His linked novels, The Forsyte Saga, got a new life in later years when, like so many other British novels from that era, it was filmed as a BBC miniseries. He won the Nobel Prize in 1932.
Arnold Bennett was another big prewar name in England, thanks to his bestselling 1908 novel about the industrial Midlands, The Old Wives’ Tale, though many critics dismissed him as an unapologetic hack (he liked to brag about churning out half a million words a year). “He was a merchant of words,” one summary puts it, “frankly writing for money, but writing with extraordinary facility and keen observation.”
He lived in France for eight years prior to the war (he was forty-seven when it broke out), and had married a French actress—so it was no surprise when, after writing suitably jingoistic articles for the secret War Propaganda Bureau, he was made Director of Propaganda in France for the Ministry of Information.
In 1915, he toured the western front, and his shock at the conditions in the trenches, it is said, caused him to be physically ill for several weeks afterwards.
“A great nation assailed by war has not only its frontiers to protect; it must also protect its good sense. It must protect itself from the hallucinations, injustices, and follies which the plague lets loose. To each his part: to the armies the protection of the soil of their native land; to the thinkers the defense of its thoughts.”
No one did more to protect “good sense” during the war than the man who wrote these lines: the French novelist Romain Rolland, author of the ten-volume Jean-Christophe, which brought him the Nobel Prize in 1915. He had an immense reputation across Europe, but that didn’t save him from being savagely excoriated from all sides when he published a book called Above the Battle in 1915, laying out with impeccable logic and passion the insanity of Germans, French, and English alike.
The uproar forced him to leave France for Switzerland, where he spent the war years doing his best to help combatants of all armies through his Agence internationale des prisonniers de guerre, and reading and rereading his beloved Tolstoy.
He was forty-eight when the war started, well up in middle age, but he was and remained a fierce defender of the rights of the young against the evil of the old: “Young men,” he implored, “do not bother about old people. Make a stepping-stone of our bodies and go forward.”
Jean-Christophe had been one of the very few novels predicting the war, which lent even more authority to Rolland’s antiwar stance. Despite the abuse, he was a writer more than capable of standing up for himself.
“For a year I have been rich in enemies,” he wrote in 1915 in the preface to his book. “Let me say this to them: they can hate me, but they will not teach me to hate. I have no concern with them. My business is to say what I believe to be fair and humane. Whether this pleases or irritates them is not my business. I know that words once uttered make their way of themselves. Hopefully I sow them in the bloody soil. The harvest will come.”
The writer that Rolland is addressing, Gerhart Hauptmann, largely forgotten now, once enjoyed a reputation equal to Rolland’s own. He won the Nobel Prize in 1912 for naturalistic plays in the Ibsen style, like The Weavers, which brought him world fame. Fifty-two when the war broke out, he was considered by the German authorities as suspiciously radical, possibly a pacifist, though it’s clear from this entry that he could defend German actions as fiercely as the most rabid patriot.
Hauptmann’s reputation had its ups and downs after the war. The Weimar Republic anointed him as one of the great German immortals, but his reputation suffered abroad; he remained in Germany under the Nazis and this was held against him, though his posthumously produced play, The Darkness, was one of the first German works to try to come to terms with guilt toward the Jews.
It wasn’t just novelists, playwrights, and poets that were commissioned to write about the war as it broke out. Jerome K. Jerome, at fifty-five, was England’s most popular humorist thanks to his still highly readable account of a trip down the Thames, Three Men in a Boat, which sold over a million copies worldwide. During the war, he gave up writing and served as an ambulance driver for the French. Forgotten now, he managed to sound like the adult in the room at a time when writers with more serious reputations were responding semi-hysterically.
He’s in Bartlett’s for a one-liner more than a little applicable to wartime propaganda.
“It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.”
American writers, when war approached their own country, would respond like their German, French, and English colleagues, turning out articles and essays for the leading magazines and newspapers; Americans, though, could afford to argue in comparative leisure, with their country maintaining a precarious neutrality for the war’s first three years. Writerly arguments in America could potentially affect policymakers in a way they couldn’t over in Europe.
Booth Tarkington was almost unique in American literary history, being a novelist who enjoyed both a high critical reputation and enormous public popularity. His Penrod remains a classic account of a Midwestern boyhood, while his Alice Adams and The Magnificent Ambersons both won Pulitzer Prizes, the latter being turned into one of Orson Welles’s best movies. Forty-seven when America joined the war, he would publish, under the “National Security League” imprint, an impossible-to-find book with the provocative title The Rich Man’s War.
The Most Desperately Earnest Thing
—Arthur Conan Doyle
When one writes with a hot heart upon events which are still recent one is apt to lose one’s sense of proportion. At every step one should check oneself by the reflection as to how this may appear ten years hence, and how far events which seem shocking and abnormal may prove themselves to be a necessary accompaniment of every condition of war. But a time has now come when in cold blood, with every possible restraint, one is justified in saying that since the most barbarous campaigns of the Thirty Years War there has been so such deliberate policy of murder as has been adopted in this struggle by the German forces. This is the more terrible since these forces are not bands of turbulent mercenary soldiers, but they are the nation itself, and their deeds are condoned or even applauded by the entire national Press. It is not on the chiefs of the army that the whole guilt of this terrible crime must rest, but it is upon the whole German nation, which for generations to come must stand condemned before the civilised world for this reversion to those barbarous practices from which Christianity, civilisation, and chivalry had gradually rescued the human race. They may, and do, plead the excuse they are “earnest” in war, but all nations are earnest in war, which is the most desperately earnest thing of which we have any knowledge. How earnest we are will be shown when the question of endurance begins to tell. But no earnestness can condone the crimes of the nation which deliberately breaks those laws which had been endorsed by the common consent of humanity.
War may have a beautiful as well as a terrible side, and be full of touches of human sympathy and restraint which mitigates its unavoidable horror. Such have been the characteristics always of the secular wars between the British and the French. Could one imagine Germans making war in such a spirit? Think of their destruction of the University of Louvain and the Cathedral of Reims. What a gap between them—the gap that separates civilisation from the savage!
Can any possible term save a policy of murder be applied to the use of aircraft by the Germans? It has always been a principle of warfare that unfortified towns should not be bombarded. What is to be said, then, for the continual use of bombs by the Germans, which have usually been wasted in the destruction of cats or dogs, but which have occasionally torn to pieces some woman or child? If bombs were dropped on the forts of Paris as part of a scheme for reducing the place, then nothing could be said in objection, but how are we to describe the action of men who fly over a crowded city dropping bombs promiscuously which can have no military effect whatever, and are entirely aimed at the destruction of innocent civilians? These men have
been obliging enough to drop their cards as well as their bombs on several occasions. I see no reason why these should not be used in evidence against them, or why they should not be hanged as murderers when they fall into the hands of the Allies. It is a murderous innovation in the laws of war, and unless it is sternly repressed it will establish a most sinister precedent for the future.
If the words of one humble individual could reach across the sea, there are two things upon which I should wish to speak earnestly to a German: the one, our own character, the other, the future which he is deliberately preparing for the Fatherland which he loves. Our papers do get over there, even as theirs come over here, so one may hope it is not impossible that some German may give a thought to what I say, if he is not so bemused by the atmosphere of lies in which his Press has enveloped him that he cannot recognise cold truth when he sees it.
First as to ourselves: we have never been a nation who fought with hatred. It is our ideal to fight in a sporting spirit. It is not that we are less in earnest, but it is that the sporting spirit itself is a thing very largely evolved by us and is a natural expression of our character. We fight as hard as we can, and we like and admire those who fight hard against us so long as they keep within the rules of the game. All British prize-fights end with the shaking of hands. Though the men could no longer see each other, they were led up and their hands were joined. When a combatant refuses to do this, it has always been looked upon as unmanly, and we say that bad blood has been left behind. So in war we have always wished to fight to a finish and then be friends, whether we had won or lost.
Now, this is just what we should wish to do with Germany, and it is what Germany is rapidly making impossible. She has, in our opinion, fought a brave but thoroughly foul fight. And now she uses every means to excite a bitter hatred which shall survive the war. The Briton is tolerant and easy-going in times of peace—too careless, perhaps, of the opinion of other nations. But at present he is in a most alert and receptive mood, noting and remembering very carefully every word that comes to him as to the temper of the German people and the prospects of the future. He is by no means disposed to pass over all these announcements of permanent hatred. On the contrary, he is evidently beginning, for the first time since Napoleon’s era, to show something approaching hatred in return. He—and “he” stands for every Briton across the seas as well as for the men of the Islands—makes a practical note of it all, and it will not be forgotten, but will certainly bear very definite fruits. The national thoughts do not come forth in wild poems of hate, but they none the less are gloomy and resentful, with the deep, steady resentment of a nation which is slow to anger.
But the pity of it all! We might have had a straight, honest fight, but all this has been rendered impossible by all these hysterical screamers of hate, and by those methods of murder on land, sea, and in the air with which the war has been conducted.
It is understood that this is a fight to the end. That is what we desire. Our grandchildren will thrill as they read of the days that we endure.
From The German War by Arthur Conan Doyle; Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1914.
They Must Be Destroyed
—Maurice Maeterlinck
At these moments of tragedy none should be allowed to speak who cannot shoulder a rifle, for the written word seems so monstrously useless and so overwhelmingly trivial in face of this mighty drama that will for a long time and maybe forever free mankind from the scourge of war—the one scourge among all that cannot be excused and that cannot be explained, since alone among all scourges it issues entirely from the hands of man.
This is the moment for us to frame our inexorable resolution. After the final victory, when the enemy is crushed—as crushed he will be—efforts will be made to enlist our sympathy. We shall be told that the unfortunate German people are merely the victims of their monarch and their feudal caste; that no blame attaches to the Germany we know that is so sympathetic and cordial—the Germany of quaint old houses and open-hearted greetings; the Germany that sits under its lime trees beneath the clear light of the moon—but only to Prussia; that homely, peace-loving Bavaria, the genial, hospitable dwellers on the banks of the Rhine, the Silesians and Saxon—I know not who besides—have merely obeyed and been compelled to obey orders they detested, but were unable to resist.
We are in the face of reality now. Let us look at it well and pronounce our sentence, for this is the moment when we hold the proofs in our hands; when the elements of the crime are hot before us and should out—the truth that will soon fade from our memory. Let us tell ourselves now therefore that all we shall be told thereafter will be false. Let us unflinchingly adhere to what we decide at this moment when the glare of the horror is upon us.
It is not true that in this gigantic crime there are innocent and guilty or degrees of guilt. They stand on one level, all who have taken part. The German from the north has no more especial craving for blood than the German from the south has especial tenderness and pity. It is very simple. It is the German from one end of the country to the other who stands revealed as a beast of prey. We have here no wretched slaves dragged along by a tyrant King who alone is responsible. Nations have the governments they deserve, or rather the Government they have is truly no more than a magnified public projection of the private morality and mentality of a nation.
No nation can be deceived that does not want to be deceived.
We have forces here quite different than those on the surface—forces that are secret, irresistible, profound. It is these we must judge, must crush under heel once for all, for they are the only ones that will not be improved, softened, or brought into line by experience, progress, or even the bitterest lessons. Their springs lie far beneath hope or influence. They must be destroyed as we destroy a nest of wasps.
Even though individually and singly Germans are all innocent and merely led astray, they are none the less guilty in mass. This is the guilt that counts—that alone is actual and real, because it lays bare underneath their superficial innocence, the subconscious criminality of it all. No influence can prevail on the unconscious or subconscious. It never evolves. Let there come a thousand years of civilization, a thousand years of peace, with all possible refinements, art, and education, the German spirit which is its underlying element will remain absolutely the same as today and would declare itself when the opportunity came under the same aspect with the same infamy.
Through the whole course of history two distinct will-powers have been noticed that would seem to be the opposing elemental manifestations of the spirit of our globe, one seeking only evil, injustice, tyranny, suffering, the other strives for liberty, right, radiance, joy. These two powers stand once again face to face. Our opportunity is to annihilate the one that comes from below. Let us know how to be pitiless that we have no more need for pity. It is essential that the modern world should stamp out Prussian militarism as it would stamp out a poisonous fungus that for half a century had poisoned its days. The health of our planet is the question. Tomorrow the United States and Europe will have to take measures for the convalescence of the earth.
From Current History; the European War; The New York Times Company, New York, 1915.
The Most Sincere War
—G. K. Chesterton
Unless we are all mad, there is at the back of the most bewildering business a story; and if we are all mad, there is no such thing as madness. If I set a house on fire, it is quite true that I may illuminate many other people’s weaknesses as well as my own. It may be that the master of the house was burned because he was drunk; it may be that the mistress of the house was burned because she was stingy, and perished arguing about the expense of the fire-escape. It is, nevertheless, broadly true that they both were burned because I set fire to their house. That is the story of the thing. The mere facts of the story about the present European conflagration are quite as easy to tell.
Before we go on to the deeper things which make this war the most sincere war of human h
istory, it is easy to answer a question of why England came to be in it at all; as one asks how a man fell down a coal hole, or failed to keep an appointment. Facts are not the whole truth. But facts are facts, and in this case the facts are few and simple.
Prussia, France, and England had all promised not to invade Belgium, because it was the safest way of invading France. But Prussia promised that if she might break in through her own broken promise she would break in and not steal. In other words, we were offered at the same instant a promise of faith in the future and a proposal of perjury in the present.
Upon the immediate logical and legal origin of the English interest there can be no rational debate. There are some things so simple that one can almost prove them with plans and diagrams, as in Euclid. No; upon the cold facts of the final negotiations, as told by any of the diplomatists in any of the documents, there is no doubt about the story. And no doubt about the villain of the story ….
It will be noted that this ultimate test applies in the same way to Serbia as to Belgium and Britain. The Serbians may not be very peaceful people; but on the occasion under discussion it was certainly they who wanted peace. You may choose to think of the Serb as a sort of born robber; but on this occasion it was certainly the Austrians who were trying to rob. Similarly, you may call England perfidious as a sort of historical summary, and declare your private belief that Mr. Asquith was vowed from infancy to the ruin of the German Empire. But when all is said, it is nonsense to call a man perfidious because he keeps his promise.
Lastly, there is an attitude not unknown in the crisis against which I should particularly like to protest. I should address my protest especially to those lovers and pursuers of peace who, very shortsightedly, have occasionally adopted it. I mean the attitude which is impatient of these preliminary details about who did this or that and whether it was right or wrong. They are satisfied with saying that an enormous calamity called war has been begun by some or all of us, and should be ended by some or all of us. To these people this preliminary chapter about the precise happenings must appear not only dry, but essentially needless and barren. I wish to tell these people that they are wrong; that they are wrong upon all principles of human justice and historic continuity; but that they are especially and supremely wrong upon their own principles of arbitration and international peace.
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