Where Wars Go to Die

by W. D. Wetherell

  The first of July dawned, a beautiful summer morning, and the British and French infantry sprang over their parapets and rushed to the attack on both sides of the Somme. Twelve hours after the fighting began, Sir Douglas Haig telegraphed: “Heavy fighting has continued all day between the rivers Somme and Ancre. On the right of our attack we have captured the German labyrinth of trenches on a front of seven miles to a depth of 1,000 yards, and have stormed and occupied the strongly fortified villages of Montauban and Mametz. In the centre, we have gained many strong points. Up to date, 2,000 German prisoners have passed through our collecting stations. The large number of the enemy dead on the battle-fields indicate that the German losses have been very severe.”

  So much for the first day’s news. The attack was well begun …

  The result on the Somme has set the heart of England aflame; even while we ponder those long, long casualty lists which represent the bitter price that British fathers and mothers, British wives and daughters have paid, and must still pay, for the only victory which will set up once again the reign of law and humanity in Europe.

  From England’s Effort, by Mrs. Humphrey Ward; Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1918.

  The World Has a Right to Know

  —Richard Harding Davis

  When I returned to New York every second man I knew greeted me sympathetically with: “So you had to come home, hey? They wouldn’t let you see a thing.” And if I had time I told him all I saw was the German, French, Belgian, and English armies in the field, Belgium in ruins and flames, the Germans sacking Louvain, in the Dover Straits dreadnoughts, cruisers, torpedo destroyers, submarines, hydroplanes; in Paris bombs falling from air-ships and a city put to bed at 9 o’clock; battle-fields covered with dead men; fifteen miles of artillery firing across the Aisne at fifteen miles of artillery; the bombardment of Rheims with shells lifting the roofs as easily as you would lift the cover of a chafing-dish and digging holes in the streets, and the cathedral on fire; I saw hundreds of thousands of soldiers from India, Senegal, Morocco, Ireland, Australia, Algiers, Bavaria, Prussia, Scotland, saw them at the front in action, saw them marching over the whole northern half of Europe, saw them wounded and helpless, saw thousands of women and children sleeping under hedges and haystacks with on every side of them their homes blazing in flames or crashing in ruins.

  That was part of what I saw. What during the same two months did the man at home see? If he were lucky he saw the Braves win the World Series, or the Vernon Castles dance the fox-trot …

  The army calls for your father, husband, son—calls for your money. It enters upon a war that destroys your peace of mind, wrecks your business, kills the men of your family, the man you were going to marry, the son you brought into the world. And to you the army says: “This is our war. We will fight it in our own way, and of it you can only learn what we choose to tell you. We will not let you know whether your country is winning the fight or is in danger, whether we have blundered and the soldiers are starving, whether they gave their lives gloriously or through our lack of preparation or inefficiency are dying of neglected wounds.” And if you answer that you will send with the army correspondents to write reports home and tell you, not the plans for the future and the secrets of the army, but what are already accomplished facts, the army makes reply: “No, these men cannot be trusted. They are spies.”

  Not for one moment does the army honestly think those men are spies. But it is the excuse nearest at hand.

  This is a world war, and my contention is that the world has a right to know, not what is going to happen next, but at least what has happened. If men have died nobly, if women and children have cruelly and needlessly suffered, if for no military necessity and without reason cities have been wrecked, the world should know that.

  Those who are carrying on this war behind a curtain, who have enforced this conspiracy of silence, tell you that in their good time the truth will be known.

  It will not.

  Some men are trained to fight, others are trained to write. The latter can tell you of what they have seen so that you, safe at home at the breakfast table, also can see it. Any newspaper correspondent would rather send his paper news than a descriptive story. But news lasts only until you have told it to the next man, and if in this war the correspondent is not to be permitted to send the news I submit he should at least be permitted to tell what has happened in the past. The war is a world enterprise, and in it every man, woman and child is an interested stockholder. They have a right to know what is going forward. The directors’ meetings should not be held in secret.

  From With the Allies, by Richard Harding Davis; Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1918.

  Old Men Don’t Go

  —H. G. Wells

  Mr. Britling’s conception of his own share in the great national uprising was a very modest one. He was a writer, a footnote to reality; he had no trick of command over men, his role was observation rather than organisation, and he saw himself only as an insignificant individual dropping from his individuality into his place in a great machine, taking a rifle in a trench, guarding a bridge, filing a cartridge until the great task was done. Sunday night was full of imaginations of order, of the countryside standing up to its task, of roads cleared and resources marshalled, of the petty interests of private life altogether set aside. And mingling with that it was still possible for Mr. Britling, he was still young enough, to produce such dreams of personal service, of sudden emergencies swiftly and bravely met, of conspicuous daring and exceptional rewards, such dreams as hover in the brains of every imaginative recruits …

  It was acutely shameful to him that all these fine lads should be going off to death and wounds while the men of forty and over lay snug at home. How stupid it was to fix things like that! Here were the fathers, who had done their work, shot their bolts, returned some value for the costs of their education, unable to get training, unable to be of service, shamefully safe, doing April fool work as special constables; while their young innocents, untried, all their gathering possibilities of service unbroached, went down into the deadly trenches … The war would leave the world a world of cripples and old men and children …

  He felt himself as a cowardly brute, fat, wheezy, out of training. He writhed with impotent humiliation.

  How stupidly the world is managed.

  He began to fret and rage. He could not lie in peace in his bed; he got up and prowled about his room, blundering against chairs and tables in the darkness … We were too stupid to do the most obvious things; we were sending all these boys into hardship and pitiless danger; we were sending them ill-equipped, insufficiently supported, we were sending our children through the fires of Moloch, because essentially we English were a world of indolent, pampered, sham good-humored, old and middle-aged men. (So he distributed the intolerable load of self-accusation.) Why was he doing nothing to change things, to make them better? What was the good of an assumed modesty, an effort at tolerance for and confidence in these boozy old lawyers, those ranting platform men, those stiff-witted officers and hide-bound officials? They were butchering the youth of England.

  Old men sat out of danger contriving death for the lads in the trenches. That was the reality of the thing. “My son!” he cried sharply in the darkness. His sense of our national deficiencies became tormentingly, fantastically acute. It was as if all his cherished delusions had fallen from the scheme of things … What was the good of making believe that up there they were planning some great counterstroke that would end in victory? It was as plain as daylight that they had neither the power of imagination nor the collective intelligence ever to conceive of a counterstroke. The old men would sit at their tables, replete and sleepy, and shake their cunning old heads. The press would chatter and make odd ambiguous sounds like a shipload of monkeys in a storm. The political harridans would get the wrong men appointed, would attack every possible leader with scandal and abuse and falsehood …

  The spirit and honour and drama h
ad gone out of this war.

  Our only hope now was exhaustion. Our only strategy was to barter blood for blood—trusting that our tank would prove the deeper …

  While into this tank stepped Hugh, young and smiling …

  The war became a nightmare vision.

  From Mr. Britling Sees It Through, by H. G. Wells; Macmillan; New York, 1917.

  Chapter Five:

  Pity

  Probably no war before and certainly no war after has brought civilian novelists, poets, and dramatists into such close proximity to wounded soldiers as did World War I. The Civil War saw Whitman nursing dying Union soldiers in Washington, but it would be hard to think of another nineteenth-century poet demonstrating this kind of hands-on compassion; in World War II, ambulance services and hospitals were militarized, and no amateurs would be allowed as close to the fighting as they were in the Great War. As the terrible year of 1916 gave way to the even more horrible year of 1917, writers would turn from writing diatribes, analyses, and exhortations, to focus on individual soldiers caught up in the tragedy, needing all the sympathy and pity a nurse—or a novelist—could bring them.

  More and more it’s not the “Hun” that’s the enemy, but the war itself, so, in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in 1914, writers begin moving away from abstractions and “great issues”—the wounded are individualized and made vivid, if only in brief vignettes; out of the millions who served in the war, these are the ones we see up close and remember, thanks to the writers sitting beside them, tending their wounds—and going back to their huts at night to write about them.

  Changes in writing style and tone that began to emerge as writers witnessed the war in person now intensify; after a writer tended a soldier whose gangrenous leg had just been cut off, there was no going back to a florid nineteenth-century writing style or a cheery way of looking at things.

  The more ironic, harder sensibility is very much of the twentieth century. A writer like Mrs. Humphrey Ward writes of 1917 from the vantage point of 1878, but Enid Bagnold and May Sinclair, with their striking mix of pity for the wounded and fretful self-absorption (they focus again and again, not only on what the soldiers feel, but on what they feel themselves) read like writers of the 1920s or, for that matter, of 2016. Even Henry James, whom we saw earlier torturing his way to a baroquely phrased understanding of what the war meant, now finds enough pity to get past his own circumlocutions to his simple and tender point: the wounded boys he nurses in the London hospital are “the very flowers of the human race.”

  Another change: more and more the writers worth remembering and reading today are female. Many of them served as nurses—the traditional role for women in war, though hardly a passive one, not with what was demanded of them in the surgical wards of station hospitals. And even women waiting at home like the Jenny of Rebecca West’s novel The Return of the Soldier—their role was a lot more wrenching than merely “waiting” would imply.

  The literary historian Samuel Hynes points out how significant a change this represented—women at home being able to picture how horrible the war truly was.

  “Jenny, the narrator, can picture these things because Rebecca West could, because any English civilian could by 1916. From the war’s beginning its terrible particulars were brought home continually to England and into the lives and minds of the people there. The First World War was the first English war to be reported and photographed in the daily newspapers, and the first to be filmed and shown to the public in cinemas. Jenny doesn’t know the whole story of the war, but she knows the worst of it—the horror stories that we all have in our heads, and visualize as the reality of the Western Front. Such knowledge would not have been available to a sheltered woman like Jenny during any previous English war; this was the first war that women could imagine, and so it was the first that a woman could write into a novel.”

  (Jane Austen, writing exactly 100 years before West, famously could not imagine the Napoleonic Wars she and her characters lived through, and so could not or would not write about them.)

  Pity was the response that moved many women to write—a great, all-embracing pity that can still move us today. It’s a word they use often, wondering whether they feel too much of it or not anywhere near enough. Vera Brittain, whose Testament of Youth became one of the war’s best-known memoirs, worried that nursing in front-line hospitals would eventually turn her compassion into ice; she prayed to be spared “the bright immunity from pity which the highly trained nurse seems so often to possess.”

  Brittain, as writer and nurse, never lost this pity—or the anger that ran just beneath.

  “I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy war could see a case of mustard gas in its early stages—could see the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great mustard-colored suppurating blisters, with blind eyes all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke.”

  Male writers, of course, felt pity too. Wells’s Mr. Britling nurses a very different kind of victim—his own aunt, who has been wounded in a German Zeppelin raid on the English coast; a particularly heinous crime, in Britling’s view, because England hasn’t been attacked on her own soil for so many centuries, let alone had bombs rained down from the air on its innocent civilians. He—and the other writers included here—would have to get used to this kind of barbarity very fast if they wished to stay relevant, to find a way to write about what, when it first happened, must have seemed like the modern age announcing its appearance in one high-explosive burst.

  The pity writers brought to their writing was not evoked only by the wounded. Many describe the simple, long-suffering, “ordinary” men caught up in the fighting through no fault of their own, and in particular the wrenching disparity between what they experienced on the battlefield and what civilians at home thought the war was like.

  May Sinclair joined the Munro Ambulance Corps when war broke out, and spent seventeen days in Belgium during the early retreats; not a young woman (she was fifty-one), her nerves quickly broke under the strain and she was sent back to England. Her book on the experience, A Journal of Impressions in Belgium, was one of the very first books written and published by a woman on the war. Rebecca West, soon to write her own war book, called it “This gallant, humiliated book,” and its complicated mix of irony, pity, and self-doubt can only be termed “Modern.”

  “This country is formed for the very expression of peace,” Sinclair writes, as her ambulance carries her toward the fighting,

  “It is all unspeakably beautiful and it comes to me with the natural, inevitable shock and ecstasy of beauty. I am going straight into the horror of war. For all I know it may be anywhere, here, behind this sentry; or there, beyond that line of willows. I don’t know. I don’t care. I cannot realize it. All that I can see or feel at the moment is this beauty. I look and look, so that I may remember. All your past is soaking in the vivid dye of these days … I would rather die than go back to England.”

  Her novel, The Tree of Heaven, became a bestseller later in the war; an influential critic, she is given credit for inventing the term “stream of consciousness” in 1918 to describe the latest literary innovation.

  Enid Bagnold, with her writing career already well launched in England, volunteered as a nurse when the war broke out and was stationed at a hospital in Woolrich. Her A Diary Without Dates was so frank and critical of the hospital administration that she was fired; still wanting to serve, she went on to drive an ambulance in France, and got from the experience her second wartime book, The Happy Foreigner. She was twenty-five.

  She achieved popular success after the war with her novel about horse racing, National Velvet, the film version of which made Elizabeth Taylor a star. Her play The Chalk Garden is still performed; when it appeared on Broadway in 1956, Arthur Miller wrote, “It is the most steadily interesting, deeply felt, and civilized piece of work I have seen in a ve
ry long time.”

  Diary Without Dates, published in 1917, shows a modern sensibility fully at work. She writes on the title page, “I apologize to those I may hurt. Can I soothe them by pleading that one may only write what is true for oneself?”

  Hugh Walpole was thirty when the war broke out and was already a highly successful English novelist. Like so many writers, he volunteered for Red Cross ambulance work, but unlike most, who were sent to France, he ended up on the eastern front in Russia, which gave him a unique perspective and the material for two wartime novels, The Dark Forest and The Secret City. He won the Russian “Cross of Saint George” for rescuing a wounded soldier under fire.

  While in Russia, he helped establish the Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau in Petrograd and witnessed the first stages of the Revolution; returning to England, he wrote more propaganda for John Buchan’s wartime bureau.

  His close friend Henry James was terrible impressed by Walpole’s bravery, writing that he was showing “the last magnificence of pluck, the finest strain of resolution.”

  Rebecca West first made her literary reputation by publishing an attack on the old school of English writers, particularly Mrs. Humphrey Ward; this brought her to the attention of, among others, H. G. Wells. She and Wells became lovers just before the war broke out (West was twenty-one), never mind that West had referred to him in print as “the Old Maid among novelists.” They had a son together, and West was supported by Wells throughout the war years. Wells wrote of being struck by her “curious mix of maturity and infantilism; I had never met anything quite like her before, and I doubt if there was anything like her before.”