Her novel, The Return of the Soldier, published in 1918, examines the relationship between three women and a soldier suffering shell shock. Samuel Hynes (the soldier/writer who was one of the most astute students of the war’s literature) called it “an extraordinary book, a perfect small work of art, a war novel that makes its perfection out of its limitations; a novel of an enclosed world invaded by public events, a private novel containing history.”
West herself didn’t have to go to war—it came to her, when in 1918 German Gotha aircraft bombed the village on the Thames where she was staying with her son; one incendiary bomb dropped only a few yards away. Wells may have had this in mind when he wrote the scene excerpted at this chapter’s end.
H. M. Tomlinson is mostly forgotten now, but in 1914 he was an essayist and travel writer who was often compared to Thoreau and/or Conrad; his classic account of a trip up the Amazon on a tramp steamer, The Sea and the Jungle, is still in print.
He was an official correspondent with the British troops in France (he was forty-five), but managed to rise above the restrictions and censorship to produce some of the most sensitive civilian writing about the war, showing a real fellow feeling for soldiers and what they had to deal with.
Tomlinson blames the well-born, the clever, the haughty, and the greedy for making the war out of “the perplexity of their scheming”—and then, panicking when it breaks out, calling upon the masses to save them.
“Then out from their obscurity, where they dwelt because of their own worth, arise the Nobodies; because theirs is the historic job of restoring again the upset balance of affairs. They make no fuss about it. Theirs is always the hard and dirty work. They have always done it. If they don’t do it, it will not be done. They fall with a will and without complaint upon the wreckage willfully made of generations of such labor as theirs, to get the world right again, to make it habitable again, though not for themselves; for them, they must spend the rest of their lives recreating order out of chaos.”
In the 1920s, Tomlinson became one of the first critics to write intelligently and movingly of the literature produced by the war.
G. M. Trevelyan, born into the aristocracy, was forty by the time the war broke out. He was one of Britain’s most highly regarded literary historians, especially for his Garibaldi Trilogy on the famous Italian patriot. His brother Charles Trevelyan resigned from Asquith’s government to protest the war, and was vilified, but George, exempted from the army because of his eyesight, led the first Red Cross ambulance unit to Italy and spent three years close to the front lines.
He was caught up in the disastrous retreat at Caporetto, but, as the excerpt makes clear, was a long way from blaming Italian cowardice for the disaster, as other commentators were (and are) quick to do.
My copy of Scenes from Italy’s War has an elegant bookplate pasted in front—John Hampton Barnes is the owner’s name—and the pages, a hundred years old now, have edges that seem freshly cut. Like many books included here, it includes a few token photographs, including one stirring shot of a tattered Italian flag flying defiantly over Monte Santo on the Isonzo River that saw so much fighting. Pasted on the title page is a little one-by-three insert of “Errata,” making sure the reader knows to correct “October” for “November” on page 222, line 5, “six and nine” for “eight and twelve” on page 183, line 4, and—italics being important—“Bersaglieri ciclisti” for “Bersaglieri ciclisti” on page 84, line 8.
Some World War I literature is forgotten because, having written one book on the war that received little attention, the author went on to write another on the same experience that became famous, thereby condemning the earlier book to extinction.
John Dos Passos’s novel Three Soldiers is firmly within what would become, in the 1920s and 30s, the “official” literary canon of the war, but, as a young volunteer (he was twenty-two), he wrote a totally forgotten novel while the war was still being fought: One Man’s Initiation: 1917, a title he later changed to First Encounter; it is drawn from his experience in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps on the front lines with the French.
Dos Passos had the book republished in 1942, when another war was in progress, writing, in his preface:
“I think the brutalities of war and oppression come as less of a shock to people who grew up in the Thirties than they did to Americans of my generation, raised as we were during the quiet afterglow of the nineteenth century, among comfortably situated people who were confident that industrial progress meant an improved civilization, more of the good things of life, more freedom, a more human and peaceful society. To us, the European war of 1914–18 seemed a horrible monstrosity, something outside of the normal order of things, like an epidemic of yellow fever in some place where yellow fever had never been heard of before. Now these things are more familiar.”
In writing One Man’s Initiation, Dos Passos admits to having been heavily influenced by the recently published novel Under Fire (Le Feu) by Henri Barbusse, which appeared in 1916 and became an immediate sensation (my copy is the twelfth printing from 1918) with its graphic, searing account of life on the western front as seen by a disillusioned Poilu. After Barbusse’s book, civilian writers—except for the hacks—would find it hard to cling to any last romantic illusions about the war.
All That This War Has Annihilated
—May Sinclair
I don’t want to describe that ward, or the effect of those rows upon rows of beds, those rows upon rows of bound and bandaged bodies, the intensity of their physical anguish suggested by sheer force of multiplication, by the diminishing perspective of the beds, by the clear light and nakedness of the great hall that sets these repeated units of torture in a world apart, a world of insufferable space and agonizing time, ruled by some inhuman mathematics and given over to pure transcendent pain. A sufficiently large ward full of wounded really does leave an impression very like that. But the one true thing about this impression is its transcendence. It is utterly removed from and unlike anything that you have experienced before. From the moment that the doors have closed behind you, you are in another world, and under its strange impact you are given new senses and a new soul. If there is horror here you are not aware of it as horror. Before these multiplied forms of anguish what you feel—if there is anything of you left to feel—is not pity, because it is so near to adoration.
If you are tired of the burden and malady of self, go into one of these great wards and you will find instant release. You and the sum of your little consciousness are not things that matter any more. The lowest and least of these wounded is of supreme importance and significance. You, who were once afraid of them and of their wounds, may think that you would suffer for them now, gladly; but you are not allowed to suffer; you are marvellously and mercilessly let off. In this sudden deliverance from yourself you have received the ultimate absolution, and their torment is your peace …
I am to look after Mr.______. He has the pick of the Belgian Red Cross women to nurse him, and they are angelically kind and very skillful, but he is not very happy with them. He says: “These dear people are so good to me, but I can’t make out what they say. I can’t tell them what I want.” He is pathetically glad to have any English people with him.
I sat with him all morning. The French boy has gone and he is alone in his room now. The morning went like half an hour, while it was going, but when it was over I felt as if I had been nursing for weeks on end. There were so many little things to be done, and so much that you mustn’t do, and the anxiety was appalling. I don’t suppose there is a worse case in the Hospital. He is perhaps a shade better to-day, but none of the medical staff think that he can live.
Madame E______ and Dr. Bird have shown me what to do, and what not to do. I must keep him all the time in the same position. I must give him sips of iced broth, and little pieces of ice to suck every now and then. I must not let him try to raise himself in bed. I must not try to lift him myself. If we do lift him we must keep his body tilted at the
same angle. I must not give him any hot drinks and not too much cold drink.
And then he is six foot high, so tall that his feet come through the blankets at the bottom of the bed; and he keeps sinking down it all the time and wanting to raise himself up again. He must be kept very quiet. I must not let him talk more than is necessary to tell me what he wants, or he will die of exhaustion. And what he wants is to talk every minute that he is awake.
He drops off to sleep, breathing in jerks and with a terrible rapidity. And I think it will be all right as long as he sleeps. But his sleep only lasts for a few minutes. I hear the rhythm of his breathing alter; it slackens and goes slow; then it jerks again, and I know that he is awake.
And then he begins. He says things that tear at your heart. He has looks and gestures that break it—the adorable, willful smile of a child that knows that it is being watched when you find his hand groping too often for the glass of iced water that stands beside his bed; a still more adorable and utterly gentle submission when you take the glass from him; when you tell him not to say anything more just yet but to go to sleep again. You feel as if you were guilty of act after act of nameless and abominable cruelty.
He sticks to it that he has seen me before, that he has heard of me, that his people know me. And he wants to know what I do and where I live and where it was that he saw me. Once, when I thought he had gone to sleep, I heard him begin again: “Where did you say you lived?”
I tell him. And I tell him to go to sleep again.
He closes his eyes obediently and opens them the next instant.
“I say, may I come and call on you when we get back to England?”
You can only say: “Yes. Of course,” and tell him to go to sleep.
His voice is so strong and clear that I could almost believe that he will get back and that some day I shall look up and see him standing at my garden gate.
Mercifully, when I tell him to go to sleep again, he does go to sleep. And his voice is a little clearer and stronger every time he wakes.
And so the morning goes on. The only thing he wants you to do for him is to sponge his hands and face with iced water and give him little bits of ice to suck. Over and over again I do these things. And over and over again he asks me, “Do you mind?”
He wears a little grey woolen cord round his neck. Something has gone from it. Whatever he has lost, they have left him his little woolen cord, as if some immense importance attached to it.
He has fallen into a long doze. And at the end of the morning I left him sleeping.
Some of the Corps have brought in trophies from the battlefield—a fine grey cloak with a scarlet collar, a spiked helmet, a cuff with three buttons cut from the coat of a dead German.
These things make me sick. I see the body under the cloak, the head under the helmet, and the dead hand under the cuff.
We shall never know all that the War has annihilated.
From A Journal of Impressions in Belgium, by May Sinclair; Macmillan; New York, 1915.
A Bit of Metal Turned Them for Home
—Enid Bagnold
When one shoots at a wooden figure it makes a hole. When one shoots at a man it makes a hole, and the doctor must make seven others.
I heard a blackbird sing in the middle of the night last night—two bars, and then another. I thought at first it might be a burglar whistling to his mate in the black and rustling garden.
But it was a blackbird in a nightmare.
Those distant guns again to-night …
Now a lull and now a bombardment; again a lull, and then batter, batter, and the windows tremble. Is the lull when they go over the top?
I can only think of death to-night. I tried to think just now, “What is it, after all! Death comes anyway; this only hastens it.” But that won’t do; no philosophy helps the pain of death. It is pity, pity, pity, that I feel, and sometimes a sort of shame that I am here to write at all …
Waker had a birthday yesterday and got ten post cards and a telegram. But that is as nothing to another anniversary.
“A year to-morrow I got my wound—two o’clock to-morrow morning.”
“Shall you be awake, Waker?”
“Yes.”
How will he celebrate it? I would give a lot to know what will pass in his mind. For I don’t yet understand this importance they attach to such an anniversary. One and all, they know the exact hour and minute on which their bit of metal turned them for home.
Sometimes a man will whisper, “Nurse …” as I go by the bed; and when I stop I hear, “In ten minutes it will be a twelvemonth!” and he fixes his eyes on me.
What does he want me to respond? I don’t know whether I should be glad or sorry that he got it. I can’t imagine what he thinks of as the minute ticks. For I can see by his words that the scene is blurred and no longer brings back any picture. “Did you crawl back or walk?”
“I … walked.” He is hardly sure.
I know that for Waker that moment at two o’clock in the morning changed his whole career. From that moment his arm was paralysed, the nerves severed; from that moment football was off, and with it his particular ambition. And football, governing a kingdom, or painting a picture—a man’s ambition is his ambition, and when it is wiped out his life is changed.
But he knows all that, he has had time to think of all that. What, then, does this particular minute bring him?
They think I know; for when they tell me in that earnest voice that the minute is approaching they take for granted that I too will share some sacrament with them.
Waker is not everything a man should be: he isn’t clever. But he is so very brave.
From A Diary Without Dates, by Enid Bagnold; William Heinemann; London, 1918.
The Very Flower of the Human Race
—Henry James
It would be the essence of these remarks, could I give them within my space all the particular applications naturally awaiting them, that they pretend to refer here to the British soldier only—generalisation about his officers would take us so considerably further and so much enlarge our view. The high average of the beauty and modesty of these, in the stricken state, causes them to affect me, I frankly confess, as probably the very flower of the human race. One’s apprehension “Tommy”—and I scarce know whether more to dislike the liberty this mode of reference takes with him, or to incline to retain it for the tenderness really latent in it—is in itself a theme for fine notation, but it has brought me thus only to the door of the boundless hospital ward in which, these many months, I have seen the successive and the so strangely quiet tides of his presence ebb and flow, and it stays me there before the incalculable vista. The perspective stretches away, in its mild order, after the fashion of a tunnel boring into the very character of the people, and so going on forever—never arriving or coming out, that is, at anything in the nature of a station, a junction or a terminus. So it draws off through the infinite of the common personal life, but planted and bordered, all along its passage, with the thick-growing flower of the individual illustration, this sometimes vivid enough and sometimes pathetically pale. The great fact, to my now so informed vision, is that it undiscourageably continues and that an unceasing repetition of its testifying particulars seems never either to exhaust its sense or to satisfy that of the beholder. Its sense indeed, if I may so far simplify, is pretty well always the same, that of the jolly fatalism above-mentioned, a state of moral hospitality to the practices of fortune, however outrageous, that may at times fairly be felt as providing amusement, providing a new and thereby a refreshing turn of the personal situation, for the most interested party. It is true that one may be sometimes moved to wonder which is the most interested party, the stricken subject in his numbered bed or the friendly, the unsated inquirer who has tried to forearm himself against such a measure of the “criticism of life” as might well be expected to break upon him from the couch in question, and who yet, a thousand occasions for it having been, all round him, inevitably neglected
, finds this ingenious provision quite left on his hands. He may well ask himself what he is to do with people who so consistently and so comfortably content themselves with being—for the most part incuriously and instinctively admirable—that nothing whatever is left of them for reflection as distinguished from their own practice; but the only answer that comes is the reproduction of the note. He may, in the interest of appreciation, try the experiment of lending them some scrap of a complaint or a curse in order that they shall meet him on congruous ground, the ground of encouragement to his own participating impulse. They are imaged, under that possibility, after the manner of those unfortunates, the very poor, the victims of a fire or shipwreck, to whom you have to lend something to wear before they can come to thank you for helping them. The inmates of the long wards, however, have no use for any imputed or derivative sentiments or reasons; they feel in their own way, they feel a great deal, they don’t at all conceal from you that to have seen what they have seen is to have seen things horrible and monstrous—but there is no estimate of them for which they seek to be indebted to you, and nothing they less invite from you than to show them that such visions must have poisoned their world. Their world isn’t in the least poisoned; they have assimilated their experience by a process scarce at all to be distinguished from their having healthily gotten rid of it.
The case thus becomes for you that they consist wholly of their applied virtue, which is accompanied with no waste of consciousness whatsoever. The virtue may strike you as having been, and as still being, greater in some examples than others, but it has throughout the same sign of differing at almost no point from a supreme amiability. How can creatures so amiable, you allow yourself vaguely to wonder, have welcomed even for five minutes the stress of carnage? and how can the stress of carnage, the murderous impulse at its highest pitch, have left so little distortion of the moral nature? It has left none at all that one has at the end of many months been able to discover; so that perhaps the most steadying and refreshing effect of intercourse with these hospital friends is through the almost complete rest from the facing of generalisations to which it treats you.
Where Wars Go to Die Page 18
