Latterly he had much sleepless misery. In the day life was tolerable, but in the night—unless he defended himself by working, the losses and cruelties of the war came and grimaced at him, insufferably. Now he would be haunted by long processions of refugees, now he would think of the dead lying stiff and twisted in a thousand dreadful attitudes. Then again he would be overwhelmed with anticipations of the frightful economic and social dissolution that might lie ahead … At other times he thought of wounds and the deformities of body and spirit produced by injuries. And sometimes he would think of the triumph of evil. Stupid and triumphant persons went about a world that stupidity had desolated, with swaggering gestures, with a smiling consciousness of enhanced importance, with their scornful hatred of all measured and temperate and kindly things turned now to scornful contempt. And mingling with the soil they walked on lay the dead body of Hugh, face downward. At the back of the boy’s head, rimmed by blood-stiffened hair—the hair that had once been “as soft as the down of a bird”—was a big red hole. That hole was always pitilessly distinct. They stepped on him—heedlessly. They heeled the scattered stuff of his exquisite brain into the clay …
From all such moods of horror Mr. Britling’s circle of lamplight was his sole refuge. His work could conjure up visions, like opium visions, of a world of order and justice. Amidst the gloom of world bankruptcy he stuck to the prospectus of a braver enterprise—reckless of his chances of subscribers …
But this night even this circle of lamplight would not hold his mind. Doubt had crept into this last fastness. He pulled the papers towards him, and turned over the portion he had planned.
His purpose in the book he was beginning to write was to reason out the possible methods of government that would give a stabler, saner control to the world. He believed still in democracy, but he was realising more and more that democracy had yet to discover its method. It had to take hold of the consciences of men, it had to equip itself with still unformed organisations. Endless years of patient thinking, of experimenting, of discussion lay before mankind ere this great idea could become reality, and right, the proven right things, could rule the earth.
Meanwhile the world must still remain a scene of blood-stained melodramas, or deafening noise, contagious follies, vast irrational destructions. One fine life after another went down from study and university and laboratory to be slain and silenced …
Was it conceivable that this mad monster of mankind would ever be caught and held in the thin-spun webs of thought?
Was it, after all, anything but pretension and folly for a man to work out plans for the better government of the world?—was it any better than the ambitious scheming of some fly upon the wheel of the romantic gods?
Man has come, floundering and wounding and suffering, out of the breeding darkness of Time, that will presently crush and consume him again. Why not flounder with the rest, why not eat, drink, fight, scream, weep and pray, forget Hugh, stop brooding upon Hugh, banish all these priggish dreams of “The Better Government of the World” and turn to the brighter aspects, the funny and adventurous aspects of the war, the Chestertonian jolliness, Punch side of things? Think you because your sons are dead that there will be no more cakes and ale? Let mankind blunder out of the mud and blood as mankind has blundered in …
Let us at any rate keep our precious Sense of Humour …
He pulled the manuscript towards him. For a time he sat decorating the lettering of his title, “The Better Government of the World,” with little grinning gnomes’ heads and waggish tails …
Mr. Britling’s pen stopped.
There was perfect stillness in the study bedroom.
“The tinpot style,” said Mr. Britling at last in a voice of extreme bitterness.
He fell into an extraordinary quarrel with his style—at his exasperation about his own inexpressiveness, at his incomplete control of these rebel words and phrases that came trailing each its own associations and suggestions to hamper his purpose with it. He read over the offending sentence.
“The point is that it is true,” he whispered. “It is exactly what I want to say” …
Exactly? …
His mind stuck on that “exactly” … When one has much to say style is troublesome. It is as if one fussed with one’s uniform before a battle … but that is just what one ought to do before a battle … One ought to have everything in order.
He took a fresh sheet and made three trial beginnings.
“War is like a black fabric.” …
“War is a curtain of black fabric across the pathway.”
“War is a curtain of dense black fabric across all the hopes and kindliness of mankind. Yet always it has let through some gleams of light, and now—I am not dreaming—it grows threadbare, and here and there and at a thousand points the light is breaking through. We owe it to all these dear youths—”
His pen stopped again.
“I must work on a rough draft,” said Mr. Britling.
From Mr. Britling Sees It Through, by H. G. Wells; The Macmillan Company; New York, 1917.
Works and Writers Selected, Per Chapter
Chapter One: Argue
The most desperately earnest thing, Arthur Conan Doyle; They must be destroyed, Maurice Maeterlinck; The most sincere war, G. K. Chesterton; The moral energy of nations, Henri Bergson; I do not hold my tongue easily, George Bernard Shaw; Mere wordmonger to shame, Christabel Pankhurst; The god of force, John Galsworthy; I am a professional observer, Arnold Bennett; The children of Attila, Romain Rolland; Are we barbarians?, Gerhart Hauptmann; The man who does his fighting with his mouth, Jerome K. Jerome; All normal Americans, Booth Tarkington.
Chapter Two: Moralize
The big guns at work, Joseph Conrad; The abyss of our past delusion, Henry James; The unfurling of the future, Thomas Hardy; Let loose these evil powers, Gilbert Murray; The will to power, Thomas Mann; Wordsworth’s Valley in War-Time, Mrs. Humphrey Ward; Men whispered together, H. G. Wells; Scientific Barbarism, Havelock Ellis; Keep our mouths shut, W. B. Yeats.
Chapter Three: Witness
A calamity unheard of in human annals, Edith Wharton; I shall stay, Mildred Aldrich; Its purpose is death, Richard Harding Davis; Stench of the battlefield, Frances Wilson Huard; The swathe of stillness, Henry Beston; Little household gods shiver and blink, Edith Wharton; The Gothas, Mildred Aldrich; It is no pleasure to tell what I saw, Richard Harding Davis; The War Capital of Serbia, John Reed; That sepia waste, Winston Churchill.
Chapter Four: Lie
Babies on bayonets, Arnold J. Toynbee; Hymn of Hate, Ernest Lissauer; Mother is the name of the gun, Arthur Conan Doyle; The master spirit of hell, W. D. Howells; Vandal guns of dull intent, Edmond Rostand; These terrific symbols, Rudyard Kipling; Few wished themselves elsewhere, John Buchan; Nearer than any other woman, Mrs. Humphrey Ward; The world has a right to know, Richard Harding Davis; Old men don’t go, H. G. Wells.
Chapter Five: Pity
All that this war has annihilated, May Sinclair; A bit of metal turned them for home, Enid Bagnold; The very flower of the human race, Henry James; With the wounded I was at home, Hugh Walpole; The Boche bread is bad, Henry Beston; The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West; On Leave, H. M. Tomlinson; Andiamo a casa, G. M. Trevelyan; What manner of man, John Dos Passos; Smashed in some complicated manner, H. G. Wells.
Chapter Six: Protest
This war is trivial, Bertrand Russell; The last great carouse, G. F. Nicolai; Courage there is no room for, Jane Addams; This unspeakably inhuman outrage, W. E. B. Du Bois; A war made deliberately by intellectuals, Randolph Bourne; Women who dared, Emily G. Balch; The bitterness of gall, Scott Nearing; Crime against the individual, Reinhold Niebuhr; This saturnalia of massacre, E. D. Morel.
Chapter Seven: Mourn
And the bullet won, Richard Harding Davis; He loved his youth, John Buchan; Demons of the whirlwind, George Santayana; All four lie buried on the Western Front, Gilbert Murray; Eyes lit with risk, Jean Cocteau; Drop drop drop of b
lood, Henry Beston; Of all the days in my life the most terrible, Harry Lauder; He wanted me to write, Katherine Mansfield; A girl in a pinafore, H. G. Wells; Tears are difficult for a man to shed, Paul Claudel; I lay on that brown mound, Harry Lauder; And I will murder some German, H. G. Wells.
Chapter Eight: Entertain
Lips under sod, Florence L. Barclay; Thoughts rode him like a nightmare, John Buchan; I brag of bear and beaver, Robert W. Service; Settling down to his dastardly work, William Le Queux; Far too young to assist, Charles Amory Beach; To die is easier, Edgar A. Guest; That dumb, backwoods, pie-faced stenographer, Dorothy Canfield Fisher; The azure gaze of Miss Hinda Warlick, Edith Wharton; My God, lady!, Mildred Aldrich; Nobody’s Land, Ring Lardner.
Epilogue: Guide
The pilgrimage, Mildred Aldrich; Turn right at cemetery gate, American Battle Monuments Commission; Peasants go there to dig, Henry Williamson; Visit to the Battlefield, Michelin & Cie.; Cemeteries become unremarkable, Stephen Graham; Back to the Somme, John Masefield; Whose credulous hearts the maggots were now eating, C. E. Montague; The most tragic and dreadful thing that has ever happened to mankind, H. G. Wells.
Notes
INTRODUCTION: The quote from Cyril Connolly appears in Enemies of Promise (Persea, 1983). The Doyle, Murray, Montague, Maeterlinck, Kipling, Davis, Wharton, Wells, and Ellis quotes are taken from their books cited in the text. Barbara Tuchman’s comment on the changes caused by the war is from Promise of Greatness edited by George A. Panichas (John Day, 1968), as are L. P. Hartley’s and Vera Brittain’s. The famous benediction, “We will remember them,” comes from Laurence Binyon’s poem “For the Fallen.” You can watch a fascinating interview with survivor Harry Patch, filmed when he was 109, on YouTube.
CHAPTER ONE: The story of the first two soldiers killed in the war comes from Gene Smith’s small classic, Still Quiet on the Western Front (Morrow, 1965). Wells’s and Doyle’s quotes are from their books cited in the text. Much of the information on Maeterlinck comes from Cyclopedia of World Authors edited by Frank N. Magill (Harper, 1958), which is a good source for writers who are now almost forgotten. 20th Century Culture, a biographical companion edited by Bullock and Woodings (Harper, 1983) also proved useful, as did the ever-reliable Webster’s American Biographies, edited by Charles Van Doren (Merriam, 1974). The American Chesterton Society website is www.chesterton.org. The quote about Shaw’s belligerence is from Jonathan Wisenthal and Daniel O’Leary. John Galsworthy’s quote on propaganda is from the History News Network website.
CHAPTER TWO: The statistics about casualties and the trench system are taken from John Keegan’s The First World War (Vintage, 2003), and Fields of Memory by Ann Rose (Seven Dials, 2000). Kipling’s quote is from his book cited in the text. Rolland’s quote on intellectual cowardice is found in Vera Brittain’s Testament of Experience (Wideview, 1970). Conrad’s complaint about what the war has done to his writing is drawn from Joseph Conrad by Jeffrey Meyers (Scribner, 1991), as is his pessimistic forecast at the war’s end. Leon Edel’s biography Henry James (Harper and Row, 1985) is the source of the quote from James’s letters. Connolly’s put-down of the late James style is from his book listed above. Quotations from Thomas Hardy are in Thomas Hardy by Michael Millgate (Random House, 1982). Russell on Murray is found in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1968). The Mann quotation comes from a Walter D. Morris translation; Richard Strauss’s rejoinder is found in The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2007), while Rolland’s is from his Above the Battle cited in the text. David C. Smith’s H. G. Wells (Yale University Press, 1986) was very helpful on Wells’s war years. Yeats’s comment on war is from W. B. Yeats by R. F. Foster (Oxford University Press, 1991).
CHAPTER THREE: H. L. Mencken was accused of being pro-German—which he almost certainly was, believing the United States had joined the wrong side. Camus’s brave quote is from Resistance, Rebellion and Death (Knopf, 1960). Hermione Lee’s Edith Wharton (Knopf, 2007) is the source of the quote on her Francophile sensibilities, as well as the Wharton letter to her American friend. Mildred Aldrich’s friendship with Gertrude Stein is described in Gertrude and Alice by Diana Souhami (I. B. Tauris, 2013). It’s worth going back to the old books of Van Wyck Brooks to learn about the American writers of the 1914–18 era; his summary of Richard Harding Davis’s enormous influence on young American writers is from The Confident Years (E. P. Dutton, 1952). The Henry Beston quote about courage in nature is from his little-known classic Northern Farm (Rinehart & Co., 1948). Upton Sinclair’s description of John Reed is taken from the Brooks book cited above.
CHAPTER FOUR: Kipling’s quote, “Because our fathers lied,” is sometimes interpreted as a bitter rant at arms manufacturers not producing enough artillery shells, not at war in general, though it’s come to be remembered as the latter. Montague’s quote comes from his book cited in the text; Shaw’s is from The New York Times History of the War cited there also. Martin Middlebrook’s The First Day on the Somme (Norton, 1972) has a justifiably high reputation. The quote on the Somme’s effect on English optimism is from Keegan cited above. Rich Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light (Henry Holt, 2013) is the source for the poll on British public opinion regarding concentration camps. John Buchan briefing the king is quoted in John Buchan by Andrew Lownie (McArthur, 1995), as is the Peter Buitenhuis quote criticizing Buchan’s omissions. J. C. Squire, when he wasn’t writing ironic light verse, was a powerful right-wing editor in London; Virginia Woolf liked dismissing his circle of like-minded writers as the “Squirearchy.”
CHAPTER FIVE: The quote from Samuel Hynes is from his introduction to West’s novel (Penguin, 198), while Vera Brittain’s are from Testament of Youth (Wideview, 1980). Sinclair’s quote is taken from her book cited in the text. Arthur Miller’s review of Bagnold’s play appears in Echoes Down the Corridor (Viking Penguin, 2000). James’s appreciation of Walpole is from Leon Edel’s biography cited above. The West-Wells affair is detailed in Rebecca West (Fawcett Columbine, 1987) by Victoria Glendinning. The Tomlison quote on nobodies is from Old Junk cited in the text. Dos Passos’s summation of the war is from his introduction to the reprinting of One Man’s Initiation (under a new title: First Encounter) published by the Philosophical Library at the start of World War II.
CHAPTER SIX: The statistics on war deaths comes from Keegan’s history cited above, as well as Hew Strachan’s The First World War (Penguin, 2003). Conscience by Louis Thomas (Viking, 2013) gives a good idea of what antiwar protestors suffered in the United States. Romain Rolland’s tribute to the protestors is from his book cited in the text. The chaplain’s screed is from The Great War in Europe by Thomas H. Russell (J. Peper, 1914). Bertrand Russell’s explanation of his motives for protesting are taken from his autobiography cited above. W. E. B. Du Bois’s reversal in opinion on the war is described in W. E. B. Du Bois by David Levering (Henry Holt, 1993). Dos Passos’s summary of Randolph Bourne appears in his novel Nineteen Nineteen (Modern Library, 1937).
CHAPTER SEVEN: Strachan and Keegan were the sources for the casualty statistics; the Beatrice Webb quote comes from Strachan. Wharton’s quote is from her book cited in the text. Emile Verhaeren’s quote is taken from The Book of the Homeless. Russell’s snarky comment on Santayana is taken from the former’s autobiography cited above. Lauder’s description of firing a revenge cannon shot is taken from his book cited in the text. “Charlie Chaplin meets Harry Lauder” is a must-view on YouTube. W. H. Auden’s poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” includes the reference to Paul Claudel.
CHAPTER EIGHT: The information on the book business is from Harold Orel’s interesting Popular Fiction in England 1914–18 (University Press of Kentucky, 1992). Murray’s quote on humor is from his book cited in the text. The quote about most authors not wasting their time on moralizing is from Odel. Virginia Woolf’s praise of Ring Lardner is taken from Ring by Jonathan Yardley (Random House, 1977). Lardner’s non-fiction book My Four Weeks in France, while less interesting t
han his wartime fiction, contains Wallace Morgan’s charming illustrations; Lardner’s bitter little doggerel appears there.
EPILOGUE: The names of the last ones to die in the war comes from Nicholas Best’s The Greatest Day in History (Public Affairs, 2008), as does Shaw’s bitter lament. D. H. Lawrence’s dark forecast is described in Samuel Hynes’s indispensable A War Imagined (Atheneum, 1991). Hynes was a fighter pilot in World War II, then went on to a long career (still in progress as of 2015) as a professor and writer, with many thoughtful books to his credit. Hynes is also the source for the stanza by Thomas Hardy. The Michelin guide is cited in the text. Albert Moravia’s quote is found in Promise of Greatness cited above. Hynes’s summation of the war and literature is from his book cited above, as is his quote on middle-aged civilians. I have a first edition of Cobb’s classic (Viking, 1935); thanks to Nicola Smith of the Valley News for steering me to Mary Borden’s little-known book. Henry Williamson’s lament is in Hynes. If you do an Internet search for “BBC Great War Interviews Henry Williamson” you’ll find the TV interview referred to. The quotes on Masefield and Montague are from Hynes.
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