Lovely War
Page 35
WOMEN AND WORLD WAR I
The Great War had a reverberating impact on women, particularly in the United Kingdom, where such a large percentage of men were pulled into the service of the war effort. Prior to the war, stringent laws and attitudes kept middle and upper-class British women within constrained, largely domestic spheres. Working-class women were chiefly employed as household servants, earning meager pay. Some women worked in factories, under appalling conditions, with wages they could scarcely live on.
When war broke out in Europe, millions of British men went overseas. Every industry now faced a dire labor crisis: farming, preaching, teaching, clerical work, entertainment, professional athletics, manufacturing, medicine, transportation, and more. Suddenly women were operating trains, driving trucks and ambulances, working in factories, assisting in hospitals, and even performing surgery. Women from every rung of the socioeconomic ladder stepped up to “do their bit.” Wealthy women organized charities and relief organizations for Belgian refugees, for war wounded, for widows and orphans. They opened hospitals and hired women doctors and nurses to staff them. Young women joined the Women’s Land Army and moved to the countryside to grow urgently needed food. The Red Cross employed thousands of nurses and nursing assistants. The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) enlisted volunteers and secretaries at relief huts. Countless thousands of women left domestic servitude and took better-paying war production jobs in factories, turning out millions of artillery shells. For an engaging, thoughtful, and at times, hilarious account of how women stepped up to “do their bit” across all aspects of British life, I recommend Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in World War One by Kate Adie.
Much of society was aghast to see women in the workplace, exposed to worldly vices. An anxious traditionalist element of society insisted that this “unnatural” state of affairs was temporary; as soon as the war ended, women would give up their jobs and return to domestic life, yielding jobs to the men. In large measure, this is what happened.
But women’s capacity had been proven, exposing the fallacy in the belief that women were too fragile, emotional, or unintelligent for political life. When the war ended, the British Parliament passed the “Representation of the People Act 1918,” granting suffrage (voting rights) to all men, regardless of property, and to all women over the age of thirty, with minimum property ownership requirements. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granted American women the right to vote. In 1928, Parliament extended the Representation of the People Act, granting suffrage to all women over the age of twenty-one, on equal footing with men. (It took the Second World War drawing to a close for France to grant the vote to women in 1944.)
For a moving account of one young war nurse who became an activist for peace and women’s rights, I recommend Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain. This beloved memoir stands as one of the greatest women’s accounts of the First World War. A 2014 BBC/Heyday Films feature film adaptation starring Alicia Vikander and Kit Harington beautifully depicts the book’s essence.
American women volunteered in large numbers as well, including African American women. Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, by Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn Magnolia Johnson, is a firsthand account that provides a frank look at the persecution faced, and the inspiring work done, by women who served as YMCA volunteers at the Camp Lusitania “Negro hut” at Saint-Nazaire.
IMPACT OF WORLD WAR I
World War I was the first war to use aircraft for surveillance and combat in any significant way, and the first war in which submarines were used to great effect. Tanks were invented during the Great War—a project directed by Winston Churchill—in hopes of bursting through the craters and barbed wire of no-man’s-land to penetrate enemy lines. By land, by sea, and by air, an entirely new form of war was waged, using heavy artillery field guns capable of bombing targets scores of miles away. Although nuclear weapons and smart missiles were yet to appear, World War I gave us modern warfare as we now know it.
Medical advances emerged from the treatment of the war’s millions of casualties. Modern weaponry created ghastly, debilitating injuries, but innovations in prosthetics and reconstructive surgery brought many an increased quality of life. Prosthetic facial masks, if eerie-looking, concealed gruesome facial injuries and lent their wearers dignity and privacy.
Injuries less likely to be seen, but no less debilitating for many, were mental and emotional. It wasn’t until later in the war that the concussive impact upon the brain of nearby explosions was better understood. It took longer still for the psychological devastation of trench warfare to be seen as a war injury and not mere cowardice or weakness. Manifestations of “shell shock” varied from uncontrollable shaking, to refusal to return to combat, to erratic behavior, suicide, nightmares, screaming, depression, anxiety, and violent behavior. Hospitals like the one in Maudsley grew in number and expanded their mental health facilities, designing them with comfort, therapy, rehabilitation, and medication management in mind. Pink walls and friendly, cheerful treatment were innovations. Though the world had, and still has, a long way to go in understanding, treating, and destigmatizing mental illness, it’s inspiring to see what gains were made in the name of compassion and sympathy for those who suffered in ways that, not long prior, would have been scorned as cowardly or “unmanly.”
A WAR OF THE OLD UPON THE YOUNG
Older men made the decisions that thrust the world into war in the summer of 1914, but it was chiefly the young who bore the war’s burden. Countless youth lied about their age and enlisted as young teens.
Throughout the war, soldiers who saw lives wasted in endless, futile carnage for no perceptible gain grew increasingly disillusioned with the middle-aged leaders who poured out young blood like water from the safety of their leather-backed chairs. The disparity between the gore and filth of the trenches and the image of heroic honor conjured by war propaganda caused a crisis of faith—both religious and patriotic—for millions.
Poets and artists in the trenches used art to lambaste this war apparently waged by the old upon the young. The works of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Ivor Gurney, Alan Seeger, and Edward Thomas, and even the idealistic early war poetry of Rupert Brooke, stand as memorials to youth and innocence lost forever, alongside works by well-known writers and poets such as Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, Carl Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Women working at the Front, among them Vera Brittain, the author of Testament of Youth, contributed stunning poetry to the war canon. The Poetry Foundation has compiled an outstanding collection of World War I poetry on its website. It’s brilliant, bitter, and heartbreaking.
For memoirs and fictional accounts of life at the Front from soldiers who fought there, I recommend the perennial classics All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, and Good-bye to All That, by Robert Graves.
The causes and provocations that led the world into such a devastating war aren’t easily distilled; perhaps for that reason, the First World War remains less understood than the Second. For eminently readable accounts of how we got into such a global mess, I recommend the highly acclaimed works The Guns of August, by Barbara W. Tuchman, and The War That Ended Peace, by Margaret MacMillan.
IN MEMORIAM
Researching and writing Lovely War made me love these soldiers, these Tommys and Poilus and Doughboys and Anzacs and Jerrys who fought and died along the Western Front because they had no choice. But it wasn’t until I traveled to France and Belgium, visiting preserved trenches and underground tunnels, still-hollowed shell craters, breathtaking monuments, war museums, and row after row of pristine gravestones—witnessing Europe’s fidelity to their memory—that I began to glimpse the true cost of this war. I have never seen anything like it. Lovingly tended graves marked “Welsh Soldier, Known Only to God,” broke my heart.
A frequent theme
in the writings of men at the Front was their marveling at how, over the shell-blasted wasteland of the killing fields, a glorious sunset could still paint the sky, or the freshness of dew and birdsong could still make morning sweet. Even in the trenches. For all its horror and despair, for many, the Great War sharpened life, showing it for the brief and fleeting gift it was, and revealing home, freedom, safety, family, beauty, and love to be precious beyond price.
Many never returned from the war. Others returned but were never the same. Still others returned to bigotry and hatred that history has yet to leave firmly in the past. They paid a price.
Their children paid a similar price in the global war that followed.
We owe a debt.
How might the twentieth century have gone if nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip had failed to assassinate Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand at a June parade in Sarajevo in 1914? Possibly some other spark would have lit the same fuse. Possibly not. We can’t know.
But we can choose to use whatever means lie in our own power to be agents of healing, hope, justice, plenty, and peace.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adie, Kate. Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in World War One. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013.
Badger, Reid. A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Brittain, Vera. Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. First published in Great Britain in 1933 by Victor Gollancz Limited.
Graves, Robert. Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography. London: Penguin Books, 2008. First published in the United Kingdom in 1929 by Anchor.
Harris, Stephen L. Harlem’s Hell Fighters: The African-American 369th Infantry in World War I. Washington, DC: Potomac Books Inc., 2003.
Hunton, Addie W., and Kathryn Magnolia Johnson. Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces. Brooklyn: Brooklyn Eagle Press, 1920.
Lentz-Smith, Adriane. Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.
MacMillan, Margaret. The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914. New York: Random House, 2013.
Miles, William (director). Men of Bronze: The Black American Heroes of World War I. 1977.
Nelson, Peter N. A More Unbending Battle: The Harlem Hellfighters’ Struggle for Freedom in WWI and Equality at Home. New York: Basic Civitas, a member of the Perseus Books Group, 2009.
Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front. Toronto: Little, Brown & Company, 1929.
Sparrow, Walter Shaw. The Fifth Army in March 1918. London: John Lane, 1921.
Tuchman, Barbara W. The Guns of August: The Outbreak of World War I. New York: Random House, 2014. Originally published by Macmillan, 1962.
Wright, Richard. Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Originally published 1945 by Harper & Brothers.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE WAR TO END ALL WARS failed to live up to expectations. It didn’t end in a month. It wasn’t over by Christmas. It wasn’t glorious, and it most certainly did not halt future war.
Those who supported me in writing this book, however, exceeded all expectations.
My first draft was supposed to be over by Christmas. It wasn’t. But when it finally appeared, my editor, Kendra Levin, climbed fearlessly over the parapet into the no-man’s-land of those early drafts, time after thankless time. There ought to be a Distinguished Service Medal for editorial valor. I’d go further and lobby for Kendra’s nomination for the Victoria Cross.
My agent, Alyssa Henkin, and my publisher, Ken Wright, have championed this project from its inception. I hope always to live up to their faith in me.
The entire team at Penguin Young Readers embraced Lovely War. Regina Hayes and Dana Leydig provided superb insight into early drafts. I could do nothing without Janet Pascal. Special thanks to Kaitlin Severini for her painstaking efforts. Kim Ryan has taken my work around the globe. Marisa Russell brings my work into the sun, and Carmela Iaria puts it in just the right hands. Samira Iravani and Jim Hoover make my books gorgeous, and Jocelyn Schmidt and Jennifer Loja make all of this possible.
I’m lucky to have early readers who shared their time and insights so generously. To Nancy Werlin, Debbie Kovacs, Kelly Anderson, Alison Brumwell, Kyle Hiller, Hannah Gómez, Herb Boyd, and Luisa Perkins, thank you for leaving your mark upon this story.
I prayed my way through every page, and that which has carried me aloft thus far never forgot me. Divine help gave life to this project, including but not limited to Aphrodite’s contributions.
The pace and process of researching and writing this book was unusually intense, and my family had to live with a Julie who was present but not. They cheerfully carried on, gave me a wide berth to do what I needed to do, and celebrated each milestone with love and takeout. Thanks especially to Daniel, for always believing. It really is the Berry family who brings these books into the world.
At the vanguard of the Berry army stands my glorious Phil, my best-beloved, and Lovely War’s subject, theme, and inspiration.
JULIE BERRY is the author of the 2017 Printz Honor and Los Angeles Times Book Prize shortlisted novel The Passion of Dolssa, the Carnegie and Edgar shortlisted All the Truth That’s in Me, and many other acclaimed middle grade novels and picture books. She holds a BS from Rensselaer in communication and an MFA from Vermont College. She lives in Southern California with her family.
*. Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles, page 94.
* From “Secret Information Concerning Black Troops,” dated August 7, 1918, reprinted in Crisis Magazine, May 1919 edition, volume 18, number 1 (whole number 103). Edited by William Edward Burghardt du Bois. The Crisis Publishing Company, a publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
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