I do not think we exchanged a word as we crossed that field. So we came, when we were, perhaps, half a mile from the Bapaume road, to a slight eminence, a tiny hill that rose from the field. A little military cemetery crowned it. Here the graves were set in ordered rows, and there was a fence around them, to keep them apart, and to mark that spot as holy ground, until the end of time. Five hundred British boys lie sleeping in that small acre of silence, and among them is my own laddie. There the fondest hopes of my life, the hopes that sustained and cheered me through many years, lie buried.
The soldier pointed to one brown mound in a row of brown mounds that looked alike, each like the other. Then he drew away. And so I went alone to my boy’s grave, and flung myself down upon the warm, friendly earth. My memories of that moment are not very clear, but I think that for a few minutes I was utterly spent, that my collapse was complete.
He was such a good boy!
As I lay there on that brown mound, under the June sun, all that he had been, and all that he had meant to me and to his mother came rushing back afresh to my memory, opening anew my wounds of grief. I thought of him as a baby, and as a wee laddie, beginning to run around and talk to us. I thought of him in every phase and bit of his life, and of the friends that we had been, he and I!
And as I lay there, as I look back on it now, I can think of but the one desire that ruled and moved me. I wanted to reach my arms down into the dark grave, and clasp my boy tightly to my breast, and kiss him.
How long did I lie there? I do not know. And how I found the strength at last to drag myself to my feet and away from that spot, the dearest and the saddest spot on earth to me, God only knows. But I am going back to France to visit again and again that grave where he lies buried. And meanwhile the wild flowers and the long grasses and all the little shrubs will keep watch and ward over him there, and over all the other brave soldiers who lie hard by.
From A Minstrel in France, by Harry Lauder; Hearst’s International Library; New York, 1918.
And I Will Murder Some German
—H. G. Wells
Cissie and Letty had been sitting in silence before the fire. She had been knitting—she knitted very badly—and Cissie had been pretending to read, and had been watching her furtively. Cissie eyed the slow, toilsome growth of the slack woolwork for a time, and the touch of angry effort in every stroke of the knitting needles.
“Poor Letty!” she said very softly. “Suppose after all he is dead?”
Letty met her with a pitiless stare.
“He is a prisoner,” she said. “Isn’t that enough? Why do you jab at me by saying that? A wounded prisoner. Isn’t that enough despicable trickery for God even to play on Teddy—our Teddy? To the very last moment he shall not be dead. Until the war is over. Until six months after the war …
“I will tell you why, Cissie …”
She leant across the table and pointed her remarks with her knitting needles, speaking in a tone of reasonable remonstrance. “You see,” she said, “if people like Teddy are to be killed, then all our ideas that life is meant for honesty and sweetness and happiness are wrong, and this world is just a place of devils; just a dirty cruel hell. Getting born would be getting damned. And so one must not give way to that idea, however much it may seem likely that he is dead …
“You see, if he is dead, then Cruelty is the Law, and some one must pay me for his death … Some one must pay me … I shall wait for six months after the war, dear, and then I shall go off to Germany and learn my way about there. And I will murder some German. Not just a common German, but a German who belongs to the guilty kind. A sacrifice. It ought, for instance, to be comparatively easy to kill some of the children of the Crown Prince or some of the Bavarian princes. I shall prefer German children. I shall sacrifice them to Teddy. It ought not to be difficult to find people who can be made directly responsible, the people who invented the poison gas, for instance, and kill them, or to kill people who are dear to them. Or necessary to them … Women can do that so much more easily than men …
“That perhaps is the only way in which wars of this kind will ever be brought to an end. By women insisting on killing the kind of people who make them. Rooting them out. By a campaign of pursuit and assassination that will go on for years and years after the war itself is over … Murder is such a little gentle punishment for the crime of war … It would hardly be more than a reproach for what has happened. Falling like snow. Death after death. Flake by flake. This prince. That statesman. The count who writes so fiercely for war. The Kaiser and his sons and his sons’ sons would know nothing but fear now for all their lives. Fear by sea, fear by land, for the vessel he sailed in, the train he traveled in, fear when he slept for the death in his dreams, fear when he walked for the death in every shadow; fear in every crowd, fear whenever he was alone. Fear would stalk him through the trees, hide in the corner of the staircase; make all his food taste perplexingly, so that he would want to spit it out … I shall get just as close to the particular Germans who made this war as I can, and I shall kill them and theirs …
“That is what I am going to do. If Teddy is really dead …”
From Mr. Britling Sees It Through, by H. G. Wells; Macmillan; New York, 1917.
Chapter Eight:
Entertain
For every Great War writer who agonized over the moral and existential issues raised by the war, there were a hundred who saw in the carnage the chance to make a quick buck. Hack writers, like farmers, machine tool operators, and munition makers, found that the war stimulated demand for their labor. In England alone, over 14,000 people listed their occupation on the most recent census returns (1911) as “author.” Between wages doubling, book prices being halved, no competition yet from radio or talkies, and a rapidly expanding population of literate adults, the years 1914–18 were good ones for writers whose primary motives were commercial. The war provided them with an abundance of topical subject matter, and an audience, the vast majority of them seeking to be titillated rather than informed, soothed rather than challenged, entertained rather than depressed.
Most of the popular writers’ work, judging by what survives in second-hand bookshops, was pure dreck—but evocative dreck that mirrors contemporary attitudes in the same way popular songs from the era can. The men and women who produced it, to give them their due, were being faithful to yet another time-honored responsibility of the writer: to divert, to beguile, to amuse. These tasks are all the more important, they might argue, in times like these, when war-weary people need help in simply carrying on. Yes, we’ll include some morality here and there, but it will be the simplest black-and-white kind: our side good, the other side bad—and what’s wrong with that, since it’s true? The best hack writers, then as now, believe with all sincerity in what they’re writing.
Some of this entertainment was produced by authors who were a long way from being hacks. John Buchan, taking time off from his official propaganda duties, wrote one of his most successful “shockers” in 1916, taking his hero Richard Hannay on a global chase that includes, while he’s disguised as an Anglophobic South African, an interview with the Kaiser; Greenmantle was among the books read most frequently in the trenches. Edith Wharton, capable of the highest literary art, could also turn out an unapologetic potboiler like The Marne, though its fired-up American heroine, entertaining the troops in a YMCA canteen near the front, says a lot about the spirit in which America entered the war. Even a sober, no-nonsense writer like Mildred Aldrich, still living near the front lines in France as the tide of war swept back again in the Kaiserschlacht, the German’s last-ditch March 1918 offensive, could find some fun in the characters the fighting brought to her doorstep.
After the war, poetry written to a very standard became one of its leading literary legacies, but during the war itself people read verse, rhymes, doggerel on themes of the most patriotic kind, written by authors enjoying a celebrity and income that contemporary poets can only dream of. The bitter antiwar poems of Si
egfried Sassoon, published during the war, may have sold a thousand copies; the sentimental flag-and-motherhood rhymes of Edgar Guest sold in the hundreds of thousands. “We get the impression,” the editor Harold Monro wrote of the deluge of bad poetry, “of verse writers excitedly gathering to do something for the flag, and as soon as they begin to rack their brains how that something may be done in verse, a hundred old phrases for patriotic moments float in their minds, which they reel into verse or fit into sonnets—and the press is delighted to publish them.”
Books for children also thrived—their authors saw the war as a chance for their young heroes and heroines to have all kinds of death-defying adventures, preferably in the air over France against German spies.
Some writers, brave or foolish, tried to pull off something that would seem, even in retrospect, to be nearly impossible: to make the Great War funny. Some of this, on the American side, plays off the innocents-abroad theme that goes back to Mark Twain; much of it, particularly on the English side, involves the roughest, most obvious kinds of stereotypes. Professor Gilbert Murray, looking down on this from his classical pedestal, tried to cut the Grub Streeters some slack.
“All this callous cheerfulness, all this gay brutality, with which people write of bursting shells and the ‘leg of a fat Hun performing circles in the air,’ or of poking into dug-outs with bayonets and ‘picking out the Boches like periwinkles on a pin’ … all that loathsome stuff is to a great extent mere self protection. It is a kind of misplaced tact. Something more real, more near the truth, more undisguisedly horrible, is just round the corner of the writer’s mind, and he is determined not to let it show itself. If it emerged, it would make every one feel awkward.”
Of all the writers who tried mining humor out of the war, there is probably only one whose work is still, a hundred years later, authentically funny: Ring Lardner. The bestselling American humorist, with thousands of devoted readers, published three books on the war while it was still in progress, bringing his ironic, mordant sensibility to bear long before that kind of attitude became common. Writers of lesser talent thought fat Huns were laughable—Lardner knew there were funnier things out in “Nobody’s Land” than that, starting with the big-talking American rubes he was a genius at capturing.
The establishment British writer and editor Edmund Gosse, writing at the start of the war in 1914, trying to understand what it would mean for literature, predicted, “The book which does not deal directly and crudely with the complexities of warfare and the various branches of strategy, will, from Christmas onwards, not be published at all.”
He could not have been more wrong. Though hundreds of potboiler novels were written on war themes, the most popular books of the period had nothing to do with the war at all. The westerns of Zane Grey, the adventures of Tarzan or Dr. Fu Manchu—these topped the bestseller lists in America and England. Readers in the Great War, like readers in all eras, wanted escape more than they wanted involvement, and there were thousands of writers more than willing to provide it. The high moral and artistic purpose that writers like Conrad and Yeats brought to their work simply would not have occurred to them as having anything to do with their roles. As critic Harold Odell points out,
“Most authors did not spend much time moralising about progress and civilization; they took for granted much that came into question during the Great War itself. And it is a nice question, calling for careful judgement, whether the unwillingness of the vast majority of them to treat the war directly, honestly and critically in their fiction constituted an evasion of authorial responsibility. At the time, they did not think so. Neither did their readers.”
Florence Barclay, a rector’s wife in her fifties, enjoyed huge popularity both in England and the States for her novels that combined sentimental religious themes with a touch of romance; each new volume sold in the hundreds of thousands. Judging by the blurbs included in the back of My Heart’s Right There, even critics loved her, with reviews of her most famous book, The Rosary, gushing about “a perfect love story—one that justifies the publishing business, refreshes the heart of the reviewer, strengthens faith in the outcome of the great experiment of putting humanity on earth.” Or, perhaps getting closer to the secret of her appeal: “The well-known author has not sought problems to solve nor social conditions to arraign, but has been satisfied to tell a sweet and appealing love-story in a wholesome simple way.”
My Heart’s Right There takes its title from a line in the enormously popular wartime song Tipperary. The novel consists almost entirely of the brave wounded soldier Jim addressing his brave passive wife Polly.
By 1914, Canadian Robert W. Service, “the Bard of the Yukon,” was probably the world’s most famous poet and one of its richest writers in any genre; his much-loved ballad of the Klondike gold rush, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” was memorized and recited by millions. He was forty when the war broke out, and volunteered as an ambulance driver on the western front, though he soon had to resign due to poor health. His brother, Lieutenant Albert Service, died while serving with the Canadian infantry in France.
Service’s Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, published in 1916 and dedicated to his brother, was one of the bestselling books of the year. He received three government decorations during the war for the effectiveness of his poems as propaganda.
His popularity continues today, with an Internet search of his name pulling down 206,000,000 results.
English paranoia about German spies provided bestselling novelist William Le Queux with the subject matter for several over-the-top espionage novels during the war—but at least his paranoia was genuine. Convinced that German special agents were out to assassinate him, he requested special protection from Scotland Yard, and fully believed in the treasonous machinations of high government officials, as depicted so melodramatically in Number 70, Berlin: A Story of Britain’s Peril.
Le Queux, at fifty-four, was a protégé of the press baron Lord Northcliff, and an early popularizer of aviation and radio; he was said to have churned out over 150 novels, more than a few themed around a projected German invasion of England, which he greatly feared. His pamphlet, German Atrocities: A Record of Shameless Deeds, published in September 1914, was the first in the long series of similar “official” reports on alleged enemy dastardliness.
“Charles Amory Beach” was the made-up name for one or more of several “house writers” who created the “Air Service Boys” series published by the World Syndicate publishing company between 1918 and 1920, dealing with the adventures of two young American lads serving in France with the Lafayette Escadrille.
Children’s books, during the war, were enlisted for propaganda purposes just as were books for adults—and not just books for boys. The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit; or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos by Hildegarde Gertrude Frey (most children’s writers of the day seemed to favor three names) proved that adolescent girls could play an active role in the war as well.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher, thirty-nine, was one of those American novelists who occupied a position not quite in the first rank but a long way from the bottom; she enjoyed critical respect with wide popularity among readers of all types. Like Edith Wharton, she was involved in volunteer war work in France, founding a Braille press for blinded veterans in Paris, and running a convalescent center for refugee children. Her Home Fires in France is one of the relatively rare short-story collections themed on the war.
For many years after the war, Fisher served as an editorial board judge on the original Book-of-the-Month Club, and had an important role in guiding America’s reading tastes; she was also an early influential proponent of both Montessori education and education for adults.
Edgar A. Guest, thirty-seven in 1917, was America’s most popular poet, with his “rhymes” appearing in three hundred American newspapers.
“His rhymes—he never claimed for them the status of poetry—were of the simplest sort, full of folksy vernacular, friendship, and all the common virtues and veriti
es. Guest was thoroughly realistic about his work, knowing it for doggerel and sentimental jingle, but it was, he explained, precisely what he liked and what, moreover, millions of other ordinary people liked, and the ridicule of unkind critics left him unscathed.”
His collection of verses, A Heap o’ Livin’ (“It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it a home”) sold more than a million copies in 1916, and he followed it up with a collection grouped around war themes, Over Here, which became an immediate bestseller in 1918.
My copy of Over Here, a first edition from 1918 originally owned by a “Lois A. Antle,” survives—and this is very rare—with its dust jacket intact. It shows a tall, handsome doughboy breaking ranks from a farewell parade to go to the curb to hug his adoring mother. The flap copy reads,
“Every father or mother who has a son ‘over there’ will find in Over Here a heartrending message of hope and good cheer, and a stirring appeal for a greater loyalty in the trying times ahead. If you are a true-blue American, you will enjoy Over Here with its glowing tribute to our soldier boys, and its ringing declaration of faith in the high destinies of our country and our flag.”
Ring Lardner’s reputation as a serious short-story writer would have to wait until the 1920s, when fans like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway praised his work. During the war, his popularity was already immense—but as a humorist and sportswriter, whose baseball-playing characters, hicks with huge self-regard, let him display his acidic genius with American slang. His most famous character is Jack Keefe, a semi-literate baseball pitcher who writes letters home to his pal Al that reveal a lot more than he intends. Keefe, the classic American rube, “has a mind as small as his ego was large.”
Where Wars Go to Die Page 26