A Broken World: Letters, Diaries and Memories of the Great War

by Sebastian Faulks

  The detail Sinclair fixes on is an ‘absurd little dog’ lying in the straw, surrounded by a Flemish family who have sacrificed their own comfort in order to make a bed for him. Other writers in this collection have similarly sifted their memories for salient images and episodes; ‘the diamonds of the dustheap’, to coin a phrase Virginia Woolf used on 20 January 1919 to describe the hoped-for yields of making a diary. Were diamonds there already, awaiting retrieval, or did pressure have to be exerted upon rawer materials? Sinclair’s detail is not arbitrary. Selection brings shape and significance to experience: it is one way of making life intelligible. The detail Sinclair picks out from the scene resonates with ideas – though, as with much fiction, she leaves the work of articulating them to readers. Could the impression she selects be expressive of resilience? The refugees resist adherence to the imperative that so often accompanies moments of terror, ‘every man for himself’: the needs of individuals do not trump the collective desire to make content the family pet. Amidst violence, nurture persists. But then is violence, in turn, nurtured by the story? Given the 1915 publication date of Sinclair’s journal, casting a group of refugees as exemplary survivors has propagandist implications.

  Upon interpretation, small details scale up. Anthologies rarely include explicit interpretations: they are the beginnings of journeys that readers might embark upon themselves. Editors’ introductions and afterwords act similarly to Sinclair’s guide: they can point out details and ask questions. These will of course be motivated by particular concerns and interests. Entries in this volume have been included not always for what they tell us about the war, but for what they suggest about how writing mediates distance, displacement, conflict and loss. The organisation of the book is indicative of this, as is its title: the volume encourages consideration of the different ways in which writing accompanies the ‘endeavour to balance’, to coin the final lines of Amy Lowell’s ‘September. 1918’, ‘upon a broken world’. Titles and taxonomies can begin discussions even while they limit them. ‘Broken world’, expansive and macro-scale, draws out possible significances of Robert Graves’s miniature story about the gunning down of ‘a glass case full of artificial fruit and flowers’. Is the destruction of this relic of bourgeois living reflective of the impact of war on other ‘artificial’ things? Describing its effects in his war memoir Now It Can Be Told (1920), journalist Philip Gibbs wrote: ‘They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love […] Now the ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground.’ Yet it is also the case that much was made, rather than ‘broken’, during wartime. This collection includes records of relationships forged in shared spaces (cultural encounters in homes, camps and train carriages), and, where physical proximity was not permitted, by writing (open letters which transcend national borders). It is also not the case that for all writers war was the only breaking point in their lives. One rationale of not organising this volume chronologically was to allow for the inclusion of memories that exceed the 1914-18 bracket. Events of military-strategic importance do not always correspond with moments that held most significance for individuals whose writing features here.

  Readers of this collection are encouraged to make their own readings and patterns. Regardless of how the anthology is organised, there will always be alternative threads that can be drawn between entries. Parts of Edward Thomas’s diary read like a birdwatcher’s log; they might have been paired with Rosa Luxemburg’s prison letters (‘You can’t think how much I had come to depend on the society of those little creatures’, 2 August 1917). Listening to a soldier’s story which blends brutality with birdsong, the holding of a blood-covered body with the hearing of a cuckoo, Ivor Gurney describes (in a letter included in this collection) his ‘shame’ at revelling in the artistic inspiration war provides. These examples in turn might have been paired with Sinclair’s account. Does the logging of birds function similarly to her picking out of the little dog? Does it mark resistance: a wish to soar above the constraints of the immediate environment; to recognise that not everything can be circumscribed by the logic of military and state strategy? These questions are not intended to close the texts to alternative readings; there are other leads to be pursued. Birds also have, like the pilots of this volume, like the readers of this collection, the privilege of the panoramic. Sidney Rogerson’s entry details how trench-life impacted upon the soldier’s sense of perspective: ‘he began to lose the wider view, and instead to see falconwise the minutest details around, details which will ever survive in his memory.’ This anthology swoops between the bird’s and (what veterans sometimes call) the worm’s eye perspective. It combines letters and diaries unframed by hindsight with memories published and scribbled many years after the war. It has not sought to place these texts in a hierarchy; items have been chosen because in each case they have included details that have struck the anthologists.

  Surveying the spectacle, Sinclair takes note of how circumstances have flung together like with unlike: ‘The rigidly righteous bourgeoise lies in the straw breast to breast with the harlot of the village slum, and her innocent daughter back to back with the parish drunkard.’ Anthologies are similarly constitutive: making new allegiances and separating individuals and groups usually placed together. This anthology places accounts by professional writers alongside the memories of people whose names will not be found in biographical dictionaries. It encourages comparisons between the two. Both exhibit sensitivity to language, use form in interesting ways, and include arresting turns of phrase. The details that punctuate this volume, that interrupt the familiar, are not always things witnessed or experienced. They are often characteristics of the writing itself: whether Albert and Ernest Fletcher’s bitter conclusion to their 1963 letter, ‘rubbing our wounds’, or Havildar Abdul Rahman’s poignant simile for survivors: ‘Those who have escaped so far are like the few grains left uncooked in a pot.’ This is not to relegate the less unusual accounts to the ‘dustheap’: there is a case to be made for a duller anthology which reflects the grinding monotony of what was, for many, the typical experience of war. Yet, with writing, it is often the case that what at first seems familiar – Major E. W. J. Edgley’s list of ‘mud’, ‘rats’, and ‘the patience and endurance of the soldiers’ – becomes less so upon closer inspection: ‘mud’ appears twice (oozing beyond the bounds of his numbered list), and, curiously, ‘patience and endurance’ are only noted ‘in retrospect’.

  Much of this volume is reliant on the work of other collectors: on what they chose to include and on the questions they asked of witnesses. There is still much work to be done establishing archives that give voice to colonial troops and civilians; there are letters, diaries and memories yet to be translated. We cannot create first-hand testimonies any more: there are no more First World War veterans to interview. And yet we can re-read the texts that we do have; and new stories are still coming to light, donated to museums or uploaded to websites. We can also make new selections from existing archives. These have often privileged the more visceral accounts: when compiling its half-centenary documentary series, the BBC asked for ‘vivid’ memories. Yet some of the most interesting replies actively resisted the wording of this call. The shortest answer received was: ‘From August 1st 1915, to about April, 1916, nothing vivid happened. It was just hold on to what you have got’ (cited in a drafted BBC newsletter entitled ‘The Long and Short of It’). This concise contributor inspires consideration of the kinds of experience the search for vivid memories risks sidelining; more generally, it cautions collectors to think carefully about the questions they ask.

  First World War writing encourages a peculiar kind of attentiveness from readers partly because of how much remains unsaid. Mrs S. E. Chessum is perhaps most eloquent when most laconic: ‘we were 9 round the table, now. I am only one’. Like many writers included in this anthology, she adopted the role of the anthologist because she needed to speak of, and for, and perhaps to, those who could not tel
l their own story. In a letter from the front her son refers to the flower-seeds she had sent him: ‘I have put them in. but do not suppose shall see them grow up. but some other sore head may be cheered.’ Likewise, Mrs Chessum would never see her son ‘grow up’, but she transcribed her son’s words, and donated many other stories about him to the Imperial War Museum. She sowed the seeds then; they spring up again now: the ‘bunch of flowers’ that the word ‘anthology’ derives from. This may seem too pretty an image for a war book. Yet unspeakable loss can be poignantly implied by attempts to cover, conceal and console. Mrs Chessum never turns the ‘white spots’ of her letters red, but flowers, birds and little dogs become striking against a background of mud, rats and bleeding bodies. This anthology is full of such strange juxtapositions: they can be found both between and within entries. If we are sensitive to ‘undertones’ – to borrow from the title of Edmund Blunden’s 1928 war memoir – they are also created in the process of reading First World War memories.

  Hope Wolf, 2014

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  EPIGRAPH

  Amy Lowell, ‘September. 1918’, in Pictures of the Floating World by Amy Lowell (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1919), p. 244-5

  DISTANT HAMMERS

  H. J. Ewels to Millie (Mrs Harry Ewels), 29 May 1917, ‘Censored Postcards, Western Front, 1917’, Imperial War Museum, Documents, Misc. 124, Item 1937

  D. H. Lawrence to Lady Ottoline Morrell, March 1915, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. by Aldous Huxley (London: William Heinemann, 1932), pp. 222-3

  Norman Demuth, quoted in Max Arthur, Forgotten Voices of the Great War (London: Ebury, 2002), p. 19

  E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Home Front: A Mirror to Life in England During the World War (London: Hutchinson, 1932), pp. 114-8

  W. F. Tapp to Professor Stanley Weintraub, 12 October 1979, ‘Reminiscences of Armistice Day (11 November 1918)’, Imperial War Museum, Documents, Misc. 109, Item 1701, File 2, ‘11 Nov. in British Isles, Children – School’

  Hermia Mills to Professor Stanley Weintraub, 10 October 1979, ‘Reminiscences of Armistice Day (11 November 1918)’, Imperial War Museum, ibid.

  Alex J. Booth to Professor Stanley Weintraub, undated, ‘Reminiscences of Armistice Day (11 November 1918)’, Imperial War Museum, Documents, Misc. 109, Item 1701, File 3, ‘Armistice in Remote Places and at Sea’

  Muriel Dayrell-Browning to her mother, 4 September 1916, ‘Private Papers of Mrs M. Dayrell-Browning’, Imperial War Museum, Documents, 92/49/1

  John Frederick Macdonald, Two Towns – One City: Paris – London (London: Grant Richards, 1917), pp. 173-9

  Mrs M. Hall, quoted in Max Arthur, Forgotten Voices, pp. 67-8

  Katharine Jex-Blake, ‘Girton College, Cambridge: War Work, 1914-1919’, in The Girton Review, Jubilee number 1920, Girton College Archive, GCRF 2/1/1/10

  A. F. E. Sanders, War Work Index Cards, Girton College Archive, GCAC 2/1/3/4

  Mrs Howard Priestman, ibid.

  Helen E. Macklin, ibid.

  Muriel E. Jackson, ibid.

  May S. Gratton, ibid.

  Gertrude Exton, ibid.

  Joan Denny, ibid.

  F. E. Ashwell Cooke, ibid.

  L. E. Blyth, ibid.

  M. R. G. Bell, ibid.

  Janet Case, ibid.

  Mrs Ayrton, ibid.

  Edith Helen Pratt, ibid.

  J. H. Stephen, ibid.

  Mrs Prichard to Anon., 18 June 1915, ‘The First World War letters and papers of Mrs G. S. Prichard relating to RMS Lusitania’, Imperial War Museum, Documents, PP/MCR/C43

  Lilian Pye to Mrs Prichard, 26 November 1915, ibid.

  Grace H. French to Mrs Prichard, 10 September 1915, ibid.

  Olive North to Mrs Prichard, 11 September 1915, ibid.

  Sergeant E. Cooper, quoted in Lyn Macdonald, 1914–1918: Voices and Images of the Great War (London: Penguin, 1988), pp. 235-236, 234

  Helen Thomas, World Without End (London: William Heinemann, 1931), pp. 181-194

  Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925 (London: Gollancz, 1933), pp. 251-4

  Virginia Woolf, ‘Heard on the Downs: The Genesis of Myth’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Andrew McNeillie, Vol. 2: 1912–1918 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1987), 40-2, pp. 40-1, initially published in The Times, 15 August 1916

  Vincent Brown and ‘Little Raymond’ to Harry Brown, ‘Postcard Damaged by Shrapnel, 1918’, Imperial War Museum, Documents, Misc. 3346

  MIND AND MATTER

  Joseph Shaddick, ‘Poppy, Framed’, © Imperial War Museum, EPH 9960

  Rudolf Binding, A Fatalist at War, transl. by Ian F. D. Morrow (Boston and New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 1929), pp. 59-63

  Bert Bailey, quoted in Lyn Macdonald, 1914–1918, pp.110-111

  Frank Cocker, letters home, June 12 1915, July 1 1915, August 17 [1915], August 26 1915, January 6 1916, January 12 1916, ‘Private Papers of Lieutenant F. Cocker MC’, Imperial War Museum, Documents, 82/11/1

  Jack Dorgan, quoted in Max Arthur, Forgotten Voices, p. 81-2

  Ivor Gurney to Catherine Abercrombie, June 1916, and to Marion Scott, 21 June 1916, in Ivor Gurney, Collected Letters, ed. by R. K. R. Thornton (Manchester: Mid Northumberland Arts Group & Carcanet Press, 1991), pp. 91-2; 100-102

  Ernest Swinton, quoted in Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London: Penguin, 1979) pp. 159-161

  Edward Thomas, ‘War Diary, 1917’, in Edward Thomas, The Collected Poems and War Diary, 1917, ed. by R. George Thomas (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), pp. 158, 164, 171-2

  Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898–1918, ed. by Felix Klee (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), pp. 348, 350, 380-1, 387-8

  Horace Pippin, ‘Letter, circa 1943’, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, ‘Horace Pippin Notebooks and Letters’, Box 1, Folder 5

  Stephen Graham, The Challenge of the Dead (London: Cassell, 1921), pp. 119-21

  Martin Hieber, letter sent on 4 December 1916, in German Students’ War Letters, transl. and arranged from the original edition of Philipp Witkop by A. F. Wedd (London: Methuen, 1929), pp. 346-8

  Sidney Rogerson, Twelve Days, with a foreword by B. H. Liddell Hart (London, Arthur Barker, 1933), pp. 12-15

  A Sikh in Palestine, ‘Letters from Indian Army Troops’, created by D. C. Phillott, 1918, Cambridge University Library, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, MS Add.6170

  Guy Chapman, A Passionate Prodigality (London: Ivor Nicholson, 1933), pp. 144-146

  Stuart Cloete, A Victorian Son: an Autobiography 1897-1922 (London: Collins, 1972), pp. 236-7, 244, 245, 248

  Joe Murray, quoted in Max Arthur, Forgotten Voices, p. 119

  S. W. Brown to BBC, 2 August 1963, Imperial War Museum, Documents, BBC Great War Series Correspondence Files, Bro-Bry

  A. F. Hibbert to BBC, 12 July 1963, Imperial War Museum, ibid., Hib-Hit

  E. W. J. Edgley to BBC, 17 September 1963, Imperial War Museum, ibid., Ead-Eic

  Tom Adlam, quoted in Max Arthur, Forgotten Voices, p. 180-4

  Ford Madox Ford to Joseph Conrad, 6 September 1916, in Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. by Richard M. Ludwig (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 73-4

  Ronald Skirth, The Reluctant Tommy, ed. by Duncan Barrett (London: Macmillan, 2010), pp. 94-7

  Frederick W. Noyes, Stretcher Bearers…at the Double! (Toronto: Hunter Rose Company, 1937), pp. 112-116

  Ellen N. La Motte, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Heroes’ in The Backwash of War: The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an American Hospital Nurse (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919), pp. v-vi, 3-13

  Sarah MacNaughtan, My War Experiences in Two Continents (London: John Murray: 1919), pp. 1-2, 5-7

  Leslie Holden, A Little Graffic Experience of a Coolgardie Boy, 6 December 1916, pp. 24-7, ‘Private Papers of L. Holden’, Imperial War Museum, Documents, 07/08/1

  May Sinclair, A
Journal of Impressions in Belgium (London: Hutchinson, 1915), pp. 60-69

  Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That: An Autobiography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929), pp. 157-9

  Havildar Abdul Rahman to Naik Rajwali Khan, 20 May 1915, Military Department Censor of Indian Mails, 1914-15, India Office Records, British Library, IOR/L/MIL/5/825/3

  Anon., ‘Diary of an unknown Royal Army Medical Corps Orderly, Western Front, 1916’, Imperial War Museum, Documents, Misc. 105, Item no. 1663

  W. G. Seymour, photograph taken in 1917, sent with letter to Tony Essex, 6 August 1963, Imperial War Museum, Documents, BBC Great War Series Correspondence Files, Sca-Sex

  BETWEEN BORDERS

  Anon. to Rosenberg Esquire, ‘White Feather Postcard, August 1915’, Imperial War Museum, Documents, Misc. 2984

  W. H. Riddell to BBC, 19 May 1964, Imperial War Museum, Documents, BBC Great War Series Correspondence Files, Ric-Rix

  Vernon Lee, ‘Bach’s Christmas Music in England and in Germany’, in Jus Suffragii, Monthly Organ of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, Vol. 9., No. 4, 1 January 1915 [Reissued in International Woman Suffrage: Jus Suffragii, 1913-1920, ed. by Sybil Oldfield, Vol. 2 (London: New York, Routledge, 2003), p. 36]