Spain and Germany (not Invasion, understandably), his work has largely been forgotten by English readers.
Invasion, by Maxence van der Meersch, translated by Gerard Hopkins New York: Viking Press, 1937
Young Woman of 1914 (1931) is the first in narrative order and the second in order of publication of Arnold Zweig’s tetralogy of the First World War (the others are The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1927), Education before Verdun (1935) and The Crowning of a King (1937)). Calling this a tetralogy, however, should not imply that there are such strong links among the books that they need to be read in sequence or even in totality. Aside from the character of the writer and draftee Werner Bertin–a major character in this novel and a supporting one in the others–and a few other minor characters and events, the common bond among the books is one of context, not content.
The young woman of the title is Leonore Wahl, the daughter of a successful Jewish banker in Berlin, university student and eager follower of the intellectual radicals of her time. She meets and has an affair with Werner Bertin, a rising young writer of a more modest family. I hesitate to say that she falls in love with Bertin, because although the two develop a relationship that continues when Bertin is enlisted into the German Army Services Corps and shipped off to a series of postings, Zweig makes it clear that neither is quite ready to put head over heart.
Until Leonore finds that she is pregnant, that is–or at least, until she deals with this fact. If Young Woman of 1914 is remembered at all today, it is as one of the earliest and frankest accounts of abortion. Given her youth, her situation as a single woman, and her awareness of the weaknesses as well as the strengths of her feelings for Bertin, she decides to have an abortion. Although illegal at the time, safe but surreptitious abortions could be found if one had sufficient funds and guile. With the help of her brother, Leonore locates a doctor who performs the procedure:
Leonore, outstretched on the examination chair, uttered no more than a sharp gasping moan as she clutched its metal edges. On each side of her a Sister held down her arms and shoulders with dragoon-like fists. The violence of the onslaught almost deprived her of consciousness. Her heart seemed to change into an organ sensitive to pain, and she felt as though it were splitting within her breast; an engulfing surge of torment swept over her forehead and temples.
“Poor creatures, they always had to pay the bill,” the doctor muses.
This excerpt gives a sense of the ham-fistedness of Zweig’s style–or at least of Eric Sutton’s translation–that turns the experience of reading his novels into something akin to hiking through thick underbrush. It’s unfortunate, as the basic story here is actually quite modern. When Bertin meets Leonore again, he does feel and express some remorse, but mostly to be seen to care. In truth, what she’s gone through is alien and a little distasteful to him.
Having seen a little of combat and a great deal of the drudgery and boredom of army life, though, Bertin has a much greater appreciation for the comfort of a loving relationship, and Leonore herself seems prepared at last to find refuge in the tenderness they feel for each other. They decide to marry, if only to postpone Bertin’s quick return to the front. And as she sees him off at the train station, she thinks, “It was none other than love that had come upon her–love that suffers, schemes, creates: just love.”
I have mixed feelings about this book. It’s full of fine moments, such as a walk Bertin takes through the streets of a Bosnian town while serving on the Balkan front, where Zweig captures the flow of life that goes on despite the big-H history happening all around it. And in the relationship of Leonore and Bertin, he does a good job of conveying the awkwardness of lovers who need to establish an intellectual equality before confronting their real feelings for each other. On the other hand, what would have been a little masterpiece if pared down a to around 150 pages takes Zweig over 380 pages to tell. And this is one of Arnold Zweig’s shortest books! It’s no surprise to discover that he went on to become a key literary figure in East Germany. There is a certain Marx-like windbagishness in his writing. Stefan Zweig–no relation–would have dealt with this in a novella.
Young Woman of 1914, by Arnold Zweig, translated by Eric Sutton London: Martin Secker, 1932
I first read The Violet Dots after finishing Prof. Donald Emerson’s course on the First World War as an undergraduate at the University of Washington. My research for that course had led me to my first neglected discovery, W. V. Tilsley’s Other Ranks, and I had kept on reading about the experience of combat on the Western Front, snatching up whatever new titles came out, such as John Ellis’ remarkable Eye-Deep in Hell.
Michael Kernan, a reporter with the Washington Post, was inspired by Martin Middlebrook’s 1972 book, The First Day on the Somme, which followed about ten different British soldiers through the lead-up, attack, and aftermath of one of the war’s greatest battles. Kernan wanted to focus in on the life of one veteran of the Somme and asked Middlebrook for a reference. Middlebrook happily suggested Tom Easton, a private with the 1st Tyneside Scottish, 34th Division who’d kept a diary throughout his time on the Front. Middlebrook had interviewed Easton and collected material on his wartime experiences, but had been forced to drop his story from the book for the sake of space.
Kernan travelled to meet Easton, who was now retired and living in a former mining town in Northumberland. As the reader quickly sees, Tom Easton was quite a remarkable man even without considering his experiences in the war. Born into a large and poor miner’s family, he followed his father and brothers into the pit. Perhaps he would have become just another working man had he not joined the Army in November 1914. But when he returned, he proved a natural leader, playing a large role in trade union and Labour Party organizing in his community. He married, raised a family, played in a local amateur orchestra, served on his local council, and in dozens of ways helped better the lives of the people in his town. Although soft-spoken, good-humored and humble, he was also a man of granite-hard strength and character.
While Kernan first saw in Tom Easton just a way to connect to a time over sixty years in the past, he soon comes to view him as a model of integrity and commitment, and it almost seems that the story is being pulled away from the war and transformed into a portrait of Tom. But Kernan gently insists on returning with Tom to the scene of the battle, and what follows is a stunning lesson in just how deep and long the scars of combat can run. As the pair walk through cemeteries and fields, retracing the events of the Somme, the calm, self-assured man of eighty is transformed into a fearful, shaking teenager sobbing with uncontrollable grief, remembering a friend last seen running toward the German line shouting, “Mother! Mother! Help me!”
Tom Easton died in 1980. Kernan retired from the Post in 1989 and published one other book, a novel titled The Lost Diaries of Frans Hals (which, from the looks of the reviews on Amazon, I will have to add to my list). He died in 2005. “He was a glorious writer who could make anything interesting,” recalled Mary Hadar, a colleague, for his obituary.
The Violet Dots, by Michael Kernan New York: George Braziller, 1978
“This book is an attempt to fill a gap,” John Baynes writes in his introduction to Morale, his classic study of the 2nd Scottish Rifles in the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in March 1915. “In all the mass of histories, studies, memoirs, biographies and novels which have been published about the First World War little has been done to investigate the most interesting field of all–the morale of the front-line soldier.”
Had Baynes attempted a sweeping study of morale in general, or even morale in combat, or even of morale in combat on the Western Front, I doubt that anyone would remember his book. But Baynes recognized early on that “the subject is too big”:
I decided that I would rather stick to something small and try to get near the truth, and being a Regular serving officer in the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) I naturally chose to study my own Regiment. I decided to look at one battalion in one battle–the 2nd Battalion at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, 9 to 15 March 1915. This battalion, which always referred to itself as the 2nd Scottish Rifles and did not normally use the name Cameronians, started the battle about nine hundred strong on 9 March. Six days later it came out of action. By this time the hundred and fifty men left were commanded by the sole surviving officer, a 2nd Lieutenant.
In approaching his subject, Baynes is guided by Edmund Blunden’s admonition in his poem, “Victorians”: “… read first, and fully shape/The diagram of life which governed them.” The officers and other ranks of the 2nd Scottish Rifles, as he carefully pieces together the “diagram” of their life, are particular, not representative men. He begins by introducing us to the battalion as it stood, garrisoned on Malta, at the start of the war. It numbered about a thousand officers and men–large enough a unit to be self-sufficient by the standards of the day, small enough for there to be a strong level of familiarity among the members–fewer than thirty in total–of the officers’ mess, among the NCOs–roughly fifty–and among the men in each of the four companies.
The battalion was somewhat exception in that it came late for a Regular Army unit to the front, having spent some years in the relative isolation of Malta. The men averaged over five years’ service. The routines of garrison life–the day in, day out grind of inspection, drill, and firing practice–was certainly monotonous and unwelcoming to the imagination, but as Baynes shows, it was remarkably effective in reinforcing the men’s “bloody-mindedness”:
When using the term I do not mean a surly refusal to do what is ordered but a refusal to give way to conditions which might be expected to make a man sour. It has an element of rebellion in it, of course, but the rebelling is not so much against authority as against difficult circumstances. As things get worse the man with this quality becomes more determined to stick them out.
The battalion’s six days in the Battle of Neuve Chapelle put its bloody mindedness to an exceptional test. After marching up to the front trenches through the night of 9-10 March, it stood, waiting, for over two hours, until the artillery fell silent and the attack began. It was a classic example of the disastrous tactic of sending hundreds of men clambering over the top:
Almost at the same moment came another noise: the whip and crack of the enemy machine-guns opening up with deadly effect. From the intensity of their fire, and its accuracy, it was clear that the shelling had not been as effective as expected. Worse than its lack of effect on the enemy was the fact that it had scarcely touched the wire. Instead of being broken up, the wire and the thick hedge looked just the same as they had before the bombardment.
The attack began at 8:05 AM. By 9:30 AM, all but two officers were dead or wounded, and over thirty of the NCOs. Three hundred fifty or so of the other ranks were killed or wounded. They had managed to advance about a three hundred meters.
Further assaults during the day were able to secure the German’s front line of trenches, but progress stopped after that. By the afternoon of 12 March, General Haig, then commanding the First Army, issued orders to “push through regardless of loss, using reserves if required.” Unfortunately, the 2nd Scottish Rifles had no reserves by then, and as Baynes remarks, “From here the story of the battle becomes a sorry tale, except for the courage, willingness, and effort of the soldiers who tried to do the impossible.” On the night of 14-15 March, 2nd Lieutenant Somervail and one senior NCO led one hundred forty-three men back to their billets.
Baynes completes his account of the battle and his assessment of its significance (he calls it “a failure but not a waste” in that it demonstrated the combat integrity of the British forces in the first major offensive action after the stalemate of the previous fall) by page 91 of the book. Then the most interesting material begins.
Over the next seven chapters, he focuses on the battalion and the various factors that reinforced–or undermined–its ability to remain intact, on duty, and engaged in the battle for over four days after losing over three-fourths of its men. He describes the officers, who sat roughly half-way up the social and economic hierarchy of the Regular Army. They came from upper middle class families and good schools but not great wealth. They believed in sport and maintaining existing values and social distinctions. They were not bullies or martinets, however, and the worst thing one could say of a fellow officer was that he didn’t take care of his men.
The NCOs and other ranks came from poor working class areas in Glasgow and the surrounding Lanarkshire. The Army was generally considered a step up in the world:
One could almost say that for them the whole of their lives had been a conditioning for the trenches. As children they had learnt to live happily with so many of the things that made life at the front unbearable for those reared in gentler surrounding. Cold, ragged clothes, dirt, lice and fleas, bad food, hard beds, overcrowding, rats, ugly surroundings; these were nothing new to someone whose boyhood had been passed in a Glasgow slum.
Duty in the Army brought order and cleanliness to his life, a healthier diet, and regular exercise. The Army–particularly in the person of his Sergeant–was interested in him: “people cared whether he wore his uniform correctly, whether he progressed in his training, and whether he was a credit to the Regiment.” The Regiment, in fact, was, according to Baynes, “the quintessence of the morale of the pre-1914 Army.”
Discipline and drill were also significant factors. Maintaining a marksman’s rating was one of the few ways in which a private could make a little more money, and hours were spent every week in “pokey drill”–loading and unloading dummy rounds to increase firing speed. Many British Army regulars achieved such a rate of fire that the Germans believed their battalions were equipped with dozens of machine guns (they averaged two guns per battalion, in fact).
The strength of the class system prior to the war was another factor. The officers and men of the 2nd Scottish Rifles came from a world in which class structure and the inherent right of the more privileged to command those in the lower classes was accepted. Many writers have argued that the experience of combat on the Western Front, particularly the relentless years of futile “over the top” attacks, ultimately undermined this acceptance, leading to strikes and the rise of the Labour Party afterwards. But in the early days, when the battalion marched into its first battle, class was, Baynes argues, a greater factor in morale than religion, morals, or patriotism.
Since its first publication in 1967, Morale has come to be recognized as an essential text on its subject. Although only reprinted once, in 1987, you can find it cited in numerous articles in British, American, Canadian, French, and even Israeli military journals. To use it as a guide for dealing with the morale of combat troops in other situations, though, is, I think, a mistake. One could never–should never–attempt to reproduce the factors that enabled the 2nd Scottish Rifles to remain intact through devastating losses.
What makes Morale a book worth rediscovering is not its value as a source of instruction but its high merit as an attempt by one author to deeply understand his subject. Although examining the battalion’s morale provided Baynes with the motivation to undertake this book, I would argue that its greatest value is in offering an exceptional example of reconstructing, in Blunden’s words, “the diagram of life” which governed a particular group of men in a particular time and a particular situation. This is the kind of history that helps remind us that, as David McCullough puts it, people in that past “didn’t live in the past”: “They lived in the present. It is their present, not our present, and they don’t know how it’s going to come out. They weren’t just like we are because they lived in that very different time. You can’t understand them if you don’t understand how they perceived reality and you don’t understand that unless you understand the culture.” And for understanding the culture of the Regular British Army at the start of the First World War, I can recommend no book more highly than John Baynes’ Morale.
Being selected for the Pulitzer Prize is no guarantee of that anyone will remember your work–at least not more than ten years afterward. Take Stephen Bonsal. Unfinished Business, his diaries and reminiscences from the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, where he sat between President Woodrow Wilson and Wilson’s assistant, Colonel Edward House, translating the speeches and remarks of the other attendees, won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for History. Sixty years later, the book is as obscure as, say, Forgotten First Citizen: John Bigelow by Margaret Clapp–the 1948 winner, by the way.
That fact alone is no great crime. There are plenty of award winners that soon lose whatever aura of excellence they might have held. And there are some, we must admit, that won only because advocates were divided over better works, opening a crack through which they slipped as dark horses of lesser merit.
When it was selected in 1945, the primary significance of Unfinished Business was probably seen in light of the impending end of World War Two and the creation of the United Nations. All parties involved in the establishment of the United Nations recognized that they had an obligation to learn from the mistakes of the past, and of the Peace Conference in particular.
The legendary version of the Peace Conference was that the idealism and altruism of the American, Wilson, was undermined by the self-interest and small-mindedness of Old Europe–of France and Italy, who insisted on reparations that gave Hitler fuel for his rise to power a dozen years later. The reality, as recalled with remarkable candor and dispassion by Bonsal, was much more mundane.
Wilson was long on ideas and brittle in character, lacking the leather-assed patience required of an effective diplomat. Small words in little clauses consumed hours of talk over fine points, and much of the time big issues pivoted on the most trivial matters:
Last night M. Larnaude [Ferdinand Larnaude, a French delegate to the Conference] again drooled along for hours in criticism or rather in misrepresentation of the Monroe Doctrine reservation, and many of his hearers feared that a filibuster was under way, but such was not the case. Suddenly pulling out his watch with an expression of alarm that was comical to behold, the learned dean muttered, “Ciel! I have only twelve minutes to catch my train, but I warn you, M. le President, that I shall resume the statement of my objections at the next Plenary Session.”
The older I get, the more I come to view politics and diplomacy as the most difficult of all arts. Bonsal’s diaries and reminiscences of the Peace Conference vividly illustrate the obstacles that lie in the path of any forward movement of mankind when it operates in a political setting. Self-interest is only the simplest and most obvious one. Personalities, temperaments, quirks, habits, and eccentricities are minefields that lurk beneath the skins of every individual at the table. Differences in working hours–Clemenceau, like Churchill, was one for naps and late hours; Wilson preferred a predictable day-time routine–toss grit in the machinery. Language, language, language: even with the finest translators (and Bonsal provided a simultaneous translation at every session Wilson attended), words and phrases are misinterpreted and misunderstood. And technology always gets in the way:
Hughes of Australia, indeed, made several outrageous attacks on the President, which, however, Wilson did not take up at one or even later because, as on the Australian secretaries explained to all present, Hughes did not understand the President’s point of view owing to the fact that, as so often before, his electrical hearing apparatus had failed to function.
Bonsal’s book opens on the eve of the Armistice and ends a little over a year later, with the Senate’s rejection of the Treaty. He worked alongside House, and later Wilson, through the preparations and initial sessions of the Conference. A veteran foreign correspondent fluent in a number of European tongues, he acted as an emissary to many of the other delegations and as a personal advisor to House and Wilson. He remained at the negotiating tables throughout most of the Conference, taking only a break of a few weeks to accompany South African General Jan Christian Smuts on a mission to Austria, Hungary, and Serbia in March and April 1919.
This trip, along with a later journey to Berlin after the Conference, provide the most memorable sections of the book. Bonsal had lived in Vienna for a number of years and reported on the Balkan wars in the years leading up to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914. He notes everywhere how quickly the structures of the Hapsburg Empire crumbled away after Emperor Charles I relinquished the throne in 1918:
I visited Francis Joseph’s apartment. I saw that, as the tradition had it, there was no water laid on. I scrutinized his Gummi portable bathtub and saw that now it was full of holes. The starving mice that had formerly lived on the fat tidbits that fell from the imperial table, reduced to starving rations like all living things in the Danube capital, were gnawing on it.
Later, after the Conference, he traveled to Berlin, where he’d first met House in 1915. Bonsal found the Kaiser’s former capital in disarray, with well-meaning but overwhelmed socialists attempting to reconstruct a government while Unter den Linden was filled with wounded veterans from the war: “crouched against the cold, damp walls as though ashamed for the stranger to see their distorted leg and arm stumps, their dead eyes, or their faces scarred almost beyond recognition.”
Arriving in Paris late at night, he watched the train’s passengers depart the station and head back to their homes:
The train hobbled into Paris about midnight. After standing in the crowded corridor with my heavy pack for eight hours, I found I could hardly walk. I leaned against an iron pillar and watched and watched and waited. Slowly the silent mob of the lame, the halt and the blind, the crape-draped widows, and the pale-faced, sad-eyed orphans of some of the four hundred thousand gallant soldiers who died defending the great fortress against the onrush of the invading Germans, dissolved. For me the pomp and pageantry of war had vanished for a long time, perhaps forever, and what remained was misery and tears, loneliness and squalor. It was hours before the last of the war widows, carrying children who would never see their fathers, disappeared into the darkness of the city where victory perched. But I shall see them always?always.
Neglected though it may be, Unfinished Business is an exceptional book worth rediscovering by anyone interested in history and politics. There are not many writers who can cover the posturing and manoeuvring of the greatest men of the time and, a few pages later, describe the sorrows and woes of the lowest in society–and in neither case losing his sense of perspective. As Time magazine’s reviewer wrote, “”no one else has presented the plight of the plain people of Europe, in relation to the strained secrecy of the Conference, and few have written of their agony as does Colonel Bonsal in terms so hardheaded and so poignant.” I hope one of these days to catch up with his 1937 memoir of his years as a foreign correspondent, Heyday In A Vanished World.
But the old routine had to be followed again, almost as monotonously as in Saint Pierre Wood and in the camp of Arcachon — drudgery of all sorts, fetching water, carrying soup, wine, grenades, work with pick and shovel to extend the branching ways. The coupe-coupe and gun were useless here too and the only difference the Blacks could see in the trenches was that they could find death there at any moment, but they had no better chance of dealing it.
Certainly life in these holes in the ground did not seem like the war they had imagined. War as their parents had always spoken of it was war in the open, the stealthy surroundings of a village, the ambuscade behind the trees, then all at once warriors dashing forward with wild cries, palisades overthrown, streets taken, the combat around the huts, the gun that once fired cannot be reloaded, sabre strokes on naked flesh, screams of women who flee into the forest, necklaces and bracelets snatched, old men gutted like useless beasts, young men borne into slavery — these were the memories of ancient warfare. Then at night the return, driving before them droves of cattle and captives, women bending before the conquerors, dances, tambours, songs of the witch doctors, all celebrating the exploits of the glorious day….
Intrigued, I did a little searching and located an English translation: The Long Walk of Samba Diouf. It appears to have been out of print in English since its first printing back in 1924, but it didn’t cost too much to obtain a copy in good condition. It was written by Jerome and Jean Tharaud, French brothers and writers who collaborated on dozens of books, won the Goncourt Prize in 1906, and were separately inducted into l’Academie Française (in 1938 and 1946).
The Long Walk of Samba Diouf tells the story of a young Senegalese fisherman who sets out to claim some animals that were left to him by a relative. His journey takes him through lands belonging to other tribes, and along the way, he learns of the war that has broken out in the homeland of the Toubabs — the local term for the French colonials. Like most other natives, he ignores the news, concerned more with his fantasies of coming home a wealthy man, ready to marry the daughter of one of the strong men in his village.
Unfortunately for Samba, he wanders into an strange town just as the French authorities announce a draft of able-bodied young Africans. For every 100 villagers, one man has to be offered up for service in to the Toubab cause. A few local men befriend him, ply him with palm wine, and turn him in as their contribution. When Samba comes to, he’s on his way to a boat destined for France.
Although the Tharauds (at least as translated) adopt a rather stilted tone to convey it, the mix of tribes, languages, customs, and religions in Samba’s group of inductees is the most memorable aspect of his story. The Toubabs see the men as a faceless band of “les noirs”, but they are a wild hodgepodge — Muslims and animists; sophisticated traders and primitive bushmen. Each has some story to tell around the campfire or barracks stove each night, and each has his own interpretation of this odd endeavor of the French to turn them into a uniformed batch of able, if loosely disciplined, utility troops.
After months of training, the Africans are hauled up to the front. Expecting to put their skills as warriors to the test, they spend their days merely filling in shell craters and laying down new duckboard lanes through the mud. Finally, the NCO in charge of the group convinces his commander that the men deserve a chance in combat. In a brief, furious scene in which the sensations of an attack across No Man’s Land is mixed with learned impressions of war as told by their elders, the men attack a German line, and Samba is wounded.
From this point, the journey rolls back in a fast rewind. Samba recovers in a field hospital, wondering for a moment if the tenderness of a beautiful French nurse could lead to romance. It’s all in his head, of course, and soon enough he’s boarding another ship, headed back to Africa. He eventually gets back to his home. In true war story cliche, his girlfriend has married another, and he’s never managed to collect the livestock that was to make his fortune. He returns to fishing. What significance the whole experience has had for him is unclear as the book ends.
It would be hard for any book written almost eighty years ago by white men about the world as experienced by African men not to seem a bit dated now. To the credit of the Tharauds, who specialized in accounts of peoples very different from the advantaged, intellectual world they inhabited — Africans, Jews, Gypsies — they make considerable efforts to take the perspective of the Africans at face value. Although they adopt primitive dictions to convey the talk and thoughts of the men, there is relatively little implication that these conversations and perceptions are not sublte and sophisticated in their own way. The Tharauds’ Samba is a considerable development from James Fennimore Cooper’s American Indians, and The Long Walk of Samba Diouf probably ranks among the more balanced and sympathetic Western attempts to depict a Third World culture.
Jerome and Jean Tharaud are largely forgotten now, even in France. I suspect this is due mostly to the fact that the gap between the French and the people of their former colonies has shrunk considerably — physically, at least, if not in other ways. However, they deserve recognition for creating some of the earliest works in which these peoples were treated from an anthropological rather than imperialistic perspective.
The novel is thus both a critique of British imperialism – of its coarsening effects, its brutalities and self-deceptions – and a warning against literary populism. But it is also a proper novel about human failure, about the price paid (and the public benefits reaped) when part of the human heart is suppressed. It seems impossible that Kipling could not have heard of Dingley; also highly unlikely he would have read it (not least because of Archie’s death-scene). I can’t find Kipling making any written or reported comment on the novel; fictionalising him, I would imagine silent contempt as his reaction to this piece of Gallic impertinence.
Unfortunately, Dingley stands even less chance than The Long Walk of Samba Diouf of being rediscovered, at least by English readers — it’s never been translated.
Close on now —must be. they’d be getting tea ready at home. Had they his field card yet? Fulshaw’s eyes were brilliant with excitement. The first birthday he’d missed at home. They’d send him some of the cake in his next parcel. Must stick near Jack. One up the spout … make sure his safety catch was off. What an uproar. Good job they didn’t know at home exactly what was happening.
The burden of shells lifted, the absence of racket stinging his ear-drums. He heard a whistle, a way off. Fulshaw swept his arm upwards, climbing the parapet. “Come on, lads!”
Bradshaw experienced a moment of indecision. Should he jump over the parapet first, risking getting marked down, or hesitate till the others climbed out? Jerry’s machine-guns would rake the parapet; many got pipped in the head in the act of climbing out. Like that film. He found himself on top, enormously magnified and exposed, and joined in the cramped forward walk of the irregularly formed line. Two others between him and Jack. Better leave it at that. When would that empty feeling in the stomach go? He felt afraid to look in front, and kept his eyes down. They saucered with wonder at seeing a sun-baked face peering up at him from one shell-hole. It smelt. He saw another; a green-white face pressed into the side of the hole, the remainder a limp, ragged bundle of khaki. Some other battalion had been over the same ground.
He raised his eyes slowly over the dry pot-holed surface of No Man’s Land; saw in front what might have been an indistinct row of heads and shoulders, some distance away. Impossible to go straight. Some holes had things to avoid in them. They plodded blindly over the innumerable gougings towards the crackling machine-guns and rifle-fire. The impetuous Fulshaw fell first, in Bradshaw’s path. The little private bent down on one knee, forgetting the order that nobody had to stop with wounded. His officer waved him on, groaning; other hand to groin. Bradshaw had a desire to stay.
“Shall I get the stretcher-bearers, sir?”
The officer’s face grew drawn with pain.
“No, no! Carry on!”
Bradshaw looked round and espied a dud shell. He pulled it up, surprised by its weight, and set it upright on its base near the officer.
“Just to mark the spot, sir. I’ll tell the stretcher-bearers where you are as soon as I see them.”
He passed on, a dozen yards behind the thin, extended line. They looked pathetically ineffective. As he caught up, the back of Corporal Dawkins’ head fell out; upraised arms sagged to earth. Bradshaw slipped in beside Driver without a word. Dawkins killed. He was post corporal at Bouzincourt–handed Bradshaw his mail.
They were men in front there. Germans. Patches of green further behind; unshelled fields. Sergeant Todd called out,
“Don’t bunch up, there …”
Bradshaw saw a wide gap on his right, moved right to lessen it. The next man closed towards him, the unaccountably dropped flat. He crouched lower, an attitude that gave a false impression of grimness and determination — men ready to strike. They were merely trying to minimise their bodily targets.
The spasmodic crackling rippled, then sharply cracked in its sweeping arc. Above it Bradshaw head a choking sob. Somebody fell. The sergeant staggered but kept on. Another sob. Wounds … exhaustion? He didn’t know. But he no longer wondered why men walked to attack, even in broad daylight. The ground was abominably loose and uneven. No real surface. A series of craters and holes, with nothing to walk on but the loose rims.
The line thinned mysteriously; became little bunches of twos and threes. They stumbled on exhaustingly, throats dry. He looked up again. No mistaking them this time; less than a hundred yards away. He prayed for something to happen before he got that far. Chick was right, then? The Germans were safe in their dugouts whilst the ground was writhing under our barrage; ready to nip up when it lifted and catch us coming across?
No shells came to aid them now. They were targets. Sweating gunners would be saying:
“Well, if the bloody infantry don’t do something after that lot, that God we’ve got a Navy!”
The last seventy-five yards might well have been seventy-five miles. They would never get there. Every decent-sized shell-hole clung to Bradshaw’s feet, saying, “Get down to it, you fool. Get down to it! Pretend you’re wounded!” Driver was still there, to the left and slightly ahead. He wanted to draw nearer, but felt that, closer, one or the other would be hit. He knew that the slightest swerve or stumble could put him either in the direct track of a bullet or out of its line of flight. To the end of his days the picture of those stumbling men would remain with him; floundering into shell-holes; climbing out. Faltering, dropping, reeling on. Bent figures stumbling forward with distressful gasps; falling, often remaining down.
Fifty yards from the German trench the struggling remnant expended its last ounces of diminishing energy. It gathered, too scattered and demoralised to go farther, into two huge craters, like the sheep that soldiers are.
I first stumbled across Other Ranks while taking Prof. Don Emerson’s course on the First World War at the University of Washington. I was in the habit of roaming the stacks of Suzzallo Library, particularly the long aisles of old fiction that sat in a neglected corner of the fifth floor. As a break from studying, I would browse the shelves, inspecting titles that seemed interesting. Even then, I hoped to find lost treasures among those forgotten books.
I recognized the title phrase, used to described the enlisted men in the British Army, from the course, but I didn’t recognize Tilsley’s name. I did, however, know Edmund Blunden, who’d written the Introduction. Blunden’s Undertones of War was one of the memoirs on our reading list. His name suggested this might be something worth reading, so I checked Other Ranks out and read it over the next weekend.
I had already become fascinated by the breakdown in class structures that resulted from the meatgrinder of trench warfare, but I found Other Ranks unique among the remarkable British memoirs of the Western Front. Blunden’s own book, along with Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, Guy Chapman’s A Passionate Prodigality, Siegfried Sasson’s trilogy, and other well-regarded first-hand accounts, were all from the perspective of educated, upper-class officers. Until oral histories of ordinary soldiers began to be published in the 1960s, hardly any corresponding accounts could be found to speak for them.
For that alone, Other Ranks would be worth remembering. But this is more than just an authentic memoir of the life and deaths of men in the front line: it is a powerful piece of prose. Tilsley’s style is careful, economical. Nothing is overstated. His sentences are often short, almost telegraphic. The poetry is between the lines.
Although written as a novel, Other Ranks opens with a brief disclaimer: “None of the characters in this chronicle is fictitious.” We can assume, then, that Dick Bradshaw, from whose viewpoint the story is told, represents Tilsley. If so, then Other Ranks is all the more remarkable for its success in portraying the evolution of Bradshaw’s outlook from naive draftee to seasoned veteran.
In the very first paragraph, Bradshaw imagines “an inspection, when some great general would stand before him and say: ‘Fight for England–you? Run away, boy, and come back when you’re a man!” Still too young to shave, Bradshaw is a quiet, respectful lad, probably from the family of a clerk or shopkeeper. He and his buddy, Jack, watch guardedly as the older men in their company of Lancastershire draftees indulge their vices: drinking, gambling, smoking, whoring–and, most of all, boasting. Both fear being shown up as unfit to be soldiers.
The book opens as Bradshaw’s “C” Company leaves the depot at Etaples and heads for their first engagement at the front: a late and futile attack in the Battle of the Somme. The excerpt above describes climactic moment of going over the top, the infantry assault across No Man’s Land, a tactic that claimed hundreds of thousands of casualties in the course of the war and almost never succeeded.
Over the next fourteen months, “C” Company carries on, alternating between stints in the front line and carrying out tedious chores at bases “down the line.” As Tilsley writes, “down the line,” “up the line,” and “in the trenches” “were elastic phrases. To the infantry, Poperinghe [ten miles from the front] was down the line; to non-combatant units, up.”
The unit experiences the miserable and perilous lot of what was known as the P.B.I.: the Poor Bloody Infantry. A wounded Highlander Bradshaw encounters near the end sums up their unenviable lot:
And of all the lousy jobs in this bloodstained war is anybody so mucked about as the P.B.I.? You exist like a pig for weeks on end, grovelling and nosing and snivelling for rations. Your constitution is steadily undermined month after month by insufficient grub. Your body is lousy and dirty, and covered with disgusting sores. The hair on you is a nesting and breeding-place for chats and crabs, and has to be shaved off. You’re unclean; degraded. Any Tom, Dick, or Harry from the R.E.s [Royal Engineers] can muck you about. You have the most dangerous, tedious, monotonous, and thankless job of all, and you get less pay than anybody else.
Though he proves a worthy soldier and earns promotions to corporal and sergeant, Bradshaw loses any illusions he had about the war and his leaders. He goes from thinking of “great generals” who will size him up to referring to virtually everyone above the rank of subaltern as “The older men who use, and misuse, us….” As he writes in his diary at the close of the book,
So now, after nearly two years in the army and fourteen months overseas, I am returning as a wounded Tommy who has done his bit. The irony of it! I came here with a duty before me–to kill Germans. For months I received instructions on how to drive home into my adversaries’ bodies the long pointed blade of steel recently discarded. There has never been blood upon its surface; only a little mud and dust. Hardly more potent has been my rifle–and both have been carried many wearisome miles. My service has been a washout; undistinguished. Yet I have seen many dead men and boys–so many that the sight ceased to shock. Not normal dead, but cruel mutilations that were never on God’s earth meant to be.
Published in 1931, Other Ranks was late and lost in the wave of war memoirs and novels. The Times Literary Supplement gave it a brief, polite review. Never released in the U.S., it soon vanished. Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory missed it, as did other studies of war literature by Bernard Bergonzi and Samuel Hynes. Aside from a rare copy that pops up now and again for hundreds of dollars, it sits collecting dust on the shelves of scholarly libraries like the one where I found it. If I could choose only one book from this site to be reissued and rediscovered, this would be it. Not only in recognition of its exceptional balance of honesty and discretion, but in tribute to the sacrifice of a generation of Other Ranks.
Mr. Blunden remarks that Mr. Tilsley “misses nothing.” He has, indeed, a very keen eye. Like most “other ranks” who have written of their experiences in the War, he had had an upbringing and an education superior to that of his fellows. He was one of those who believed that the Army could not make soldiers of his kind, and admits that when he saw a German raiding party approaching he forgot in his excitement to take off his safety-catch. Perhaps for this reason he displays at times a pessimism regarding the respective qualities of British and German troops which is at war with his pride in the 55th Division…. Mr. Tisley’s description of an attack on the Somme is as vivid as anything of the sort that has been written.
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.
(1934), was based on material began in the camp. He saw himself as an exception case, though, and was careful to caution in his preface that this must not “induce my readers to think that I call good what in itself is evil.”
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, first published posthumously in 1935, was reissued by 
, on Cohen-Portheim’s experiences during the war and his interment, appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of 
, after reading 
–reissued as a New York Review Classic–Cobb calls van der Meersch “a regionalist who had written almost exclusively about Roubaix and who had brought honour to the town by winning the 
. By the time Cobb met him, “He was tubercular and had fallen under the influence of a medical eccentric who preached under-nourishment as a cure for tuberculosis; his most recent novel [Corps et âmes, translated as 
Being selected for the Pulitzer Prize is no guarantee of that anyone will remember your work–at least not more than ten years afterward. Take 
, his diaries and reminiscences from the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, where he sat between President Woodrow Wilson and Wilson’s assistant, Colonel Edward House, translating the speeches and remarks of the other attendees, won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for History. Sixty years later, the book is as obscure as, say, 
by Margaret Clapp–the 1948 winner, by the way.
Bonsal’s book opens on the eve of the Armistice and ends a little over a year later, with the Senate’s rejection of the Treaty. He worked alongside House, and later Wilson, through the preparations and initial sessions of the Conference. A veteran foreign correspondent fluent in a number of European tongues, he acted as an emissary to many of the other delegations and as a personal advisor to House and Wilson. He remained at the negotiating tables throughout most of the Conference, taking only a break of a few weeks to accompany South African General Jan Christian Smuts on a mission to Austria, Hungary, and Serbia in March and April 1919.
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Close on now —must be. they’d be getting tea ready at home. Had they his field card yet? Fulshaw’s eyes were brilliant with excitement. The first birthday he’d missed at home. They’d send him some of the cake in his next parcel. Must stick near Jack. One up the spout … make sure his safety catch was off. What an uproar. Good job they didn’t know at home exactly what was happening.