Conundrums for the Long Week-End

by Robert Kuhn McGregor

  By the time war finally came, von Schlieffen was long in retirement, his place taken by Helmuthe von Moltke, a good soldier but not one to roll the dice. Von Schlieffen’s plan called for an audacity that von Moltke simply could not muster.8

  The war began early in August 1914. As Dorothy L. Sayers and hundreds of equally foolish tourists struggled to flee from panicked France, the French army acted as anticipated. Wearing glorious red uniforms, they rushed eastward, completely misreading Germany’s disposition of forces and its underlying intent. The result was unparalleled slaughter, a German victory so complete as to ruin von Schlieffen’s carefully constructed strategy. By August 20, the French were in full retreat westward.

  The main German thrust, passing north of the French invasion, crushed “poor little Belgium” in thirteen days. The invasion of neutral Belgium forced Britain to declare war on August 4, but it would be another seventeen days before the British Expeditionary Force could reach the fighting. It was up to the retreating French to rescue the situation.

  Retreat was exactly what von Schlieffen had not wanted the French to do. The force on the German frontier was intended to engage the enemy and hold them in place, not bloody them so badly that they moved westward. When the French did that, they encountered the main German invasion coming down from Belgium. The French were in disorder, but they offered enough opposition to bog down the German advance. As the British fell into line, allied resistance stiffened; the German invasion stalled. By September 5 any German hope for quick victory was gone. The two sides spent more than a month trying to outflank each other, a desperate business ending in cold rain with both lines firmly anchored to the North Sea. The troops dug in to escape the constant and brutal hail of enemy ordnance. In mid-October, three hundred miles of trenches stretched from the North Sea to Switzerland. Neither side would move very much over the next four years. The price for that stalemate would be horribly high.9

  Two months of massive warfare should have been instructive, but many lessons were lost on those in command. They did give up on cavalry charges rather quickly, but the massed infantry assault remained a staple of war for the next three years. “Always attack” was the French mantra; the British accepted this, though no one had an answer for the ugliest fact of the war: the machine gun was the ultimate defensive weapon. Time after time, troops were sent over the top in well-organized, open assaults, target practice for a handful of defenders wielding a well-placed machine gun. Death tolls were unforgivable.

  The Somme, Vimy Ridge, Caudry, the Marne—lessons in French geography written in blood. Sayers mentions these and other battles of the Great War in her eleven Wimsey novels; contemporary readers recognized the names instantly. These were the places where illusions of advanced civilization dispersed, where men exchanged their faith in progress and glory for the dubious advantages wrought by technological butchery. In the autumn of 1916, while Sayers assumed her first job at the Hull High School for Girls, teaching modern languages and trying to keep her head during zeppelin raids, more than one million men fell in France. By then, dreams of rapid victory had long given way to the harsh realities of a war of attrition. Nobody could win, but everyone had to empty their country of the able-bodied, sending them to the nightmare in the trenches. Too much was already spent; no one dared to lose.10

  If the French and English lines were hell on earth, the German experience proved worse in the end. A British naval blockade strangled the country, and food became critically scarce. Although the allies did not know it, by 1917 the Germans had to win the war soon or starve. Again Germany decided on a desperate gamble.

  The only answer to British naval superiority was unrestricted use of submarines to prevent supplies reaching Britain—an attempt to starve that island first. Whenever the Germans sought to play this card, sabers rattled in the United States. America was the leading “neutral” supplier, England the chief beneficiary. Facing internal collapse, the German high command resumed unrestricted submarine attacks on February 1, 1917, calculating that Britain would surrender before the Americans could mobilize to intervene.

  It was a huge mistake. German submarines were unable to make much of a dent in British supply lines, and the United States entered the war on a massive scale. Had the Germans simply held out, they probably would have won. Russia began to collapse early in 1917; by year’s end their leadership, elevated by the Bolshevik Revolution, was happy to end the war on the eastern front. The Germans would have faced only France and Britain, both nearing exhaustion.

  By spring 1918 the Germans were completely desperate. The tactical leadership of both sides had learned a lot from the three years of debacle. New attack strategies ended the stalemate, and armies began to move. Needing to win quickly, the Germans moved first, shock attacking the British at the Somme late in March. They drove the allies back forty miles toward Paris, but the British lines would not break. The Germans tried again in April and May, gaining vast amounts of ground but failing to rout the enemy. They lost six hundred thousand soldiers in the three offensives.

  The Spanish influenza struck as the Germans mounted a fourth attempt. Because of malnutrition, their troops suffered far worse than did the allies from this new horror. The Germans gained only four miles in this attempt. In July they tried one last offensive at the Marne but with no success. German offensive capacity was exhausted, and morale was crumbling. The allied counterattack began on July 18.

  In less than two months, British, French, and American forces recaptured all the lands taken by the Germans in the spring. Britain’s chief war innovation, the tank, paved the way. Allied ground tactics now bore a curious resemblance to naval deployments, and German resistance slowly melted. Germany’s only hope was to maintain a functioning army long enough to achieve a voice at the peace negotiations. The merciless pounding carried on into late autumn, as thousands died fighting Germany’s well-ordered retreat. The firing stopped suddenly at eleven o’clock on the morning of November 11 as an armistice was signed. The date was etched in the minds of millions. The killing stopped; the pain would linger forever.11

  The next year brought “peace”—a hopeless, vengeful, witless peace guaranteed to plunge Europe into war again before long. Allied leaders simply refused to accept that this war had killed the past, that nineteenth-century passions and politics could not recreate nineteenth-century stability. They fell back on nineteenth-century values: nationalist competition and revenge. Germany was humiliated, forced to accept guilt for the war and to pay the entire debt. Stripped of army, navy, and industrial capacity, Germany was left economically moribund. Still, the allies expected this crippled economy to turn over vast sums to support their own national economies. It was a formula for financial disaster, and it worked all too well. By 1931 all of Europe was in massive recession.12

  November 12, 1918 began a long, anguished process of building a new world. For the war’s survivors, there could be no return to the comparative innocence of older days; they had witnessed too much death. Those at home helped as they could, but they too had burdens. Virtually every family in England had lost a brother, a son, a husband, a close cousin, or a dear friend. With the struggle over, long-swallowed grief could be loosed at last.13

  As Robert Graves observed, only two classes existed in England after the war: those who had served at the front, and everybody else. The gulf between was painfully wide. Neither had the least ability to look into the heart of the other, to feel empathy. For the soldier, the return to civilian life was a shock. The war had further mechanized industry and accelerated the use of motor vehicles. Life was faster. Women were everywhere in public, smoking openly, voicing opinions on political questions (including their own right to vote), wearing clothes that flattened breasts and de-emphasized sexuality, and holding jobs they did not want to leave. Everyone wanted to be nice to the soldiers, but no one knew quite what to say. Everything seemed so different, so hollow.14

  Society wanted very much to welcome the men back but, at the same
time, people did not want to give up what they had gained in the soldiers’ absence. Most women returned to the home reluctantly, and a significant few held on to a new life in the public sphere. War veterans found the adjustment to changing women’s roles especially difficult. Long stretches of abstinence in the trenches inclined the troops to objectify women as just so many desirable bodies. The idea that British women might desire something more—a job, security without marriage, common respect—seemed utterly foreign.

  Return to civilian footing, even in the most elemental fashion, proved difficult. Many soldiers found their old jobs gone, either mechanized out of existence or taken over by others. Pensions and other forms of public aid were inadequate to meet the desperate need. Especially poignant was the exigency of those mutilated by the war. Many walked the streets with missing limbs, wrecked faces, or gassed-out insides. Resentments simmered on both sides of the great gulf.15

  Most critically, perhaps, the soldiers did not wish to talk about the war or about the loss of life; whereas the rest of society needed to. Nine hundred thousand deaths required public grieving, public remembrance. Bodies of half the men killed in the war were never identified, much less recovered. Following the armistice, Parliament established the Imperial War Graves Commission to oversee the creation of proper cemeteries in France to honor the deceased. Few British casualties returned to British soil. For the nation to bring closure to so stupefying a loss, the British people had to commemorate, to grieve publicly as one. Over the silent protests of thousands of survivors who would just as soon forget, communities throughout England held ceremonies to honor the veterans and to dedicate monuments to those who were gone. Homage to the dead was critical to getting on with life.16

  The first war memorials were separately sponsored by the religious and lay communities. The business of honoring the dead was traditionally the domain of the religious, but here the Church of England found itself in an awkward position. The Church’s chaplains were bitterly resented during the war—they had mouthed all the patriotic guff the soldiers came to hate and they had failed to accompany the men to the front, to the gates of hell. The parsons could do little to compensate for that kind of failure. Any attempt to recall the glory of imperial Britain, the dedicated spirit of Victorian days, met with bemused disaffection. Church memorials were shunned, and overly patriotic monuments fared no better. Lord Peter encounters such a monument in Yorkshire in Clouds of Witness; he can only regard “that thing” as incongruous. Like most soldiers, Peter had seen the war through, but not for any reasons of traditional patriotism.17

  The right chord was struck in London, almost accidentally. The government commissioned Sir Edwin Luytens to construct a temporary monument in Whitehall, centerpiece for a celebratory march by British forces and their leaders during demobilization in 1919. Luytens delivered a spare, geometrical shape, an empty tomb bereft of all religious and patriotic connotations. The cenotaph was simple and sobering, a spare shell over a gnawing emptiness. The work so perfectly reflected public feeling that the government had no choice but to permanently install the monument at Whitehall as a national symbol of all that was lost in the Great War. Dorothy L. Sayers made prominent mention of the cenotaph in two of her novels.18

  The grief did not end with the dedications and the ceremonies. The war cast a silent pall that lasted more than a decade. But life had to go on. There was much to resolve, much to build, much to face. The transition to peacetime footing led to rampant inflation followed soon by the inevitable contraction of government buying. The resultant recession left many to face criminally high prices with no source of income. Parliament extended unemployment insurance benefits in 1920, demonstrating a sympathetic comprehension that was historically unusual, if inadequate.

  There was much unfinished business. The Irish situation demanded immediate attention. The government had quelled a rebellion on Easter Sunday, 1917, but the Irish were clearly fed up with British misrule. The Irish Republican Army organized in 1919. Terrorism mounted. The Government of Ireland Act stabbed at the problem in 1920; one year later came the Irish Free State. In 1921, Parliament also passed an act intended to give the people of India greater control over their own affairs.

  At home, a new Parliamentary Reform Act, adopted in 1918, sought to deflect pressures from still other sources of massive dissatisfaction. The Act gave the right to vote to virtually all men over the age of twenty-one and some women over the age of thirty. 1919 brought the Sex Qualification Removal Act, removing bars to public employment on the basis of sex. The government had at last begun to recognize the rights of women, if only in a minimalist fashion. The legal voting age for women was at last lowered to twenty-one in 1928, essentially completing Britain’s ratification of democracy.

  Working class unrest became endemic in the years immediately following the war, despite the political gains of the Labour party. 1919 saw a national railway strike, the following year a coal strike. Parliament created the Sankey Commission to study the problems of persistent poverty and dangerous conditions in the mines, but little was accomplished. In 1921, the owners locked out the coal miners, resulting in a humiliating reduction in wages.19

  Troubled times. Dorothy L. Sayers struggled along with everyone else, a young, well-educated (most men would have said overeducated) woman trying to make her way in a tight economy, competing against thousands of returning soldiers who wanted her to go home. Sex Qualification Removal Act or no, England in the immediate postwar era had little room for women in the public economy. Sayers’s choices for employment were severely circumscribed by her advanced education and her sex.

  She struggled to maintain an optimistic outlook. An intellectual above all else, in the three years after leaving Oxford Sayers published two volumes of poetry, both printed in very small numbers. This, sad to say, was her happiest achievement during the war years. Life after Oxford was difficult to accept. She took the teaching position at Hull but found the work trying and unfulfilling. Next she tried her hand as a publisher’s assistant at Black-well’s, the small firm in Oxford that had brought out her own books, only to discover that there was no money in it. Infusions of funds from her father kept body and soul together through the end of the war.20

  The armistice brought new opportunities. Leaving Blackwell’s in May 1919, she took a job as headmaster’s assistant at the L’Ecole Des Roches in Verneuil, Normandy. Sayers ventured into French education mainly to pursue Eric Whelpton, an invalided soldier she had met at Oxford. Her love for Whelpton was not encouraged or returned. In 1920 he left France and her life, after offering to sell her his interest in the school. Sayers returned to England soon after. Two more teaching jobs followed, both of them brief, before she took an advertising position at Benson’s in May 1922. The job was less than ideal for a woman of Oxford education, but it was far better than staying home. Unfulfilled in her job prospects, unhappy in affairs of the heart, Sayers found some solace by turning to popular fiction.21

  It was in Normandy that she first demonstrated her interest in detective stories. A friend at Oxford sent her a steady diet of Sexton Blake, that much-bloodied denizen of the mass market pulps. When Eric Whelpton teased her about lowbrow tastes, she announced her intention to enter into a syndicate with college friends to produce new detective fiction and make lots of money. Whelpton seemingly was unimpressed.22

  Whether the syndicate existed outside Sayers’s defensive imagination is difficult to say. One thing is certain: Sayers first attempted detective fiction in Normandy in 1920, trying her hand at a Sexton Blake novel. Like characters in much mass market fiction, Blake was the product of no single author. His publishers purchased Blake yarns from any number of sources, printing them with no author credit at all. Sexton Blake was not so much authored as produced assembly-line style.23

  The story that Sayers outlined in France was very much a product of postwar conditions—a story built on themes of international intrigue and war-weary mistrust between agents of Britain and France
. It was to be firmly in the Sexton Blake tradition: murder and mayhem among the rich and famous, many high speed chases through land, sea, and air, daring escapes by masters of disguise, and the recovery of a valuable jewel after a violent climax. The intrepid Blake must have possessed a hard head to withstand all the blows dealt him in the series.

  The unfinished manuscript of Dorothy L. Sayers’s effort to produce a Sexton Blake mystery survives intact, providing a glimpse into the genesis of a fictional hero. This fellow named Wimsey was to appear as a secondary character in the adventure. The murder touching off the entire chain of events was to take place in the Wimsey flat in Piccadilly and put Sexton Blake on the trail of the international archfiend, Renault. In his first incarnation, Lord Peter is introduced as the son of the Duke of Peterborough, but much of his later character is instantly recognizable. He is described as a “harmless sort of fellow, I think. Distinguished himself in the war. Rides his own horse in the Grand National. Authority on first editions. At present visiting the Duchess in Herts. I’ve seen his photo somewhere. Fair-haired, big nose, aristocratic sort of man whose socks match his tie. No politics.” Harriet Vane’s description of Peter in Gaudy Night was not much different.24

  Sexton Blake is supposed to investigate the murder in Piccadilly, of course, and to follow up the incredible string of criminal events that would ensue. Lord Peter refuses to stand quietly aside. Entering the chase, he flies to Rome to discover that Renault has disguised himself as a woman and intends doubling back to England. Peter cleverly diverts the scoundrel’s luggage to Paris, where it is opened, revealing Renault a jewel thief. Sexton Blake then lays a trap to capture the fiend and recover the jewel he has stolen.

  Sayers never concluded this story and later chose to forget it completely. It is not difficult to hazard why, though it is the plainest guesswork. For one thing, she left France without Eric Whelpton; the work she did there may have held unpleasant associations. More probably, she gave it up because Sexton Blake was not her own creation but that of a syndicate. More fun was to be had inventing from scratch. Finally, there was the fact that she had invented this fellow Wimsey, an intriguing character. He had shown every capacity for taking over the Blake story. Why not put him to work on his own?25