Where Wars Go to Die

by W. D. Wetherell

  On the shelf next to Doyle, as if taking part in a chin-to-chin debate, is Justice in War-Time by Bertrand Russell. Russell the famous philosopher, Russell the mathematician, Russell the great popularizer of abstract thought—Russell who was one of the very few public intellectuals who dared speak out against the war while it was still in progress.

  It was printed in Chicago by the Open Court Publishing Company in 1916—so maybe it was only in a still-neutral America that his antiwar writing could get published? There’s an old-fashioned bookplate pasted in front showing books arranged against a window, with the marvelous name “Kenneth Glendower Darling,” and a little epigraph: “Who hath a book hath but to read/And he may be a king indeed/His kingdom is his ingle-nook.”

  Like any old book, it implicitly asks a question. Who was Mr. Darling, and why, in a world flooded with propaganda like Doyle’s, was he interested in Bertrand Russell?

  Here is another book, a hundred-year-old version of a paperback, with covers so tattered and peeling it’s as if the book is drawing its last breaths in my hand: The German Terror; an historical record by Arnold J. Toynbee.

  Toynbee? Wasn’t he a famous, highly respected British historian? The cover is gray around the edges, black within, with a garish German imperial eagle surrounded by jagged red flames—it seems to be rising from hell or sinking back again. There’s a map in front that needs care in unfolding, but is in perfect shape after that. “The invaded country,” it says, with bold red shadings showing the successive stages of the German advance through Belgium and France. The owner’s name doesn’t appear, but he or she, obviously an American, has scribbled something in pencil just above the publishing date MCMXVII. “We fought for freedom for ourselves in l776, and we now fight for freedom of the world.”

  There’s another book next to it (a really good day at the bookstore, this, but I’m compacting dozens of visits, dozens of stores, into one miraculous one), the slimmest of the four. Treat ’em Rough: Letters from Jack the Kaiser Killer is the title, by Ring W. Lardner.

  Lardner was the great American story writer and humorist—but what was he doing writing about war? The cover shows a caricature of a baseball player—small legs and torso, thick bat, big grinning face topped by a doughboy’s campaign hat—and he’s following through after walloping a baseball, only the baseball is the Kaiser’s mustachioed face tucked into a spiked pickelhaube helmet.

  These books, after being published to what you assume was at least modest interest and receptivity, have gone on to hibernate through the next century, so it’s natural to wonder where they’ve spent the interval—what care or what luck resulted in their surviving long enough for someone like me to find them.

  Take the one I have open on the desk, Essays in War-Time by Havelock Ellis, published by Constable and Co. in London in 1917. Ellis is remembered as a pioneering researcher into human sexuality, and is usually given credit for coining the terms “homosexual” and “narcissism.” He was an important name in his day, and it’s understandable that he would bring his far-ranging perspective, his eye for the big picture, to the war that was tearing apart the civilization that had made his career possible.

  It’s easier to trace this book’s history than with most. Published in London, it obviously crossed the Atlantic to the States on a ship, perhaps as a kind of literary ballast to go along with British gold for American munitions. There’s a plate pasted on the endpapers, “The Gardner-Harvey Library of Miami University Middletown, Ohio,” while on the opposite page is handwritten “F. B. Amato, 26th June 1928,” and, below that, “From Mortimer and Daddy,” so it must have been on the family’s bookshelf until the 1930s. Did someone die then? Was the book then donated to the college library, which may have been interested because of Ellis’s reputation?

  There’s a “Date Due” slip pasted on the back, but it only shows the book being checked out once, on Halloween 1960, with no dates stamped below it. The library, seeing the poor checkout record, must have discarded it at some point, probably in the 1970s, possibly offering it in a campus book sale, where some book lover found it and brought it home.

  After that, it’s harder to guess. Whoever bought it could have died, and his or her heirs probably donated it to yet another book sale, this one perhaps a fund-raiser at the local library or school. Someone thought well enough of it to load it in their car and drive it across the country, but then it must have ended up in the possession of someone who had no use for it whatsoever. It was somehow transferred to the Whatley Antiquarian Book Center in Whatley, Massachusetts, where (stopping to use their restroom on the way back to New Hampshire) I found it in 2009, and, taking it home, became probably only the third or fourth person to read it cover to cover in a hundred years—and found it to be informative and fascinating, with a perspective on the war far beyond what you would think that anyone writing in the midst of it could possibly achieve.

  But here’s the remarkable thing. As little read as these books are today, as thoroughly forgotten, there are lots of them—books and essays written on the Great War, during the Great War, by the best writers of the day, the greatest novelists, dramatists, poets, and philosophers. List the names and you’re listing the literary giants, the Nobel Prize winners, the ones who are still read, studied, and reverenced today. James, Conrad, Shaw, Bergson, Chesterton, Wells, Yeats, Rebecca West, Edmond Rostand, Romain Rolland, Hardy, Masefield, Mann, Cocteau, Gorky, Niebuhr, Dewey, and a dozen others of comparable rank.

  Add to these the books written during the war by writers who later became important (Henry Beston, for instance, who, after publishing a totally neglected book called A Volunteer Poilu, went on to become the best nature writer in America), the ones written by writers who should have been better known (like Mildred Aldrich, who spent four years living and writing just behind the front lines), and the books written during the war by authors, famous then, who are now totally forgotten (like the novelist Winston Churchill, the American Winston Churchill), and you have an entire literature of World War I that hardly anyone has paid attention to in the 100 years since it was produced.

  This neglect is almost total. A recent bestselling history of the war cites 216 separate books in the “Notes” section at the end, and yet only nine of these books were published during the war itself, and none were written by the great writers listed above; in an earlier history, this one by the renowned John Keegan, 193 books are cited, but only six that were published 1914–18, and none by the above writers. In The Penguin Book of First World War Prose, published in 1990, the emphasis is almost entirely on books written after the war, and the same is true of Paul Fussell’s landmark study, The Great War and Modern Memory, which concentrates on the postwar canon written by ex-soldiers. Hardly any mention is made of the literary giants who wrote while the war was still going on.

  You need to read individual biographies of the authors to find any information about their World War I writings, and even here the record is skimpy. One otherwise excellent biography of Ring Lardner devotes no more than five or six sentences to his writings on the war, though Lardner devoted three books to the subject, managing to do the seemingly impossible—make the war humorous in a way that can still be appreciated 100 years later.

  Why critics and historians have neglected these books is hard to fathom; why the general reading public forgot them is perfectly understandable. When the war ended, the very last thing anyone wanted to read about was the horror they had just experienced, especially when so much of the war writing—the mood having shifted—now seemed shrilly propagandistic. When war books did come back into fashion, it was the 1920s, and the mood was somber, repentant, disenchanted, so the books written back while the war was in progress, even the ones that went far beyond propaganda, now seemed hopelessly idealistic. Hemingway’s heroes distrusted “big” words and abstractions—and there were lots of big words in these earlier books.

  But the main reason they became forgotten was that another, even greater war came along,
producing so many books on its own that the literature from the earlier war was literally pushed from the shelves. Who wanted to read about Kaiser Wilhelm when Hitler was coming to power? Who cared about Sarajevo when Pearl Harbor was under attack? Twenty years after the Armistice, World War I was now ancient history, at least to the reading public, and sympathy for poor gallant Belgium, which had moved so many readers in 1914, now seemed, in the face of fresher horrors, little more than quaint.

  And something else was happening—the visual world was taking over from the world of print. When you think of World War I, no iconic photographs spring to mind; when you think of World War II, you picture a whole gallery, from the Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi to Mussolini hanging like cold meat at that gas station in Milan to the face of Dachau survivors as they’re liberated to the sailor sweeping the girl off her feet on V-E Day in New York. People now wanted their wars photographed or newsreeled, and the few grainy black-and-white illustrations found in the World War I books, added to them as after-thoughts, hardly measured up to the dramatic images they became used to seeing in The March of Time or British Pathe.

  Even without these special cultural circumstances, most of these books would have faded from view, dying the natural death almost every book eventually suffers. Cyril Connolly, writing in 1938, said that the overriding goal for an author is to write a book that will still be read ten years after it’s published—and that if a book accomplishes this, then it deserves to be termed “immortal.” (Shelf life being what it is today, ten weeks is the new immortal.) To survive that long, Connolly said, a book must have some “quality that improves with time.”

  The forgotten literature of World War I has this quality, at least the best of it. It’s precisely because it was written on the other side of a great divide—before the visual age, before the digital age—that it has become so evocative when we try to look back. The writers who produced it were, at least potentially, the men and women whose minds were best equipped to understand what the world was going through, the ones whose hearts could most deeply feel the enormous human tragedy. “War is the most deadly earnest thing,” Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, a generalization there is still no arguing with. “This war is the most tragic thing that has ever happened to mankind,” added H. G. Wells, speaking more specifically—and at the time there was no question but that he was right, too.

  What writers like these had to say about the war not only gives us a clearer idea of what their era was like, but speaks in terms that we can still read with profit; a hundred years is a long time, but not that long, not when the war ushered in a modern era that isn’t done with us yet. And if the war does indeed mark the divide between what seems, on the far side, the almost ancient, and, on this side, the all-too-painfully modern, then it’s in the books written from 1914 to 1918 where we can see the change happening.

  (A novelist I know tells me he finds it relatively easy to imagine and write about any event from 1914 onwards, including the Great War, but impossible to contemplate a novel set in 1913 or earlier, since it would be like writing about men in armor or ladies in hooped skirts; he couldn’t possibly understand them.)

  “In 1914,” the Bloomsbury writer Leonard Woolf wrote, “in the background of one’s life and one’s mind there was light and hope; by 1918, one had accepted a perpetual public menace and darkness, and had admitted into the privacy of one’s soul an acquiescence in insecurity and barbarism.”

  Writer after writer testifies to this change. “Like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours,” is the way Barbara Tuchman sums up the war. “In pre-war days,” L. P. Hartley adds, “hope took for granted what in post-war days fear takes for granted.” “A vast age of transition,” Vera Brittain calls it, looking back on a war that saw the death of her brother, her fiancé, her best friend, “which carried the nineteenth century into the twentieth; the changes were apocalyptic and fundamental, and mankind was never the same again.” “Much that was then taken to be fairly noble now looks pretty mean,” C. F. Montague says; “Much that seemed reassuringly stable is now seen to be shaky. Civilization itself wears a strange new air of precariousness.” And the American essayist Agnes Repplier worries that “The standard of evil has been forever changed.”

  The writers anthologized here came to maturity in that prewar world; they were a generation that believed in reason, in civilization, in art, in progress, in a human destiny that was full of hope. These were the qualities that made them the great artists they were, but it did not equip them to deal with the tragic experience of the modern, postwar world—or did it? One of the surprises in reading their work is the amount of cynicism, irony, and “modernism” that you find, even in 1914, so maybe the change wasn’t quite as dramatic as later studies like to claim.

  Still, the task of interpreting the war was soon given over to a younger generation of writers, particularly those who had served in the trenches and seen the obscenities of war—and thus the modern age—up close. They saw a lot, these writers, but by the same token there was much they didn’t understand or care to understand; they were, as most were quick to admit, primarily focused on the little patch of No Man’s Land they could see through their trench periscopes, never mind what was happening in the larger world. But it was their writings that became the war’s canonical literature, their novels and memoirs that still color our view of the war, while the civilian literary response is largely ignored.

  To state the obvious, middle-aged writers like Hardy, Yeats, Rolland, Mann, and Conrad never served in the trenches. They escaped the filth, the carnage, the mud, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t alive to it, weren’t struggling to take in what was going on. Writers like Wharton understood the soldiers’ agony, but also understood the pain of the refugees, the widowed, the bereaved, and the tragic implications of what was being destroyed.

  These writers had an importance that wasn’t confined to the world of ideas. Poets, novelists, and dramatists enjoyed a status and influence in 1914 that writers of today can only dream of; they weren’t just ivory-tower intellectuals read by a harmless coterie, but celebrities, opinion makers, movers and shakers, forces for good and sometimes for evil; it’s no exaggeration to say that the words of Doyle, Kipling, and Toynbee sent young men to their deaths.

  The writer Russell Miller emphasizes this point. “This was an age, before radio, movies and television, when writers wielded huge social as well as literary influence, were quoted as authorities on a whole range of subjects, and were looked upon to provide a moral view of the world.”

  (Many of the books I find were widely read when first published. Mildred Aldrich’s accounts of her life near the trenches were bestsellers in America; John Buchan’s novels were the ones soldiers carried with them in the trenches; Edgar Guest’s flag-and-motherhood poems appeared in most American newspapers and were read out loud at the supper table.)

  And while a modern-day writer, op-editing on the latest war half a world away, will almost certainly not have a friend or relative involved in the fighting, nor gone anywhere near it him- or herself, many of these writers managed to find their way to Flanders to see for themselves what was going on. Many allowed themselves to be taken on well-organized, smoothly-run “trench tours,” with a little dollop of danger at the end to make it all seem authentic, but others served in the ambulance corps, worked as nurses, or cared for refugees.

  And while jingoistic, bellicose writers like Doyle and Kipling may have influenced young boys to enlist, their own sons were killed in the war, so they can’t be accused of blatant hypocrisy. Other writers suffered personally as well. Conrad’s son was gassed; Katherine Mansfield’s brother was killed; Russell was thrown into prison; Shaw’s reputation was destroyed; James, nursing the wounded, died of a broken heart.

  One more point to keep in mind when it comes to these books. The authors were working in 1914, when books as physical objects were at the peak of their influence and power, but by 1918 had begun their long slow d
ecline, to the point where, in our own day, books as objects have an increasingly tenuous existence, as covers, binding, flaps all disappear and words go electronic … and so it’s a miracle that books from a hundred years ago even survive at all, let alone the great insights that, if we search them out in old bookstores, still live within those nostalgically familiar cardboard covers.

  It is not sufficiently recognized that 100 years after it officially ended, with the last surviving combatants all having died, the Great War is still very much a living memory. People continue to be impacted by its pain, though it’s muted now, buffered, but not yet erased. The usual simile is to a boulder being dropped into a still pond, with an explosion, then a wave, then a ripple—and more ripples, each one wider than the next, but softer, spreading a lot farther, if you study the pond carefully, than anyone would expect.

  Havelock Ellis understood this as far back as 1916.

  “All these bald estimates of the number of direct victims to war give no clue to the moral and material damage done by the sudden destruction of so large a proportion of the young manhood of the world, the ever widening circles of anguish and misery and destitution which every fatal bullet imposes on humanity, for it is probably true that for every ten million soldiers who fall on the field, fifty million other persons at home are plunged into grief or poverty or some form of life-diminishing trouble.”

  This is well said—and Ellis could have multiplied his fifty million by a factor of ten if he drew his “ever widening circles” out across the next century.

  A few examples.

  After writing a novel set in Flanders in 1918, I was interviewed on public radio. The host of the program, a man named John, asked me why I had mentioned, just in passing, the “Bois de Fere” as the place where a minor character’s husband has been killed.