It would be hard to argue with Rolland’s verdict, looking back on these writers now. In writing history, it’s best not to judge using hindsight, but in assessing literature we do it all the time—and it’s difficult to understand why the literary giants, who saw and understood so much, didn’t make the extra moral effort to condemn their own side as much as they did the opposing one. A brave few did—we will read their work later—but the giants excerpted here wrote nothing that risked their enormous reputations.
The best of them, the ones whose writings still resonate a hundred years later, were at least honest enough to admit that they found the war a torturous and tragic reversal of all they held dear. The one book that captures this best—the struggle of a sensitive writer to understand the Great War—is H. G. Wells’s Mr. Britling Sees It Through, which, though forgotten now, is the classic novel of World War I, or rather, the classic civilian novel of World War I.
My copy is the May 1917 edition published by Macmillan in New York. On the title page is listed the twenty-two reprintings the novel had had since it was published the previous September—an astonishing tribute to its popularity. “Gladys Stinnaman” is the name elegantly penciled in the front, and she added the date, “July 1917.” In the back, testifying further to Wells’s enormous influence, are advertisements for his earlier novels, including The War in the Air, published in 1907, which accurately predicted the battles that were now taking place between Fokkers and Spads in the skies over France.
The binding is the deep red that publishers of the day favored for their big names, with proud gold lettering for the title. It has just one illustration, a color frontispiece, with a handsome young man (he turns out to be an American) standing with his arms crossed, staring down at a pretty, redheaded Gibson girl reading a book on a garden bench. They will turn out to be minor characters—Wells needs a naive, well-meaning American to symbolize a naive, well-meaning America—but love and romance sold books even then, never mind the novel’s darkly serious themes.
The real hero of Mr. Britling Sees It Through is the title character, who is very much Wells himself—a renowned public intellectual who, after writing suitably patriotic articles at war’s start, retreats to the countryside and begins having second (and third and fourth) thoughts. It may be the bravest, most honest account of an intellectual dealing with the war that we have—and, by writing frankly about his own tortured sympathies and thoughts, Britling/Wells manages to speak for all those other writers who were trying to find a language suitable for a tragedy whose horrors not a single one of them had foreseen.
Joseph Conrad’s short novel The Heart of Darkness is such an unsparing depiction of the horrors central to the modern world that it comes as a shock to realize it was written in 1899, fifteen years before the Great War started. Still, if any writer was equipped by temperament and talent to understand the unfolding tragedy, it was surely Conrad, with his pessimism and irony, his empathy for strong men in situations of extreme duress … but he wrote very little about the war, and it seems to have caught him by surprise.
Dangerous surprise. Of all times to leave England for a European vacation, he chose the summer of 1914, taking his family to his birthplace in Poland just as the war was breaking out. He was very nearly caught and interned there as an enemy civilian; it was only by some behind-the-scenes diplomatic work that he was allowed to travel to Vienna (now an enemy capital) and on through Italy to home, an experience he chose to write about when Edith Wharton asked him to contribute an essay to The Book of the Homeless to raise money for Belgian refugees.
Once this initial adventure was over, he had a hard time settling in, writing to a friend:
“Fact is I am hard up simply because I haven’t been able to write of late to any serious amount. I have been more affected morally and physically by the war than I thought possible. Perhaps if I had been able to lend a hand in some way I would have found the war easier to bear.”
Word of this itchiness must have been passed to the Navy, because the veteran sea captain (he was fifty-nine) was invited to go on a twelve-day cruise on the HMS Ready, an armed “Q” boat disguised as a merchant vessel to lure German submarines. As his son John noted, the experience cheered Conrad up, changing him “from the gouty individual I knew to an able and energetic seaman almost as soon as his feet hit the deck.”
This was the high point of the war for him before things got darker. His son Borys was gassed and shell-shocked near Cambrai in October 1918. This gave Conrad a sardonic view of the Armistice when it came, writing to a friend:
“The great sacrifice is consummated—and what will come of it to the nations of the earth the future will show. I cannot confess to an easy mind. Great and very blind forces are set catastrophically over all the world.”
Conrad is the one writer you wish had written a Great War novel who didn’t. Was he too old to take it on? Was the tragedy too vast for him? Was horror a subject he could only write about if it took place not in Flanders, but in the Congo or the South Seas?
Henry James, the great aesthetician and moralist (Conrad called him “the historian of fine consciences”) was seventy-one when the war broke out, and not a well man. Various physical ailments were ganging up on him, but even more disturbing was the heart trouble caused by having lived long enough to witness the civilization he wrote about so brilliantly about come crashing down in flames.
For James, World War I was “a nightmare from which there is no waking save by sleep.” Shortly after it began, he wrote to some American friends:
“I write to you under the black cloud of portentous events on this side of the world, horrible, unspeakable, iniquitous things. I mean horrors of war criminally, infamously precipitated … Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers and I’m sick beyond cure to have lived to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared the wreck of our beliefs that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become impossible … it seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way—but I avert my eyes from the monstrous scene.”
He tried his best to help the war effort. He opened his London house to Belgian refugees, accepted the chairmanship of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps, took out British citizenship (he listed Prime Minister Asquith as a reference on his application), and visited wounded soldiers at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London.
“The men probably didn’t know who he was,” his biographer Leon Edel writes.
“What came through to them was his kindness, his warmth … All his life he had preached the thesis of ‘living through’ and ‘infinite doing.’ Now he practiced it in full measure. It gave him new reason for existence, and through the rest of 1914 and well into 1915, until recurrent illness slowed him up, he surrendered himself to the soldiers.”
He died February 28, 1916, without knowing how the war would end. A year earlier, he had been cajoled by his friend Edith Wharton (“Almost too insistently Olympian,” he said of her) to contribute an essay to The Book of the Homeless, and the result, “The Long Wards,” is one of the last pieces he wrote.
Cyril Connolly would call James’s later style a “tyranny of euphonious nothings,” but, at least in this context, its intricacies show a refined intelligence trying bravely, via language, to come to terms with war’s evil.
Thomas Hardy, seventy-four, could remember as a boy talking to veterans of Wellington’s army; his three-part drama in verse, The Dynasts, was considered by many critics to be the most memorable literary response to the Napoleonic Wars written by an Englishman.
But perhaps one war is all a writer can be asked to respond to in a lifetime. “Hardy seems to have been aged ten years by this war,” his wife wrote in 1914. “I think he feels the horror of it so keenly that he loses all interest in life.”
He was nothing if not patriotic, so, when called to the (later) infamous meeting of British writers called by Charles Masterman, h
ead of the War Propaganda Bureau, he not only attended, but tried his best to write poems to order, including the wretched, well-meant “A Call to National Service.”
“I now would speed like yester wind and whirred
Through yielding pines; and serve with never a slack
So loud for promptness all around outcries!”
He did better with “Before Marching and After,” which was dedicated to the memory of a favorite nephew killed on the western front.
“But he still only asked the spring starlight, the breeze
What great thing or small thing his history would borrow
From that Game with Death he would play on the morrow”
To Hardy’s great credit, he kept an eye out for the young war poets, including Siegfried Sassoon who, though decorated for his bravery in the trenches, would soon become famous for his bitterly antiwar poems. “I do not know how I could stand the suspense of war,” the old poet wrote the younger one, “if it were not for the sustaining power of poetry.”
When Edith Wharton came begging for a contribution to her anthology, he offered a poem that manages to suggest, however tentatively, that perhaps not just Germany was to blame for unleashing the war.
Few British intellectuals wrestled with the moral implications of the war as assiduously as Gilbert Murray. An Oxford don, he enjoyed a wide reputation as the leading authority on ancient Greek language and culture; his translations of Euripides brought him tremendous acclaim, and there could be few humanists in Europe who understood more about tragedy than he did.
In 1917, he put together a collection of his talks and speeches, Faith, War and Policy, and had it published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin. My copy is from the library of Rev. Henry L. Griffin, D.D., of the Bangor Theological Seminary—just the sort of person, you feel, who would buy the book.
“Such interest as this book may possess,” Murray writes in the introduction,
“will be in large part historical. Changes have assuredly been wrought in the minds of all thoughtful people throughout Europe by the experiences of these shattering years. And it seems worth while to have a record of the mind of a fairly representative English Liberal, standing just outside the circle of official politics.”
Murray, then fifty-one, wrote better than he knew. His essays show the torment of a supremely civilized writer trying to come to terms with war’s horror; much of it reads like a passionate anti-war tract, and yet, when you read closer, it’s clear that he supported the war and thought it should be fought with all necessary rigor.
His great friend Bertrand Russell, who reached just the opposite conclusion, held his views in contempt, writing, “I naturally expected that Murray would be on the side of peace, yet he went out of his way to write about the wickedness of the Germans, and the superhuman virtues of Sir Edward Gray.”
Murray deserved better than this—and when Russell went to prison for his own antiwar views, Murray tried his best to come to Russell’s aid. Later in the war, he worked with H. G. Wells for a postwar league of nations, and eventually became one of the founders of the famine-relief organization Oxfam. His ashes are buried in Westminster Abbey.
Thomas Mann would come to regret his wartime writings. Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (written in part to refute his brother Heinrich’s influential essay “Zola” that defended French culture) stressed the primacy of conservative values over liberal ones, and pointed to Germany as the supreme defender of the former and hence the war’s righteous party.
“War!” he wrote in November 1914. “We felt purified, liberated; we felt an enormous hope.”
He had already achieved an international reputation as one of the world’s great novelists, and his panegyric to war appalled many who admired him, including the great German composer Richard Strauss.
“It is sickening,” he wrote in a letter, referring to Mann, “to read in the papers of the regeneration of German art … to read how the youth of Germany is to emerge cleansed and purified from this ‘glorious war,’ when in fact one must be thankful if the poor blighters are at least cleansed of their lice and bed-bugs, and cured of their infections, and once more weaned from murder.”
Romain Rolland, the conscience of Europe, was if anything even madder than Strauss.
“In an access of delirious pride and exasperated fanaticism, Mann employs his envenomed pen to justify the worst accusations that have been made against Germany. He affirms that Kultur and Militarism are brothers—their ideal is the same, their aim the same, their principle the same. Their enemy is peace—war brings out strength.”
Mann soon outgrew these views—Nazi Germany would have no more ardent enemy—and he was forced into exile in 1933. Thirty-nine years old when the war broke out, he would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.
By 1914, Mary Augusta Ward had come to epitomize the values of Victorian England that were already being discredited, including her choice of a byline to write her enormously popular religious-themed novels. It was never “Mary Ward” on the title page, always “Mrs. Humphrey Ward.” No surprise, then, that she wasn’t popular with suffragettes—she was president of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League—and was seen as a force for reaction, never mind that she had been instrumental in establishing educational settlement houses across England to help the poor.
H. G. Wells even mentions her in his Mr. Britling Sees It Through, taking it as a given that his audience would know whom he was referring to.
“When I looked out the train this morning,” he has an American character say, “I thought I had come to the England of Washington Irving. I find it is not even the England of Mrs. Humphrey Ward.”
A figure of fun to the younger generation—but as the niece of Matthew Arnold, related by marriage to the extraordinary Huxley family, she was too well-connected and successful to pay them much mind. She was sixty-three when the war broke out, but that didn’t keep her from engaging in British propaganda efforts—she would write three books on the war.
Later, we’ll see what she was capable of in this line; the excerpt below, written in a more sensitive, measured tone, was her contribution to Edith Wharton’s fund-raising effort for Belgian refugees.
Sadly, H. G. Wells is remembered now, at least in the United States, almost solely as the author of the science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds, and for the 1938 radio adaptation by Orson Welles that supposedly (this has been debunked now) sent Americans rushing panicked into the streets. Even his famous catchphrase for World War I, “the war to end all wars,” is usually attributed to Woodrow Wilson.
This is a shame, for Wells, at forty-eight, was at the height of his power and influence during the Great War, and no writer on any side was more engaged in thinking about the war, writing about the war, and working toward the eventual peace. He even had an influence on the fighting; his 1903 short story, “The Land Ironclads,” accurately predicted the development of the tank, and Winston Churchill was always quick to credit Wells with giving him the idea when he set out to find a machine that would break the deadlock of trench warfare.
Wells, who was nothing if not energetic, also spent the war engaged in a number of love affairs, the most notorious of which was with Rebecca West, who—as we’ll see later—wrote a classic civilian war novel herself.
Mr. Britling Sees It Through,Wells’s autobiographical novel detailing his reactions to the war (he had also written an earlier one, Boon, dealing with similar themes), enjoyed enormous popularity when it was published—and not just in English-speaking countries. It was immediately translated into German (two of the most sympathetic characters are German), and, via Switzerland, was widely distributed behind enemy lines. Maxim Gorky wrote Wells from Russia, telling him that “Britling was without doubt the finest, most courageous, truthful and humane book written in Europe in the course of this accursed war.”
The novel begins at Matching Easy, Mr. Britling’s home in rural Essex, where a boisterous weekend party is
in progress, featuring, among other innocent diversions, a wild game of lawn hockey. Britling—famous for his articles on a whole range of political, cultural, and scientific subjects—is at the center of all this, and Wells pokes gentle fun at his alter ego.
“No photographer had ever caught a hint of his essential Britlingness and bristlingness. Only the camera could ever induce Mr. Britling to brush his hair, and for the camera alone did he reserve that expression of submissive martyrdom. He was wearing now a very old blue flannel blazer, no hat, and a pair of knickerbockers of a remarkable bagginess, and made of one of those virtuous socialistic homespun tweeds that drag out into wooly knots and strings wherever there is attrition. His face wore the amiable expression of a wire-haired terrier disposed to be friendly … He talked about everything, he had ideas about everything; he could no more help having ideas about everything than a dog can resist smelling at your heels. He sniffed at the heels of reality.”
The fun and games are interrupted only by worries about unrest in Ireland, at least until word comes of a much more serious development on the opposite side of Europe.
Havelock Ellis, at fifty-five, was famous/infamous for his pioneering writings on human sexuality, but this was only one of the many subjects that he wrote about authoritatively—only Wells among British writers rivaled him in range of interests. Just a list of chapter headings in his Essays in War-Time (my copy is a fifth impression from 1917) gives an idea of this breadth.
Evolution and War; War and Eugenics; Morality in Warfare; Is War Diminishing?; War and the Birth-Rate; War and Democracy; Feminism and Masculinism; The White Slave Crusade; The Conquest of Venereal Disease; The Nationalisation of Health; Eugenics and Genius; The Production of Ability; Birth Control.
Where Wars Go to Die Page 8
