Where Wars Go to Die

by W. D. Wetherell

  Just as no Great War general ever worried about climate change, no World War I writer worried about the dawning visual age, let alone the future digital age, nor about a future that could very well see the extinction of books as physical objects and the subsuming of what was rather quaintly termed “literature” under the avalanche of mass culture.

  But you can focus back on the past too far; lofty detachment sometimes obscures as well as sharpens. The soldier-critic Samuel Hynes found just the right distance when he wrote his 1990 study of Great War culture, A War Imagined. His introduction explains in one pithy paragraph why, even a hundred years later, we still need to care about what the writers of that era had to say.

  “The First World War was the great military and political event of its time, but it was also the great imaginative event. It altered the ways in which men and women thought not only about war but about the world, and about culture and its expression. No one after the war—no thinker or planner, no politician or labor leader, no writer or painter—could ignore its historical importance or frame his thought as though the war had not occurred, or had been simply another war.”

  It’s through this understanding that the neglected war literature collected in this volume should be approached. World War I, if nothing else, presented writers with a challenging literary experiment few of them would have wished for. Faced with the collapse of civilization, how, as a writer, do you respond?

  We’ve seen the answers.

  Some respond by giving up their writing and enlisting in the armies. Some respond by getting killed. Some respond by using their words to get other men to enlist and be killed. Some argue about politics, strategy, who’s to blame. A small number—a very small number—protest. Some—Yeats, Pound, Forester, Strachey, Frost—ignore the war entirely. Some try to ameliorate its worst features, to fight toward a better future. Some swallow every lie the government hands them; some intuitively spit them out. Some seek to increase the hatred, others to reduce it. Some try to make money. Some attempt to understand the larger tragedy. Every one of them believes in the permanence of literature, the supremacy of the written word, the primacy of books.

  The forgotten literature of the war written by civilians is vaster than one volume can do justice to. If space permitted, it would be good to quote from Hermann Hesse’s heartfelt appeals for peace, or from the pacifist playwright Miles Malleson, or novelist Stephen McKenna, whose Sonia was a bestseller in 1917, or Rose Allatini, whose 1918 novel Despised and Rejected, about a homosexual pacifist, brought her prosecution under the Defence of the Realm Act and the destruction of all copies, or Francis Meynell, among the first pacifist writers in any Allied country. And it would be good to include the antiwar satire of the brave Austrian writer Karl Krauss.

  For that matter, it would be good to include those forgotten writers on the war whose best work appeared years afterwards, like American Humphrey Cobb, whose Paths of Glory, published in 1935, remains one of the best Great War novels (and, directed by Stanley Kubrick, one of the best films about the Great War), and the remarkable Mary Borden, whose experimental The Forbidden Zone, published in 1929, is one of the most original of the war’s memoirs. And there’s another: C. S. Forester’s novel The General, published in 1936, which shows how when fate needs hard men to do its dirty work, hard men come to the fore.

  Most of these men and women were middle-aged or older; the younger generation of writers, the ones who had actually experienced the fighting, would not have their turn until the 1920s, when their voices, so authentic and “modern,” would help cause much of the writing from 1914–18 to be immediately forgotten.

  This book has tried to restore the imbalance. “An ignorant, middle-aged civilian will not write about the war in the way that a young subaltern will,” Hynes reminds us, “but he may write movingly nonetheless.”

  To me, it’s their trying that I find moving, a hundred years later. A novelist myself, an “aging non-combatant,” I know what it’s like to sit down at your desk to attempt to comprehend a world that seems engaged in perpetual war. I know, in other words, what H. G. Wells’s Mr. Britling feels as he sits down at the conclusion of the novel, his son dead, his civilization in ruins, with nothing to fight back with but his puny ability with words … and for that reason, it’s with Britling at his desk, speaking for all writers in all times, that these excerpts will end.

  This book concerns the past, so perhaps it’s appropriate to take a moment and look toward the future. Specifically, to the future of the books I’ve drawn from here. For the past twenty years, almost accidentally at first, then eventually with more purpose, they have been accumulating on the bookshelves in my office, to the point that they take up almost an entire wall. They look good there. For reasons of economy, most of the books published 1914–18 were small, so they match each other, forming neat rows. Most are brown—chocolate brown, reddish brown, khaki brown, trench brown. For the past two years, as I’ve stitched together this book, they were taken down often from their perches, opened and closed, read and perused, and they’ve held up to the usage quite well. Some have bindings that are crumbling, and others, when you turn the pages, flake into rough paper bits, but I’m gentle with them, and they respond by hanging tough; having survived two world wars and a murderous century, they will not mind continuing to fulfill their original purpose: being handled, being read. They are a long way yet from dust.

  So they’re survivors, these books—but for how much longer? I’ll keep them for a while, enjoying if nothing else the stolid, knowing way they sit there on my shelves. But when I’m gone, it’s hard to see them surviving me more than a few years. These are, after all, books that have already been discarded, some discarded many times. No library wants them, no collectors. My heirs, with no other recourse, will empty them into a dumpster along with the other life’s accumulations they won’t have use for.

  A few of these titles, by then, will have been digitized; if students in the future want to consult them, some will be waiting in the Internet cloud. That’s survival, of sorts, though for some of us, the quaintly old-fashioned physicality is still important, and digital books, whatever else they are, are not the books these writers created, nor the books that people alive in 1918 held in their hands.

  But they’ve made their mark, done their job, reminding us, in an age where literature is dying, how writers at the height of their powers faced a catastrophe armed with nothing more powerful than words—and how, against all odds, they did this so successfully that their words, even now, are the best way to understand what mankind suffered in those four fated years.

  A Guide to the American Battle Fields in Europe was prepared by the American Battle Monuments Commission and printed by the United States Government Printing Office in Washington. My sturdily bound copy is stamped with the name “A. R. Farless” in the front, of “San Mateo, California.” Mr. Farless, or another reader, tore out a 1919 National Geographic article and folded it in the pages; it’s about Gold Star Mothers—mothers who lost a son in the fighting—traveling to France on organized visits to see where their sons were killed. The photo shows them posed on a liner in mid-ocean, overdressed, hundreds of them, staring up at the photographer on the bridge.

  This guide was a quality production, with copious photographs, maps so detailed and beautifully printed they could be hung in a museum, and an informative, no-nonsense text. The preface states, “The publication of this book was expedited in order to have it available for the large number of ex-service men who intend to go to Europe in the fall of 1927”—a pilgrimage to mark the tenth anniversary of America’s entrance into the war.

  Henry Williamson served in the war as a twenty-year-old, and went on to a long career as an author; he became famous for his nature books, including the bestselling Tarka the Otter. Later, he wrote a series of fifteen novels based on the war, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Despite a later flirtation with fascism, he’s still read and admired today—a Henry Williamson Society is de
dicated to perpetuating his memory. If you go online, you can watch him interviewed, an old man now, in the 1964 BBC series The Great War. It is fascinating, particularly his description of taking part, as a young man, in the famous Christmas Truce in the middle of No Man’s Land in 1914.

  “It is sad to think,” he wrote in 1934, “that in a few years the literature of the war of 1914–18 will be forgotten, like that of other wars, in a European war arising not because the last war was forgotten, but because its origins and contributing causes in each one of us were never clearly perceived by ourselves.”

  Michelin Tires traces its history back to 1889, when the company patented the first pneumatic bicycle tire; it continues to be one of the world’s largest tire companies today, famous for its emblem, the tire-chested “Michelin Man,” and its Red Guides to European restaurants and the bestowal of the coveted Michelin stars for the world’s best chefs.

  Ypres and the Battle of Ypres was published in 1920 in the “Michelin Illustrated Guides to the Battlefields” series. No other book from that era is more evocative, with its photos, maps, and matter-of-fact descriptions of what the devastated western front looked like just after the fighting stopped. I came across a copy in an old bookstore in Vermont—and found it so moving it was one of the inspirations for my own World War I novel, A Century of November.

  It’s a small book, designed to be easily carried, with only a single advertisement for Michelin there in the front: a drawing of a woman helping her daughter into an elegant touring car while the chauffeur patiently waits. “The Best & Cheapest Wheel,” the caption reads, “is the Michelin wheel. Elegant Strong Simple Practical.”

  On the title page is the dedication.

  “In Memory of the Michelin Workmen and Employees Who Died Gloriously For Their Country.”

  Stephen Graham, at thirty, already had a reputation as a travel writer when he enlisted in the Scots Guards, thanks to his books on prewar Russia. He wrote two books on the war, A Private in the Guards and The Challenge of the Dead, with its subtitle “A vision of the War and the life of the common soldier in France, seen two years afterwards between August and November 1920.”

  John Masefield served as Britain’s Poet Laureate for almost fifty years; I’m old enough to remember having to memorize his “Sea Fever” in school. Thirty-six when the war broke out, he volunteered at a military hospital in France, went to Gallipoli to report on the battle, then spent weeks walking over the Somme trenches after the front line had temporarily moved eastward.

  Very much a traditional Georgian poet, “believing that poetry is made out of natural beauty, and plain, traditional words,” he found the war made writing poetry impossible; rather than write “false” war poetry, he spent the war writing prose.

  Forty-seven was old to enlist in the British army, so C. E. Montague, an editorial writer for the Manchester Guardian, dyed his white hair black in order to pass the medical. He served as a captain at General Headquarters—responsible for, among other duties, escorting VIP writers like Shaw and Wells around the trenches—before being invalided back to civilian life. His Disenchantment of 1922, “a book about how England turned, and betrayed herself, her soldiers, and her values,” was one of the first books to capture—and perpetuate—the bitter postwar mood.

  The Pilgrimage

  —Mildred Aldrich

  The expected news came early Monday morning. As we anticipated, the order had been given to cease firing at eleven. We had known it would come, but the fact that the order had been given rather stunned us. To realize that it was over! How could one in a minute?

  I was up early to wait for the papers. It was a perfect white day. The whole world was covered with the first hoar frost and wrapped in an impenetrable white fog, as if the huge flag of truce were wound around it. I went out on the lawn and turned my eyes toward the invisible north. Standing beside my little house I was as isolated as if I were all alone in the world, with all the memories of these years since that terrible day in August 1914. I could not see as far as the hedge. Yet out there I knew the guns were still firing, and between them and me lay such devastation as even the imagination cannot exaggerate, and such suffering and pain as the human understanding can but partly conceive. Against the white sheet which encircled me I seemed to see the back water of the war which touched here. Four years and four months—and how much is still before us? The future has its job laid out for it. Is ordinary man capable of putting it over?

  I had expected that at eleven, when they ceased firing at the front, our bells would ring out the victory. We had our flags all ready to run up. I was standing on the lawn listening, flags ready at the gate, and Amelie stood in the window at her house, ready to hang out hers. All along the road, though I could not see them for the fog, I knew that women and children were listening with me. The silence was oppressive. Not a sound reached me, except now and then the passing of a train over the Marne. Then Amelie came down to say that lunch was ready, and that I might as well eat whether I had any appetite or not, and that perhaps something had happened, and that after lunch she would go over to Quincy and find out what it was.

  So, reluctantly, I went into the house.

  It was just quarter past twelve when I heard someone running along the terrace, and a child’s voice called, “Ecoutez, Madame, ecoutez! Les carillons de Meaux!”

  Far off, faint through the white sheet of mist, I could hear the bells of the cathedral, like fairy music, but nothing more. I waited expecting any moment to hear the bells from Couilly or Quincy or Conde, and the guns from the forts. But all was silent. There were no longer any groups on the roads. I knew that every one had gone home to eat. Somewhere things were happening, I was sure of that. But I might have been alone on a desert island.

  I was too nervous to keep still any longer, so I walked up to the corner of the Chemin Madame, thinking I might hear the bells from there. As I stood at the corner I heard footsteps running toward me on the frozen ground, and out of the fog came Marin, the town crier, with his drum on his back and a cocarde in his cap. He waved his drumsticks at me as he ran, and cried, “I am coming as fast as I can, Madame. We are ringing up at four—at the same time the Tiger reads the terms in the Chamber of Deputies and Lloyd George reads them in London,” and as he reached the corner just above my gate he swung his drum around and beat it up like mad.

  It did not take two minutes for all our little hamlet to gather about him, while in a loud, clear voice he read solemnly the ordre de jour which officially announced that the war had ended at eleven o’clock, and the inhabitants of the commune were authorized to hang out all their flags, light up their windows, and join in a dignified and seemly celebration of the liberation of France. Then he slowly lifted his cap in his hand as he read the concluding phrases, which begged them not to forget to pray for the brave men who had given their lives that this day might be, nor to be unmindful that to many among us this day of rejoicing was also a day of mourning.

  There was not a cheer.

  Morin swung the drum over his shoulder, saluted his audience, and marched solemnly down the hill. In dead silence the little group broke up.

  The run out to Chateau-Thierry from here took less than an hour in a little Ford car. It was not an ideal day for the trip. It was gray and windy, and there was a fine drizzle of rain now and then. A sunny day would have been less sad, but I doubt it would have suited my mood any better.

  Over the line where the first battle of the Marne passed in the fall of 1914 time has effaced almost every trace, so it was not until we neared Bouresches and Belleau that we began to realize that here battles had been fought. These three little hamlets are so tiny that, although they feature on road maps for the guidance of ardent automobilists, you will find no mention made of them in any guide-books. Even by name they were, until June of last year, unknown to every one outside the immediate vicinity. Now, ruined as they all are, each bears at either end a board sign, with the name of the town painted in black letters.
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br />   With the ruins of what was once a tiny hamlet on one hand, across a shell-torn field rises the small, densely wooded height whose name is known today to every American—the tragic Belleau Wood. The little hamlet is just a mass of fallen or falling walls, as deserted as Pompeii and already looking centuries old.

  The road approaching it is still screaming with reminiscences of the war four months after the last gun was fired. All along the way are heaps of salvaged stuff of all sorts—mountains of empty shell cases of all sizes, piles of wicker baskets containing unused German shell, thrown down and often broken shell racks, all sorts of telegraphic materials, cases of machine-gun belts, broken kitchens, smashed buckets, tangles of wire and rolls of new barbed wire—in fact all the debris of modern warfare plus any quantity of German artillery material left in their retreat—everything, in fact, except guns and corpses.

  Across the fields still zigzag barbed-wire entanglements in many places, while in others the old wire is rolled up by the roadside. Here and there is still a trench, while a line of freshly turned soil in the green fields shows where the trenches have been filled in.

  In the banks along the road are the German dugouts, with broken drinking cups, tin boxes, dented casques, strewn about the entrances, which are often broken down, while every little way are the “foxholes” in the banks marking the places where the American boys tried to dig in. The ground before the town which the Germans had shelled so furiously, as the Americans were pushing through to cross the fields and clean out the wooded hill opposite, has been swept and ploughed by the artillery on both sides. The American Captain whose guest I was could say, from a glance at the shell holes: “That is one of ours.” “That was one of theirs.” “That is a 75.” “That is an 88.” “That is a 240.” “This place was rushed.” “That place was shelled.”

  Nature is doing her best to heal the scarred landscape, but Belleau Wood, across the field from the ruined hamlets, is a sinister sight still. It is a ghastly sort of place to fight in—a thickly wooded slope, a tangle of uncleared brush on the outskirts ideal for masking machine guns; the clearing of it called for a terrible loss of life.