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Abstract
Historical and literary critical orthodoxies hold that unfavourable British literary responses to the First World War did not materialise until Journey’s End and the war-books controversy of 1930. What appears to have happened is that an initial and largely factitious 1930 newspaper controversy has been conflated artificially with artefacts of popular culture from the 1960s to create a linear historical narrative of popular misrepresentation. A review of war fiction and memoir in English published prior to 1929 shows this narrative to be entirely unhistorical: considerable numbers of unfavourable responses to the First World War exist in British writing from this earlier period. The argument that there was a spell of post-war optimism before the general public changed its mind in 1929 is impossible to sustain. There never was a unitary British narrative of the First World War, and if the general perception of it by the British people since 1929 has been negative, the explanation does not lie in Depression-era war books but in whatever caused readers and reviewers of the time to respond favourably to individual accounts of the war rather than to a patriotic gloss.
Notes
1. Jerrold, The Lie About the War.
2. Ibid., 9.
3. Ibid., 19–20.
4. The titles are: Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms; Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front; Aldington, Death of a Hero; Graves, Good-bye to All That; Barbusse, Le Feu; Babel, Red Cavalry; Montague, Rough Justice; Wharton, Squad; Zweig, The Case of Sergeant Grischa; Cummings, The Enormous Room; Blake, The Path of Glory; Herbert, The Secret Battle; Mottram, The Spanish Farm Trilogy; Thompson, These Men Thy Friends; Grider, War Birds.
5. It is not entirely clear, when Jerrold writes of ‘falsification,’ whether he means deliberate fraudulence.
6. Jerrold, The Lie About the War, 23.
7. “Quincunx,” “In General”, Saturday Review, 3 May 1930, 556. Crozier himself appears to have been a highly colourful, larger-than-life individual. See Brigadier-General F. P. Crozier, A Brass Hat in No Man’s Land, 11–26; and Walker, “The Clash of the Croziers,” 13–31.
8. Brigadier-General C. D. Baker-Carr, Letter, The Times, 7 April 1930, 15.
9. Falls, War Books: A Critical Guide (London, 1930), xii.
10. Ibid., 182–3, 261–2, 292, 295.
11. “The Pen and the Sword,” The Times, 10 April 1930, 17.
12. “This War Book Business,” The Week-end Review, 3 May 1930, 253–4.
13. British propaganda and British war-aims are, of course, exhaustively farmed topics. For propaganda see Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning; Sanders and Taylor, British Propaganda during the First World War, 1914–1918; Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire; Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words; Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War and Paddock, A Call to Arms. British war-aims are examined in a neglected classic by Guinn, British Strategy and Politics 1914 to 1918. The more recent study by French, British Strategy and War Aims, 1914–16, notwithstanding its title and, presumably, the author’s intention, indicates that there was no strategy at all and constitutes the most persuasive argument for British neutrality in 1914 that I have read. (In fairness, I should say that a subsequent book by the same author, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition 1916–1918, is vastly superior to its predecessor in every respect, and essential reading for an understanding of the later years of Great Britain’s First World War.) The absence of any unitary British view of the war in the 1920s is indicated by Ponsonby, Falsehood in War-time and by Willis, England’s Holy War.
14. Barnett, “A Military Historian’s View of the Great War,” 1–18.
15. Ibid., 7.
16. “The Garlands Wither,” Review of The Lie About the War, by Douglas Jerrold, War Books: A Critical Guide, by Cyril Falls, Témoins, by Jean Norton Cru, and Mars; or, The Truth About War, by Alain, Times Literary Supplement, no. 1480 (12 June 1930): 485–6.
17. The comments of St John Ervine, who lost an arm in the war, are of interest, here. See his column, “Notes on the Way: Men, Women and Events,” Time and Tide 11, no. 19 (9 May 1930): 595–8; and no. 20 (16 May 1930): 629–32.
18. Barnett, “Oh What a Whingeing War!,” 18–19.
19. Bond, “British ‘Anti-War’ Writers and Their Critics,” 817–30.
20. Ibid., 821.
21. Ibid., 819.
22. Bond, “A Victory worse than a Defeat? British Interpretations of the First World War,” Annual Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives Lecture, King’s College London, 20 November 1997.
23. Bond, The Unquiet Western Front.
24. Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory, 84.
25. See, for example, Travers, The Killing Ground, xvii.
26. Strachan, The First World War, Vol. I: To Arms (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001), xv; Strachan, The First World War: A New Illustrated History, xvi.
27. For evidence that initial levels of war enthusiasm have been exaggerated see the Adjournment Debate of 3 August 1914, House of Commons Debates, 5th ser., 65: 1841–70; Gregory, “British ‘War Enthusiasm’ in 1914: A Reassessment,” 67–85; Arthur, Forgotten Voices of the Great War; Mundy, No Heroes, No Cowards; Silbey, The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War, 1914–1916.
28. Watson, Fighting Different Wars.
29. H. G. Wells, “The Sword of Peace,” Daily Chronicle, 7 August 1914, 4, and MacKenzie and MacKenzie, The Time Traveller, 297–310.
30. Wells, Mr. Britling Sees It Through.
31. Ibid., 227.
32. Ibid., 247.
33. Ibid., 343–4.
34. Ibid., 344–9.
35. Bennett, The Pretty Lady, 44.
36. Ibid., 241.
37. Ibid., 57.
38. Ibid., 88.
39. Ibid., 92.
40. Ibid., 94–5, 156.
41. Ibid., 209.
42. Henry James, “The Younger Generation,” Times Literary Supplement, no. 635 (19 March 1914): 133–4, and no. 637 (2 April 1914): 157–8. James discussed Walpole – a personal friend – in the April instalment.
43. One of England’s most prolific novelists recalled meeting in the winter of 1914–15 with Henry James “in the house of a well-known London hostess, who spoke with scorn of the fact that immediately on the outbreak of war Walpole had left his country.” The hostess refused to entertain either Walpole’s poor eyesight or the fact that his Russian trip had been planned long before hostilities broke out as an excuse. “Henry James was so angry that, suddenly seizing my arm, he muttered, ‘Let you and me who are friends of Walpole leave this house!’” Lowndes, The Merry Wives of Westminster, 140.
44. Walpole, The Dark Forest, 17.
45. Ibid., 35.
46. Ibid., 79.
47. Ibid., 117.
48. Ibid., 84–5, 144, 193–4, 232–3.
49. Ibid., 281.
50. Ibid., 306.
51. For the reception of The Dark Forest see Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole: A Biography, 149–50, 168.
52. Cannan, Pink Roses, 41.
53. Ibid., 47.
54. Ibid., 121.
55. Ibid., 50. The Morning Post, owned by Lilias, Countess Bathurst (1871–1965) and edited by Howell Arthur Keir Gwynne (1865–1950), was the most aggressively militarist of the wartime London dailies. Northcliffe’s Daily Mail also strongly supported the Army but, on 21 May 1915, famously attacked Lord Kitchener, then Secretary of State for War, over the shortage of high-explosive shells on the Western front. In the ensuing furore, copies of the Daily Mail were publicly burnt in the London Stock Exchange. See Taylor, The Great Outsiders, 158–9, and Thompson, Northcliffe: Press Baron in Politics, 1865–1922, 240–3.
56. Pink Roses, 260.
57. Fitzroy [Rose Laure Allatini], Despised and Rejected.
58. Ibid., 149.
59. Ibid., 150.
60. Ibid., 151.
61. Ibid., 193.
62. Ibid., 247–8.
63. Johnson, Land Fit for Heroes, 11.
64. Ruck, A Story-Teller Tells the Truth: Reminiscences and Notes, 19.
65. Allatini’s publisher, C. W. Daniel Ltd of Graham House, Tudor Street, EC4, was summonsed under Regulation 27(c) of the Defence of the Realm Act, specifically for publishing material likely to interfere with recruiting and discipline. The importance attached to the prosecution seems evident from the status of the people who attended the hearing at the Mansion House in the City of London under Alderman Sir Charles Wakefield (Charles Cheers Wakefield, 1st Baron Wakefield (1859–1941), who founded the Wakefield Oil Company, subsequently re-named Castrol, in 1899, and was raised to the peerage in 1930). There was no jury. The Crown Prosecutor himself, Sir Richard Muir, led the prosecution. (Sir Richard David Muir (1857–1924), famous for his part in the 1910 trial of Dr Crippen, was knighted in 1918. His only son died on active service (of influenza) on the same day as Wilfred Owen: 4 November 1918.) The case appears to have been initiated by Colonel Lord Chichester, head of the Pelham Committee, the organisational apex of the tribunal system that adjudicated on conscientious objectors. (Jocelyn Brudenell Pelham, 6th Earl of Chichester (1871–1926).) The defending counsel was also distinguished: George Cecil Whitely (1875–1942), who became Common Serjeant of London in 1932. The trial was brief and expensive for the publisher. Around 335 unsold copies of the novel were confiscated and destroyed and Charles Daniel had to pay £460-worth of fines and costs. “‛Despised and Rejected’: Publisher of Pacifist Novel Fined,” The Times, 11 October 1918, 5.
66. Alderman Wakefield’s remarks at the trial make it clear that “perverted” sexuality rather than pacifism provoked the severe penalty meted out to the publisher: “The question whether the book was obscene was not before him, but he did not hesitate to describe it as morally unhealthy and most pernicious.” The Times, ibid.
67. Two of the better known such works are Frankau, Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant, and Raymond, Tell England. In both cases a didactic narrator insists upon what should be thought about the war rather than allowing the reader to decide from the characters and incidents presented.
68. Macnaughtan, My War Experiences in Two Continents, 40.
69. Ibid., 106.
70. Ibid., 119.
71. Jacomb, Torment (A Study in Patriotism), 134.
72. F. A. V., Combed Out, 24. “F. A. V.” was Frederick Augustus Voigt (1892–1957), who joined the Manchester Guardian after the war and forged a distinguished career as a journalist. His forte was the exposure of political repression and state terror, a talent that makes his war memoir both horrifying and essential reading. His fourth chapter, “The Casualty Clearing Station,” is a perfect exemplar of Remarque’s subsequent observation: Erst das Lazarett zeigt, was Krieg ist (“A hospital alone shows what war is”).
73. Reginald Viscount Esher, The Tragedy of Lord Kitchener, 58–9.
74. Conan Doyle, The British Campaign in France and Flanders, 1: 56.
75. Buchan, Nelson’s History of the War, 6: 90.
76. Ibid.
77. Conan Doyle, The British Campaign in France and Flanders, 2: 246.
78. Buchan, Nelson’s History of the War, 14: 31–2.
79. Buchan, Nelson’s History of the War, 14: 34.
80. Buchan, Nelson’s History of the War, 20: 113.
81. Conan Doyle, The British Campaign in France and Flanders, 6: 305.
82. Buchan, Nelson’s History of the War, 24: 123–4.
83. Interestingly, Alec Waugh wrote in 1923 that: “The Victorians indulged in such an orgy of self-righteousness. They proclaimed so loudly that they were leaving the world better than they found it: and we know what manner of inheritance they handed down to us. It may be pardoned in us, I think, our indifference to politics, and the rights and wrongs of little nations.” In the same book he noted that: “In the early spring of 1921 I wrote a sketch of an ex-officer; it was an attempt to interpret the spirit of post-war disillusionment.” Waugh, Myself When Young: Confessions, 158.
84. In May 1915 five accredited British correspondents were granted permission to join the British Army in the field at GHQ for an indefinite period. They were: John Buchan, Philip Gibbs, Percival Phillips, Herbert Russell and Valentine Williams. They were given an officer’s uniform and the right to wear a green armband, the mark of the Intelligence Service. They were answerable to Brigadier-General John Charteris, Head of the Intelligence Service, and Colonel Hutton Wilson, in charge of the press. Buchan became a lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps in October 1915. He was replaced in April 1916 by Henry Perry Robinson who wrote for The Times and the Daily News. Gibbs wrote for the Daily Chronicle and the Daily Telegraph. Phillips, who was temporarily replaced by John Irvine during the Somme battles owing to illness, wrote for the Daily Express and the Morning Post. Russell wrote for Reuters News Agency. Williams, who wrote for the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, joined the Irish Guards and was replaced by William Beach Thomas in December 1915. When Northcliffe took Thomas with him to the United States in November 1917 Thomas was replaced temporarily by George Dewar, who covered the battle of Cambrai.
85. Gibbs, Realities of War.
86. Ibid., 4.
87. Ibid., 7.
88. Ibid., 11. Dr Nicholas Hiley has identified this Indian civil servant as John Champion Faunthorpe (1871–1929), who became aide-de-camp to King George V after the war.
89. Ibid., 46.
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid., 56–7.
92. Ibid., 76.
93. Ibid., 116.
94. Ibid., 117–18. Robert Graves felt this way, and so did many others. A medical officer who served with distinction in both the Boer War and the First World War wrote: “It was disturbing that those who abused the ‘conchie’ were often, one way and another, doing quite well out of the War. I was not sorry when I found myself again in a French train on my way up from Rouen to the Headquarters of the First Cavalry Division. At Havre a much-bemedalled and rather cynical colonel expressed the opinion that I was ‘a particularly damned fool to be in such a cast-iron hurry to get back to the Front.’ A fool perhaps. My haste was the result of sheer boredom, but I was not the only fool who found England in time of war impossible and danger rather fascinating.” Osburn, Unwilling Passenger, 227.
95. Realities of War, 148.
96. Ibid., 368–9.
97. “A Military Historian’s View,” 14.
98. Lovat Fraser, “Things Hidden.” Daily Mail, 21 January 1918, 2.
99. Dewar and Boraston, Sir Douglas Haig’s Command: December 19, 1915, to November 11, 1918, 1: 252.
100. Montague, Disenchantment.
101. Ibid., 34. We notice the patriotic Montague’s anger over “the Staff work of 1915,” 39 years before Alan Clark’s much-reviled account of the Western Front battles of that year in The Donkeys.
102. Montague, Disenchantment, 46.
103. Ibid., 50.
104. Ibid., 53.
105. Ibid., 98.
106. Ibid., 102. The war correspondent William Beach Thomas, whose reports were satirised under the name “Teech Bomas” in the trench newspapers The Kemmel Times, The Somme-Times and The B.E.F. Times, described his feelings after the first day of the Somme battle: “On the next day and yet more on the day after that, I was thoroughly and deeply ashamed of what I had written, for the very good reason that it was untrue.” Thomas, A Traveller in News, 109.
107. This line of inquiry has produced a host of works valuable for the documentary evidence and incidental insights they provide but ultimately unsatisfactory as explanations of popular feeling. Examples include Moynihan, People at War 1914–1918; Liddle, Testimony of War, 1914–1918 and Liddle, Home Fires and Foreign Fields: British Social and Military Experience in the First World War. Works dealing specifically with the British soldier include Brown, Tommy Goes to War; Holmes, Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front, and Meyer, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain. Cultural attitudes have been examined by Hynes, A War Imagined and Robb, British Culture and the First World War. Studies of mainstream (as opposed to highbrow) literature of the war include Onions, English Fiction and Drama of the Great War, 1918–1939 and Bracco, Merchants of Hope. The latter work shows that the overwhelming majority of “middlebrow” writers wrote stories on which they imposed a moral. In other words, the “meaning” of the events they described was given a marginal gloss rather than being allowed to emerge naturally from the narrative.