by None
Stories of the inter-war years are likewise diverse in approach and sentiment. ‘Trench stories’ of that period, by such authors as C. E. Montague (‘A Trade Report Only’, 1923) and Richard Aldington (‘Victory’, 1930), tend to be war-critical and emphasize the horror and human tragedy of the war. But by that time, remembrance and healing had also become a major theme. Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Fly’ (1922) explores a father’s grief six years after his son was killed. Published in the same year but in a completely different spirit, Harold Brighouse’s ‘Once a Hero’ casts a satirical light on a hypocritical cult of public commemoration that serves the living more than it does the ‘glorious’ dead.
A decade later, the pain of remembering had abated, as Winifred Holtby’s ‘The Casualty List’ (1932) suggests: to the old woman in this story, the daily obituary of natural deaths has become more real and affecting than the lists of casualties she recalls from the war. The necessity for 1920s Britain to recuperate even underlies a story that looks back to the hidden war of intelligence: in John Buchan’s ‘The Loathly Opposite’ (1928), two men from a former decoding unit suffer ailments that may result from their exhausting efforts during the war. That they find a cure in the former enemy’s country reflects late-1920s pacifism and the desire to achieve reconciliation with Germany.
Other stories of the time raised more controversial issues: that British soldiers had been shot for desertion, for example, like the underage volunteer in John Galsworthy’s ‘Told by the Schoolmaster’ (1927). The difficulties returned soldiers experienced in readjusting to post-war Britain are the subject of Hugh Walpole’s ‘Nobody’ (1921); his protagonist only regains a purpose in life when he forms a new affiliation with the working classes and thus stands for the reorientation with which his society as a whole was confronted. The war’s impact on conceptions of gender is another prominent theme of the post-war years.23 While D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Tickets, Please’ (1919) sketches a war caused by women’s entry into ‘male’ working domains, Radclyffe Hall’s ‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself’ (written 1926) depicts an ageing lesbian who longs for the active role, freedom and temporary acceptance that work as an ambulance driver had afforded her during the war and which she lost with the Armistice.
Although their number decreased dramatically after the caesura of the Second World War, stories about the First World War continued to be written after 1945. Not unexpectedly, their main concern is how the war is remembered across the gap of time and how this memory is passed on to future generations. Robert Graves’s early 1960s story about the ‘Christmas Truce’ of 1914 explicitly includes a man who wishes his war veteran grandfather to march with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. By the end of the twentieth century, few First World War soldiers were left, and the character in Julian Barnes’s ‘Evermore’ (1995) anticipates that the war’s collective memory will fade. But this story itself helps to perpetuate its memory, as do the others in the anthology’s final section. Muriel Spark’s ‘The First Year of My Life’ (1975) and Robert Grossmith’s ‘Company’ (1989) indicate in their own original ways how the war continues to haunt later generations, figuratively and, as Grossmith’s ghost story suggests, even literally.
Barbara Korte
NOTES
1. See for example H. G. Wells, The War That Will End War (London: Palmer, 1914).
2. On the ‘great Casualty Myth’ see John Terraine, The Smoke and the Fire: Myths and Anti-myths of War 1861–1945 (London: Leo Cooper, 1992), p. 35.
3. The war’s culture of mourning is discussed in Jay Winter’s influential study Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
4. See Fussell’s seminal The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 155f.
5. On this ‘great boom of war literature’ see, among others, Rosa Maria Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919–1939 (Providence, Rhode Island: Berg, 1993), p. 14.
6. Disenchantment (London: Chatto & Windus, 1922) is the programmatic and frequently quoted title of C. E. Montague’s recollections of his war experience.
7. See in particular Douglas Jerrold’s The Lie about the War: A Note on Some Contemporary War Writers (London: Faber and Faber, 1930). On a ‘distorted’ popular memory based on canonical literature, see also the recent historical scholarship of Gary D. Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War. Myths and Realities (London: Headline, 2001) and Brian Bond, The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
8. See Bracco, Merchants of Hope; Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1950–2000 (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).
9. Susan Hill, Strange Meeting (1971), Pat Barker, Regeneration Trilogy (1991–5) and Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong (1993). Other significant novels of the 1990s include Robert Edric’s In Desolate Heaven (1997), David Hartnett’s Brother to Dragons (1998) and Helen Dunmore’s Zennor in Darkness (1993).
10. Perry’s series of novels set in the war was begun in 2003, with No Graves as Yet; Morpurgo’s Private Peaceful came out the same year.
11. ‘Bartimeus’ was the pseudonym of Lewis Anselm da Costa Ricci (1886–1967), ‘Taffrail’ that of Henry Taprell Dorling (1883–1968).
12. Some of Phillpotts’s short stories were collected in The Human Boy and the War (London: Methuen, 1916).
13. On the more recent history of the short story in Britain see Clare Hanson, Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880–1980 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985) and Dominic Head, The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Specifically on the modern short story as an art of the ‘significant moment’, see Frank O’Connor in The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (London: Macmillan, 1963), p. 23.
14. See Blunden’s introduction to the anthology Great Short Stories of the War: England, France, Germany, America, ed. ‘H.C.M’ (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1930), p. ii.
15. H. E. Bates, The Modern Short Story: A Critical Survey (1941; Boston: The Writer, 1965), p. 203. Also compare George Walter’s observation in the introduction to his Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (London: Penguin, 2006) that after the war, ‘the market for war poetry dried up almost as quickly as it had appeared’ (p. xxiii).
16. See Motion’s introduction to his anthology of First World War Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. xi, also quoted by Walter, First World War Poetry, p. 31.
17. Story collections of other well-known writers associated with the war, like C. E. Montague’s Fiery Particles (1923) and R. H. Mottram’s Armistice (1929), were last published in the early 1970s, i.e. in the wake of the 1960s’ revived interest in the First World War.
18. See note 14.
19. The anthology was also published in the United States (New York: Harper, 1931), with an introduction by H. M. Tomlinson (1873–1958), who had just published his anti-war novel All Our Yesterdays (1930). A slightly earlier collection, James G. Dunton’s C’est la Guerre! The Best Stories of the World War (Boston: Stratford, 1927), had a strong American focus and included only two British examples.
20. Of the writers reprinted here, Katherine Mansfield has a New Zealand and Mary Borden an American background, but the war stories of both were written or published while their authors lived in Britain.
21. Despite the modern technology with which it was fought, the experience of the war sometimes seemed to border on the archaic and the surreal, and for the bereaved, spiritualism became a source of consolation. It is not surprising, therefore, that the supernatural story was perceived to have an affinity to the war. On the war and the supernatural, see also Winter, Sites of Memory, pp. 54–77.
22. On the involvement of British writers in the propaganda machine see also Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914–18 and After (London: Batsford, 1989), pp. 79–1
16, and Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: The Bodley Head, 1990), pp. 25–56.
23. On the war’s importance for a re-conceptualization of masculinity and femininity, see Sandra M. Gilbert’s seminal article ‘Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War’, in Speaking of Gender, ed. Elaine Showalter (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 282–309.
Further Reading
Anthologies of Short Stories of the First World War
Great First World War Stories (London: Chancellor, 1994): this is a reprint of Great Short Stories of the War, 1930, and includes, among others: H. M. Tomlinson (‘A Raid Night’), F. Britten Austin (‘The End of an Epoch’), ‘Saki’ (‘The Square Egg’), R. H. Mottram (‘The Devil’s Own’) and Algernon Blackwood (‘Cain’s Atonement’).
Women, Men and the Great War, ed. Trudi Tate (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995): has a special interest in the gender experience and perception of the war, and includes, among others: Wyndham Lewis (‘The French Poodle’), Ford Madox Ford (‘The Scaremonger’), Virginia Woolf (‘The Mark on the Wall’), May Sinclair (‘Red Tape’) and Mary Butts (‘Speed the Plough’).
Political and Social History of the First World War
DeGroot, Gerard, Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War (London: Longman, 1996).
Marwick, Arthur, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (London: Macmillan, 1991 (1965)).
Strachan, Hew (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Strachan, Hew, The First World War: A New Illustrated History (London: Simon & Schuster, 2003).
Cultural History and Impact of the First World War
Eksteins, Modris, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin; and London: Bantam Press, 1989).
Todman, Dan, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon and London, 2005).
Tylee, Claire M., The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women’s Writings, 1914–64 (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1990).
Studies of the War’s Literature
Bergonzi, Bernard, Heroes’ Twilight; A Study of the Literature of the Great War (1965; Manchester: Carcanet, 1997 [1965]).
Eby, Cecil, The Road to Armageddon: The Martial Spirit in English Popular Literature 1870–1914 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1987).
Higgonet, Margaret R., Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I (New York: Plume, 1999).
Onions, John, English Fiction and Drama of the Great War, 1918– 39 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990).
Parfitt, George, Fiction of the First World War: A Study (London: Faber, 1988).
Raitt, Suzanne, and Tate, Trudi (eds.), Women’s Fiction and the Great War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
Sherry, Vincent, The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
A Note on the Texts
The first published appearance of a short story in a magazine or newspaper is often difficult to trace and obtain. The author may also have revised this version for a later appearance in collected form. Where possible, the text reprinted here is therefore that of its first appearance in an author’s collection, assuming that this is the author’s definitive version. Where this source was unavailable, other anthologies were considered an acceptable alternative. The respective edition is specified in the note to each story.
The texts are unabridged. Apart from house-styling in minor typographical details, spelling and punctuation have not been altered, but obvious printer’s errors have been emended.
1
FRONT
ARTHUR MACHEN
THE BOWMEN
It was during the retreat of the eighty thousand,1 and the authority of the censorship is sufficient excuse for not being more explicit. But it was on the most awful day of that awful time, on the day when ruin and disaster came so near that their shadow fell over London far away; and, without any certain news, the hearts of men failed within them and grew faint; as if the agony of the army in the battlefield had entered into their souls.
On this dreadful day, then, when three hundred thousand men in arms with all their artillery swelled like a flood against the little English company, there was one point above all other points in our battle line that was for a time in awful danger, not merely of defeat, but of utter annihilation. With the permission of the censorship and of the military expert, this corner may, perhaps, be described as a salient, and if this angle were crushed and broken, then the English force as a whole would be shattered, the Allied left would be turned, and Sedan2 would inevitably follow.
All the morning the German guns had thundered and shrieked against this corner, and against the thousand or so of men who held it. The men joked at the shells, and found funny names for them, and had bets about them, and greeted them with scraps of music-hall songs. But the shells came on and burst, and tore good Englishmen limb from limb, and tore brother from brother, and as the heat of the day increased so did the fury of that terrific cannonade. There was no help, it seemed. The English artillery was good, but there was not nearly enough of it; it was being steadily battered into scrap iron.
There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another: ‘It is at its worst; it can blow no harder,’ and then there is a blast ten times more fierce than any before it. So it was in these British trenches.
There were no stouter hearts in the whole world than the hearts of these men; but even they were appalled as this seven-times-heated hell of the German cannonade fell upon them and overwhelmed them and destroyed them. And at this very moment they saw from their trenches that a tremendous host was moving against their lines. Five hundred of the thousand remained, and as far as they could see the German infantry was pressing on against them, column upon column, a grey world of men, ten thousand of them, as it appeared afterwards.
There was no hope at all. They shook hands, some of them. One man improvised a new version of the battle-song, ‘Goodbye, Good-bye to Tipperary’,3 ending with ‘And we shan’t get there.’ And they all went on firing steadily. The officers pointed out that such an opportunity for high-class, fancy shooting might never occur again; the Germans dropped line after line; the Tipperary humorist asked: ‘What price Sidney Street?’4 And the few machine-guns did their best. But everybody knew it was of no use. The dead grey bodies lay in companies and battalions, as others came on and on and on, and they swarmed and stirred and advanced from beyond and beyond.
‘World without end. Amen,’5 said one of the British soldiers with some irrelevance as he took aim and fired. And then he remembered – he says he cannot think why or wherefore – a queer vegetarian restaurant in London where he had once or twice eaten eccentric dishes of cutlets made of lentils and nuts that pretended to be steak. On all the plates in this restaurant there was printed a figure of St George in blue, with the motto, Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius–May St George be a present help to the English. This soldier happened to know Latin and other useless things, and now, as he fired at his man in the grey advancing mass – three hundred yards away – he uttered the pious vegetarian motto. He went on firing to the end, and at last Bill on his right had to clout him cheerfully over the head to make him stop, pointing out as he did so that the King’s ammunition cost money and was not lightly to be wasted in drilling funny patterns into dead Germans.
For as the Latin scholar uttered his invocation he felt something between a shudder and an electric shock pass through his body. The roar of the battle died down in his ears to a gentle murmur; instead of it, he says, he heard a great voice and a shout louder than a thunder-peal crying, ‘Array, array, array!’
His heart grew hot as a burning coal, it grew cold as ice within him, as it seemed to him that a tumult of voices answered to his summons. He heard, or seemed to hear, thousands shouting: ‘St George! St G
eorge!’
‘Ha! messire; ha! sweet Saint, grant us good deliverance!’
‘St George for merry England!’
‘Harow! Harow!6 Monseigneur St George, succour us.’
‘Ha! St George! Ha! St George! a long bow and a strong bow.’
‘Heaven’s Knight, aid us!’
And as the soldier heard these voices he saw before him, beyond the trench, a long line of shapes, with a shining about them. They were like men who drew the bow, and with another shout their cloud of arrows flew singing and tingling through the air towards the German hosts.
