by Will R Bird
Though Dobbes concluded that Ghosts “is an honest and always interesting document, a genuine voice from the ranks of death,” he added that it was “[c]arelessly written,” and “can hardly be judged a ‘good book.’” Nor was Dobbes out of line to say that, “One has no impulse to compare it with, say, Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That or Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. Such books are records of an intellectual response to war.” His only mistake – for which he could not be held responsible – was to assume that the narrative persona of “a simple and unreflecting farm boy” in Ghosts was the one that also appears in And We Go On, a book which actually does invite comparison with the work of Graves and Sassoon as “an intellectual response to war.” If she had been writing about And We Go On rather than Ghosts, I would fully endorse Margaret MacIntyre’s judgement in The Bluenose Magazine of Fall 1977 that, “For me, it beats that all-time classic ‘All Quiet on the Western Front.’”
In her doctoral thesis, Monique Dumontet shows that the most damaging loss in Ghosts is the removal of the broad spectrum of voices heard throughout And We Go On, from that of Tommy (who largely disappears in the later version), to the Professor and the Student (who are entirely excised from Ghosts), to others who debate the war’s justice, the ethics of killing, the fate of the human soul, and even the value of beauty.2 The absence of a Socratic symposium in Ghosts greatly lessens the weight of the narrative and makes it a far less important work. And the lack of dialogue and the preponderance of monologue in Ghosts lend weight to Hugh Laming’s question, “Did he never speak of poetry and music or was he deafened by the roar of guns?” As the reader has seen, Bird speaks often and eloquently of such things in the original version of his memoir. Perhaps the best assessment will be made by readers who compare Ghosts with Go On and then judge for themselves.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author is grateful to the University of Manitoba for travel funding to examine the Clarke, Irwin fonds in the William Ready Archives at McMaster University in Hamilton.
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1 Although Capt. P.A. Thompson had used the phrase after the war to criticize the general staff, his sub-title is more critical of the German High Command. See Lions led by donkeys showing how victory in the great war was achieved by those who made the fewest mistakes (London: T.W. Laurie, 1927). Who, then, were the “donkeys”?
2 Those wanting further guidance may wish to explore the textual comparisons on offer in Dr. Dumontet’s “Appendix” to her dissertation, “‘Lest We Forget’: Canadian Combatant Narratives of The Great War,” which can be found online at http://hdl.handle.net/1993/4246
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