War Stories

by Sebastian Faulks

  Laurie Lee was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, and educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School. At the age of nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, where he was trapped by the outbreak of the Civil War – to which he later returned by crossing the Pyrenees, as described in his book As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.

  He published five books of poems: The Sun My Monument (1944); The Bloom of Candles (1947); My Many-Coated Man (1955), Pocket Poems (1960); and Selected Poems (1983). His other works include a verse play for radio, The Voyage of Magellan (1948); a record of his travels in Andalusia, A Rose for Winter (1955); The Firstborn (1964); a collection of his occasional writing, I Can’t Stay Long (1975); Two Women (1983); and three bestselling volumes of autobiography, Cider with Rosie (1959), which has sold over five million copies worldwide, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), and A Moment of War (1991), now published together in one volume as Red Sky at Sunrise (1992). Laurie Lee died in 1998.

  Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots Minister, was brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Royal Navy; two and a half years spent aboard a cruiser were later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel. He went on to write twenty-nine bestselling novels, many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Force 10 from Navarone, Where Eagles Dare and Bear Island. He died in 1987.

  Norman Mailer was born in New Jersey in 1923. He grew up in Brooklyn and entered Harvard University to study engineering when he was only sixteen. During the Second World War, Mailer served in the Philippines, an experience which formed the basis of his debut novel, The Naked and the Dead.

  A major figure in postwar American literature, his other works include Barbary Shore, The Deer Park, Advertisements for Myself (for which he was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award), Ancient Evenings, Harlot’s Ghost and, most recently, The Gospel According to the Son.

  David Malouf is recognized as one of Australia’s finest writers. His novels include Johnno, An Imaginary Life, Harland’s Half Acre, The Great World, Remembering Babylon and The Conversations at Curlow Creek. He has also written five collections of poetry and three opera libretti. He lives in Sydney.

  André Malraux was born in France in 1901 and educated in Paris where he studied archaeology and orientalism. His first visit to Asia was in 1923, when he became involved in revolutionary activities in China. The visit resulted in his book Les Conquérants (1928). This was followed by La Voie royale (1930) and La Condition humaine (1933), which won the Prix Goncourt.

  In the middle and late 1930s Malraux became one of France’s leading anti-Fascists, and organized a volunteer air squadron to fight for the Republicans in Spain. His novel dealing with the early part of the war in Spain, Days of Hope (1938), was written close to the events.

  After a distinguished career in the Second World War, Malraux became involved in the Gaullist movement. He was Minister of Information from 1945-6 and became Minister of State at the inception of the Fifth Republic in 1959. After de Gaulle’s withdrawal from politics in 1969, Malraux continued to be active both in the intellectual and the international fronts. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford, an Officier de la Légion d’Honneur and a Compagnon de la Libération. Malraux died in 1976.

  Stratis Myrivilis was born in Sykamia, Lesbos in 1892. He wrote his first novel, Life in a Tomb, in journal form as a sergeant in the trenches of the Macedonian front. It became one of the most successful and widely read works of fiction in Greece since its publication in serial form in 1923–4, despite its inclusion on the list of censored books under both Metaxas and the German occupation. It is the first volume in a trilogy containing The Mermaid Madonna and The Schoolmistress with the Golden Eyes.

  A prolific author, Myrivilis was also an active journalist and broadcaster, being General Programme Director for the Greek National Broadcasting Institute from 1936 to 1951 (excluding the period of German occupation, when he was dismissed because of a broadcast he gave calling on Greeks to resist). After the war he was elected President of the National Society of Greek Writers. He died in 1969.

  Bao Ninh was born in Hanoi in 1952. During the Vietnam War he served in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. Of the five hundred who went to war with the brigade in 1969, he is one of the ten who survived. A huge bestseller in Vietnam, The Sorrow of War is his first novel.

  Tim O’Brien served as an infantryman in Vietnam and later worked as a national affairs reporter for the Washington Post. Born in Minnesota, he now lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

  When If I Die in a Combat Zone, his first book, was published in 1973, it established him as one of the leading American writers of his generation, a status that was confirmed when his novel Going After Cacciato won the 1979 National Book Award. His other books include The Things They Carried (1990), In the Lake of the Woods (1994) and Tomcat in Love (1999).

  Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Toronto. His books include Coming Through Slaughter, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, The Cinnamon Peeler, Running in the Family, In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient.

  Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabrück in 1898. Exiled from Nazi Germany, and deprived of his citizenship, he lived in America and Switzerland. His novels include All Quiet on the Western Front, The Road Back, Three Comrades, The Sparkling of Life and A Time to Love and a Time to Die. Remarque died in 1970.

  James Salter was born in New Jersey in 1925. He is the author of The Hunters (1957), The Arm of Flesh (1961), A Sport and a Pastime (1967), Light Years (1975), Solo Faces (1981), Dusk and Other Stories (1988) and his memoirs, Burning the Days (1997). He won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1989.

  Siegfried Sassoon was born at Brenchley, Kent, in 1886. He was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Clare College, Cambridge. After university, he lived at home and wrote poems which were privately printed.

  He enlisted at the outbreak of the First World War and was sent to France as a second lieutenant where he won the Military Cross. In 1917 he threw his MC into the Mersey and publicly announced his refusal to go back to the front. He expected to be court-martialled but was sent to Craiglockart Hospital near Edinburgh, thanks to the intervention of his friend Robert Graves. There he befriended and encouraged the poet Wilfred Owen, before returning to his regiment, with whom he served in Palestine and France until July 1918.

  His attitude towards the war found fierce expression in his poetry, including the collections Counterattack (1918) and Satirical Poems (1926). His fiction includes the autobiographical trilogy, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, containing Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston’s Progress (1936). He was awarded the CBE in 1951 and the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 1957. Sassoon died in Heytesbury, Wiltshire, in 1967.

  Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. During the Second World War he served in Europe and, as a prisoner of war in Germany, witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. He is the author of fourteen other novels, most recently Timequake, a collection of stories and three non-fiction books. He lives in New York City.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  This is a list of some of the titles we considered. In many cases we wanted to include extracts but found none sufficiently representative and/or self-contained.

  First World War

  ALDINGTON, RICHARD, Death of a Hero (London: Chatto & Windus 1929)

  ALVERDES, PAUL, Changed Men (London: Martin Secker 1933)

  BARBUSSE, HENRI, Under Fire (1916; trans. London: J.M. Dent 1917)

  BARKER, PAT, Regeneration (London: Viking 1991)

  BARKER, PAT, The Eye in the Door (London: Viking 1993)

  BARKER, PAT, The Ghost Road (London: Viking 1995)

&
nbsp; BARNES, JULIAN, ‘Evermore’, in: Cross Channel (London: Jonathan Cape 1996)

  BOYD, WILLIAM, An Ice-Cream War (London: Hamish Hamilton 1982)

  BOYD, WILLIAM, The New Confessions (London: Hamish Hamilton 1987)

  BRIFFAULT, ROBERT, Europa (London: Robert Hale 1936)

  BRIFFAULT, ROBERT, Europa in Limbo (London: Robert Hale 1937)

  CÉLINE, LOUIS-FERDINAND, Journey to the End of the Night (1932; trans. London: John Calder 1988)

  CHATWIN, BRUCE, On the Black Hill (London: Jonathan Cape 1982)

  DOS PASSOS, JOHN, Three Soldiers (New York: Viking Penguin 1921)

  EDRIC, ROBERT, In Desolate Heaven (London: Duckworth 1997)

  FAULKNER, WILLIAM, Soldiers’ Pay (London: Chatto & Windus 1926)

  FAULKNER, WILLIAM, ‘The Wasteland’ (comprising ‘Ad Astra’, ‘Victory’, ‘Crevasse’, ‘Turnabout’ and ‘All the Dead Pilots’), in Collected Stories (London: Chatto & Windus 1951)

  FORD, FORD MADDOX, Parade’s End (London: The Bodley Head 1924–8)

  GLAESER, ERNST, Class 1902 (1928; trans. London: Martin Secker 1929)

  GRISTWOOD, A.D., The Somme, including also The Coward (London: Jonathan Cape 1927)

  HAŠEK, JAROSLAV, The Good Soldier Švejk (1921–3; trans. London: William Heinemann 1973)

  HEMINGWAY, ERNEST, ‘Soldier’s Home’, in In Our Time (London: Jonathan Cape 1926)

  HEMINGWAY, ERNEST, A Farewell to Arms (London: Jonathan Cape 1929)

  INGRAM, KENNETH, Out of Darkness (Chatto & Windus 1927)

  JAPRISOT, SEBASTIEN, A Very Long Engagement (1991; trans. London: Harvill 1993)

  JONES, DAVID, In Parenthesis (London: Faber and Faber 1937)

  KEABLE, ROBERT, Simon Called Peter (London: Constable 1921)

  MALOUF, DAVID, Fly Away Peter (London: Chatto & Windus 1982)

  MANNING, FREDERIC, The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929; second edition: Her Privates We, London: Peter Davies 1930)

  MAXWELL, W.B., We Forget Because We Must (London: Hutchinson 1928)

  MYRIVILIS, STRATIS, Life in the Tomb (1924; trans. London: Quartet 1987)

  O’FLAHERTY, LIAM, The Return of the Brute (London: Mandrake Press 1929)

  READ, HERBERT, Ambush (London: Faber and Faber 1930)

  RENN, LUDWIG, War (1928; trans. London: Martin Secker 1929)

  REMARQUE, ERICH MARIA, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929; trans. 1929; new trans. London: Jonathan Cape 1994)

  ROTH, JOSEPH, Flight Without End (1927; trans. London: Chatto & Windus 1983)

  ROTH, JOSEPH, Tarabas (1935; trans. London: Chatto & Windus 1987)

  ROUAUD, JEAN, Fields of Glory (1990; trans. London: Harvill 1994)

  SASSOON, SIEGFRIED, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (London: Faber and Faber 1928)

  SASSOON, SIEGFRIED, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (London: Faber and Faber 1930)

  SOLZHENITSYN, ALEKSANDR, August 1914 (1971–83; trans. London: Jonathan Cape 1989)

  SOLZHENITSYN, ALEKSANDR, November 1916 (1993; trans. London: Jonathan Cape 1999)

  THOMPSON, EDWARD, In Araby Orion (London: Ernest Benn 1930)

  THOMPSON, EDWARD, These Men Thy Friends (London: Macmillan 1933)

  WELLS, H.G., Mr Britling Sees It Through (London: Cassell 1916)

  WILLIAMSON, HENRY, How Dear Is Life (London: MacDonald 1954)

  YEAYES, V.M., Winged Victory (London: Jonathan Cape 1934)

  ZWEIG, ARNOLD, The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1927; trans. New York: Viking Penguin 1928)

  ZWEIG, ARNOLD, Education Before Verdun (1935; trans. London: Martin Secker 1936)

  Russian Revolution and Civil War

  BABEL, ISAAC, ‘Red Cavalry’, in: Collected Stories (1924–37; trans. 1955; new trans. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1994)

  SHOLOKHOV, MIKHAIL, And Quiet Flows the Don (1929; trans. London: Putnam 1934)

  Spanish Civil War

  FURST, ALAN, Night Soldiers (London: The Bodley Head 1988)

  HEMINGWAY, ERNEST, For Whom the Bell Tolls (London: Jonathan Cape 1941)

  LEE, LAURIE, A Moment of War (London: Viking 1991)

  MALRAUX, ANDRÉ, Days of Hope (1938; trans. London: Hamish Hamilton 1968)

  SIMON, CLAUDE, The Palace (1962; trans. London: John Calder 1987)

  Second World War

  ANATOLI, A. (KUZNETSOV), Babi Yar (1966; trans. London: Jonathan Cape 1970)

  BALLARD, J.G., Empire of the Sun (London: Victor Gollancz 1984)

  DE BEAUVOIR, SIMONE, The Blood of Others (trans. 1944; London 1948)

  BEGLEY, LOUIS, Wartime Lies (London: Picador 1991)

  DE BERNIERES, LOUIS, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (London: Secker & Warburg 1994)

  BINDING, TIM, Island Madness (London: Picador 1998)

  BÖLL, HEINRICH, Group Portrait With Lady (1971; trans. London: Secker & Warburg 1973)

  BÖLL, HEINRICH, A Soldier’s Legacy (1982; trans. London: Secker & Warburg 1985)

  BÖLL, HEINRICH, The Silent Angel (1992; trans. London: André Deutsch 1994)

  BÖLL, HEINRICH, The Stories of Heinrich Böll (trans. London: Secker & Warburg 1986)

  BOOTH, MARTIN, Hiroshima Joe (London: Hutchinson 1985)

  BOWEN, ELIZABETH, The Heat of the Day (London: Jonathan Cape 1949)

  BUCHHEIM, LOTHAR-GÜNTHER, The Boat (1973; trans. London: HarperCollins 1975)

  BURNS, JOHN HORNE, The Gallery (London: Secker & Warburg 1948)

  BUZZATI, DINO, The Tartar Steppe (1945; trans. Manchester: Carcanet Press 1996)

  CALVINO, ITALO, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (1947; trans. 1956; new trans. London: Jonathan Cape 1998)

  CUNNINGHAM, PETER, Consequences of the Heart (London: Harvill 1998)

  CURTIS, JEAN-LOUIS, The Forests of the Night (1947; trans. London: John Lehmann 1950)

  VAN DIS, ADRIAAN, My Father’s War (1994; trans. New York: The Free Press 1996)

  ENDO, SHUSAKU, The Sea and the Poison (1957; trans. London: Peter Owen 1972)

  ENDO, SHUSAKU, Stained Glass Elegies (1979; trans. London: Peter Owen 1984)

  FARRELL, J.G., The Singapore Grip (London: HarperCollins 1978)

  FAULKNER, WILLIAM, ‘Two Soldiers’ and ‘Shall Not Perish’, in Collected Stories (London: Chatto & Windus 1951)

  FOWLES, JOHN, The Magus (1966; revised London: Jonathan Cape 1977)

  FULLER, JOHN, The Burning Boys (London: Chatto & Windus 1989)

  FURST, ALAN, The Polish Officer (London: HarperCollins 1995)

  FURST, ALAN, The World at Night (London: HarperCollins 1997)

  GALLICO, PAUL, The Snow Goose (London: Michael Joseph 1941)

  DEL GIUDICE, DANIELE, Take-Off (1994; trans. London: Harvill 1996)

  GRASS, GÜNTER, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. London: Secker & Warburg 1962)

  GRASS, GÜNTER, Dog Years (1963; trans. London: Secker & Warburg 1965)

  GREEN, HENRY, Caught (London: Chatto & Windus 1943)

  GREENE, GRAHAM, The Ministry of Fear (London: Jonathan Cape 1943)

  GROSSMAN, VASILY, Life and Fate (1980; trans. London: Harvill 1985)

  HARRIS, ROBERT, Enigma (London: Hutchinson 1995)

  HELLER, JOSEPH, Catch-22 (London: Jonathan Cape 1962)

  HELLER, JOSEPH, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here (London: Simon & Schuster 1998)

  HENDERSON, MEG, The Holy City (London: Flamingo 1997)

  HERSEY, JOHN, The Call: An American Missionary in China (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1985)

  HUGHES, DAVID, The Pork Butcher (London: Constable 1984)

  JONES, JAMES, From Here to Eternity (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1952)

  JONES, JAMES, The Thin Red Line (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1963)

  KADARÉ, ISMAÏL, The General of the Dead Army (1970; trans. London: Quartet 1986)

  KOEPPEN, WOLFGANG, Death in Rome (1954; trans. London: Hamish Hamilton 1992)

  KOESTLER, ARTHUR, Arrival and Departure (London: Jonathan Cape 1943)

  MACLEAN, ALISTAIR, HMS Ulysses (London: Collins 1955)

  MAILER, NORMAN, The Naked and t
he Dead (London: Alan Wingate 1949)

  MALAMUD, BERNARD, ‘Armistice’, in The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud (London: Vintage 1998)

  MALOUF, DAVID, The Great World (London: Chatto & Windus 1990)

  MANNING, OLIVIA, The Balkan Trilogy (London: William Heinemann 1987; comprising The Great Fortune, 1960; The Spoilt City, 1962; and Friends and Heroes, 1965)

  MANNING, OLIVIA, The Levant Trilogy (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1982; comprising The Danger Tree, 1977; The Battle Lost and Won, 1978; and The Sum of Things, 1980)

  MICHAELS, ANNE, Fugitive Pieces (London: Bloomsbury 1996)

  MONSARRAT, NICHOLAS, The Cruel Sea (London: Cassell 1951)

  MORANTE, ELSA, History: A Novel (trans. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1974)

  MULISCH, HARRY, The Assault (trans. New York: Pantheon 1985)

  ONDAATJE, MICHAEL, The English Patient (London: Bloomsbury 1992)

  PALMER, WILLIAM, The Pardon of Saint Anne (London: Jonathan Cape 1997)

  PRITCHETT, v.s., ‘The Voice’, in The Lady from Guatemala: Selected Stories (London: Vintage 1997)

  PYNCHON, THOMAS, Gravity’s Rainbow (London: Jonathan Cape 1973)

  SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL, Iron in the Soul (1949; trans. London: Hamish Hamilton 1950)

  SHUTE, NEVIL, A Town Called Alice (London: William Heinemann 1950)

  SIMON, CLAUDE, The Flanders Road (1960; trans. London: John Calder 1985)

  SIMONOV, KONSTANTIN, Days and Nights (London: Hutchinson 1945)

  SKVORECKY, JOSEF, The Engineer of Human Souls (1977; trans. London: Chatto & Windus 1984)

  STEINBECK, JOHN, The Moon is Down (London: William Heinemann 1942)

  STYRON, WILLIAM, Sophie’s Choice (London: Jonathan Cape 1979)

  SZCZYPIORSKI, ANDRZEJ, The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman (1986; trans. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1990)

  VIDAL, GORE, Williwaw (New York: Dutton 1948)

  VONNEGUT, KURT, Slaughterhouse-Five (London: Jonathan Cape 1969)

  VONNEGUT, KURT, ‘A Nazi City Mourned at Some Profit’, in: Palm Sunday; An Auto-biographical Collage (London: Jonathan Cape 1981)

  WAUGH, EVELYN, The Sword of Honour Trilogy (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1984; comprising Men at Arms, 1952; Officers and Gentlemen, 1955; and Unconditional Surrender, 1961)