Writing disenchantment: British First World War prose, 1914–30 9781526103178

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction
Patriotism, propaganda and pacifism, 1914–1918
From hope to Disenchantment, 1919–1922
Modernism, conflict and the home front, 1922–1927
Sagas and series, 1924–1928
Popular disenchantment: the War Books Boom, 1928–1930
Conclusion
Select bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Writing disenchantment

Andrew Frayn

British First World War prose, 1914–30

Writing disenchantment

Writing disenchantment analyses the phenomenon of literary disenchantment after the First World War. In this study, Andrew Frayn argues that it is not only a response to the conflict, but a condition of industrial, urban modernity whose language is used in writing both combatant and civilian accounts of wartime experience. The beliefs which are negated must also be kept in mind: courage, faith and honour were not wholly eradicated by the war. This is the first detailed account of what it means to be enchanted and disenchanted in war literature. First World War literature is situated in the context of theories of decline, decay and degeneration. Critics such as C. F. G. Masterman, Oswald Spengler and Max Weber are invoked to demonstrate the development of these ideas from the mid-nineteenth century alongside mass culture. Authors responded critically to the conflict from its earliest days, but such expressions were tacitly, sometimes even officially, circumscribed. The rise of disenchantment to become the dominant narrative of the war is charted from stories of pacifism and conscientious objection to the harsh criticisms of the war, and the structures of modernity that enabled it, in the War Books Boom of 1928– 30. This shift is traced in texts, manuscript material, sales and review data. This book discusses modernist authors such as Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf alongside middlebrow authors from H. G. Wells to Rebecca West and long-forgotten bestsellers. These sometimes jarring juxtapositions show the strained relationship between enchantment and disenchantment in the war and the subsequent decade.

British First World War prose, 1914–30

Frayn

‘A nuanced, sophisticated book that advances its insights through careful readings of works both iconic and very nearly forgotten. The pairing of high modernist with mass-cultural novels is ingenious, and reveals the overarching coherence of British culture in the Great War.’ Stephen Ross, University of Victoria

Bottom: A merry party in a newly captured village. Official photograph taken on the British Western Front by Ernest Brooks, c.1916 (National Library of Scotland)

ISBN 978-0-7190-8922-0

9 780719 089220 www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Cover design: riverdesign.co.uk

Andrew Frayn has taught English Literature at the universities of Manchester, Salford and Central Lancashire, and at De Montfort University

Cover image, top: Damaged houses on Moor Terrace, Hartlepool. The damage was caused by the German bombardment of Hartlepool on 16 December 1914. (Hartlepool Cultural Services)

Writing disenchantment

Writing disenchantment

Writing disenchantment British First World War prose, 1914–30

Andrew Frayn

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © Andrew Frayn 2014 The right of Andrew Frayn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN  978 0 7190 8922 0  hardback First published 2014 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Contents

List of figures page  vi Acknowledgements vii List of abbreviationsix Introduction

1

1 Patriotism, propaganda and pacifism, 1914–1918

40

2 From hope to Disenchantment, 1919–1922

77

3 Modernism, conflict and the home front, 1922–1927

119

4 Sagas and series, 1924–1928

163

5 Popular disenchantment: the War Books Boom, 1928–1930

201



Conclusion

240

Select bibliography 248 Index255

List of figures

1.1 ‘Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?’ (courtesy of Imperial War Museum) 44 1.2 Facsimile page from H. G. Wells, Mr Britling Sees It Through 52 2.1 C. E. Montague outside ‘Hut 17’, 1915 (courtesy of Mr Robert Elton) 96 2.2 C. E. Montague, 1917 (courtesy of Mr Robert Elton) 97 3.1 Peace Day parade, 1919 (courtesy of Corbis Images) 139 4.1 R. H. Mottram and other officers, 1915 ­(courtesy of Mrs A. S. Hankinson and the executors of R. H. Mottram, with assistance from Hannah Verge and the Norfolk Record Office) 170 4.2 The making of a new railway (courtesy of National Library of Scotland) 187 4.3 Destruction of railroads in Belgium by retreating Germans188 5.1 Paul Nash, dustjacket for Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero (courtesy of Tate Images, on behalf of the estate of Paul Nash) 210 5.2 When a train is signalled they all rush off to their ­ambulances (courtesy of National Library of Scotland) 228

Acknowledgements

Writing Disenchantment has developed over more than a decade. Thanks to Howard Booth, whose supervision contributed to this work as part of two dissertations, and who has continued to be a source of wry wisdom. Max Saunders prompted a rethink from the doctoral version of this work by observing after my viva that ‘I thought it was going to say a bit more about what disenchantment was.’ This volume attempts to do just that. Ana CardenCoyne suggested the title; both offered constructive criticism as PhD examiners. The book has been almost wholly rewritten since. Caroline Zilboorg has been a regular source of encouragement, support and hospitality. I’m very grateful to Howard Booth, Sarah Burton, Erinn Campbell, Laura Doan, Laleh Guilanpour, Gemma Moss and Robert Spencer for reading sections of this work. The time-honoured caveat: any errors which remain are mine. For other comments, suggestions and observations thanks to Jane Eblen Keller, Helen Malarky, Thomas Nevin, Mike Sanders, Ian Scott and Vincent Sherry. Thanks to the staff at Manchester University Press for their patience and forbearance. Friends and family keep us going through such long endeavours. Thanks to Carolyn Broomhead for her support and confidence(s) over the full length of this project. I raise a glass to my Manchester urban family, who have continued to remind me of life outside research and kept me in check by asking repeatedly about war poets. Katherine Bennett, Emma Pearson and Claire Frearson have been there to pick up various pieces as they’ve fallen. I am grateful for their love and support. Thanks also to Lisa Gertson for her patience and encouragement as I finished the book. I know we’ll continue to do the same for each other. My father, John, has always encouraged me to do something I

viii

Acknowledgements

enjoy, probably long beyond the point where it seemed reasonable. Thanks to my brother Dan for regular accommodation when I’ve needed to visit the British Library. As I write this, I also remember those who will not be able to read this book. My grandfather, Thomas Howarth Bamford, was a link back to the First World War: I remember vividly him talking about being got out of bed as a child while visiting relatives in London to watch the Zeppelins being shot down. My mother, Rosemary, died before I became interested in the war, but I know she’d be proud to see this. Thinking about death and pride is always uncomfortable, but appropriate for a study of the First World War and its literary legacy. I am grateful to the late Catherine Aldington and Mrs A. S. Hankinson for granting me permission to view archival material relating to Richard Aldington and R. H. Mottram respectively. Versions of parts of this work have been presented at conferences and seminars at the University of Birmingham, Newcastle University, Liverpool Hope University, the University of Manchester, Université d’Artois, the University of Sheffield, and the Modernist Studies Association Conference. Thanks to the organisers of those events who invited or selected me to present, and to those who offered thoughts and feedback in response. Elements of Chapter 2 are found in my essay in Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy (eds), The Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), of Chapter 4 in my essays in Andrzej Gasiorek and Daniel Moore (eds), Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transformations, International Ford Madox Ford Studies 7 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008) and Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes (eds), An Introduction to Ford Madox Ford (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). My thanks for permission to reproduce material here.

List of abbreviations

CE Deg DH Dis DR DW EME JE JR Lb LCL MB

C. F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London: Methuen, 1909) Max Nordau, Degeneration, intro. George L. Mosse ([1892] 1895; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993) Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero, first UK unexpurgated edition ([1929]; London: Sphere, 1965) C. E. Montague, Disenchantment (London: Chatto & Windus, 1922) Rose Laure Allatini (as A. T. Fitzroy), Despised and Rejected (1918; London: GMP, 1988) Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. C. F. Atkinson, 2 vols ([1918–21]; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1926–28) D. H. Lawrence, England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele (1922; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) R. C. Sherriff, Journey’s End (1929; London: Penguin, 2000) Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, ed. Kate Flint (1922; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) D. H. Lawrence, The Ladybird, in The Fox; The Captain’s Doll; The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl (1923; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover; A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) H. G. Wells, Mr Britling Sees it Through (1916; London: Hogarth, 1985)

x

List of abbreviations

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) MM D. H. Lawrence, Memoir of Maurice Magnus, ed. Keith Cushman (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987) MPF [Frederic Manning], The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme & Ancre 1916, 2 vols (London: Piazza Press, 1929) NC Rose Macaulay, Non-Combatants and Others (1916; London: Capuchin Classics, 2010) OBM D. H. Lawrence, ‘On Being a Man’, in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) OCH D. H. Lawrence, ‘On Coming Home’, in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine PE Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End, ed. Max Saunders (London: Penguin, 2002) PJ Gilbert Frankau, Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant (London: Hutchinson, 1919) RJ C. E. Montague, Rough Justice (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926) RS Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918; London: Virago, 1980) SB A. P. Herbert, The Secret Battle, intro. Winston S. Churchill (1919; London: Methuen, 1928) SFT R. H. Mottram, The Spanish Farm Trilogy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927) TE Ernest Raymond, Tell England: A Study in a Generation (London: Cassell, 1922) TL Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, eds Hermione Lee and Stella McNichol (1927; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992) Wm Cicely Hamilton, William—An Englishman (London: Skeffington & Son, 1919) WN [Rebecca West], War Nurse: The True Story of a Woman Who Lived, Loved and Suffered on the Western Front (New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, 1930) MD

Introduction

In Alaska there is a place called Disenchantment Bay. At its head is the Hubbard Glacier, the largest tidewater glacier on the continent of North America and, by anyone’s standards, a wonder of nature. It stretches around seventy-five miles from its source in the Yukon, grows year on year, and regularly calves icebergs the size of a small tower block. However, Alejandro Malaspina despaired on sighting it. His mission for the Spanish government was to map the Gulf of Alaska and find the fabled Northwest Passage. Sailing through Yakutat Bay in 1792 he thought he had found it as the bay continued to narrow and progress inland; his hopes were dashed when he found a giant wall of ice blocking his progress some ten miles later. In the face of this spectacular wilderness, a geological marvel, he named it Puerto del Desengaño – Disenchantment Bay. To Malaspina it was a sign only of dashed hopes. Disenchantment is felt at the inability to achieve a prized objective; it is the failure of experience to live up to previous ideals and beliefs. Disenchantment is often associated with the literature that followed the First World War. This book defines the term and examines how it became the dominant memory of the conflict. Disenchantment existed long before the War Books Boom of 1928–30, and C. E. Montague’s 1922 prose response to the war takes the term as its title. As an early and influential literary usage I prefer this term throughout.1 It is often invoked but rarely defined, and the eminent historian Gary Sheffield asserts that ‘“Disillusionment” is capable of such wide interpretation as to become almost meaningless as a concept. What, for instance, is to be made of men disenchanted with post-war life who looked back at the war years through a rosy glow, as the pinnacle of their life?’2 The concept is certainly malleable, but deserves rigorous

2

Writing disenchantment: First World War prose

­ efinition due to its endurance in popular and academic discusd sions. I argue that the fond recollection of war years and postwar disenchantment are necessarily interlinked. Disenchantment is  produced in industrial modernity by the social and cultural interactions between the traditional enchantments of faith and the modern enchantments of science, its practices and procedures. First World War literature represents an extreme form of technological rationalism, and its uneasy negotiation with established worldviews. War was contiguous with modern life, and to understand its literature we must engage with the ways it intervenes in contemporary debates. Disenchantment exists before the First World War, continues during it, and endures following it. It does not appear in an instant following the Somme or the Armistice, the Treaty of Versailles or the failure to build a ‘fit country for heroes to live in’, the General Strike of 1926 or the literary precedents of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End. A long cultural context of writing across disciplines about decay, decline and degeneration, uncertainties and fears of invasion must be taken into account, along with the enchantments which were questioned, some believed shattered irrevocably, by  the  conflict. There was no pre-war idyll, and the language used to describe disenchantments before the war is mobilised in response  to the conflict.3 It was not, as Edith Wharton’s novel would have it, The Age of Innocence (1920) which was torn asunder by the experience of the war.4 The summer of 1914 was unusually warm, but only a privileged few had the leisure to enjoy those conditions: it was not all jumpers slung over shoulders and riverside picnics. The American philosopher Edgar Saltus had written in 1885 that: history and experience [… are] quite competent to prove that this world is far from being the best one possible. If neither of them succeeds in so doing, then let him wander through the hospitals, the cholera slums, the operating-rooms of the surgeon, the prisons, the torture-chambers, the slave-kennels, the battlefields, or any one of the numberless haunts of nameless misery; or, if all of these are too far, or too inconvenient, let him take a turn into one of the many factories where men and women, and even infants, work from ten to fourteen hours a day at mechanical labor, simply that they may continue to enjoy the exquisite delight of living.5



Introduction 3

The impact of the First World War is often characterised as a rupture, but there is no wholesale change to material conditions.6 Early post-war commentators noted that factors contributing to unrest had been apparent before 1914, such as the failure of wage increases to match inflation.7 However, the war becomes a focus for disenchantment: non-combatants also wrote disenchanted war books. I examine how the language of social inequality finds a focus in First World War fiction. As Michael Saler states, intellectuals and elite groups ‘have enchanted themselves with the spell of disenchantment, but that spell appears to be breaking, leaving a specifically modern, “disenchanted” enchantment in its wake’.8 Disenchantment is highly visible in literature, not only the highbrow and canonical. It is negotiated differently in popular fiction, which I keep in mind throughout this volume. I led into Sheffield’s observation about disillusionment with my own title term. The two are usually synonymous, but I posit that there is a qualitative difference. Deceit and falsehood are always present in illusion; there is no positive valence. Think, for example, of the gloriously inept magician G. O. B. in the US television series Arrested Development, and his repeated assertion that he performs not tricks, but illusions. In contrast, at the moment of enchantment the belief object is endorsed profoundly. Disenchantment and instability did not characterise the pre-war world, and there were improvements to the social fabric: the Old Age Pension was introduced in 1909 and National Insurance in 1911. People went to war for manifold reasons – social pressure, schoolboyish fantasies, compulsion, even money. But many enlisted to defend their country and its values, which did not seem illusory. Those values had physical form in the land itself and the monarch, who represented the army, the nation and the church: God was the ultimate authority. A religious education in a worshipful society was shared by most troops, even if they had ceased to believe in its consolations.9 In our sceptical society it is hard to believe that such strongly-felt enchantments could have preceded post-war disenchantments. However, that strength precipitates an almost inversely proportional response. To demonstrate the ways in which contemporaries responded to war and modernity, this volume pays attention to early twentiethcentury commentators and theorists as much as recent critics and historians. Concerns about racial decline and degeneration were bound up in European imperialism. National values needed to be

4

Writing disenchantment: First World War prose

asserted across borders and loyalty to the metropolitan centre had to be ensured. In Britain reform was prominent, as social theorists sought to reconcile the extreme poverty of working-class urban life with the very modern enchantment of progress, particularly in science and technology. Misinterpretations of Charles Darwin’s theories problematised these debates: from as early as 1880, critics had to point out that this is not the fittest as an absolute, but the fittest for purpose in the current environment.10 Adaptation is not necessarily advancement, and can often lead to degeneration as the functionality of useful tasks is prioritised. The power of science was feared as well as lauded: progress carried with it trepidation about radical change. Even a progressive thinker such as the socialist and suffragist Cicely Hamilton, discussed in Chapter 2, worried that ‘if and when civilisation comes to its ruin, the destructive agent will be science; man’s knowledge of science applied to warfare, meaning slaughter not only of human bodies but of human institutions, of all we have created through the centuries.’11 The most extreme German critics, such as Oswald Spengler, feared for civilisation as a whole. Such works are invoked throughout to emphasise that this is a language of the time, not simply a response to the war. Disenchantment, the First World War, and literary studies Following a brief initial burst of work about the War Books Boom at its end, which I discuss in the conclusion, the early work on English First World War literature was Bernard Bergonzi’s 1965 Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War. In 1996 Bergonzi looked back at his work on revising it for the second time and realised some of its limitations. He surveys acutely important works such as Modris Eksteins’ Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age and Elizabeth A. Marsland’s The Nation’s Cause: French, English and German Poetry of the First World War. Bergonzi focuses on canonical authors, particularly soldier-poets, and both he and Paul Fussell make a compelling claim for the literariness of the First World War. It was understood by recourse to the literary canon, and Shakespeare’s Henry V was regularly invoked.12 However, that aspect is over-emphasised by the focus of both critics on officer-poets,13 which perpetuates that impression. Fussell assesses the literary world before the war: ‘One read Hardy and Kipling and Conrad and frequented worlds of



Introduction 5

traditional moral action delineated in traditional moral language. […] One lolled outside on a folding canvas chaise, or swam, or walked in the countryside. One read outdoors, went on picnics, had tea served from a white wicker table under the trees.’14 This begs the question: who is Fussell’s ‘one’? It is not an every(wo)man, but a highly educated, cultured, and often leisured man.15 Women and working-class writers are excluded. Samuel Hynes’s A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture has a much wider range, but still misses significant popular and middlebrow authors such as Gilbert Frankau and R. H. Mottram, and offers little detailed engagement with women novelists. These accessible analyses of First World War literature carry enduring weight, Fussell particularly, but here I look outside their canon. Bergonzi, Fussell, and Hynes all either implicitly or explicitly state a model of rupture. The start of the war was written as rupture, but I argue that the depiction as rupture was just that: life continued. The war was quickly represented as a watershed, particularly an artistic watershed. Fussell and Bergonzi see war literature as a discrete category, but neither material conditions nor modes of representation change so quickly or dramatically. These critics appreciate the ways memory shapes narrative, but do not parse effectively the crystallisation of literary disenchantment in the post-war decade. More recent critics take a less stratified view, making links with other forms. Holger Klein’s edited collection The First World War in Fiction discusses a wide range of texts, resisting synthesis and favouring instead subtle comparison by collecting essays on adjacent subjects. In the last twenty years, critics such as Allyson Booth, Trudi Tate, Vincent Sherry and Mark D. Larabee have reintroduced the war and post-war literature to a fuller historical context. The war did not occasion a break in the development of modernist and avant-garde literature. In Modernism, History and the First World War, Tate compares British, American and European literature and their contexts, while Booth, in Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space Between Modernism and the First World War specifically examines depictions of the military in civilian texts. This problematically suggests that modernism is separate from war experience, and Sherry points out that neither work defines ‘modernism’.16 I adopt Sherry’s view that modernism is a counterculture of modernity. He argues that the ‘grammar and vocabulary through which the war was constructed in political

6

Writing disenchantment: First World War prose

Britain, in particular, represent an idiom whose coherence reaches deep into the major traditions of intellectual liberalism and, in its disturbance, opens into an equally profound range of resonance and implication’.17 That continuity underpins this study, but I analyse a very different range of literature to demonstrate the ways in which popular, middlebrow and modernist texts about the war by men and women, civilians, combatants and others use existing language to discuss the conflict. Linguistic, historical, philosophical and material continuities mean that the model of rupture cannot hold. Few critics have tried to define disenchantment; none has engaged with the idea at length. Klein identifies several categories: disillusionment, alienation, works of despair, endurance, renewal, heroism, meliorism, and the paradoxical detachment from and embrace of ‘a new age of automated violence’.18 The military historian Brian Bond has examined Montague and disenchanted literature in several works, and criticises his lack of objectivity.19 This, for me, misses the point: my interest is in how disenchantment comes to represent First World War experience. The most extensive treatment of disillusionment is by Eric Leed in No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I. He charts the impact of military service on the individual, and argues that: ‘War experience was nothing if not an experience of radical discontinuity on every level of consciousness.’20 The characterisation of change as disconnection is problematic: it can only be meaningful in relation to what has gone before. Leed later describes the ‘crushing normality of industrialized war’, but does not see it in terms of the existing industrialised world.21 He links disillusionment with rupture, and the failure of military service to provide an escape from the industry and technology of daily life. Disillusionment results from modernity, but Leed sees ‘the disillusionment of the volunteer as […] a militarized proletarianization, a process in which they lost a social “self” they didn’t know they possessed’.22 Disillusionment is the realisation of being trapped in the ideologies of the modern and modernising world that comes directly from war.23 It is, for Leed, a loss of both social and spiritual status precipitated by the realisation by the officer class of material realities to which the working class was already accustomed. This is partly true, but Leed’s model of rupture does not account for the endurance of the spiritual much later than he supposes: industrial modernity co-existed effectively with religion and high idealism. Leed’s viewpoint contrasts with



Introduction 7

Janet S. K. Watson, who argues that it ‘was only the difficulties of the 1920s and after that created the disillusioned look back at war; it was not, for most people, a product of the war years themselves’.24 Peter Buitenhuis, Modris Eksteins and Benjamin F. Martin all see disillusionment as a post-war phenomenon.25 The most convincing evocation of enchantment and disenchantment is by Sarah Cole, who in a 2009 article sees these ideas in relation to theories of violence, ‘not a passive recognition of spiritual flatness, but the active stripping away of idealizing principles’.26 Both have their own literary traditions. Cole’s compelling investigation, which sees disenchantment in terms of theories of violence, covers a variety of nations and looks as far forward as Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938). For me, disenchantment is not solely attributable to the war years or the 1920s. It is a product of social conditions which were already ingrained. The language of disenchantment that exists before the war gives authors the means to criticise it, and that disenchantment is heightened by the ongoing problems of the 1920s. Why prose? Poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen have come to dominate literary studies of the First World War. Why, then, does this volume focus on prose? Popular First World War poetry was not disenchanted. The lyric form is appropriate for intense moments of pleasure or horror, hence its suitedness for propaganda. Jessie Pope was a jingoistic touchstone, exemplified by the reproduction of a ‘letter which reached the office of The Daily Mail from a soldier at the front’ as preface to her War Poems (1915).27 She wrote stirring refrains such as ‘Are we downhearted? – NO!’ and used sport as the analogy for war in ‘Play the Game’, recalling the famous refrain of Henry Newbolt’s ‘Vitaï Lampada’ (1897).28 Now derided, Pope was a patriotic success, along with authors such  as Alice Meynell and Gilbert Frankau; I discuss the latter in Chapter 2. Rupert Brooke was a more literary success, made famous by quotation from ‘The Soldier’ in the 1915 Easter Sunday sermon from St Paul’s Cathedral. It probably also helped that Brooke was a good-looking young chap.29 He was dead less than three weeks later. Julian Grenfell’s rousing ‘Into Battle’ was published in The Times on the same day as the notice of his death.30

8

Writing disenchantment: First World War prose

The reception of these poets was bound up in remembrance, and Peter Parker states acerbically that ‘it was Brooke, Grenfell and the scores of other young (and preferably dead) poets, now forgotten, who were considered representative during and just after the War’.31 The early verses of Sassoon and Graves were not dissimilar to more patriotic poets. Before he had experienced front-line combat Sassoon wrote: ‘War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise, / And, fighting for our freedom, we are free.’32 His view that ‘they are fortunate, who fight’ endured well into the war, and Jean Moorcroft Wilson observes the kinship of such enchantment with Brooke.33 The war poems of The Old Huntsman (1917), whose title evokes Pope’s Three Jolly Huntsmen (1912), use images such as the poetic ‘woeful crimson of men slain’, which contrast markedly with the ‘terrible corpses – blind with blood’ in Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918).34 Graves’s enthusiasm was not so pronounced, but he expressed the violence of the conflict in archaisms and high diction: ‘I looked, and ah, my wraith before me stood, / His head all battered in by violent blows.’35 Edward Marsh, the patron of Georgian poetry and an influential civil servant, told Graves that his poems ‘were written in the poetic diction of fifty years ago’.36 Modern language was not solely the preserve of modernist poetry. Graves viewed himself as ‘a sound militarist in action however much of a pacifist in thought’, emphasised by the clumsy lines ‘To fight and kill is wrong – / To stay at home wronger’.37 The association of these poets with disenchantment, and their popularity, derives largely from the success of their later prose works about the war, and subsequent reappraisal of their poetry.38 The dominant view was that victory must be won and necessary hardships endured. In wartime, disenchantment was at best an emergent viewpoint. The First World War is the only conflict to occasion a major, popular prose response. Poetry was previously the form for matters of note. Other poets also saw a crisis of literary form in response to the First World War. F. S. Flint wrote in 1920 that ‘rhyme and metre are dead or dying devices, that their use brings poetry into contempt (the poetry in verse form, that is); and that, in spite of the number of books of verse by soldiers that appear, it is not the poetry in them that moves us’.39 He argues for the primacy of free verse, and observes astutely that war poetry is interesting for the access to profound experience it appears to grant. Thomas Hardy bemoaned poetry’s decline as a result of ‘the barbarizing of taste in



Introduction 9

the younger minds by the dark madness of the late war, the unabashed cultivation of selfishness in all classes, the plethoric growth of knowledge simultaneously with the stunting of wisdom’.40 This threnody for verse itself is linked with a wider claim about the lost enchantment of wisdom, which I continue to explore below. In his classic study Aspects of the Novel (1927), E. M. Forster still values English poetry over prose, and the Russian novel above vernacular fiction.41 However, more progressive authors and thinkers were starting to reassess: modernist authors sought alternative traditions. Ford Madox Ford believed in the potential power of prose: ‘Creative prose is poetry; the novel is narrative poetry and displaces nothing.’42 For him, poetry is not simply a matter of form and metre, but quality of language. D. H. Lawrence saw an opportunity to do creative damage to the novel: ‘this war […] kicks the pasteboard bottom in the usual “good” popular novel. People have felt much more deeply and strongly these last few months and they are not going to let themselves be taken in by “serious” works whose feeling is shallower than that of the official army reports.’43 He attacks commercial, generic novels and seeks to make it a ‘serious’ form. However, canonical modernism must be understood against ‘“good” popular novels’. I analyse several in this book, and they offer richer texture and detail than modernist prejudices suggest.44 Aside from questions of value, prose more easily demonstrates the varied rhythms and textures of quotidian life. Theorists such as Hayden White have drawn attention to the necessary formation of history through narrative: we work to integrate events within our life story before making them aesthetic.45 Virginia Woolf questions the ability of prose to reach the artistic heights of poetry, but observes that it ‘has taken all the dirty work on to her own shoulders’ and is ‘adequate […] to deal with the common and the complex’.46 Poetry lacks ‘the supports and comforts of literature. […] Its power of make-believe, its representative power, is dispensed with in favour of its extremities and extravagances.’47 The literary critic Tim Kendall points to the enduring power of war poetry, and I argue that many war novels acknowledge both the poetry of life and its mundanity; the repeated shift between extreme experiences and the mundane gives the literature of war its distinctive rhythm.48 This is not to gainsay the value of war poetry. However, in the war novel we see exceptional events alongside the tedium of war: the constant threat is punctuated by intensely

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Writing disenchantment: First World War prose

dangerous bursts of activity. The narrator of R. H. Mottram’s The Spanish Farm Trilogy (1924–27), which I discuss in Chapter 4, states that to ‘fight for a few minutes, one must live for weeks’ (SFT, 793).49 The contrast between rest and action, uncertainty and confirmation, for combatants and civilians, enables a clearer understanding of the rhythm of war experience and the structures which contain disenchantment. There is also an ongoing formal shift: for Saltus, ‘[r]ealistic fiction is a picture of life as it is, and not, as was formerly the case, a picture of life as we want it’.50 The novel is no longer necessarily a comedic or exalting form. In extended prose the negotiation between enchantment and disenchantment is evident: disenchantment was not yet overpowering. Why Britain? National identity is crucial to the enchantments which persuade people to support war. Valuable critical and historical accounts such as Modris Eksteins’s Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Jay M. Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History and Leo van Bergen’s Before My Helpless Sight: Suffering, Dying and Military Medicine on the Western Front, 1914–1918 take a comparative approach, and there are inevitable transnational correspondences. Works such as the French authors Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire (1916) and Georges Duhamel’s Lives of the Martyrs (1917), the German Walter Flex’s The Wanderer Between Two Worlds (1916), the Australian and New Zealand literature following Gallipoli, and the American responses of John dos Passos in Three Soldiers (1921) and E. E. Cummings in The Enormous Room (1922) might all be considered under the rubric of disenchantment. Here, I focus on British (dis)enchantments, bound up in distinctive rhetorical strategies and narrative modes. These enchantments were particularly masculine, coming from patriarchal structures, and this study keeps in mind tensions around gender which were manifested in the suffrage movement and the idea of the New Woman. Eric Leed observes that ‘those who marched onto European battlefields in 1914 had a highly specific and concrete image of what war meant, an image that was deeply rooted in the past and in their culture’.51 At the turn of the twentieth century Britain was apparently in a position of strength, seen in and ­reinforced by the



Introduction 11

language used in conservative newspapers such as The Times and the Daily Telegraph. The recently founded Daily Mail shared a similar political standpoint, but was aimed at the increasing mass market. It was soon an influential million-seller which supported the Second Boer War and took a militaristic stance as the First World War approached. Long-standing narratives about Britain as a natural leader of progress were reinforced, and its isolation was the secure foundation for aggressive imperialist expansion. Those myths were reiterated partly to allay fears about British strength, physical, metaphysical and military, in comparison with rival imperial nations. As the early twentieth-century German sociologist Max Weber points out, the ‘prestige of power […] means in practice the glory of power over other communities; it means the expansion of power, though not always by way of incorporation or subjection. The big political communities are the natural exponents of such pretensions to prestige.’52 The rhetoric of British masculinity was vital to Britain’s expansion. A chivalric, knightly form of military heroism was still current before and after the First World War, and Britain’s war was fought to preserve these values.53 The invasion of Belgium gave a focus to nebulous ideas of honour. The behavioural code derived from the nineteenth-century interest in Arthurian legend encapsulated by Tennyson’s poetry, particularly The Idylls of the King (1859–85).54 It harks back to a feudal world, fought for and ruled by a superior warrior caste. In Henry Newbolt’s semi-autobiographical ‘Novel of Youth’ The Twymans (1911), he names the protagonist Percival, alluding to the Arthurian knight.55 Percival tells of his indoctrination with ‘phrases, insisted upon again and again’, implanting in him the ideals of ‘ancient patriotism […] with examples of heroic self-sacrifice and passionate devotion’.56 The aim of his school to enforce ‘robust virtues – fortitude, self-reliance, intrepidity […], public spirit, general readiness for united action’ implies preparation for warfare.57 Mental health was strongly linked with physical fitness, which was promoted by playing team sports and games. Rugby football was favoured for its dangerous physicality as an expression and test of manliness.58 It was a sort of trial by ordeal, exacerbated by the fact that ‘to the end of the century many smaller schools still made do with a drill sergeant in charge of games’.59 The individual might make a defining contribution, but it must be in the collective interest, aligning sport with military history. The

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nineteenth century saw the codification of rules of sports such as Rugby Union and Association Football, and war.60 The strength of these ideals clashed with the reality of fighting in the First World War, and Allen J. Frantzen argues that when ‘young men filled with illusions of chivalry were ordered to walk into machine-gun fire, an ancient brotherhood fell before the weapons of a new age’.61 As I continue to argue, the change after the First World War was not so stark. A new hero began to appear, but the old, knightly hero endured in popular fiction and other media if, admittedly, in terminal decline: the 1960s television series The Saint featured a protagonist named Simon Templar. The notion of duty was crucial to continuing the war, and hierarchical allegiance was instilled by the public schools. The collective loyalties instilled by team games were redoubled by the house system. Boys were affiliated to ever greater powers, in a chain of command rising through form, house, school, monarch and God (DW, 2, 301).62 Military training sought to achieve the same interpellation of the individual within a rigid hierarchy at a time when, conversely, it started to seem possible to traverse unseen social boundaries. However, the notion of hierarchy itself was little troubled. The public schools were responsible for inculcating discipline in modernity, which, in Weber’s formulation, ‘is nothing but the consistently rationalized, methodically trained and exact execution of the received order, in which all personal criticism is unconditionally suspended and the actor is unswervingly and exclusively set for carrying out the command’.63 Soldiers acted instinctively in a state of exhaustion for much of the time; there was little time to consider the validity of abstract ideas.64 Shared beliefs allowed men to come together in the First World War. The values instilled in the public schools were disseminated widely through the hegemony of public-school-educated officials in the government and the military, and perpetuated by the Old Boy networks of the major schools and universities.65 Official language therefore derived from this culture, and spread across social classes as the Forster Education Act of 1870 and its successors led to increasing literacy.66 Along with juvenile periodical fiction, novels such as Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) introduced the ethos to a wider public, and helped root the belief that schools should produce ‘a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a Christian’.67 The working class is absent in Hughes’s and



Introduction 13

other such novels, which focus on the growing bourgeoisie.68 C.  F.  G.  Masterman, an early twentieth-century commentator, states that ‘the middle class […] stands for England in most modern analyses’ (CE, 14).69 Scholarships for less well-off pupils exist, but the criticism is a fair one. The ideals put forth in the public schools remained prevalent, imposed from the top down, ingrained in official language and perpetuated by publication privilege at the point when the education system was expanding. Mottram’s Stephen Dormer thinks about the men who ‘shyly imitated the class standards which he and those like him handed down to them from the fount of English culture and fashion in the Public Schools’ (SFT, 760). Joanna Bourke notes astutely that it ‘was not a tradition that was known in the working classes’, but acknowledges that ‘the extent to which these traits were stimulated within grammar and state schools is a matter for debate’.70 Education is superficially opened up, but hierarchies remain entrenched; school inspector Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) clearly demonstrates the importance of dissent, as long as it is quickly assimilated. The English historian-philosopher R. G. Collingwood suggests that elites and the working class have separate cultures but shared beliefs.71 This model helps think about the ways in which class differences remained little altered: after the war, culture again had a bigger say in social constructions. Disenchantment: decline, decay and degeneration Disenchantment must be viewed in the context of a literature of decline, decay and degeneration which proliferated in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in the physical sciences, social sciences and humanities. The British Conservative Prime Minister the Marquis of Salisbury opined in 1887 that ‘Whatever happens will be for the worse, and it is therefore in our interest that as little should happen as possible.’72 Saltus sees only systematic disenchantment as modern, as opposed to individual expressions, and specifically links intelligence, civilisation and disenchantment.73 Authors wrestled with the seeming challenges to the ‘natural order’, and to reconcile scientific progress with the condition of the working class. Racial and cultural decline was one strand, represented stridently in Germany by Max Nordau’s reactionary polemic Degeneration (1892, trans. 1895), later Max Weber, and Oswald

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Spengler in The  Decline of the West (1918–22, trans. 1926–28). The classic study of these ideas in Europe is Daniel Pick’s Faces of Degeneration, c. 1848–c. 1918. For him, degeneration is produced by a crisis of liberal progressivism, and ‘exemplified the radical contradiction of faiths in that period. It is irreducible to one message, motive, or “interest group”.’74 Pick stresses the interrelation of enchantment and disenchantment, and that it cannot be reduced to any one strand. In the discussion of such a wide-ranging idea, it is necessary to consider manifold factors of life and responses to it in industrial modernity. The language of disenchantment is inextricably linked with the development of industrialism, the city and ideas about civilisation, both as noun and verb. Progress is not matched by living conditions, and there is an ongoing concern about the health of the nation. Spengler makes clear the importance of the city: ‘The Megalopolis – sceptical, practical, artificial – alone represents Civilization to-day’ (DW, 1, 353–4). Early commentators such as Saltus criticised the ‘satisfied mediocrity’ of the bourgeoisie, and this led to concerns about the negative impact of mass culture.75 Nordau sees England as the preeminent modern nation: ‘The state of degeneration and exhaustion, which we observe to-day in all civilized countries […] must of necessity have shown itself sooner in England than elsewhere’ (Deg, 75). He believes in the value of technological progress, but in extremis it leads to degeneration. The conditions of workers in the city slums were often interpreted in terms of racial decline: in nineteenth-century medical discourse bodily degeneration is a product of urban conditions.76 Contagion was linked with dense population.77 Masterman was shocked by conditions in London’s East End, where he was a Member of Parliament from 1906 to 1914: ‘The visitor, stimulated to heroic enterprise, descends warily with palpitating pulse into the forgotten regions of the poor. The result is a cruel disillusionment.’78 The inability to see a resolution to social iniquities and class stratification leads to disenchantment, and in The Condition of England (1909) Masterman goes further: The large hopes and dreams of the Early Victorian time have vanished: never, at least in the immediate future, to return. The science which was to allay all diseases, the commerce which was to abolish war, and weave all nations into one human family, the research which was to establish ethics and religion on a secure and positive



Introduction 15 foundation, the invention which was to enable all humanity, with a few hours of not disagreeable work every day, to live for the remainder of their time in ease and sunshine – all these have become recognised as remote and fairy visions. (CE, 214–15)

The imperial narrative of progress now seems inadequate. Malfeasances cannot be eradicated by science, and the failure to uphold values of humanity over values of the nation state suggests a troubled future. However, just as the liberal elite was worried about the condition of England, so individual localities were the object of pride for many.79 Fears about national health are also fears about maintaining the political health of the nation.80 Following the Boer War, the quality of recruits to the army was a worry. Far from being a professional body at the turn of the century, the army was often seen as a last refuge for the indigent.81 The pre-war stereotype of the soldier was someone ‘poorly educated and often unfit. An internal army memo in 1904 reported that “under present conditions, largely those who have failed in civilian life offer themselves as recruits”.’82 War was not inevitable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it was certainly in view: national boundaries and nation states were unstable. The Boer War was a recent memory, and had been a contentious issue in the British press. The Unionists’ victory in the 1900 ‘khaki’ election resulted from support for the conflict, although its duration later provoked discontent.83 The rush for naval supremacy preoccupied the country, and Paul Kennedy states that ‘the greater part of the Conservative press had been galvanised by the Boer War into a fit of patriotic excess on the one hand, and into repeatedly calling for a drastic reconstruction of defence and imperial affairs on the other’.84 Spengler notes that ‘the old Northern races, in whose primitive souls the Faustian was already awakening, discovered in their grey dawn the art of sailing the seas which emancipated them’ (DW, 1, 332). That emancipation necessarily led to conflict with other peoples: while it could be represented as adventure, maritime navigation and charting was about trade and conquest. Britain undertook a busy shipbuilding programme on the Two Power Standard, which was adopted formally in 1889. The two powers against which strength was calculated were France and Russia – not Germany. The navy’s focus shifted with the treaty agreements of the first decade of the

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Writing disenchantment: First World War prose

twentieth century, particularly the Entente Cordial (1904) and the Triple Entente (1907).85 The need for such agreements shows the underlying tensions across Europe, and Bonar Law exemplified their complexities: he demanded naval supremacy, not merely superiority, over Germany, but in 1912 attended a conference to promote better Anglo-German understanding.86 War was also anticipated in literature. The Battle of Dorking (1871) told of Britain’s invasion by an unnamed Germanic foe and the possible break-up of the empire. It spawned imitations, sequels and rebuttals, and was reissued in 1914 with a polemical introduction.87 Fears of invasion literature remained popular, and William Le Queux made writing it a career. Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903) and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) and The War in the Air (1908) were other popular examples.88 Even in E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) war does not seem imminent, but ‘the remark “England and Germany are bound to fight” renders war a little more likely each time that it is made, and is therefore made the more readily by the gutter press of either nation’.89 Germany, although a traditional ally, was seen as a likely belligerent nation, and militarism was linked specifically with Prussia.90 However, the threat was so often stated that the war sometimes became the boy who cried wolf, as Wells noted in Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916): ‘A whole generation had been brought up in the threat of this German war. A threat that goes on for too long ceases to have the effect of a threat’ (MB, 123). Britain was itself aggressively expansionist, but national narratives described bringing progress, civilisation and right-thinking to supposedly lesser nations. Imperialism seemed equally likely to lead to war, as Britain cast anxious glances across the Irish Sea.91 There were, of course, pleas for peace around the same time, the disenchantment of political unrest offering the hope of future enchantment in resolution. There were even attempts to replace war as an institution of the capitalist world with a compulsory and binding system of international arbitration in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.92 These meetings set out some of the rules for warfare, and attempted to adapt to developing military technology such as submarines, but Spengler saw the failure of the latter conference as a contributory factor to the First World War (DW, 2, 430).93 Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion (1909) stated that a war between industrial powers would be futile. While



Introduction 17

a measured or disinterested (perhaps even uninterested) response is common for the most part, extreme and unlikely scenarios can be played out in fiction. Hollis Godfrey’s early science fiction novel The Man Who Ended War (1908) is a case in point; mass culture and science are key modern enchantments, as the development of the genre shows.94 Industrial capitalism was seen explicitly as the cause of war by the Second International, whose declarations against war suggested that it was a likely enough prospect for which to legislate. Such was the influence of the International that it was put forward for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913, and the candidacy held over into 1914. Georges Haupt writes that ‘the International did not merely declare “war on war”, but believed itself capable of mobilising an army of five million organised workers in the active struggle for peace’.95 Even the desire for peace was belligerent, and attests to the perilous equilibrium of competing tensions in the pre-war years. Machine age, machine war Once the war started, the impact of technological progress on military strategy rapidly became apparent. Weber puts it bluntly: ‘War in our time is a war of machines.’96 Mass death in war has occurred in Western society since the latter part of the nineteenth century; for example, the machine gun was first used in the American Civil War.97 Barbed wire, pillboxes and similar equipment were used in the Boer War.98 Machines were understood both as the epitome of progress and conduits for alienation. Collingwood conceives machines as a form of enchantment, predicated on the inability to comprehend the inner workings of the machine, and points to the ‘dignity we get by using machines’, which offer the satisfaction of surpassing human endeavour.99 In wartime, the ability of machines to surpass human strength and endeavour loses its positive valence. Spengler suggests that ‘in every Culture, the technique of war hesitatingly followed the advance of craftsmanship, until at the beginning of the Civilization it suddenly takes the lead, presses all mechanical possibilities of the time relentlessly into its service, and under pressure of military necessity even opens up new domains hitherto unexploited’ (DW, 2, 420). Technology and techniques were quickly adapted from commercial uses, such as miners ­tunnelling below the Flanders clay. Collingwood goes further and,

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writing in 1936, he sees a necessary link between the arms race of the early twentieth century and the wars which followed: ‘To keep the peace, armaments must be effective: to be effective, they must be designed on the basis of searching experiments, and only war can provide those experiments. War, actual war, is thus the presupposition of there being armaments. Frequent, destructive, and hotly contested war is the presupposition of there being highly efficient armaments.’100 There was no shortage of such armaments in the First World War, and these only got more efficient as the conflict continued. Leed argues that ‘the dissociation of technology from its traditional associations […] made it strange, frightening and demonic’, but I cannot agree that technology was otherwise seen as a benign indicator of progress.101 A clash was seemingly inevitable between residual methods and the new, mechanised war. Field Marshal French’s prediction of ‘a war of movement and manoeuvre’ was soon thrown into sharp contrast with the realities of mechanical war.102 Kitchener had been in South Africa and was consequently quick to see the possibilities of entrenchment. However, his suggestion that the war might last for several years was met with incredulity by the British cabinet.103 Britain was ill-prepared for a long land war, having focused its efforts on naval strength, and strategic policy was slow to form: Hew Strachan states that for ‘both sides, trench warfare continued to be a matter of expedience, not a foundation for strategy’.104 Initial optimism was quickly challenged by the number of men killed and wounded at the first Battle of Mons in the first month of the war, and British superiority no longer seemed assured.105 Close-range weaponry was more portable and effective over a greater distance than ever before, while long-range heavy artillery was effective from up to three miles; developments continued apace.106 Technology was supposed to guarantee the success of the Battle of the Somme, the preceding bombardment intended to cut barbed wire and reduce the numbers of operative guns and troops. The result is well-known.107 That technology did not guarantee an advantage is emphasised by Germany’s failure in the war, while at the time it was the leading industrial nation.108 Eksteins sees it as a battle of German modernism and British conservatism, in the military and political sense as well as the literary.109 The question became: who could find ways to use that technology effectively?110



Introduction 19

Max Weber made a more expansive link between mechanisation and disenchantment. The unspoken backdrop for his lecture ‘Science as a Vocation’ was the 1917 Russian revolution, and the text was published the following year. He noted that the unknowns in the world were becoming ever fewer: There are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but […] one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service.111

As the knowledge of atomic structure continued to develop, and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was on the cusp of being proved by A. S. Eddington, the world seemed knowable without the need for blind faith. However, the loss of that enchantment requires the acquisition of another: there is, to coin a phrase, a dialectic of disenchantment.112 Saler argues: ‘[m]odern enchantment often depends upon its antinomial other, modern disenchantment, and a specifically modern enchantment might be defined as one that enchants and disenchants simultaneously: one that delights but does not delude.’113 The world is always thus potentially understandable by someone even if it is outside of the grasp of most; Spengler points out that one of the effects of specialisation and the calculability of everything is to create the gap between expert and layman, reducing the accessibility of knowledge (DW, 1, 328). He points out that precision in and of itself has no significance, but must still be contained within systems of signification: ‘Every fact, even the simplest, contains ab initio a theory’ (DW, 1, 379). For both Simmel and Weber as more specialisation is required professionally, so it bleeds into the personal life.114 Knowledge becomes less valued and people are able to comment and engage less extensively, therefore having less agency. The disenchantment with modern civilisation was exemplified by Spengler, perhaps the preeminent theoretician of decline. His Decline of the West sweeps across the rise and fall of cultures from antiquity to modernity, and he writes of the irrevocable decline of Western civilisation. His title evokes Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89), which warned of the dangers of the clash between civilisation and barbarism; it was still in print at the outbreak of war.115 The First World War is an un­avoidable

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Writing disenchantment: First World War prose

context for the two volumes of Decline of the West; it was conceived in response to Anglo-German unrest in 1911.116 Spengler asserts that ‘the World-War appeared to me both as imminent and also as the inevitable outward manifestation of the historical crisis, and my endeavour was to comprehend it from an examination of the spirit of the preceding centuries – not years’ (DW, 1, 46). He does so in two volumes and over 1,000 pages in total. His work should not be linked directly with German defeat in the war: the first volume was published in July 1918, and so was finished by the time the Hundred Days Offensive started with the Battle of Amiens in early August. However, on publication it caught the national mood. It garnered notoriety in Germany and attention in the English liberal press on its translation, although it was as much criticised as lauded.117 Spengler sees civilisation as the final stage of a culture, and aligns the nineteenth-century Western situation with the descent of classical civilisation (DW, 1, 31–3, 106–7). He talks about the necessity of being ‘in form’, drawing out the root of the phrase in physicality (DW, 2, 330–1), and war is the degradation of civilisation into overly regimented form. For Spengler the decline of the West was not a specific problem but an eternal imponderable, with civilisation as the tipping-point of any culture towards destruction.118 Literary disenchantments Post-war literary disenchantment is not new following the First World War. Earlier authors such as Stendhal and Stephen Crane discuss the problems faced and the difficult decisions which must be made, not merely the glory of war. They were admired by several of the authors studied in this volume. The clearest European pre­ cedent is in the French tradition. Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma contains memorable scenes of the Battle of Waterloo, and Aldington and Ford found Stendhal’s writing appealing in both form and content.119 Fabrizio del Dongo, Stendhal’s startlingly naive protagonist, is almost wholly passive, buffeted by the actions of others and without agency. Like many later combatants, he is initially enthusiastic to fight, but is quickly disenchanted by his physical encounter with war and death. On his way to battle, a French woman acts as prophet of doom: ‘Poor young lad! He’s going to get killed straight off. As God’s my witness, it won’t be long.’120 This acknowledgement of the omnipresence of death in



Introduction 21

increasingly distant and mechanised warfare struck a chord with combatant readers in the First World War. Similarly, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) shows the impact of the American Civil War on a young recruit, Henry Fleming. The protagonist starts to flee from the conflict but, ironically, gains the titular mark from a stray bullet. The ‘singular absence of heroic poses’ is narrated along with powerful images of mechanical death: ‘Other men, punched by bullets, fell in grotesque agonies. The regiment left a coherent trail of bodies.’ 121 Crane’s non-combatant status did not diminish his ire, as his dispatches from the Spanish-American War of 1898 demonstrate, along with his critique of militarism in War is Kind (1899). Ford later praised the style and substance of The Red Badge of Courage, and traces are evident in Aldington and Manning.122 Montague alludes to staff wearing the ‘Red Badge of Funk’ (Dis, 48): in the response to the First World War Crane’s bitter irony becomes outright criticism.123 Post-war disenchantment is predicated on survival: war only seems disastrous to those who do not suffer the most extreme effects. Maurice Blanchot posits that ‘The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. It does not touch anyone in particular; “I” am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside. […] There is no reaching the disaster.’124 The hero is reconfigured in response to the First World War: no longer do individual agency and martial skill play the dominant role, but appear secondary to the brute force and unreason of machine war. The toll taken on the individual and the group means that survival seems meaningless and victory pyrrhic. Collingwood argues that ‘the vast increase in the scale and destructiveness of modern warfare is an outward symptom of a change in the spirit of warfare and in the way in which war is conceived by mankind’.125 Spengler argues that the technique of war ‘renders largely ineffectual the personal heroism of the thoroughbred, the ethos of the noble, and the subtle intellect of the Late Culture’ (DW, 2, 420), and Leed suggests that the ‘hero of this war was not an “offensive” but a “defensive” personality’.126 Such successes as the solo raid which won Sassoon the Military Cross were rare. Apocryphally, it was due to the German troops’ inability to believe that he could have attacked alone. The Western Front was inhospitable to the creation of heroes: T. E. Lawrence, the enduring traditional hero of the First World War, fought a ­different war of espionage and continuing movement. The German historian Bernd

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Huppaüf observes astutely that ‘strong and continued attempts notwithstanding, the experience of this war could no longer be integrated in traditional patterns of creating meaning through ideals of heroism and identification with the nation’.127 The representation of the endurance required on the Western Front derives from a quintessentially British model of stoicism and the ‘stiff upper lip’. Not to vocalise problems was a coping mechanism and also the restriction of challenge to the status quo. To face the possibility of death consistently, however, is qualitatively and quantitatively different from managing not to cry when receiving bad news or injuring oneself. The assertion endures that there was a ten year gap to realist prose about the war.128 This contention cannot hold, as I demonstrate by charting the growth of disenchanted prose. However, works which appear soon after the war fail to conform to an increasingly strictly delineated idea of what constitutes war literature: mostly writing by combatants, which does not glorify. Conservative art remained popular, and although Nordau was quickly denigrated, his argument against the artistic iconoclasm of new forms held, in more moderate form, after the war (Deg, 544). Spengler similarly decries the idea of new styles (DW, 1, 294). Weber separates artistic progress from the seemingly inexorable, proportionate march of scientific progress; progress in art is spasmodic and, Nordau argues, more dangerous. Although participating in a complex process of negotiations with the marketplace, as Lawrence Rainey has argued,129 the apparent novelty of modernist literature ensured that sales were limited. However to gain a full understanding of modernist works and authors it is necessary to know the popular fiction of the day. The familiar focus of the war then allows work which shares themes and aspects of form with modernist literature, but is not typically understood as such, to become popular at the end of the post-war decade.130 The notion of a literary ellipsis is closely linked to the idea that the experience of war was incommunicable, memorably put forward by Walter Benjamin in ‘The Storyteller’.131 More recent critics such as Allyson Booth and Randall Stevenson also assert the language gap between home and the front.132 This is true only to a limited extent. Much paper, ink and effort is expended on discussing the war throughout the 1920s, and to claim that the experience of war was un-narratable becomes a war narrative in itself.133 This form of war is not unrepresentable per se, but its narrative formulations are yet



Introduction 23

to be normalised. A formal shift is also enacted: changing post-war reactions are not, for the most part, followed in poetry. Poets such as Sassoon and Graves suffered a creative death after the generationdefining subject of the war. Many notable poets had died, and even those who survived were often presumed killed, as Sassoon later wryly observed.134 The war had given him a subject, but with the loss of the productive tension between the ideals for which he fought and the bureaucracy against which he protested he found it difficult to compose. Sassoon, Graves and Edmund Blunden all found their greatest subsequent success in prose: even the war poets found that poetry was not a suitable means of post-war expression. Disenchantment’s domination Through the twentieth century disenchantment becomes solidified as the only valid response to the war: it is viewed through the prism of later conflicts. Initially the war did not seem inseparable from ideas about progress.135 Trials were assimilable in the narratives of a still primarily Christian society. The impossibility of victory in war has become axiomatic, despite the efforts of revisionist historians such as Sheffield and Dan Todman.136 Wilfred Owen has come to epitomise this trait. He enlisted in October 1915, and reached the front line early in 1917, having entered an army struggling to reconcile the enchantments for which it went to war with the number of deaths which brought neither personal glory nor military advance.137 After reaching the front line, Owen wrote: We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy. Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of gray, But nothing happens.138

The war is stasis, eternally persistent and a timeless truth of nature like wet rain and stormy clouds. Owen was concussed in late February 1917, and ended up on home leave at Craiglockhart, Edinburgh, to recover from shell shock. That illness has gained importance as collective memories about the war have solidified, and the story of the meeting between Owen and Sassoon, Peter Leese notes, ‘links shellshock, falsely, with the intellectual disillusionment of the war poets’.139 The poems for which Owen is best known were written during his treatment from June to November 1917.

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‘Strange Meeting’ has come to exemplify the soldier-poet, lamenting ‘the truth untold, / The pity of war, the pity war distilled’.140 Owen wrote in a rough preface to a projected verse collection, ‘My subject is War, and the pity of war. The Poetry is in the pity.’141 This phrase has become a key to understanding the conflict through literature. However, its popularity derives from post-Second World War in­terest: the ‘old lie’ was not understood as such in 1918. Owen had almost no contemporary reception. Only five of his poems were published during his lifetime, and on a very small scale. Poems by Wilfred Owen did not appear until 1920, and it was not until 1931 that it was expanded and reissued with a memoir by Edmund Blunden, who claimed that ‘the sense of his promise and achievement has deepened since 1920’.142 That memoir was influential in the creation of an idealised version of its subject which has passed into popular consciousness.143 The building of Owen’s reputation has continued, and the hagiographical view of an author who was killed so close to the Armistice affords him undue prominence compared with lesser-known but equally powerful poets such as Edward Thomas, Charles Sorley and Isaac Rosenberg. C. Day-Lewis praised him over the other war poets in 1963: ‘It is Owen, I believe, whose poetry came home deepest to my own generation, so that we could never again think of war as anything but a vile, if necessary, evil.’144 In the absence of justification it is notable that, with the exception of Rosenberg, the other poets named survived the conflict. The inscription of Owen’s phrase on the Westminster Abbey Poets’ Corner memorial, unveiled on Armistice Day 1985, emphasised his position. Revealingly, a plaque to Owen in Manchester Cathedral (he was in the Manchester Regiment) was posted only in 1997. The veneration of Owen for the pathos of his biography, allied with the disenchantment of his verse, attests to our continuing need to create heroes. I do not criticise Owen’s verse on aesthetic grounds as Craig Raine does,145 but I ask the reader of this volume to consider how Owen came to achieve such prominence, and look again at the necessary relationship between enchantment and disenchantment. A post-memory of the war, to use Marianne Hirsch’s term, is now taking shape.146 In 2009 Henry Allingham, the last surviving founding member of the Royal Air Force, died within a week of Harry Patch, the last survivor of the fighting on the Western Front. Claude Choules, who witnessed the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow, was the last naval combatant veteran. He died in



Introduction 25

2011, and Florence Green of the Women’s Royal Air Force, the last known First World War veteran, died in 2012. Chris Baldick makes the excellent point that ‘Literary history too needs to reach beyond the easy simplifications of what may be called the futilitarian school, and into the real variety and ambivalence of war-writing’.147 In this volume I expose some of these easy simplifications by situating works which have tended to be seen as disenchanted alongside those which represent the enchantments that went missing, presumed killed by the war. The version of the First World War which now exists in popular memory is one which would be unfamiliar to many of the men who fought. Dan Diner asserts that ‘awareness of this period has been recast by a collective memory permeated by cataclysm’, and it is impossible to dissociate the current valuation of the First World War from subsequent twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury conflicts.148 Certain claims I make in this volume will clash with existing paradigms. I hope that readers will be provoked, as a result, to reassess a dated, pity-focused view of the conflict derived from A. J. P. Taylor, Alan Clark, and Blackadder Goes Forth. It is, in one sense, profoundly disrespectful to those who fought to see them as gullible enough to fall victim to these illusions. It also posits a self-aggrandising ability to see and resist ideology oneself. As the centenary of the war’s outbreak approaches, I want to reinstate to the literary discussion the value of those enchantments, and to make clear that disenchantment existed long before the war, just as its enchantments endure long after. Structure Writing Disenchantment has a broadly chronological structure. The first chapter examines disenchantment in wartime, which is constituted primarily of dissent against official narratives of the war, both publications directly sanctioned by the government and those which are tacitly approved. Both H. G. Wells’s Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) and Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) question the war, but ultimately see the necessity of continuing towards victory. There were, of course, physical injuries and mutilations during the war, but there were also mental scars. West deals with shell shock, often seen as a form of unmanning; this was medicalised in the war, although the term was circulating before. Men were no longer able to maintain the façade of

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­ naffectedness. The narrative of the war is, as Gail Braybon puts u it, ‘implicitly and explicitly male’,149 and this chapter examines the various ways in which masculinity is challenged. Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others (1916) and A. T. Fitzroy’s Despised and Rejected (1918) both assert the value of pacifism. The latter, published in the last year of the war, was banned for the harm it did to the war effort and, realistically, the way in which it also challenges traditional conceptions of masculinity through its thinly veiled portrayal of a homosexual relationship. Dissenters in the novel are marginal in a number of ways. The immediate post-war years see a complex negotiation taking place in literature about the memory of the war. The legal restrictions of wartime are gone, but tacit restrictions on representation remain. The dominant narratives remain focused alternatively on looking forward and mourning the dead respectfully, and I examine these in Chapter 2. Gilbert Frankau’s bestseller Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant (1919) sees the way to successful reconstruction in embracing capitalist progress and using technology to modernise a nostalgic idea of the country. Ernest Raymond’s Tell England (1922), with which I conclude the chapter, is a similarly conservative novel which describes the glorious career of a public schoolboy who goes from school to war via a game of cricket, and realises the value of standing alongside his schoolfriends and standing up for his country. It was the bestselling novel about the war of the decade. Other writers sought to challenge this paradigm, and Cicely Hamilton’s William—An Englishman (1919) describes the disenchantment in modernity of a young clerk-turned-socialist who gets caught up in the war. The title character wants to serve to avenge the death of his wife, who is raped by the Germans as they sweep into Belgium. A. P. Herbert’s The Secret Battle (1919) and Montague’s Disenchantment both point to the ways in which authority fails the front-line troops, and state their disenchantments, but neither believes that the war should not have been fought. The third chapter focuses on modernist literature about the war. D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf both respond to the war in their work of the post-war decade. Neither was involved with the war directly and neither was militarist: this chapter gives the lie to the enduring association of disenchantment with military service. Although they come to radically different conclusions, both authors address similar issues relating to the war, which are the same issues



Introduction 27

addressed by high modernist literature. Their focus is on the impact of the war and the age on sex and gender, and they criticise the excesses and problems of the machine age. Each wants the war to occasion radical change. Lawrence seeks an alternative civilisation in which the viscera of life are prized, and rationalism is not the be all and end all; Woolf looks to a revisioning of history to include women’s experience. At a time when calculation is particularly prized, there is a corresponding need for a class of officials to administer the ongoing calculations which determine everyone’s position within or without systems, and in the world more generally. Weber posits that bureaucracy is made permanent in modernity: ‘Where the bureaucratization of administration has been completely carried through, a form of power relation is established that is practically unshatterable.’150 Chapter 4 examines the figure of the bureaucrat in novel series by Ford Madox Ford and R. H. Mottram in the mid to late 1920s. Ford wrote in the preface to A Man Could Stand Up, the third volume, that he wanted to show ‘the public what the late war was like: this is how modern fighting of the organised, scientific type affects the mind’.151 The two protagonists are very different, but take a sympathetic view of the often-maligned administrator, asserting his potential value. Both are in military transport, emphasising the importance of space and ways of moving between it on the Western Front. The final chapter focuses on the War Books Boom of 1928–30. The international successes of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End shifted the terms of debate about the war. Remarque expressed his disenchantment with the German power structures and their inability or lack of desire to end the war. Sherriff’s play was seen in the same context, viewed as an anti-war play despite its total lack of criticism of the army. These works stimulate a desire for literature about the war which propounds criticism, and Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero is perhaps the most extreme of these. Both Aldington’s novel and Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune (also known as Her Privates We) culminate with the death of their heroes, but there is no glory. The contrast with the enduringly popular Tell England is salutary. I conclude with a discussion of women’s nursing narratives, reinforcing the point that disenchantment is not restricted to men who served in the war, and highlighting the exposure of women to front-line conditions.

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I conclude by examining the decline of the War Books Boom. There are two main factors in this. Firstly, there is in turn a reaction against disenchantment. Conservative authors and commentators such as Douglas Jerrold and Charles Carrington, who later was the first to publish a biography of Kipling, asserted that the war had been worthwhile, in fact misreading in many cases the disenchanted novels by authors such as Aldington, which insist on the value of continuing to fight. However, it is the films of All Quiet on the Western Front and Journey’s End (both 1930) which precipitate the end of the War Books Boom and, to some degree, forestall the possibility of another. With these, the novel is emphatically no longer the popular form for interpretation. It was not that the film replaced the novel, but people looked to it for the interpretative structure they previously found in prose. Disenchanted books about the First World War continued to appear throughout the 1930s, with some notable examples such as Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933) and David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937), but the focus on the previous war seemed less urgent as another major conflict became increasingly likely. Notes 1 Various historians and critics attest to Montague’s importance in shifting the terms of the debate away from traditional notions of military courage, glory and heroism. See, for example, Michael North, Reading 1922: a Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 5; Janet S. K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 190. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Penguin, 1999), p. xxix. 2 Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities (London: Headline Review, 2002), p. 158. 3 Critics who assert the pre-war idyll and a model of rupture include Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, twenty-fifth anniversary edition (1975; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), particularly ‘Never Such Innocence Again’, pp. 18–29, David Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer: Why the World Went to War in 1914 (London: Heinemann, 2004), and Norman Stone, Europe Transformed, 1878–1919, second edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Gail Braybon outlines some critiques of Fussell in her Introduction to Evidence, History and the Great War (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003), p. 3. See also Holger Afflerbach, ‘The Topos of Improbable War in Europe



Introduction 29

before 1914’, in Afflerbach & David Stevenson (eds), An Improbable War: the Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture Before 1914 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2007), pp. 161–82. 4 See also Wharton’s acute satire ‘Writing a War Story’, Woman’s Home Companion, September 1919, 17–19. 5 Edgar Evertson Saltus, The Philosophy of Disenchantment (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), pp. 103–4. 6 William McDougall, The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology with some Attempt to Apply them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), p. viii. Eviatar Zerubavel has written persuasively about historical continuity in Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 37–54. 7 George A. Greenwood, England To-Day: A Social Study of Our Times (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922), p. 64. 8 Michael Saler, ‘Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review’, American Historical Review 111 (2006), 693. 9 R. G. Collingwood, ‘Man Goes Mad’ (1936), in David Boucher, Wendy James and Philip Smallwood (eds), The Philosophy of Enchantment: Studies in Folktale, Cultural Criticism, and Anthropology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), p. 313. See also R. G. Collingwood, Religion and Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1916). 10 E. Ray Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (London: Macmillan, 1880), pp. 32–3. See also Jennifer Karns Alexander, The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), ch. 3. 11 Cicely Hamilton, Life Errant (London: J. M. Dent, 1935), p. 149. 12 Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War, third edn (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), p. 84. Montague explicitly compares Ypres with Henry V’s beleaguered, diseaseridden, but soon-to-be victorious army stuck in sodden France (Dis, 31–2). See also Matthew C. Headley, ‘Cultural Mobilization and British Responses to Cultural Transfer in Total War: The Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1916’, First World War Studies 3:1 (2012), 35–49. 13 Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight, p. 106. 14 Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, pp. 23–4. 15 Alison Light makes a similar criticism of Fussell in Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 8. 16 Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 323, n. 4. 17 Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism, p. 18.

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18 Holger Klein, Introduction to Klein (ed.), The First World War in Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976), p. 8. 19 Brian Bond, ‘Disenchantment Revisited’, in A Part of History: Aspects of the British Experience of the First World War, intro. Michael Howard (London: Continuum, 2008), ch. 14; Bond, The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ch. 2. 20 Eric Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 3. 21 Leed, No Man’s Land, p. 48, pp. 52–4. 22 Ibid., p. 94. 23 Claire M. Tylee also dates the beginning of disenchantment from 1915 in The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women’s Writings, 1914–64 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), p. 75. 24 Watson, Fighting Different Wars, p. 186. 25 Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: British, American, and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914–1933 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987), particularly ch. 12; Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 207; Benjamin F. Martin, France and the Après Guerre, 1918–1924: Illusions and Disillusionment (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999). 26 Sarah Cole, ‘Enchantment, Disenchantment, War, Literature’, PMLA 124:5 (2009), 1633. 27 Jessie Pope’s War Poems (London: Grant Richards, 1915), n. p. 28 On Pope and other women poets, see Jan Montefiore, ‘“Shining Pins and Wailing Shells”: Women Poets and the Great War’, in Dorothy Goldman (ed.), Women and World War I: The Written Response (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 51–72; Nosheen Khan, Women’s Poetry of the First World War (London: Harvester, 1988). 29 For various testimonials to this effect, see Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, p. 276. 30 See The Times, 28 May 1915, p. 9. A short biographical piece appears in the same issue, ‘Captain Julian Grenfell’, p. 5. He died on 26 May 1915. 31 Peter Parker, The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School Ethos (London: Constable, 1987), p. 25. 32 Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Absolution’, lines 3–4, in Collected Poems 1908– 1956 (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 11. 33 Sassoon, ‘France’, line 7, Collected Poems, p. 13; Jean Moorcroft



Introduction 31

Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet, a Biography (1886–1918) (London: Duckworth, 1998), p. 193. Wilson observes that Sassoon and Brooke were near contemporaries at Cambridge, but that Sassoon’s reaction was ‘an admiring antagonism’. See pp. 174–6. 34 Sassoon, ‘To Victory’, line 2, Collected Poems, p. 13; Sassoon, ‘Glory of Women’, line 11, Collected Poems, p. 79. 35 Robert Graves, ‘The Morning Before the Battle’, lines 9–10, in Complete Poems, 3 vols, eds Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995), 1, p. 15. 36 Quoted by Richard Perceval Graves, Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1895–1926 (New York: Elizabeth Sifton Books–Viking, 1986), p. 121. 37 Robert Graves to Edward Marsh, 12 July 1917, quoted by Graves, The Assault Heroic, p. 177; Robert Graves, ‘The Shadow of Death’, lines 13–14, Complete Poems, I, p. 13. See also Andrew Rutherford, The Literature of War: Five Studies in Heroic Virtue (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1978), p. 85; Watson, Fighting Different Wars, pp. 223–5. 38 Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2002), p. 278. 39 F. S. Flint, Preface to Otherworld: Cadences (London: Poetry Bookshop, 1920), p. viii. 40 Thomas Hardy, Apology to Late Lyrics and Earlier, With Many Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1922), p. xiv. 41 E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Edward Arnold, 1927), pp. 16–17. 42 Ford, ‘An Answer to “Three Questions”’ (1922), in Ford Madox Ford, Critical Essays, eds Max Saunders and Richard Stang (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), p. 206. 43 D. H. Lawrence to J. B. Pinker, 5 December 1914, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, volume II: June 1913–October 1916, eds George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 240. See also Lawrence’s comments on the War number of Poetry, DHL to Harriet Monroe, 17 November 1914, Letters, vol. 2, p. 232. Jae-Kyung Koh makes a similar observation in D. H. Lawrence and the Great War: The Quest for Cultural Regeneration (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), p. 15. Bernd Hüppauf discusses the more general relationship between destruction and production in ‘Introduction: Modernity and Violence: Observations Concerning a Contradictory Relationship’, in Hüppauf (ed.), War, Violence and the Modern Condition (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), p. 2. 44 For a wide-ranging overview of the literature of the time, see George

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Simmers’s research blog, ‘Great War Fiction’, http://greatwarfiction. wordpress.com/ (accessed 19 December 2013). 45 Hayden White, ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact’, in White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 81–100. 46 Virginia Woolf, ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, in Andrew McNeillie and Stuart N. Clarke (eds), The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1986–2011), vol. 4, pp. 434, 436. 47 Woolf, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, in Essays, 4, p. 395. See also following pages, and compare ‘On Being Ill’, also Essays, 4, in which she talks about poetry as a genre of illness. 48 Tim Kendall, Modern English War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 2–4. 49 On boredom and habit see Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 41–5. 50 Saltus, Philosophy of Disenchantment, p. 225. 51 Leed, No Man’s Land, pp. 69–70. 52 Weber, ‘Structures of Power’, in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (ed. and trans.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 160. 53 See, for example, Eksteins, Rites of Spring, p. 118. 54 Tennyson was not wholly unquestioning about these values: see Rutherford, Literature of War, pp. 13–14. 55 See Patric Dickinson, ‘Henry Newbolt, 1862–1938’, in Dickinson (ed.), Selected Poems of Henry Newbolt, (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1981), pp. 11, 15. 56 Henry Newbolt, The Twymans (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1911), pp. 100, 101. J. S. Bratton discusses this in ‘Of England, Home and Duty: The Image of England in Victorian and Edwardian Juvenile Fiction’, in John M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), pp. 73–93. See also Christine Berberich, The Image of the Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), ch. 2, ‘From Knight to Public-School Boy’. 57 Newbolt, The Twymans, p. 102. 58 Eric Dunning and Kenneth Sheard, Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players: A Sociological Study of the Development of Rugby Football (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1979), p. 59. J. A. Mangan sees it as ‘a direct form of military education’ in Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School, new edn (London: Frank Cass, 2000), p. 192. 59 J. R. de S. Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe: The Development of the Public School (London: Millington, 1977), p. 113.



Introduction 33

60 Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman, War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War, trans. Richard Veasey ([2002]; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 76. 61 Allen J. Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice and the Great War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 1–2. See also Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 136; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 209–23. 62 See also Parker, The Old Lie, p. 37; Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: Unwin Hyman, 1991), p. 69. 63 Weber, ‘The Meaning of Discipline’, in From Max Weber, p. 253. 64 Eksteins, Rites of Spring, pp. 170–5. 65 Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe, particularly pp. 155–7; C. B. Otley, ‘Militarism and Militarisation in the Public Schools, 1900–1972’, British Journal of Sociology 29 (1978), 321–39. 66 On the expansion of the educational system, see David Reeder, ‘The Reconstruction of Secondary Education in England, 1869–1920’, in Detlef K. Müller, Fritz Ringer, and Brian Simon (eds), The Rise of the Modern Educational System: Structural Change and Social Reproduction 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 135–50. Brian Simon gives an account of the increasing literacy of the working class in Education and the Labour Movement 1870–1920 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974). 67 Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 74. 68 Dennis W. Allen, ‘Young England: Muscular Christianity and the Politics of the Body in Tom Brown’s Schooldays’, in Donald W. Hall (ed.), Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 119. 69 See also Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), ch. 4, ‘The Middle Classes at School’. 70 Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion, 1996), pp. 137, 13. For an account of working-class recruiting, see David Sibley, The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War, 1914–1916 (London: Frank Cass, 2005). 71 Collingwood, ‘Addenda to the Folktale Manuscript’, Philosophy of Enchantment, p. 282. 72 Quoted by G. R. Searle, A New England: Peace and War 1886–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 203. The comment referred to the Balkans situation, but came to have a wider resonance.

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73 Saltus, Philosophy of Disenchantment, pp. 2, 21. Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings are absent from this volume; to do justice to situating the texts I discuss within his philosophies would be a different book and, indeed, a whole book in itself. On Nietzsche’s difficult position in terms of degeneration, see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 226–7. Max Nordau attacks Nietzsche as a paradigmatic degenerate (Deg, 415–72). Georg Simmel discusses the opposing positions of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in ‘The Conflict in Modern Culture’, in Donald N. Levine (ed.), On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 379–80. 74 Pick, Faces of Degeneration, p. 53. On the range of the study, see p. 43. 75 Saltus, Philosophy of Disenchantment, pp. 94–5. 76 Pick, Faces of Degeneration, pp. 191, 197. 77 Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 115. See Wald’s Introduction. On demography in wartime, particularly public health, see the essays by Catherine Rollet and Jay Winter in Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (eds), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London Berlin 1914–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), part 6. 78 C. F. G. Masterman, From the Abyss: Of Its Inhabitants by One of Them (London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1902), p. 28. See also Saltus, Philosophy of Disenchantment, p. 212. Housing in London was expensive and in short supply. See Jean-Louis Robert, ‘Paris, London, Berlin on the Eve of War’, in Winter and Robert (eds), Capital Cities at War, pp. 44–5. 79 On London see Robert, ‘Paris, London, Berlin on the Eve of War’, p. 51. 80 See Donald J. Childs, Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats and the Culture of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 1; Marius Turda, Modernism and Eugenics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 81 Pick, Faces of Degeneration, p. 202. See also Matt Houlbrook, ‘Soldier Heroes and Rent Boys: Homosex, Masculinities, and Britishness in the Brigade of Guards, circa 1900–1960’, Journal of British Studies 42 (2003), 351–88. 82 Frantzen, Bloody Good, p. 154. 83 David Brooks, The Age of Upheaval: Edwardian Politics, 1899–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 36. 84 Paul Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860– 1914 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980), p. 255. 85 Dan Diner, Cataclysms: A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge, trans. William Templer with Joel Golb ([1999];



Introduction 35

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), p. 22. See also Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West, trans. C. F. Atkinson, 2 vols ([1918–21]; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1926–28) vol. 2, pp. 428–9. 86 Thomas Weber, Our Friend ‘The Enemy’: Elite Education in Britain and Germany before World War I (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 51. Weber opposes the traditional interpretation of Anglo-German tensions leading to war. He argues that there are as many observations about improved relations as deterioration. 87 George Chesney Tomkyns, ‘The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 109:667 (May 1871), 539–72, and Tomkyns, The Battle of Dorking, intro. G. H. Powell (London: Grant Richards, 1914). Blackwood’s in 1871 shows an ongoing concern with evaluating the impact of the Franco-Prussian War, and an article of just two months before looks at ‘The British Navy: What We Have, and What We Want’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 109:665 (Mar 1871), 357–74. 88 For a brief reading of The War in the Air, see Susan R. Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 12–14. 89 E. M. Forster, Howards End, ed. David Lodge (1910; London: Penguin, 2000), p. 53. 90 Diner, Cataclysms, p. 24; Pick, Faces of Degeneration, p. 237. For a contemporary account, see Spenser Wilkinson, Britain at Bay (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909). 91 On Irish reactions to the conflict, see Adrian Gregory and Senia Pašeta (eds), Ireland and the Great War: ‘A war to unite us all’? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) and Timothy Bowman, Irish Regiments in the Great War: Discipline and Morale (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 92 See Jost Dülffer, ‘Chances and Limits of Armament Control 1898– 1914’, in Afflerbach and Stevenson (eds), An Improbable War, pp. 95–112; Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire, pp. 8–11. 93 See also Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), pp. 8–9. 94 Saler, ‘Modernity and Enchantment’, 714–15. Paul Brians describes responses to these changes in Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895–1914 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1987), and notes the apocalyptic fears of nuclear energy at a time when Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr and others were still working in their ­laboratories. 95 Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 1.

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96 Max Weber, ‘Bureaucracy’ in From Max Weber, p. 221. 97 Capdevila and Voldman, War Dead, p. xi. 98 Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979), p. 499. 99 Collingwood, ‘Magic’, p. 215, and see Leed, No Man’s Land, p. 31. 100 Collingwood, ‘Man Goes Mad’, p. 309. 101 Leed, No Man’s Land, p. 31. 102 Field-Marshal Viscount French of Ypres, KP, OM, etc., 1914 (London: Constable, 1919), p. 8. French’s role meant that he was overall head of the British Expeditionary Force at the outbreak of war. 103 Eksteins, Rites of Spring, p. 101. 104 Hew Strachan, The First World War, Volume I: To Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 280. 105 Martin Gilbert, First World War (1994; London: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 58–9. 106 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918, new edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 308. 107 William Philpott gives a detailed account of the preparations for the Somme offensive in Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme (London: Little, Brown, 2009), pp. 146–50, 167–71. 108 Hew Strachan, ‘Military Modernization, 1789–1918’, in T. C. W. Blanning (ed.), The Oxford History of Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 77. 109 Eksteins, Rites of Spring, p. 117. 110 Strachan, ‘Military Modernization’, pp. 97–8. 111 Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1918), in From Max Weber, p. 139. 112 This volume focuses primarily on theories contemporary with the First World War. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) engages with the idea of disenchantment in the context of the Second World War, and the first pages of ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’ directly invoke Weber’s phrase about the ‘disenchantment of the world’. Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 3, 5. See also, for example, Alison Stone, ‘Adorno and the Disenchantment of Nature’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 32:2 (2006), 231–54; J.  M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Adorno describes art itself as part of the process of disenchantment in Aesthetic Theory (1970; London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 74. 113 Michael Saler, ‘Modernity and Enchantment’, 702. See also Saler, ‘Modernity, Disenchantment and the Ironic Imagination’, Philosophy and Literature 28:1 (2004), 138. Simon During has written about Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic



Introduction 37

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), and enchantment is discussed in terms of fairy and folk tales by Bruno Bettelheim and R. G. Collingwood. See Philosophy of Enchantment, part II. Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1975; London: Penguin, 1991) is now much-criticised, as Catriona McAra and David Calvin point out in the Introduction to their edited collection Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), p. 2. 114 Simmel, ‘The Conflict in Modern Culture’, p. 381. 115 See Bernd Hüppauf, ‘Introduction: Modernity and Violence: Observations Concerning a Contradictory Relationship’, p. 13. 116 John Farrenkopf, Prophet of Decline: Spengler on World History and Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), pp. 19–20; C. F. Atkinson, Preface to Spengler, Decline of the West, 1, p. ix. 117 See Anon, ‘Best Sellers in Germany: Shaw and Chesterton popular’, Manchester Guardian, 24 December 1925, p. 6. The author claims that Spengler’s popularity had by this stage waned in Germany. See also Farrenkopf, Prophet of Decline, p. 21. 118 Pick, Faces of Degeneration, p. 233. 119 Ford Madox Ford, The March of Literature: From Confucius to Modern Times (London: Allen & Unwin, 1939), p. 711. See also Richard Aldington to Charles Prentice, 11 December 1925. University of Reading, Chatto & Windus Archive, CW48/2. Aldington’s correspondence deals with the potential translation of Stendhal’s work by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. Wyndham Lewis also mentions the novel in a war context in Blasting and Bombardiering (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1937), p. 129. 120 Stendhal [Henri Marie Beyle], The Charterhouse of Parma, ed. & trans. John Sturrock ([1839]; London: Penguin, 2006), p. 41. 121 Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, ed. Donald Pizer, Norton Critical Edition, third edn (1895; New York and London: Norton, 1994), pp. 27, p. 77. 122 Ford Madox Ford, Thus to Revisit: Some Reminiscences (London: Chapman & Hall, 1921), p. 108. See also the extracts in Ford Madox Ford, War Prose, ed. Max Saunders (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003), pp. 230–3. 123 See also Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, p. 83. David Trotter also likens A. P. Herbert’s Harry Penrose in The Secret Battle (see chapter 2) to Crane’s protagonist Henry Fleming. Trotter, ‘The British Novel and the War’, in Vincent Sherry (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 37.

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124 Maurice Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 1. 125 Collingwood, ‘Man Goes Mad’, p. 314. 126 Leed, No Man’s Land, p. 105. 127 Huppaüf, ‘Introduction: Modernity and Violence’, p. 2. 128 See, for example, Geoff Dyer, ‘The Human Heart of the Matter’, Guardian, 12 June 2010, www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/12/ geoff-dyer-war-reporting (accessed 18 December 2013); Eksteins, Rites of Spring, p. 277; Lynne Hapgood, ‘Transforming the Victorian’, in Lynne Hapgood and Nancy L. Paxton (eds), Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900–30 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 32–3; Michael Hofmann, Introduction to Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel [In Stahlgewittern], trans. Hoffman ([1920]; London: Allen Lane, 2003), p. viii. 129 Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 130 See Watson, Fighting Different Wars, ch. 6, ‘Creating Disillusionment in Popular Memory’. 131 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.) and Harry Zorn (trans.), Illuminations ([1955]; London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 83–4. See also Rainer Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin, trans. Jane Marie Todd ([1992]; New York: The Guilford Press, 1996). 132 Allyson Booth, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 32–4; Randall Stevenson, Literature and the Great War, 1914–18 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), ch. 1. 133 Mark Larabee makes a similar observation about Bernard Adams’s Nothing of Importance (1917) in Front Lines of Modernism: Remapping the Great War in British Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 1. Larabee’s study as a whole looks at this ­supposed aporia and sees it in terms of topography. 134 Wilson, Journey from the Trenches, p. 1. 135 See Booth, Postcards from the Trenches, pp. 104–5; Eksteins, Rites of Spring, pp. 178–9. 136 Collingwood, ‘Man Goes Mad’, p. 313. 137 See Hibberd, Wilfred Owen, pp. 166, 203, 212. 138 Wilfred Owen, ‘Exposure’, lines 11–15, in The Complete Poems and Fragments of Wilfred Owen. Volume I: The Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1983) pp. 185–6. 139 Peter Leese, ‘“Why Are They Not Cured?” British Shellshock Treatment During the Great War’, in Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner (eds),



Introduction 39

Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 206. 140 Owen, ‘Strange Meeting’, lines 24–5, in Complete Poems and Fragments, I, pp. 148–9. 141 Wilfred Owen, ‘Preface’, Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. C.  Day-Lewis (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), p. 31. Facsimile reproduction as endpapers to Hibberd, Wilfred Owen. 142 Edmund Blunden, ‘Memoir’, in Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, p. 147. Originally the introductory material for The Poems of Wilfred Owen (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931). 143 Hibberd, Wilfred Owen, p. 368. Hibberd discusses passim the efforts by Owen’s mother, Susan, and his brother, Harold, to ensure that the poet’s reputation would remain unsullied for future generations. Harold censored large quantities of letters in his brother’s hand by tearing off sections he thought inappropriate to the way his elder brother should be remembered. See Hibberd, pp. 369–70, though, for a very brief précis of this protective censorship. Harold also wrote several accounts of his brother, and his relationship with him, notably Journey from Obscurity: Wilfred Owen 1893–1918. Memoirs of the Owen Family, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963–65). He also persuaded Graves to remove a reference to Owen’s supposed homosexuality; see Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, p. 218. 144 C. Day-Lewis, Introduction to Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, p. 12. On the growth of editions of Owen, see Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, p. 291. 145 Raine, quoted by Kendall, Modern English War Poetry, p. 46. Kendall makes an interesting reading in his ch. 3, ‘Wilfred Owen’s Concern’. 146 Marianne Hirsch, ‘Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Postmemory’, Discourse 15:2 (1992), 3–29. 147 Chris Baldick, The Oxford English Literary History, volume 10, 1910–1940: The Modern Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 347. 148 Diner, Cataclysms, p. 9. 149 Gail Braybon, ‘Winners or Losers: Women’s Symbolic Role in the War Story’, in Braybon (ed.), Evidence, History and the Great War, p. 86. 150 Weber, ‘Bureaucracy’, p. 228. See also p. 196. 151 Ford Madox Ford, ‘“Author’s Note” to A Man Could Stand Up—’, in War Prose, p. 200.

1

Patriotism, propaganda and pacifism, 1914–1918

The expression of disenchantment in wartime was difficult: any challenge to orthodoxies, official and officially sanctioned discourses was most often made from an already dissenting position. People marginalised by gender, sexuality, politics, religion and profession spoke out against the war; rarely did establishment figures show dissent. The small number who chose not to participate in the war effort showed their disenchantment by not fighting or, in the case of women and men officially disbarred from combatant service by age or physical condition, by refusing to labour in its service. In this chapter I discuss the ways in which literary texts react against official narratives. The alterity of dissenting voices allows publication, but also suggests they can be disregarded. I understand official narratives broadly to mean both explicitly sanctioned work such as propaganda, laws, official war reports and other texts which are in sympathy with governmental aims, objectives and language. Max Weber points to the role of reportage in demotic language in fostering community. In war it also purports to provide information: The importance of language is necessarily increasing along with the democratization of state, society, and culture. For the masses a common language plays a more decisive economic part than it does for the propertied strata of feudal or bourgeois stamp. […] Above all, the language, and that means the literature based upon it, is the first and for the time being the only cultural value at all accessible to the masses who ascend toward participation in culture.1

As the state is democratised and, notionally with it, services such as education and political representation, there comes a need for



Patriotism, propaganda and pacifism, 1914–18 41

effective mass engagement. The democratisation of communication is also the disenchantment of faith, and the beginning of a challenge to the old orders. Patrick Brantlinger sees the mass media as complicit in perpetuating social decline.2 Where religion was previously mostly unifying, mass forms begin to provide an alternative shared language, although the hegemony of conservatism and church is slow to dwindle. Oswald Spengler explicitly characterised the press as another form of war technology: ‘Gunpowder and printing belong together – both discovered at the culmination of the Gothic, both arising out of Germanic technical though – as the two grand means of Faustian distance-tactics’ (DW, 2, 460). The press is equally culpable as long-range artillery, and has perhaps even greater power to shape narratives of war: it is not a coincidence that Marshal Joffre and Field Marshal Haig disliked the press.3 Equally powerful are the texts that are given official sanction in other ways, such as the rousing, patriotic poetry of Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell and others, discussed in the Introduction, and Horatio Bottomley’s patriotic magazine John Bull. There was not initially such a clear mandate for war as early studies of the conflict supposed: patriotic fervour was limited, and influential newspapers such as the Manchester Guardian initially opposed the war.4 However, when war became inevitable even the Manchester Guardian, which had opposed the Boer War throughout, fell into line. There were doubts about the validity of the war, but there was a clear sense that it must be supported fully and effectively,5 drawing on the British love for the underdog to defend ‘little Belgium’ just as that principle had been evoked to stimulate recruitment for the Crimean War sixty years earlier.6 Adrian Gregory states that ‘it provided both an excuse, and a cover, for the Liberals who had already decided that Germany should be resisted.’7 The war was justified as a defensive war in favour of freedom and civilisation, honourably carrying out Britain’s treaty duties in the face of Prussian militarism. The mobilisation of the British Army was just as successful an act of militarism, drawing on the enchantments of the public school spirit discussed in the Introduction. The recent creation of proto-militarist, muscular Christian organisations such as the Boys’ Brigade (1883) and Robert Baden-Powell’s Scout movement, whose bible Scouting for Boys (1908) was a bestseller throughout the twentieth century, meant that a generation of boys was indoctrinated with the values which defined the British

42

Writing disenchantment: First World War prose

Empire; the Girl Guides promoted similar values, with an emphasis considered appropriate for young Edwardians. The propagation of knightly virtues was reinforced by the stories of derring-do and adventure in the Boy’s Own Magazine (1855–90), the more successful and enduring Boy’s Own Paper (1879–1967) and their derivatives.8 Propaganda emphasised heteronormative masculinity and ­femininity. Military recruitment posters tended to separate male, public and active, and female, domestic and passive, in such slogans as ‘Women of Britain say – “Go!”’ There was a significant degree of intersectionality between pacifism and other marginal groups such as feminists, socialists, artists, homosexuals and Jews. Any expression of pacifism stood out in wartime, and unofficial social enforcement ensured that such publications were by and for marginal groups. Challenges to the system and the way the war was being conducted looked increasingly well-founded as the war ­continued; consequently, they were increasingly the subject of censure as the need to continue fighting was reasserted. Culture was scrutinised carefully, and private letters written by serving soldiers were subject to censorship. The army circumscribed individuality by the Field Service Post Card, which allowed only pre-filled comments: no additional text could be appended.9 Angela K. Smith observes that during wartime: ‘Private writing [… is] built around the empty phrase and the euphemism, entrapped and lifeless within a hollow discourse.’10 This is certainly true, but the hollowness is necessary to provide a space which can be filled imaginatively by the reader on the understanding that there were things which were better not and could not be said. In the post-war decade John Masefield asserted that ‘the events of all wars are obscure; history is only roughly right at the best. The events of this last war will be more obscure than those of most, because of the power of silencing opinion and hiding facts possessed by those who waged it.’11 A notable example was C. R. W. Nevinson’s painting ‘Paths of Glory’, depicting dead Tommies, which was banned from his Leicester Galleries exhibition.12 In Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others, discussed below, the protagonist Alix notes that ‘Painting and war don’t go together’ (NC, 33). However, context was all; newspapers did not shy away from publishing photographs of the front lines, but when framed as artistic interpretation, a more explicit attempt to create affect in the audience, such images were



Patriotism, propaganda and pacifism, 1914–18 43

unacceptable.13 John Horne describes censorship as ‘a negative means of safeguarding security and promoting consensus’, and notes the greater state control over art during wartime.14 That control continued after the war: novels about the war comment on events which had been subject to extreme official control, of which vestiges endured. Wartime prose both reinforces and poses challenges to such narratives. I take as brief case studies the renowned propaganda posters about the war and Ian Hay’s The First Hundred Thousand (1915), which extols the virtues of the training camp; against those I set Ford Madox Ford’s official works of propaganda, which show support for the war effort without resorting to jingoism. I then show the polyphonic nature of wartime novels, both those which ultimately advocate the necessity of continuing to fight, focusing on H. G. Wells’s Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) and his lover Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918), and those which offer more ambivalent assessments, such as Rose Macaulay’s pacifist Non-Combatants and Others (1916) and Rose Laure Allatini’s Despised and Rejected (1918), which discusses pacifism and conscientious objection. Allatini’s novel was published under the pseudonym A. T. Fitzroy, and in late 1918 it was banned for hindering the war effort. Patriotism and propaganda: mobilising Britain The hegemonies that propaganda bolsters are retrenched by marginalising criticism and circumscribing challenges to official discourses by legal and covert means.15 The focuses for First World War propaganda are summarised by the two best-known posters of the war, which address national identity, gender and age. Lord Kitchener’s penetrating stare from beside the slogan ‘Your country needs you’ invokes a language of duty which draws on the Christian moral code and vestiges of hierarchical feudal loyalty, but also the ability of the nation to ‘inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love’.16 In the other, the child’s question ‘Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?’ (Figure 1.1) puts pressure on the father to avoid exclusion from a defining shared masculine, patriarchal experience, and emphasises his duty to protect. The gender identities of the children are distinct: the boy is preparing for military service, playing with soldiers and cannon on the floor, while the submissively domestic,

44

Writing disenchantment: First World War prose

Figure 1.1  ‘Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?’



Patriotism, propaganda and pacifism, 1914–18 45

immaculately coiffed girl sits on her father’s lap to read. Cate Haste states that ‘the essence of propaganda is simplification’, and women did valuable war work, most visibly making munitions, but this could not appear in posters which encouraged men to enlist.17 The possibility of return to a stable national and domestic environment had to be maintained. The father’s role as protector is asserted, but in later disenchanted fiction such as Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero the Victorians, the absent grandparents of this picture, are often held responsible for creating the world which led to the war and allowed it to endure. Propaganda was understood immediately as a literary endeavour, and one of the men who participated in the pre-war discourse of disenchantment was given the responsibility for its organisation. The irony of C. F. G. Masterman’s appointment as head of the War Propaganda Bureau run from Wellington House is compounded by the fact that, as Mark Wollaeger points out, ‘by rallying support for the war on idealistic grounds he ultimately contributed to the disillusionment of the postwar years’.18 One of Masterman’s ­earliest actions was to call together, on 2 September 1914, twenty-five high profile authors including critically and popularly acclaimed people such as J. M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells and the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges. A meeting with influential newspaper editors and publishers quickly followed. Masterman himself wrote in 1915 stressing the achievement of Britain and the need for endurance and fortitude in preparation for a long war.19 Not only did Wellington House produce literature and journalism, it also operated in the new medium of cinema and produced such diverse materials as picture postcards and translations of official reports.20 Propaganda centred on the combination of prose and images. The cinema was still silent, although The Battle of the Somme (1916) was a remarkable success; printed materials offered the widest and most diverse reach, and a form in which the medium appears not to hinder engagement with the message.21 Although poetry is associated with images of the conflict which evoke strong, polarised feelings of pathos or vigour, prose is established as the main form in which extended discussions, persuasions and provocations take place. The training camps, and narratives describing them, helped build the camaraderie among troops which was a key ­enchantment

46

Writing disenchantment: First World War prose

of the first Kitchener battalions.22 Strong personal bonds were formed, described by Jay Winter as ‘fictive kinship’, and military service in England away from enemy fire was a factor in later ­disenchantments.23 The training camp is the performance and retrenchment of official masculinity fostered by the public-school ethos. Under the pseudonym Ian Hay, John Hay Beith’s The First Hundred Thousand appeared serially in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine from November 1914–15, and in single volume form just in time to be an ideal present for the second Christmas of the war.24 Fussell and Buitenhuis see a model in Kipling’s Stalky & Co (1899).25 An army officer and public-school teacher before the war, Beith had published such improving titles as The Right Stuff (1908) and A Man’s Man (1909). He portrays the shift from ‘awkward, shy, self-conscious mob’ to brave British soldiers as ‘fresh air, hard training, and clean living begin to weave their spell’.26 He was aware that ‘the Great War [had] been terribly hard on the textbooks’, but had ‘seen enough of war to win the MC and his book was intended to sustain morale’.27 When the recruits put on their uniform, they are not only dressed as soldiers, but must act and live by the same code: they ‘are beginning to think more of our regiment and less of ourselves’, and the crowning glory of the initial scenes is that they are praised by the King, the embodiment of imperial masculinity.28 Effectiveness in physical work and official validation are powerful enchantments. The First Hundred Thousand needed to convince soldiers, potential recruits and civilian relatives that the conflict was worthwhile, and while Beith clearly states the presence of death – ‘they are no longer the Hundred Thousand’ – the novel ends on a note of pride.29 It quickly went into multiple impressions; Fussell damns it with faint praise but clearly appreciates the novel’s populist qualities.30 That success spawned two sequels, Carrying On – After the First Hundred Thousand (1917), which remarkably makes itself a comedy by ending with the uplifting marriage of one of the young soldiers, and The Last Million: How they Invaded France – and England (1918), which tells the story of the US intervention in the war. Disillusion results from the realisation that war was not the play of the camp, but had real and immediate dangers. Sarah Cole observes astutely that war both created and destroyed friendships, and links disillusion to that destruction.31 Masterman’s friend Ford Madox Ford tempers the narrative of British heroism against German hate. His difficulties and



Patriotism, propaganda and pacifism, 1914–18 47

­ eveloping viewpoint are evident in his ‘Literary Portraits’ series d (1914–15).32 His propaganda books Between St Dennis and St George and When Blood is their Argument (both 1915) take their titles from Shakespeare’s Henry V, famed for the rousing royal speech before Agincourt but also the tale of a weakened army in France with low morale. Ford’s ancestry was German, and he remained Ford Madox Hueffer until 1919. That, and his appreciation of German culture shape his subtle position. He argues that ‘militarism must be fought in the home of militarism’, but also states that ‘my attack […] is not upon German learning [but …] is simply on the paucity of the products of German learning’.33 Ford is careful to separate Germany from Prussia, developing his comments in the preface to his partner Violet Hunt’s The Desirable Alien (1913) and legitimating his Münster lineage.34 His ambivalent position is emphasised in the wartime essays ‘War and the Mind’, in which he talks about vocal derision for the Kaiser as official, rather than passionate.35 Despite his idiosyncratic form of propaganda, Ford denounces Germany as ‘absolutely wrong; it is always only Germany that accepts with inevitable voracity every phrase that is bombastic and imbecile’.36 He links linguistic bluntness in German with sloganeering and militarism, and in doing so justifies his own subtlety. He presents his case as a barrister speaking on behalf of his client, and sums up: ‘One may be patriotically elated to observe [that] the English put up infinitely a better case. The poor Germans have absolutely nothing to say – nothing in the world.’37 The enemy is unvoiced: England’s case is won without any need for intellectual sparring with the German defence.38 Ford’s apparently even-handed use of factual and anecdotal evidence strengthens his case, as Wollaeger observes.39 Ford both prosecutes and passes sentence, making the only possible verdict ‘that the attitude of Great Britain was absolutely correct’.40 His propaganda is atypically multivocal, but the model of divergent positions within a coherent overall argument is taken up by writers of fiction during the conflict.41 In the midst of war: narrative negotiations Novels written in wartime are often complex struggles to reconcile justifications for war with combatant mortality. This negotiation is enacted in combatant life-writing such as the Irish working-class

48

Writing disenchantment: First World War prose

poet Patrick MacGill’s wartime work, and T. E. Hulme’s ‘War Notes’, serially published in The New Age from 1915–16 under the pseudonym ‘North Staffs’.42 However, most extended treatments come from non-combatant authors. H. G. Wells’s Mr Britling Sees it Through (1916) and Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) highlight different voices, opinions and threats seen from the home front, and express the need to maintain a stable environment to which combatants might return. Wells and West were lovers, but with very different literary reputations. Wells was famous for his novels about technology, conflict and modernity. He was an acute critic, and had written in Tono-Bungay (1909) about ‘the Unrest of the Age’, and ‘that mysterious decay and rotting of those elements, elements once regarded as the most stable in nature’.43 He was conscious of both scientific developments and pre-war disenchantments. His star had waned by the First World War, but waxed again with his bellicose propaganda journalism, collected as The War That Will End War (1914).44 Mr Britling Sees it Through shows a marked change from this view but I do not argue that, as Niall Ferguson claims, it is a ‘disillusioned’ novel per se.45 Ultimately, both Wells and West come to the conclusion that the war must be pursued to its end. Wells’s novel could not have been such a conspicuous popular success in wartime without asserting the value of duty. It was even popular in the army, Fussell suggests, because of the assertion that the army was ‘stupidly led’ (see MB, 350).46 The novel was not written as propaganda and was received ambivalently by Wellington House, although Masterman had it translated and smuggled into Germany.47 West, a critic with a burgeoning reputation, had previously only published a study of Henry James (1916). Her first novel The Return of the Soldier features an early example of a shell-shocked protagonist: the imperative is to restore Chris Baldry to vigorous masculinity. The flux created by the war is mapped onto social change due to industrialisation and consequent suburbanisation, the sources of disenchantment Masterman identifies before the war. These novels demonstrate the complexity of negotiations between official and unofficial war discourses. The title of Mr Britling Sees it Through indicates its message clearly. The eponymous protagonist is the typical Englishman, whose name, Brit-ling, describes him as one small part of his country who stands for the whole. He tries to reconcile his developing view



Patriotism, propaganda and pacifism, 1914–18 49

of the war with official narratives. The outbreak of war provokes a long section in which Mr Britling tries to reconcile his hopes and fears. The narrator eventually asserts that: ‘We have looked for an hour or so into the seething pot of Mr Britling’s brain and marked its multiple strands, its inconsistencies, its irrational transitions. It was but a specimen. Nearly every brain of the select few that counted in this cardinal determination of the world’s destinies, had its streak of personal motive, its absurd and petty impulses and deflections’ (MB, 133). The claim to typicality is explicitly stated and reiterated throughout the novel, along with the need to weigh the conflicting enchantments of personal good and the good of the nation. Wells later saw the novel as part of ‘the disillusionment about the beneficence of our war-making (1915–16–17) that followed my first attempt in 1914 to find a justifying purpose in “our” war. I did not become “anti-war.”’48 Samuel Hynes argues that ‘it is not the deaths and the horrors that sway him; it is his disillusionment at the decline of English idealism’.49 The necessity of carrying on during wartime is attested, but questioningly. The reading of war as cataclysm is retrospectively imposed onto the beginning of the conflict as the casualty list grew steadily and public figures were killed. Lord Kitchener died in June 1916 aboard the HMS Hampshire when it struck a mine; Winston Churchill’s eulogistic obituary in The Times brought Brooke to prominence.50 In Non-Combatants and Others Brooke is the model for parts of both the protagonist Alix’s wounded lover Basil Doye and her brother Paul, who dies of a self-inflicted wound.51 By the time Wells’s novel appeared in late 1916, the Battle of the Somme was still ongoing. Even in early 1914 Mr Britling describes war as ‘Armageddon’ (MB, 176), but this is not irreconcilable with the need to continue fighting. The reporting of the conflict originally focused on achievements but, as William Philpott observes, unmoving lines on the map and casualty lists could not easily be concealed. Where there were large numbers of deaths in Pals battalions of men who had enlisted together, such as in East Lancashire, morale was severely tested. Bernd Hüppauf points out that Western narratives of progress continue to exist uneasily alongside the violence that continues to be perpetuated and remembered.52 This could be incorporated nationally into a narrative prioritising the greater good, but by October that year questions about the price of military progress were becoming widespread.53

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Writing disenchantment: First World War prose

War is understood in terms of narrative and spectacle. While it impacts on Britain and the British its violence is not, for the most part, immediately a facet of daily life. It comes: in a spectacular manner, as a thing happening dramatically and internationally, as a show, as something in the newspapers […] only by slow degrees did it and its consequences invade the common texture of English life. […] It was rare that [Mr Britling] really seemed to be seeing the war; few people saw it; for most of the world it came as an illimitable multitude of incoherent, loud, and confusing impressions. But all the time he was at least doing his utmost to see the war, to simplify it and extract the essence of it until it could be apprehended as something epic and explicable, as a stateable issue … (MB, 206)

Watching war at a distance suggests the possibility of voyeuristic, vicarious pleasure. Its impact is felt through consequences which impinge gradually on the continuities of everyday life and, occasionally, by air attacks. It is difficult to narrate and process an ongoing event. The inability to see regularly the physical impact of the war requires harder work to understand it, and the narrator asserts the necessity of creating a coherent narrative from the dissonant blend of events and experiences. The reduction of complexity to linear narrative is essential for disseminating information, but the elision of texture and detail in the course of interpretation is uncomfortably close to wilfully reductive or simplistic propaganda. Mr Britling continues to work to understand the war, and ‘his thoughts grew firmer and clearer; they went deeper and wider. His first superficial judgments were endorsed and deepened or replaced by others’ (MB, 267). While his early judgments are superficial, they are also less affected by solidifying narratives about the war. The deepening of judgment is the product of further reflection, but also a continuing loss of detail which conditions the selection of subsequent details. In achieving a coherent understanding of the war, Mr Britling restricts himself to another form of superficiality which refuses the pluralities of lived experience. Mr Britling Sees it Through reasserts that Britain is reluctantly bellicose, fighting a war only to protect ‘little Belgium’. Germany has broken the tacit agreement not to wage war, policed by treaty agreements: ‘Didn’t we all trust them not to let off their guns? Wasn’t that the essence of our liberal and pacific faith?’ (MB, 173).



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The enchantment of paternal defence allows the enjoyment of militarism, and the sense of imperial superiority implies the possibility of a speedy resolution. Britain’s pacifism is proclaimed, and opprobrium apparently derives from the breakdown of trust. Mr Britling proclaims that: something that has oppressed us all has become intolerable and has to be ended. And it will be ended. I don’t know what soldiers and politicians think of our prospects, but I do know what ordinary reasonable men think of the business. I know that all we millions of reasonable civilised onlookers are prepared to spend our last shillings and give all our lives now, rather than see Germany unbeaten. (MB, 172)

The war is seen as a defence of civilisation at all costs.54 Noble motives are undercut by the evident national interest in forestalling the expansion of another imperial power. However, civilian deaths are accidental, against the reasoned choice of combatant troops to defend their enchantments with their lives. Those outside, such as Wells, see themselves in a separate category of reason. Wells’s novel starts to establish disenchantment with the army bureaucracy and high-ranking non-combatant officers, by whom many combatants felt oppressed. The rhetoric of professionalism and efficiency was pervasive at the time.55 War is not just euphemistically ‘the business’, but is commercial; those methods are applied to the organisation of the war and found wanting. Ironically, tension arises from the formerly professional army trying to cope with an influx of amateur soldiers who had largely come from the world of industry. Mr Britling observes ‘the imaginative insufficiency of the War Office that had been so suddenly called upon to organize victory’ (MB, 234–5). The imagination required to use recently developed technologies effectively is lacking due to the culture of mechanisation which precipitated those innovations. While there are competing voices in the novel, it is not the waging of war that is being organised, but victory – any other result is inconceivable. The administration is inadequate both in the War Office, and at the front. Mr Britling’s son Hugh makes a forceful criticism: ‘All the officers of this battalion over and above the rank of captain are a constellation of incapables – and several of the captains are herewith included. […] The time they should spend in enlarging their minds and increasing their military efficiency they

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devote to keeping fit. They are, roughly speaking, fit – for nothing’ (MB, 302–3).56 Officers are damned for not fighting and damned for remaining able to fight. Military leaders are exempted from the most dangerous action, shielded from the risks taken by a predominantly enlisted army. Administrative roles and their safe locations are described as unmasculine, in comparison with the fighting troops risking their lives. While front-line soldiers mostly accepted the enchanting rhetoric that healthy mind leads to healthy body,57 they began to demand more than physical leadership by example. The separation of labour and administration echoes the increasing split between white-collar managerialism and blue-collar working, and those divisions do not disappear in the army. Wells later described ‘a horizontal struggle, between class tradition and the insistent need for decisive original inventions and new methods’.58 The enchantments of rational professionalism and enthusiasm for national values seem irreconcilable. The death of Mr Britling’s son Hugh strengthens other characters’ resolve. A satisfactory narrative resolution is impossible in a novel about an ongoing war. Wells asserts from beginning to end the need to carry on, a Christian metanarrative of overcoming adversity which endures from the nineteenth-century novel. These problems are shown in a facsimile of Mr Britling’s writing (Figure 1.2). Sentences can no longer be completed; there are only

Figure 1.2  Facsimile page from H. G. Wells, Mr Britling Sees It Through



Patriotism, propaganda and pacifism, 1914–18 53

half-formed phrases which suggest sentiments. The primacy of mourning and its futility is evident from the repeated invocation of Hugh’s name at the top left of the page. Representatives of the legal and regal are denigrated as speakers of falsehood, propagandists who are above the underlined need for honesty, a plea to revive this fundamental virtue. Blood trails off into a fluid line and sinks towards the bottom of the page, as if the pen itself bleeds, before reaching ‘and make an end to them’, which the book is unable to do. The struggle to justify the deaths of volunteers must be contained to continue the narrative of justification. War is no longer a break from the quotidian: ‘The feel of it was less and less a feeling of crisis and more and more a feeling of new conditions. It wasn’t as it had seemed at first, the end of one human phase and the beginning of another; it was in itself a phase. It was a new way of living’ (MB, 246). In this phase absent death is an everyday occurrence, but the impact of Hugh’s death is offset by the joy at the return of the presumed-dead Teddy, seen before the war by Mr Britling as a dilettante secretary but made masculine by his decision to fight. Although he is so altered as to be unrecognisable, his reappearance offers hope, addresses the problem of reintegration and stresses the need to make sense of injury and death. Wells’s questioning but ultimately affirmative stance made Mr Britling Sees it Through a bestseller in the UK and the US. There was room to express doubt about the war, but the prevailing sentiment was still supportive. The novel was acclaimed by literary figures such as George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Hardy. Soldiers praised the account of the Western Front, a testament to Wells’s imaginative powers and also to the veracity of the news reports of the early part of the war.59 The critic Frank Swinnerton later described Wells’s ‘extraordinary gift for assimilating facts.’60 While authorial judgments remain problematic, Wells effectively summed up his own work: ‘I think I have contrived in that book to give not only the astonishment and the sense of tragic disillusionment in a civilized mind as the cruel facts of war rose steadily to dominate everything else in life, but also the passionate desire to find some immediate reassurance amidst that whirlwind of disaster.’61 Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier also describes war’s impact on the home front and the enchantment of enduring ­institutions such as marriage, gender and class. As Gay Wachman observes, ‘the war, despite Jenny’s nightmares and Chris’s c­ onvenient

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s­ hell-shock, remains an abstraction’.62 The novel is an early engagement with that newly-defined illness.63 For the refined protagonist Chris Baldry the symptom is amnesia, which removes the last fifteen years from his memory. He looks back to an idealised pastoral England which pre-dates the spread of commercialism and suburbanism, following Masterman in linking these with disenchantment. Chris’s memory of his working-class lover in youth, Margaret Allington, again becomes part of his present, disturbing class boundaries. The novel is narrated by his cousin Jenny, who nurses an unrequited passion for him. We are subject to her shifting judgments, as Angela K. Smith and Sharon Ouditt observe.64 The Return of the Soldier describes the attempt to cure Chris and restore his position in social systems, turning the return home of the soldier into his return to the Western Front.65 West’s novel, published in July 1918, still emphasises the value of returning to ‘normality’ and continuing the conflict towards Allied victory. Chris is a totem of war, and physical contact with him transports Jenny to an imagined No Man’s Land, the location in which he broke down.66 Masculine norms about stoicism, fortitude and the need for continuing public reassurance made it difficult for soldiers to express what was seen as mental weakness. Chris’s lack of physical symptoms and receipt of psychiatric treatment mark him as middle class, and he is firmly reinstated in that group by the end of the novel.67 On his return from the front, Jenny ‘felt his agony all the evening like a wound in [her] own body’ and she attempts to sympathise (RS, 66). Discourses of mental illness were yet to circulate widely, and even though Chris’s pain is mental she interprets it in terms of physical wounding; the imagined wound is also her desire to be penetrated by Chris. She imagines fear and injury, while Chris’s involuntary repression is replaced by his performance of masculine reserve when cured. The term ‘shell shock’ which, Ben Shephard states, ‘imbedded itself, in a crude and oversimplified way, in the public imagination’, insists on physicality, and a sufferer was only entitled to be classed as wounded if his breakdown followed an explosion.68 Jenny sees Chris’s inability to remember her or Kitty as: a fantastic act of cruelty that I could only think of as a conjunction of calamitous images. I think of it happening somewhere behind the front, at the end of a straight road that runs by a line of ragged poplars between mud flats made steel-bright with floods pitted by



Patriotism, propaganda and pacifism, 1914–18 55 the soft slow rain. There, past a church that lacks its tower, stand a score of houses, each hideous with patches of bare bricks that show like sores through the ripped-off plaster and uncovered rafters which stick out like broken bones. (RS, 135)

The removal of the phallic church tower represents Chris’s unmanning by shell shock, and shows the decline of established systems of order as well as the need to restore broken artefacts to wholeness.69 The destruction of the town is the desired destruction of urban modernity, which is mapped onto the human body. On the Western Front the fractured, decaying body became part of the surroundings, sometimes even inhabiting the trenches alongside the men, often exhumed in smaller and smaller fragments.70 However, the eradication of this enchantment can only take place in the mind. The emotional reunion for which Jenny longs is enacted between Chris and Margaret, to whom he runs across the lawn as night after night I had seen him in my dreams running across No Man’s Land. I knew that so he would close his eyes as he ran; I knew that he would pitch on his knees when he reached safety, even before I saw her arms brace him under the armpits with a gesture that was not passionate, but rather the ­movement of one carrying a wounded man from under fire. (RS, 122–3)

Chris is always physically wounded to Jenny and requires support. As Angela Woollacott points out, Jenny ‘is sustained by touching him vicariously through his lover’.71 Normative roles for women are reinscribed in this vision: women are either observers or carers, but they also intuit combatant experience. They are not ignorant about the physical consequences of warfare, but take part in a necessary conspiracy of silence. Gender roles are reaffirmed through the role of women in Chris’s recovery. Margaret and Kitty discuss the condition: ‘I don’t know how to put it …. He’s not exactly wounded …. A shell burst ….’ ‘Concussion?’ suggested Kitty. She answered with an odd glibness and humility, as though tendering us a term she had long brooded over without arriving at comprehension, and hoping that our superior intelligences would make something of it. ‘Shell-shock.’ Our faces did not illumine so she dragged on lamely. ‘Anyway, he’s not well.’ (RS, 29)72

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The three women’s attempts to comprehend Chris’s shell shock show the difficulty of treating an unseen wound as diagnoses and analyses developed. Despite their self-proclaimed superiority Jenny and Kitty are equally unable to comprehend Margaret’s report. Kitty refuses to believe that this fate could befall a serving soldier and she is contrasted with Jenny and Margaret, who work to restore Chris to his former position and status, foregoing their own happiness to return him to Kitty and the war. Jenny makes clear the role of women in wartime: ‘Like most Englishwomen of my time I was wishing for the return of a soldier. Disregarding the national interest and everything except the keen prehensile gesture of our hearts towards him, I wanted to snatch my cousin Christopher from the wars and seal him in this green pleasantness his wife and I now looked upon’ (RS, 13). Emotional attachments are rendered feminine, against the need to endure in the army, and the early part of the novel shows the tension between the domestic and the public. Women wait together and their response combines the heart’s involuntary beating with the transgression of abduction for his safety. The challenge to existing social structures is the cause of anxiety in the novel. The novel’s bleak message, but one entirely apposite for the latter part of the war, is that seemingly ideal situations cannot last, and the need is to make the best of the current situation: men need to be manly, women need to be homely, and status and its material symbols remain a vitally important enchantment. The reconciliation between Chris and Margaret reaffirms gender roles, but temporarily crosses class boundaries. It is Margaret, ‘not so much a person as an implication of dreary poverty’ (RS, 141), who offers a refuge from present-day reality and is able to cure Chris and return him to his wife. Steve Pinkerton makes a compelling case for her as an intuitive analyst/therapist.73 Margaret’s social position is at the very lowest end of the suburban, seen by Jenny as an impoverished attempt at the acquisition of social graces. The class boundary between Margaret and Chris is clear even in his recalled Utopia and he rejects her for enjoying the platonic company of a working-class man (RS, 107). Weber believes that status groups are amorphous communities, but this one cannot be reshaped to admit Margaret.74 Kitty realises that accepting Chris’s amnesia as mental illness is preferable to believing that he has rejected her in favour of Margaret, ‘whose personality was sounding through her squalor like a beautiful voice singing in a darkened room’ (RS, 96).



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Inner beauty is required, which Margaret provides, but the possibility of enduring relationships across classes is denied. Mark D. Larabee sees the aesthetic associated with her as picturesque, in the Romantic sense, in contrast to the carefully planned and maintained beauty of both Kitty and Baldry Court.75 Margaret is valued as a caregiver, but in this novel it is an unsuitable basis for marriage. As a result of his disenchantment with the war, which derives from the rapid development of industrial modernity, Chris turns to a recent pastoral: the world of fifteen years ago. Pastoral tends to be popular in times of war and crisis.76 West stated that she started the novel in 1915, which makes fifteen years ago doubly significant as the turn of the twentieth century and, looking back, the impending death of Queen Victoria. Like the First World War, both events were understood at the time as epoch-making.77 Wachman sees ‘a clear, if sentimental, connection between Margaret’s class, the pastoral romance and her curative maternity’.78 Chris’s shell shock returns him to a verdant idyll which contrasts with the suburbanisation that now threatens Baldry Court, just as the newly built houses loom on the horizon at the end of E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910).79 To Chris, Margaret represents the idealised, irrecoverable past, but to Jenny she stands for ‘the red suburban stain which fouls the fields three miles nearer London than Harrow-weald’ (RS, 22). That stain can only be washed out and the past made present through damaged consciousness, such is the hold of the spreading city in which munitions are made and conflict is created. The Freudian psychologist Dr Anderson diagnoses Chris brusquely: ‘Quite obviously he has forgotten his life here because he is discontented with it’ (RS, 165). Forgetting to register his home address with the War Office stands as proof, but the irony of Chris forgetting his home address is that soldiers could not divulge their location.80 Also implicit is the desire to escape the supposed enchantments of capitalist modernity: service and devotion to commercial interests hold sway in daytime (RS, 128). Kitty’s disenchantment is felt at the challenge to the enchantments of material goods and masculinity: she is superficial and unsympathetic, ‘the falsest thing on earth, who was in tune with every kind of falsity’ (RS, 181).81 As Smith comments, ‘The ideas articulated in these dreams highlight West’s representation of the insubstantial nature of a society controlled by a class whose dominant ideology is built around material values.’82 However, there is little possibility of escape from those values.

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The hierarchy can be flattened only in Chris’s damaged psyche, and his amnesia is a momentary realisation of false consciousness: ‘If madness means liability to wild error about the world, Chris was not mad. It was our peculiar shame that he had rejected us when he had attained something saner than sanity. His very loss of memory was a triumph over the limitations of language which prevent the mass of men from making explicit statements about their spiritual relationships’ (RS, 133). Chris rejects repression, social stratification and the danger of the Western Front, expressing his disenchantment by unconsciously disengaging from that world. However, his imagined reality must be compared with the wartime world and found wanting. To cure illness or injury in wartime means that the patient must then return to the situation that caused it.83 The cure for Chris is crueller still. To regain his masculinity he must re-live the death of his child to eradicate any temporary childishness resident within him.84 Following Chris’s eventual cure, ‘he walked not loose limbed like a boy, as he had done that very afternoon, but with the soldier’s hard tread upon the heel’ (RS, 187). Angela Woollacott notes the paradoxical desire to nurture the vulnerable and the pleasure derived from the performance of masculinity.85 During the war, for the most part, the masculine must win out. The rhetoric about lost youth emphasises the point. Boyhood must be left behind as only adult men can serve, a move from innocence to experience which in itself is a form of disenchantment, and ‘loss’ euphemistically describes the deaths of many of these men. Chris must regain a normative, undisruptive masculinity, and Jenny worries that otherwise ‘he who was as a flag flying from our tower would become a queer-shaped patch of eccentricity on the country-side, the stately music of this being would become a witless piping in the bushes. He would not be quite a man’ (RS, 183). Chris, via the simile of the flag, stands metonymically for the country as a whole. He must remain the flag itself rather than a stain upon it, structured and harmonic music rather than ‘witless piping’. Although we see nothing but circumstantial evidence that Chris is cured, to Kitty’s glee and Jenny’s dread he appears returned to normal. The ambivalent response to normality also speaks to the anticipated end of the war, which will bring the pleasure of resolution, but the return of a large number of amateur soldiers profoundly altered by military service and also the return to a ­situation viewed through



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the lens of  ongoing war as ideal, but whose material conditions were anything but. Dissent as disenchantment? Challenges to authority and orthodoxy While Wells and West seek a return to peace by continuing to fight and facilitate the conflict, a small number of dissenting voices question that apparent necessity. Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others (1916) and Rose Laure Allatini’s Despised and Rejected (1918) state the value of pacifism and conscientious objection.86 Women, Margaret Higonnet argues, made themselves active physically and politically by picking up their pens, and in these cases their action is against the war.87 Non-Combatants and Others exhibits a complex, subtle view of the world at a time when others were either in thrall to official narratives, or grappling with the issues caused by the war. Both Ouditt and Claire M. Tylee note the uncertainty of the novel, and the refusal to reduce debate to a binary.88 The text is scarred by ellipses and elisions, and certainty cannot endure in the circles in which Alix Sandomir, the protagonist, moves. Macaulay, like Wells and West, sees a tension between patriotism and pacifism, but there is much less doubt in Despised and Rejected. This chapter concludes with a discussion of Despised and Rejected, which was banned for its depiction of pacifism and conscientious objection. These expressions of disenchantment are specific to wartime; conscientious objection was legally enshrined in conscription, and pacifism after the war was prevention rather than cure. The war does not precipitate an abrupt change for the worse in Non-Combatants and Others. Alix states that ‘those were curious days, those old days before August 1914; or rather it was the days ever since that were curious and like a nightmare’ (NC, 22). In wartime the pre-war is not necessarily an idyll; those days are still curious, even if those which follow are worse. In Macaulay’s satire Told by an Idiot (1923) the narrator scorns the mythologising of the pre-war world: The first Georgian years, the years between 1910 and 1914, are now commonly thought of as gay, as very happy, hectic, whirling, butterfly years, punctuated, indeed, by the too exciting doings of dock and transport strikers, Ulstermen, suffragists, the Titanic and Mr. Lloyd George, but, all the same, gay years. Like other generalisations about

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periods, this is a delusion. Those years only seem especially gay to us because, since July 1914, the years have not been gay at all.89

Macaulay highlights the pre-war disenchantments of industrial unrest and imperial disputes; she stresses change without rupture. Her viewpoint is informed by the pre-war death on Imperial service of her brother Aulay, and even in her pre-war novel The Making of a Bigot (1914) she sees a ‘society so crammed full of causes and beliefs that no one belief has any claim to be taken more seriously than any other’.90 Surprisingly, Macaulay supported the war enthusiastically at first, but within the year she rejected militarism for good following a spell as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse.91 Fellow authors Enid Bagnold, Vera Brittain, Agatha Christie and Naomi Mitchison were also VADs, as is Alix in Non-Combatants and Others.92 In early 1919 she considered but rejected writing about the coming Versailles conference: ‘By the time it was finished, it would be too much a portion and parcel of the dreadful past – besides, [I] can’t manage it without having been in it myself – not really satisfactorily.’93 Combatant narratives of the war are privileged, and take precedence in constructing the peace. The need to move forward is clear, although Macaulay’s next novel Potterism (1920) discussed the war in the light of immediate post-war disenchantments.94 Pacifism in Non-Combatants and Others is a taboo subject, espoused only by those who are disbarred from fighting or those who have already fought. The first mention of Alix’s mother, Daphne, an active peace campaigner, expresses the shame of other family members; the second is in parentheses, enclosing the peace movement. Mrs Orme, the beacon of militarist popular opinion in the novel, thinks of Daphne ‘as a spoilt, clever, fascinating but wrong-headed younger sister’, suggesting the supposed superiority of age and experience (NC, 35). Like Aurelia Leonard in Mary Hamilton’s Dead Yesterday (1916), Daphne operates in the sphere of the political rather than the domestic.95 Where in later combatant novels mothers are rejected, here they are strongly and idealistically against the conflict.96 Soldiers are the other interested parties. John, Alix’s cousin who has been scarred facially by the war, ‘was rather interested in the peace conference’, and ‘took a more lenient view of [the peace movement] than the rest of his family did’ (NC, 27). Sympathy for pacifism is permissible in men of military age when it is visible that their martial spirit has been tested and found



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adequate. Similarly, Sassoon’s protest is only tolerated because of his military service and decoration. Narratives about the war are polarising and polarised positions which inevitably find propaganda forms. The direction of collective action is unpredictable, Gustave Le Bon argues in The Crowd, but in wartime public opinion is carefully controlled.97 The setting for much of the novel is the home of Mrs Frampton, a distant relation of the Sandomirs, where ‘people […] probably know nothing about the war, except that there is one’ (NC, 35). Alix wonders about the possibility of thought there: Were discussions at Violette, discussions in all the thousands of Violettes, always like this? Not argument, not ideas, not facts. Merely statements, quotations rather, of hackneyed and outworn sentiments, prejudices second-hand, yet indomitable, unassailable, undying, and the relation of stories, without relevance or force, and (but this much more rarely, surely) a burst of bitterness and emotion to wind it all up. (NC, 71)

Propaganda is the stale recitation of official slogans, internalised without consideration or analysis. Reasoned debate and questioning liberalism atrophy as discussion is pushed into narrow official channels which label it as dissent. Sloganeering led to a profound loss of faith in the printed press: as early as 1922, C. E. Montague called three consecutive chapters of Disenchantment ‘’Ware Politicians’, ‘“Can’t Believe a Word”’, and ‘The Duty of Lying’. Alix is always questioning, and comes to reject the false binaries created by the war as she and her mother travel through East Anglia speaking in favour of pacifism. She criticises the ‘lack of clear thinking [… which] makes [… people] lump other people together in masses and groups, setting one group against another, when really people are individual temperaments and brains and souls, and unclassifiable’ (NC, 174–5). The unthinking adoption or rejection of positions based on official narratives perpetuates a form of social tribalism. Alix asserts the need for individuality, but in wartime collective discipline must take precedence in the best interests of the army. Non-combatant reactions are shaped by official proclamations and images which stimulate the fear of alienation and otherness, alongside semi-official social pressures such as white feather giving; even the wounded Basil Doye is harangued by a woman in Trafalgar Square (NC, 86).98

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Non-Combatants and Others extensively addresses the mental impact of war. As in The Return of the Soldier, mental illness is linked with bodily injury, but for both veterans and civilians. Alix wonders whether ‘the reason why war is objectionable is that the human body is sacred and should be inviolate’ (NC, 175). Even before John and Basil return wounded and Paul dies from a selfinflicted wound, ‘Alix lay awake. Her forehead was hot and her feet were cold. She was tense, and on the brink of shivering. Staring into the dark she saw things happening across the seas: dreadful things, ugly, jarring, horrifying things. War war war. It pressed round her; there was no escape from it. Every one talked it, breathed it, lived in it’ (NC, 29). Alix presents physical symptoms as a response to the war, and sees it clearly in the darkness; I discuss D. H. Lawrence’s interest in darkness and sight in Chapter 3. The triad ‘war war war’ highlights its resistance to description in language outside of itself; it is indescribable, but also inescapable. Alix notes that the war’s effect is mental: ‘It’s my feelings really, you know, not my body. It’s only that I’m … shocked to death’ (NC, 149). She describes her mental state as ‘shocked’, showing her kinship with the shellshocked soldiers; however, she is a rare empathetic figure. Alix is unable to find consolation through faith in established systems. War’s impact on religion is evident, but Macaulay continued to believe and later criticised a friend for having ‘No religion, of course, which is unlucky’.99 In the novel, news of Paul’s death hits hard at Violette: From a long way off Mrs Frampton sobbed, ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away … It’s the Almighty’s will … The poor dear boy has died doing his duty and serving his country … a noble end, dearie … not a wasted life …’ ‘Not a wasted …’ Alix said it after her mechanically, as if it was a foreign language. (NC, 81)

The enchantments of God and nation are emphasised over the disenchantment of bereavement, as Mrs Frampton seeks consolation in the well-rehearsed fragments. Alix can only repeat a truncated version of the final platitude, and the difficulty of expressing her anguish means that she has, by the end of the chapter, ‘abandoned all theories and all words, except only, again and again, “Paul … Paul … Paul …”’ (NC, 82). Alix can only name the absent Paul, a  doomed attempt to call him back to her. A similar issue arises



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in Cicely Hamilton’s William—An Englishman (Wm, 162–3), and in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse Lily Briscoe struggles to mourn Mrs Ramsay (TL, 159–61). However, at the end of the novel Alix rejects the secular, seeking solace instead in an explicitly Christian pacifism. Where in later novels about the war old institutions and codes are explicitly rejected, in wartime there is no such easy break with the past. Non-Combatants and Others still looks forward to recovery and improvement. This philosophical shift is seen in the pacifism of the Sandomir women, but is also represented in Basil’s response to the amputation of the middle finger of his right hand. He consequently ‘wants the undamaged, as an antidote’ (NC, 76). The lame Alix is not that antidote, and even when they first meet after Basil’s wounding, his gaze is diverted by ‘a placid, indifferent, healthy sort of girl, with all her fingers on and nothing the matter anywhere. He was sick of hurt and damaged bodies and minds; his artistic instinct and his natural vitality craved, in reaction, for the beautiful and the whole and the healthy’ (NC, 85). He addresses his own wounding, Alix’s ailment, and the problem of wounded returning combatants more generally; this initially dissonant sight became normalised throughout the 1920s, and the regular visual reminders of the costs of war perhaps contributed to the growth of pacifism. Bodily wholeness is Basil’s unattainable desire, but it also speaks to the damage done to past enchantments. Reconstruction is still anticipated keenly at the end of the novel: When it’s a case of reconstructing material things, as we shall have to do in Belgium and France after the war, no one will be allowed to help without proper training; people are training for it already […]. But we seem to think that the nations can build themselves up spiritually without any learning or preparing at all, just because it’s not towns and villages and trades and wealth and agriculture that will need building up, but only intelligence and beauty and sanity and mind and morals and manners. (NC, 189)

The breathless, barely grammatical list sets forth a manifesto for qualities needed in the post-war world. Mental and moral beauty are prioritised over physical rebuilding and recovery. This acknowledges the destruction wrought and that wholeness cannot be regained by all. The actions which led to the war came from a lack of such values, but also a lack of resistance to the same. Considered

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engagement is necessary to end the war and improve conditions afterwards; Ouditt argues that Macaulay deems disinterest unviable.100 Pacifism is an extreme position of dissent in wartime, but Macaulay’s model is ultimately conservative. The war needs to end, and there needs to be an end to war, but this can be accomplished within the existing social order and its enchantments. If Non-Combatants and Others ‘was not well received by wartime reviewers’, its Christian theology at least ensured it some sympathy.101 Like Macaulay’s novel, Rose Laure Allatini combines the discussion of artistic production with sexuality and warfare but, published two further years through the war, Allatini’s Despised and Rejected expresses concerns which would become fundamentals of high modernism. In novels such as Ruby M. Ayres’s Richard Chatterton, V. C. (1915) and William J. Locke’s The Rough Road (1918) effete artistry is transformed into energetic masculinity, but here there is no such resolution.102 As Smith observes, Allatini’s novel ‘engages with radical modernisms that were undoubtedly created by the apocalyptic presence of the First World War’.103 Grace Brockington has parsed the stigma of wartime pacifism and its relationship to modernism.104 Despised and Rejected, published on 22 May 1918, was banned on 10 October 1918 as peace treaties were starting to be agreed.105 Allatini’s depiction of pacifism aligned with intermediacy ensured its frosty reception in the latter part of the war. However, it was not banned immediately and sold almost 800 copies, a reasonable figure for a small publishing house with non-mainstream interests.106 Flagging morale needed to be bolstered as the war looked likely to endure into 1919 and beyond, or at least any further decline arrested. In 1917 the poet F. S. Flint demanded ‘and will this war ever finish?’107 Basil, in NonCombatants and Others, states airily that the war will last ‘’Till October 1922, you know’ (NC, 93). The threat to the war effort caused the novel to be banned, not, officially, its representation of sexuality.108 It also addresses conscientious objection, which takes fit and healthy men out of military service. As Tylee argues, both homosexuality and pacifism challenge the violence of idealised masculinity.109 Conscientious objection existed hand-in-hand with conscription, and Asquith enshrined in law the right of religious and political objection to military service. John Rae states that conscientious objectors were only a third of a per cent of those who enlisted and conscripted during the war but, ‘numerically



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insignificant, the conscientious objectors nevertheless demanded attention’.110 Allatini gives them the attention they deserve. The war is the product of an industrialised and industrialising world in which it is only with the greatest difficulty that one can stand outside the machine. Eric Leed suggests that the ‘disillusionment of many volunteers centered upon the realization that war was labor’.111 In Allatini’s novel, none of the protagonists is under any illusion. Dennis Blackwood is othered both by his artistry and his homosexuality and is acutely sceptical about the aims of the war: ‘Do you believe that the British are fighting for disarmament, for world-peace, any more than the Germans are? The governments of the big nations – not the mass-peoples, because they weren’t asked – but the governments of all big nations organise warfare with the same ends in view – extension of power; consolidation of empire; commercial and political advantages’ (DR, 196). The pacifists are aligned with the socialist movement, which waged war against capital and saw the likelihood of European military conflict. Dennis’s disenchantment is with the machine age and the interpellated subject, unable to extricate himself (the gendered pronoun is specific) from the problems of industrial capitalism. The irony of fighting for peace is painful to Dennis and other pacifists, who realise that warfare perpetuates and strengthens hegemony. Alan, the object of his desire, later agrees in a stirring polemic: Without the masses there could be no war, and that is the solution of it all, and the end and the aim of socialism – to free the masses from the tyranny of governments that can drive them like cattle to be slaughtered in this crazy campaign of greed and hatred. Look at the wonderfully organised man-power of all the nations, with all the woman-power behind it; look at the scientific miracles and the ceaseless labour and energy that go to the production of big guns, submarines, aeroplanes and poison-gas; think of all this employed in the cause of destruction. … And think of the heroism and self-sacrifice of those who really ‘die gladly’ for a mistaken ideal; and the tremendous flame of patriotism that’s burning in the hearts of all the peoples alike: if all these tangible and intangible splendours could have been used in the furtherance, instead of in the destruction of civilisation! (DR, 240)

Mass warfare is a product of the enchantment of democracy and the legitimation of majority rule. The apparent benefits of empire all the while come at an unseen human cost, but here the casualties are not in distant colonies but in close proximity. Alan

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sees the separation by gender, and bitterly observes the connection between progress and disenchantment of machine warfare. Heroism remains valued, but the enchantments for which most enlist and many die are to him mistaken. His pacifism is Christian and humanist: improvements to civilisation can be achieved by altering existing conditions. Nationalism and its corollary patriotism are mass movements, and the necessity to construct a coherent national identity was dialectically linked with the homogeneity promoted and produced by industrial capitalism. Masterman, Le Bon and others link mass living with the degeneration of civilisation, but here it is possible for ‘the masses’ to be freed or lifted up, rather than wiped out by eugenics. However, as Smith points out, ‘it is only those with a creative gift who can find the voice to speak for the inarticulate masses and give form to the radical ideas of those marginalised by society’.112 The masses are not inarticulate, but they do not use elite linguistic and cultural forms. Spengler, in fact, posits that ‘Democracy is on the road to suicide’ as a result of the manoeuvering of party leaders (DW, 2, 457). The othering of protest as inarticulate and incoherent is a longstanding trope, traceable through Thomas Carlyle’s response to the Chartists, John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold.113 Not to fight is aligned with femininity and homosexuality and requires exceptional fortitude. To be a conscientious objector and to declare oneself as a pacifist is more of a social challenge than to serve. The difficulties of pacifism in wartime are emphasised by the example of Bertrand Russell, sacked, restricted in movement and finally jailed.114 That position begins with and is defined by disenchantment with official narratives, heightened by the restriction of individual freedoms. In Despised and Rejected the female protagonist Antoinette’s chance encounter with Oswald Forsyth, a minor character who associates with the pacifist group, shows his weakness: Standing out with the C.O.s seemed to me the finest thing in the world, and – and it meant not going into the trenches. … You see, I’m a coward – the genuine article; not the magazine-type, who is really only a hero in disguise. I’m just an abject funk. The horror of pain – even when it’s more or less humane – the dentist boring down to the exposed nerve – and then to think of pain inflicted purposely in a hundred different hideous ways. … When you know of all that can happen while you’re still conscious of it happening, how can you



Patriotism, propaganda and pacifism, 1914–18 67 go out and face it? How can all those others …? It’s marvellous, and it’s beyond me, utterly. I can only think of what it feels like to have your inside torn open by a jagged bit of shrapnel, or to have a limb amputated without chloroform (DR, 270)

This weakness shows the strength required to resist the legal compulsion to fight, even when it is lawful to do so. Oswald is not a coward waiting to be made brave but, ironically, his abjection in the face of the imagined pain either of warfare or going to prison as a conscientious objector leads him to kill himself to escape taking either option. Oswald’s admiration for the mental fortitude of those who choose to fight precludes him from standing firmly alongside the pacifists, who see serving men as part of a visibly corrupt system. The strength to believe that ‘being in the minority doesn’t imply being in the wrong’ (DR, 288), as Alan continues to assert late in the novel, does not come easily. Homosexuality is implicitly defended within the spoken pacifist rejection of militarism. Dennis argues in his hearing at the House of Commons that ‘I want to help stop the war, and all possibility of future wars. My justification for being here is my confirmed belief that I am doing more towards that end by adhering to my refusal to fight than by unthinkingly and unquestioningly going out to kill’ (DR, 313). His position is affirmed by the ‘senseless cruel punishments’ to which Alan is subjected and which he later endures himself. Hüppauf, drawing on Foucault, points out the violence done by institutions of discipline to maintain the appearance of civilisation, a crucial factor in wartime.115 Even the Tommies whom Antoinette encounters in these late days of the war have capitulated to the disenchantment of their ideals. However, these disenchantments are put in the mouths of colonial troops, a Canadian and an Irishman speaking against an optimistic Cockney. The physical hardship in the front lines leaves fully behind the chipper strength in adversity of The First Hundred Thousand, and by the end of the novel even mutilation is no barrier to further service, as the need to maintain numbers in the army is exacerbated by the war’s continuing length (DR, 331–2). These novels make clear the absolute necessity in wartime to contain disenchantment within existing narratives. Christian theology can still offer consolation, and because the outcome of the ongoing event is not known, novels almost invariably end with the resolution to carry on. Samuel Hynes sees Mr Britling Sees It

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Through and Non-Combatants and Others as ‘turning points in civilian lives in relation to the war’.116 However, wartime texts can only be understood retrospectively as such; during the conflict each account can only be a way marker. The thing which unites these novelists and their characters is observed acutely by Macaulay: ‘All the heterogeneous crowd of humanity, so at variance in almost everything else, was just now surely one in the common bond of that great desire.’117 Cicely Hamilton later wrote that ‘it is war, not peace, that brings peoples together.’118 That great desire is that the war will end, although each has their own idea about how that might happen, whether by martial force or negotiated agreement. This chapter has shown the wide variety of distinctive voices who wrote about the war, from the enduring popularity of Wells to the fleeting notoriety of Allatini. The immediate interpretations of the war were largely by women and non-combatants: those who fought in the war were busy doing just that. Women’s writing about the war addresses the pressing concerns for the home front and, as Angela K. Smith states, ‘female modernisms were very diverse and […] the war had a part to play in such creativity’.119 As for poets such as Sassoon, Owen and Graves, the war provided these women with their first major creative subject. Once the war was over, it was necessary to face the problems of reintegration, as large numbers of men were demobilised. The return to peace was hard-won, but in the act of looking back past the war for a better situation, it was all too easy to forget that peace, so-called, was and had been in many ways as febrile and disjointed as war. Notes 1 Max Weber, ‘Structures of Power’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 178. 2 Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 38. 3 William Philpott, Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme (London: Little, Brown, 2009), p. 288. 4 For example, A. J. P. Taylor suggests that ‘public feeling in England was brought to white heat. […] Everywhere men were stirred by righteous passion, and thrust eagerly forward for sacrifice.’ The ­ First World War: An Illustrated History (Harmondsworth: Penguin,



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1966), p. 56. Revealingly, the volume is dedicated to Joan Littlewood, the author of Oh! What a Lovely War. 5 John Horne, ‘Public Opinion and Politics’, in Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 280. See also Adrian Gregory, ‘British “War Enthusiasm” in 1914: A Reassessment’, in Gail Braybon (ed.), Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914–1918 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003), pp. 67–85. Gregory observes that the voluntary system which remained in Britain was a special case against the compulsion to serve in other European powers. ‘Lost Generations: The Impact of Military Casualties in Paris, London and Berlin’, in Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (eds), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 66–7. 6 See, for example, David M. Goldfrank, The Origins of the Crimean War (London: Longman, 1994). 7 Gregory, ‘British “War Enthusiasm” in 1914’, p. 77. 8 See J. R. de S. Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe: The Development of the Public School (London: Millington, 1977), pp. 117–18. 9 See Allyson Booth, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 13–16. 10 Angela K. Smith, The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 17. 11 John Masefield, Preface to the eighth edn of Gallipoli (1916; London: William Heinemann, 1928), p. vii. 12 See Charles E. Doherty, ‘Nevinson’s Elegy: Paths of Glory’, Art Journal 51:1 (1992), 64–71. 13 Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman, War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War, trans. Richard Veasey ([2002]; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 88. 14 Horne, ‘Public Opinion and Politics’, p. 281. 15 Stephen Badsey provides a concise summary in ‘Press, Propaganda and Public Relations’, in A Part of History: Aspects of the British Experience of the First World War, intro. Michael Howard (London: Continuum, 2008), ch. 4. 16 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (1983; London: Verso, 1991), p. 141. On the relation of feudalism and religion to nationalism, see pp. 12–22. 17 Cate Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1977), p. 3. For a historically focused interpretation of these posters, see Peter Buitenhuis, The

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Great War of Words: British, American, and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914–1933 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987), pp. 22–6. On the role of women workers, see Deborah Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War I (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), particularly ch. 2 and ch. 7. 18 Mark Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 17. On Masterman’s role see also Gary S. Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), ch. 3. 19 C. F. G. Masterman, After Twelve Months of War (London: Darling & Son, 1915), p. 15. 20 Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda, pp. 13–22; see also Buitenhuis, Great War of Words, ch. 2. For an extensive historical account, see M. L. Sanders and Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda during the First World War, 1914–18 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992). 21 On its popularity, see Nicholas Reeves, ‘Cinema, Spectatorship and Propaganda: Battle of the Somme (1916) and its Contemporary Audience’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 17:1 (1997), 5–28. 22 For a full account, see Peter Simkins, Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of the New Armies, 1914–16 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); also Hew Strachan, The First World War, Volume 1: To Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 103–10. 23 Jay Winter, ‘Forms of Kinship and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Great War’, in Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (eds), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 40. 24 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (New York: Collier Books/Macmillan, 1990), pp. 48–9. 25 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, twenty-fifth anniversary edn (1975; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.  28; Buitenhuis, Great War of Words, p. 113. Buitenhuis gives a brief reading of The First Hundred Thousand and Carrying On, pp. 113–16. 26 Ian Hay, The First Hundred Thousand: Being the Unofficial Chronicle of a Unit of “K(1)” (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1915), pp. 4, 16. 27 Hay, First Hundred Thousand, p. 95; John Onions, English Fiction and Drama of the Great War, 1918–39 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 34. 28 Hay, First Hundred Thousand, p. 17.



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29 Ibid., p. 342. 30 Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, p. 28. 31 Sarah Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 139. 32 Excerpts are reprinted in Ford Madox Ford, War Prose, ed. Max Saunders (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999), pp. 207–14. 33 Ford Madox Ford, Between St Dennis and St George: A Sketch of Three Civilisations (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915), p. 12; Ford, When Blood is their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915), p. xvii. Both works were published in Ford’s then name, Ford Madox Hueffer; see Chapter 4 for details about his name change. 34 Ford, Preface to Violet Hunt, The Desirable Alien: At Home in Germany, with preface and two additional chapters by Ford Madox Hueffer (London: Chatto & Windus, 1913), pp. vii–xii. See also Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda, p. 150. 35 Ford, ‘Arms and the Mind / War and the Mind’ (1916–17), War Prose, p. 44. 36 Ford, Between St Dennis and St George, pp. 68–9. 37 Ibid., p. 157. 38 On a similar quality in Ford’s writing, see John Attridge, ‘Steadily and Whole: Ford Madox Ford and Modernist Sociology’, Modernism/ Modernity 15:2 (2008), 297–316. 39 Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda, pp. 145–6. 40 Ford, Between St Dennis and St George, p. 189. 41 See Sara Haslam, ‘Making a Text the Fordian Way: Between St Dennis and St George, Propaganda and the First World War’, in Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed (eds), Publishing the First World War: Essays in Book History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 209. See also Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), vol. 1, pp. 471–6; Thomas C. Moser, The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 196–200. 42 See David Taylor, ‘Blood, Mud and Futility? Patrick MacGill and the First World War’, European Review of History 13:2 (2006), 229–50. 43 H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (1909; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946), pp. 243, 319. 44 Messinger, British Propaganda, pp. 188–91. 45 Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 236. Peter Buitenhuis appreciates the ambiguity of the novel, but I find his assertion that it shows the futility of war too strong. Great War of Words, pp. 122–3.

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46 Ferguson gives some sales data in The Pity of War, p. 236; Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, p. 164. 47 Messinger, British Propaganda, pp. 192–3. 48 H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866), 2 vols (1934; London: Faber and Faber, 1984), vol. 2, p. 677. 49 Hynes, War Imagined, p. 131. 50 W[inston] S. C[hurchill], ‘Death of Mr Rupert Brooke’, The Times, 26 April 1915, p. 5. 51 See Hynes, War Imagined, p. 127; Sarah Le Fanu, Rose Macaulay (London: Virago, 2003), pp. 91–3, 111–12. 52 Bernd Hüppauf, ‘Introduction: Modernity and Violence: Observations Concerning a Contradictory Relationship’, in Hüppauf (ed.), War, Violence and the Modern Condition (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), pp. 2, 10. 53 Philpott, Bloody Victory, pp. 291–315. 54 Richard Aldington later wrote a story with the same title. ‘At All Costs’, in Roads to Glory (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930), pp. 49–74. 55 Evelyn Cobley, Modernism and the Culture of Efficiency (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). See also Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 56 See also Buitenhuis, Great War of Words, p. 122. 57 Michael Roper, ‘Between Manliness and Masculinity: The “War Generation” and the Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1914–1950’, Journal of British Studies 44:2 (2005), p. 348. 58 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 688. 59 Hynes, War Imagined, pp. 133–4. 60 Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian Literary Scene, rev. edn (1935; London: J. M. Dent, 1938), p. 50. 61 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 671. 62 Gay Wachman, Lesbian Empire: Radical Crosswriting in the Twenties (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 123. 63 On naming shell shock, see Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD: Military Psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War (Hove: Psychology Press, 2005), pp. 17–18. 64 Smith, Second Battlefield, p. 173; Sharon Ouditt, Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 114. 65 See also Wachman, Lesbian Empire, p. 120. 66 Ibid. 67 On tiered treatment see Peter Leese, ‘“Why are they not cured?”



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British Shell Shock Treatment During the Great War’, in Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner (eds), Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), particularly pp. 213–15; also Jones and Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD, pp. 23–4, 33–50 on different symptoms and treatments. Peter Barham tells the stories of some of the usually silenced voices of shell-shock victims in Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 68 Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914– 1994 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), pp. 28–9. 69 On emasculation, see Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987), pp. 172–3; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Volume 2: Sexchanges (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), ch. 7. 70 On the proximity of the corpse in the trenches, see Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 50, 102–3. 71 Angela Woollacott, ‘Sisters and Brothers in Arms: Family, Class, and Gendering in World War I Britain’, in Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (eds), Gendering War Talk (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 134. 72 For a detailed reading of The Return of the Soldier in terms of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, see Wyatt Bonikowski, ‘The Return of the Soldier Brings Death Home’, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 51:3 (2005), 513–35. 73 Steve Pinkerton, ‘Trauma and Cure in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier’, Journal of Modern Literature 32:1 (2008), 1–12. 74 Weber, ‘Class, Status, Party’, in From Max Weber, p. 186. 75 Mark D. Larabee, Front Lines of Modernism: Remapping the Great War in British Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 114–31. 76 Terry Gifford, Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999), ch. 3. 77 On dating The Return of the Soldier see Smith, Second Battlefield, p.  171. On the end of the nineteenth century see, for example, Christopher Clausen, ‘The Great Queen Died’, American Scholar 70:1 (2001), 41–9, and Jay Dickson, ‘Surviving Victoria’, in Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid (eds), High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 23–4. Late in life, West wrote a book about 1900 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982). 78 Wachman, Lesbian Empire, p. 121. 79 E. M. Forster, Howards End, ed. David Lodge (1910; London:

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Penguin, 2000), pp. 289–90. See also Cobley, Modernism and the Rhetoric of Efficiency, ch. 4, and Lynne Hapgood, Margins of Desire: The Suburbs in Fiction and Culture 1880–1925 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 80 Smith, Second Battlefield, p. 17. 81 See also Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism, Volume 2: Postmodern Feminist Readings of Woolf, West and Barnes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 159. 82 Smith, Second Battlefield, p. 176. 83 Ibid., p. 172; Ouditt, Fighting Forces, p. 114. 84 Ouditt, Fighting Forces, p. 115. 85 Woollacott, ‘Sisters and Brothers in Arms’, p. 140. 86 Nicola Beauman, ‘“It is not the place of women to talk of mud”: Some Responses by British Women Novelists to World War I’, in Dorothy Goldman (ed.), Women and World War I: The Written Response (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), p. 146. 87 Margaret Higonnet, ‘Not So Quiet in No Woman’s Land’, in Cooke and Woollacott, Gendering War Talk, pp. 210–11. 88 Ouditt, Fighting Forces, p. 165; Claire M. Tylee, The Great War and Women’s Consciousness, 1914–1964 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), p. 114. 89 Rose Macaulay, Told by an Idiot (1923; London: Virago, 1983), p. 263. 90 Tylee, Great War and Women’s Consciousness, p. 115; Le Fanu, Rose Macaulay, p. 101. 91 Le Fanu, Rose Macaulay, pp. 105–7. Hynes discusses the epigraphs to the novel in War Imagined, pp. 1278. See also D. A. Boxwell, ‘The (M)Other Battle of World War I: The Maternal Politics of Pacifism in Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 12:1 (1993), 89. 92 Chris Baldick, The Oxford English Literary History, volume 10, 1910–40: The Modern Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 326. See Beauman, ‘“It is not the place of women to talk of mud”’, p. 145, on novels about VAD nurses set in more exotic locations. 93 Rose Macaulay to Jean Smith, 27 April 1919, in Martin Ferguson Smith (ed.), Dearest Jean: Rose Macaulay’s Letters to a Cousin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), p. 34. 94 See Phyllis Lassner, ‘“Objects to Possess or Discard”: The Representation of Jews and Women by British Women Novelists of the 1920s’, in Billie Melman (ed.), Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930 (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 249–53. Sophie Blanch gives a brief reading of Potterism in



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‘Women and Comedy’, in Maroula Joannou (ed.), The History of British Women’s Writing. Vol. 8: 1920–1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 118–19. 95 Ouditt, Fighting Forces, p. 157. See also Tylee, Great War and Women’s Consciousness, pp. 108–12. 96 See also Boxwell, ‘The (M)Other Battle of World War I’, 85–101. 97 Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd ([1895]; New Brunswick: Transaction, 1995), p. 53. 98 On white-feather-giving, see Nicoletta F. Gullace, ‘The Blood of Our Sons’: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), ch. 4. 99 Rose Macaulay to Jean Smith, 4 November 1927, in Dearest Jean, p. 158. See also Tylee, Great War and Women’s Consciousness, pp. 116–17. 100 Ouditt, Fighting Forces, p. 162. 101 Hynes, War Imagined, p. 130. 102 See Baldick, Modern Movement, p. 335 on Ayres. 103 Smith, Second Battlefield, p. 149. 104 Grace Brockington, Above the Battlefield: Modernism and the Peace Movement in Britain, 1900–1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). On Despised and Rejected, see p. 17. 105 On the peace treaties see Martin Gilbert, First World War (1994; London: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 460–3, 470–1. For a history of the negotiations see Bullitt Lowry, Armistice 1918 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1996). 106 Jonathan Cutbill, Introduction to Rose Laure Allatini (as A. T. Fitzroy), Despised and Rejected (1918; London: GMP, 1988), p. v. 107 Flint to André Spire, 7 June 1917, in Michael Copp (ed.), Imagist Dialogues: Letters between Aldington, Flint and Others (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2009), p. 210. 108 Smith, Second Battlefield, p. 149; Ouditt, Fighting Forces, p. 156; Hynes, War Imagined, pp. 232–4; Tylee, Great War and Women’s Consciousness, p. 121. 109 Tylee, Great War and Women’s Consciousness, p. 123; Wachman, Lesbian Empire, p. 103. 110 John Rae, Conscience and Politics: The British Government and the Conscientious Objector to Military Service 1916–1919 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 71. 111 Leed, No Man’s Land, p. 91. 112 Smith, Second Battlefield, p. 151. 113 Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (London: James Fraser, 1840), pp. 5–6; John Ruskin, ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (1853), in Selected Writings,

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ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 32–63; Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 38–9. 114 Margaret Moran, ‘“The World as it Can be Made”: Bertrand Russell’s Protest Against the First World War’, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 8:3 (1985), 51–68. 115 Hüppauf, ‘Introduction: Modernity and Violence’, p. 11. 116 Hynes, War Imagined, p. 135. 117 Macaulay, Non-Combatants and Others, p. 177. 118 Cicely Hamilton, Life Errant (London: J. M. Dent), p. 136. 119 Smith, Second Battlefield, p. 179.

2

From hope to Disenchantment, 1919–1922

At the end of 1918 Britain and its Allies had just won an epochdefining victory; the end of the war brought its own enchantments. The Manchester Guardian reported that it was ‘a wonderful moment, one of the greatest, clearly, of the world’s history’, and there were jubilant mass celebrations in the major cities.1 Memorialisation was not primarily a sombre affair, and a tradition of victory dances and celebrations endured into the latter part of the decade.2 As the hangovers cleared on 12 November 1918 there was a new set of circumstances to deal with: how would wartime conditions be returned to normal? Demobilisation was starting, preparations were being made for a general election, and the country was looking to the future. There was also a proliferation of memorialisation in physical memorials, in narrative, in the public and private spheres. Women’s rights had improved as a result of their war work and the suffrage movement; the franchise was extended to women over 30 in March 1918, and the khaki election of December 1918 was the first held under these rules. The key issue was how to move on from wartime hardships; the Ministry of Reconstruction had existed since mid-1917. The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, looked to build a better future, and his famous promise ‘to make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in’ signalled a commitment to greater equality; the poor health of working-class enlistees in the army was believed to stem from poor living conditions.3 US President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed that: ‘I believe that […] men are beginning to see, not perhaps the golden age, but an age which at any rate is brightening from decade to decade’.4 The British popular press was in bullish mood, aligning itself with the French Prime Minister Clemenceau’s demand for full monetary reparations, while Lloyd George’s prescient view that too

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harsh a peace would lead to further conflict was marginalised by triumphalism.5 The enchantments of victory seemed to validate the narrative of progress which had been threatened by the war. Those enchantments existed alongside and were soon felt subsumed by the problems of reintegration. For soldiers, the Armistice was not an end to their service. Ford Madox Ford later wrote: ‘I remember Armistice Day very well because I was kept so busy with military duties that I was on my feet all day until I fell into bed stone sober, at 4 next morning.’6 Robert Graves and Richard Aldington felt similarly.7 Demobilisation was a long process, which caused dissatisfaction because of the need to prioritise. Soldiers went on strike in January 1919 in order to be demobilised, and they were still being demobilised much later.8 A fear of mutiny by returning soldiers resulted; the Russian Revolution of 1917 was fresh in the mind. The influenza pandemic ensured that deaths in many streets and families continued despite the cessation of hostilities, and made a focus on the health of the nation even more important.9 Physically and mentally injured veterans wondered whether a full recovery would be possible. The war correspondent Philip Gibbs, in his Realities of War (1920), commented that: ‘They had not come back the same men. Something had altered in them. They were subject to sudden moods and queer tempers, fits of profound depression alternating with a restless desire for pleasure. Many were easily moved to passion when they lost control of themselves, and many were bitter in their speech, violent in opinion, frightening.’10 The unrest of the post-war world seemed a problem of the peace treaties which had promised a final, legal resolution.11 It was also, for writers such as Aldington, an omnipresent condition, present in a particular cynical, secular and violent capitalist formation.12 These tensions often found a focus in the labour market. Veterans wondered whether they would be able to return to pre-war roles, and women workers worried that they would be displaced back to domestic servitude, paid or unpaid. They were right to be worried: jobs which women had done as a result of the policy of substitution demanded by enlistment and conscription tended to revert; the percentage of women in work was lower in 1921 than 1911.13 While women’s rights had improved, legislative changes did not immediately lead to substantive improvements.14 The Sex Discrimination (Removal) Act of 1919 was better in name than in practice: a decade later, pitifully small numbers of women had entered the



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professions that had supposedly been opened up.15 Industrial unrest was rife, and there were strikes by coal miners, railwaymen, engineers in Belfast, a general strike in Glasgow, and the last UK police strike; a daily average of 100,000 workers were on strike in 1919. The 1920 and 1921 miners’ strikes laid the foundations for a period of industrial action which reached its climax with the General Strike of 1926.16 The war having become ‘business as usual’, the concern once it ended was how to return to the fundamentals of daily life in peace time. Works from the immediate post-war years tend not to be as polarised as later narratives. A. G. Gardiner wrote in 1922 about ‘a nation in upheaval, surging to and fro with little conscious sense of direction, dazed and bewildered by the loss of its ancient landmarks and the weakening of its normal sanctions’.17 This structure of this chapter illustrates that uncertainty, moving between the sentiment, heroism and glorious death of popular literature and alternative literary representations. The war was now viewable wholly in retrospect, and difficult and dissenting stories could be told more freely in fictional form. Disenchantment with military structures had been circumscribed during wartime or labelled as madness. Now it was publishable, although not a popular position. Vestiges of wartime conservatism still shape most novels about the war throughout the 1920s, and the literature of the early twentieth century is largely more formally and thematically conservative than the canonical focus on high modernism suggests. Chris Baldick argues that ‘the third phase of war-writing, from 1919 to 1927, is the most often disregarded and undervalued’.18 I am inclined to agree. One reason is that works from this period fail to fit easily within the myth of futility. Few survivors of the war believed that their wartime experience was without mitigation, and they often reaffirmed their belief in national values and authority structures. The need to recuperate and revivify was clear. Many authors chose to do this by dealing with the war head-on, even if the ways they wrote about it differed radically. It is a sense of disjunctions between competing and as yet unsettled narratives that I evoke in this chapter.19 Gilbert Frankau sought industrial and capitalist progress in his bestseller Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant (1919), while Cicely Hamilton’s William—An Englishman (1919) told the story of a clerk-turned-socialist. Troubling cases of the iniquities of military organisation and

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discipline were now permissible, if not yet received to popular acclaim: A. P. Herbert’s The Secret Battle (1919) describes a shell-shocked soldier shot unjustly for desertion. C. E. Montague’s Disenchantment (1922) apparently proclaimed a much more stark view of the war. It is more even-handed than its title suggests. Montague’s position in the literary establishment and closeness to the political establishment meant that he retained a belief in existing structures and traditions and spoke to an important audience of decision-makers and opinion-formers. Published in the same month as Disenchantment, Ernest Raymond’s Tell England (1922) was a saccharine, muscular Christian story of public schools and the war. It was the most popular war novel of the decade, and continued to sell well into the latter part of the twentieth century. The marked contrast between these two works published in the same month epitomises the contradictory nature of the early literary response to the war. Capitalism, socialism, enchantment, disenchantment Novels by Gilbert Frankau and Cicely Hamilton address similar complaints about the war from radically different viewpoints. The failure of progress within the existing order was, for Frankau, unthinkable. He fought in the conflict and was a successful war poet, later described as ‘really a piece of Kipling’s Englishman’.20 Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant was serialised in the pro-war journal Land and Water from late August 1919, where it appeared alongside extracts from the German General Ludendorff’s Memoirs. It was a major success, the first post-war novel to sell 100,000 copies.21 Changes to ideas about gender and sexuality which arise from wartime experiences, particularly shell shock, are contained within a conservative narrative about home-making, marriage, good business sense and man’s ability to provide for woman; Frankau extols the restorative virtues of capital.22 Cicely Hamilton’s William—An Englishman, published in March 1919, is a marked contrast. She depicts the fight against patriarchal, capitalist hegemony, and the disruption to that ‘civil war’ caused by the armed conflict in Europe. William enlists after his wife, Griselda, is raped by a German officer and then mown down by a careless motorcyclist, leading to her prolonged and agonising death.23 A clerk-turned-socialist agitator, his weak physical build renders him unable to fight. Both



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­ rotagonists are injured in the war, but Frankau looks to the future p while Hamilton bemoans the damage done. Frankau’s war poetry is rousing, patriotic and consequently now known only in contrast to the disenchantment of Sassoon and Owen. He venerated Kipling, and was likened to him by the Manchester Guardian.24 His commitment to Britain and the war is unwavering. In The Guns (1916) combatants are slaves, but this is neither shameful nor troubling: We have bartered our souls to the guns; Every fibre of body and brain Have we trained to them, chained to them. Serfs? Aye! but proud of the weight of our chain–25

The galloping anapaests allow little pause for contemplation, only defiant affirmation. Subservience is necessary, and in ‘Ammunition Column’ the soldier is ‘a cog in a giant machine, a link of an endless chain’.26 Every individual must contribute, but links and cogs can easily be replaced. Work is its own justification and reward: ‘Dominant ones, / Are we not tried serfs and proven – true to our guns?’27 Frankau reasserts the dominant social order, harks back to a feudal society and states the necessity of continuing to fight. ‘The Other Side’ is Frankau’s foray into criticism of the war, an exception to his literary and political conservatism as the title suggests. Combatant and non-combatant troops are united by hatred for civilians, and Frankau damns outmoded ideas of warfare. A Major in Flanders criticises a subaltern poet for writing: The same old tripe we’ve read a thousand times. My grief, but we’re fed up to the back-teeth With war-books, war-verse, all the eye-wash stuff That seems to please the idiots at home.28

Writing about the war is ubiquitous, but military discipline restricted what soldiers could say and when they could write. The apparently unbridgeable gap between the Western Front and the home front is reasserted stridently: ‘What’s the good of war-books, if they fail / To give civilian-readers an idea / Of what life is like in the firing line’.29 Physical degradation, mutilation and brutality must be depicted to make civilians understand, but they cannot write the specifics. Frankau gestures to Western Front conditions using vivid language, but never ceases to believe in the ‘abstract virtues which you gas

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about – / (We shouldn’t stop out here long, otherwise!) – / Honour and humour, and that sort of thing’.30 This is also a rare instance of Frankau composing free verse. The constructed British tradition of understatement is evident: Frankau downplays the possibility of glory but endorses the values for which the war was fought. The trials of the two male protagonists in Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant are contained in a Christian metanarrative. Wounding causes both to question their relationship with masculine ideals. Francis Gordon, Peter’s cousin by marriage, is first a spy and then comes to fight on the Western Front, where he is wounded on horseback at Loos. Part of the cavalry, he is unable to take cover and is thus seriously wounded. He becomes ‘the tortured thing that had been Francis Gordon. He lay there, face dead white, just muttering. Only the upper part of his body seemed human – the rest was blood, blood and dirt’ (PJ, 188). Francis is momentarily described in the past tense and only survives due to prolonged medical attention and liberal doses of morphia. When his physical condition is stabilised, Francis asks the doctor ‘one straight question’, although its directness cannot be spelt out: whether he will be able to marry, meaning whether he will be able to procreate. With the promise of an enduring limp he concludes that ‘Leaving God out of the question, to take her in marriage would not be the act of a gentleman’ (PJ, 206). His lost American love is lured to Britain by Peter’s wife Patricia as the US Army enters the war, cementing transatlantic union on a personal as well as a military level. Francis is concerned with being manly and gentlemanly, the physical performance of masculinity as well as the adherence to social codes. His reassimilation within a heteronormative family structure concludes his recuperation from the mental trauma which left him suicidal by rekindling his religious faith: ‘She was in his arms, and God grew real at last’ (PJ, 372). Physical injury leads to mental illness, and heterosexual physical contact restores his vitality: the desire to procreate necessitates his religious enchantment. Peter’s injury heals effectively and can be covered; Frankau’s subsequent novel The Seeds of Enchantment (1921) also features a protagonist debilitated by hidden scars caused by gas and shell shock. The novelty of shell shock perhaps contributes to the disproportionate amount of attention it garners over physical injuries which had known treatments or which were known to have no treatment, even if the scale and severity were different from any previous war.31



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Peter is wounded on the Somme, the ‘bloodiest experiment ever undertaken in the laboratory of war, [which] marked the beginning of the ending – of War’s ending, as softies dream to-day. Compared to this holocaust, Loos was a skirmish’ (PJ, 295). Even in the most extreme danger, pacifism is unmanly, and deaths are grimly necessary. War is conducted as an experiment: previous rules of warfare must be tested with the use of new methods. It is incorporated into the modern narrative of scientific progress, despite its horrors, and seen not as the turn towards disenchantment, but the turn towards eventual victory; there is a marked contrast with Montague’s description seven years later of ‘the ineffectual battle of the Somme […] petering out in a few last spurts of futile bloodshed’ (RJ, 298). Unlike in The Return of the Soldier, shell shock is discussed from the point of view of the combatant. Peter’s shell shock is literal, which ensures that he can be diagnosed as wounded: he ‘heard a terrific explosion overhead; felt a clanging hammer-stroke on his helmet, knew frightful pain at his heart; knew a great darkness – a darkness through which he sank to merciful oblivion’ (PJ, 314). Sinking through darkness echoes the oblivion of crossing the Lethe, and Peter needs to relearn social conventions about gender and sexuality. Conveniently, Patricia’s father is an eminent neurologist who counsels her against hysteria for her own good and Peter’s: mental illness is feminised and misunderstood as contagious. Peter focuses on physical symptoms as a result of his public school training in repression: ‘The hero is the man who controls fear – not the man who doesn’t feel it’ (PJ, 335). Heroism is no longer about reckless daring, but maintaining control and carrying on in adverse conditions. Peter is disenchanted by his inability to return to the army: this allows him to feel safe, but also provokes survivor guilt, a combination of the disenchantment of mourning and also the inability to return to the heightened masculine state of warfare. In the early post-war period shell shock can still be overcome by a limited, cathartic breach of the training in repression by expressing fear; Peter’s relatively easy recovery is repeated less frequently in the novels of the later 1920s.32 The rhetoric of possession and control in marriage endures, but the novel proposes the unification of sexual desire and love. Peter initially values Patricia for ‘the matehood and the motherhood in her’, separate from sexual desire (PJ, 101). Her father encourages her to ‘make love to [Peter] as if you were his mistress,’ and she questions

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why this cannot be a wifely trait (PJ, 336). When Peter confesses his fears she states: ‘I’m your wife, your slave, your mistress’ (PJ, 349). Masculine dominance is reasserted: Patricia submits obediently to perform domestic duties without acknowledgment and the sexual duties of a mistress without the social danger. Despite legislative improvements to women’s rights, Frankau places the female protagonist firmly in the domestic sphere. Matt Houlbrook states that ‘the retreat to home was a characteristic feature of interwar British culture. […] Britain’s stability was increasingly located in the domestic, the familial, and the suburban.’33 It is more, perhaps, a patriarchal reimposition of the values to which wartime conditions permitted a challenge. There were repeated attempts to sharpen blurred gender boundaries in the period in literature, and that retrenchment of domestic values is evident in the founding of such publications as Good Housekeeping (1922), continuing through the decade to Woman’s Own (1932) and many others.34 The pretence of equality maintains the existing enchantment of male-dominated marriage. Towards the end of the novel, Peter and Patricia journey by boat down the Thames from rural Oxfordshire, and Patricia prays to ‘give him a son!’ (PJ, 389). The couple’s two daughters are barely seen: continuation of the patriarchal line is essential. In this narrative of conservatism and capital, the countryside needs urgent modernisation, signified in part by that same Thames journey. War precipitates a break from normal trading rules, and Peter is scathing about the ‘contemptible cry of “business as usual”’ (PJ, 60). He rejects the chance to solve his own wartime business problems by profiteering,35 and stoically endures the decline of his business. With only an aged partner and an unmarried secretary to drive the business, the office of Jackson’s ‘seemed like a tomb now – all the life gone out of it’ (PJ, 244). Capitalism is driven by mature masculinity, and business is analogous with family, the patriarch needed as provider. Once Peter ceases to see money as ‘the measure of success in his career’, he is able to embrace introspection, thoughtfulness and reason (PJ, 251). This allows him to control his shell shock and develop his capitalist principles; money might not be a measure of success, but it remains a driving force. Frankau later made clear his worship of money: ‘To me, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Pierpont Morgan were far bigger heroes than Lord Roberts or Lord Kitchener.’36 Only ‘half a generation among townsfolk’ qualifies Peter to change traditional methods in



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the name of progress to ensure the farm’s profitability (PJ, 379). Attempts to value rural traditions precisely align with a developing cultural representation of the countryside as a commodity for leisure.37 As suburbs develop, urban modernity extends further into the rural, non-urban life becomes idealised, and traditional artisan methods are fetishised. Collingwood later argues that the ‘decay of taste roughly corresponds with the decline of English agriculture and the predominance of industrial interests in the country.’38 However, in this novel Peter believes that modernisation leads to progress and profit: Already, Capital had begun its revivifying influence. Old man Tebbits’ tumbledown milking-sheds existed no longer: instead, were clean stables of brick and tile, spotless pails and sterilised pans. Useless wooden structures, harbourage of rats, had been pulled down. […] Charlie Tebbits had rebuilt and enlarged old man Tebbits’ insanitary pigsties. A tractor-plough phutted in the fields. (PJ, 392)

Money is lifegiving, and the dirt of country life is modernised away while motorised machinery takes the place of people; Frankau retains a Cobdenite belief in the possibility that Free Trade is the antidote to war, put forth similarly by Angell before the war.39 Parfitt is wrong to claim that ‘the essence of [Frankau’s] England is middle-class metropolitan and even there everything is stereotyped, incapable of change’.40 Change is everywhere in the novel, particularly presented as progress, but Parfitt looks for a different change in which conservative ideas are rejected and the war’s ­ futility asserted. Frankau continued to believe in England and capital, and tried to profit from disseminating this viewpoint in Britannia (1928), as reactionary a journal as its title suggests. Douglas Jerrold, a rightwing commentator himself, suggested that it bordered on Fascist for its extreme conservatism.41 That venture failed, but the continuing enchantment of progress combined with the old enchantment of the love story made Frankau a bestseller. Similar novels such as Wilfred Ewart’s Way of Revelation (1921) appealed to popular sentiment but did not deny the horrors of war. Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant shows wounding in war, both mental and physical, but does not extrapolate the problem to the wider world. To see the war leading to recovery and progress, despite the protagonist’s wounding, showed that a knightly, Christian narrative was not yet dead.

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Cicely Hamilton is the antithesis of Gilbert Frankau: their war novels are opposing responses to industrial unrest. Frankau was an old Etonian Tory, but Hamilton was a radical feminist, well-known as a provocative dramatist and polemicist and a celebrity in the suffrage movement.42 In Marriage as a Trade (1909) she argues that women should not be thought of solely as wives and mothers, but in terms of their own drives and desires. She complains of men like Frankau, for whom ‘womanhood is summed up in one of its attributes – wifehood, or its unlegalized equivalent’, and attacks the stereotypes of woman as fickle, incomprehensible and in need of male support.43 However, she takes pains not to criticise marriage as an institution; her pre-war novel Just to Get Married (1911) addressed similar issues.44 She saw suffrage as an early challenge to values shaken further by the war, and titled a 1910 speech ‘The Disillusionment of Man’.45 She wrote later: ‘I believe that for a time I struggled against my disillusion – but then came the war, and my disillusion was complete.’46 Hamilton supported the war effort once it started, serving with the Scottish women’s ambulance unit as an administrator; she later drew on her experience as an actress and dramatist to entertain troops.47 She published a variety of journalism including an impressionistic account of the hardships suffered by the small town of Senlis (1917), addressing civilian experience in France as well as the military.48 Hamilton suggests that socialism and feminism in their pre-war forms need to be reshaped for the post-war world. The war dampened her idealism, although her commitment to equality remained. She wrote that when ‘you have once accepted the possibility that your civilization is heading for destruction, it is almost inevitable that you will slip into indifference towards many ideas and interests and activities that would otherwise have seemed to you ­important’.49 This concern is seen in William—An Englishman (1919), the story of a young clerk whose small inheritance on the death of his controlling mother leads to his engagement with socialism and to a firebrand young feminist, Griselda. Indeed, Hamilton considered the novel as much about suffrage as war.50 The title of the novel draws on Hamilton’s association with the suffrage periodical The Englishwoman (1909–21).51 The kinship of the two causes is demonstrated by the birth of the Workers’ Socialist Federation out of the suffrage movement in the east end of London, as Sylvia Pankhurst rejected her mother and sister’s endorsement of war.52



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Socialism was a contemporary issue, but one which challenged ingrained values and operated at the bounds of acceptability.53 In William—An Englishman the pre-war world tolerates enthusiastic and provocative dissent. William and Griselda understand their pre-war disenchantments in terms of warfare: when she is ejected from the theatre for protesting, he consoles her: ‘Remember this is War – God knows it’s horrible, but we must not shrink from it’ (Wm, 35). The physical force of her ejection anticipates the greater hardships to come. The disillusionment of the protagonists is the focus for the novel, but the narrative is atypical. Married on 23 July 1914, the day of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, they take their honeymoon in the depths of the Belgian Ardennes, where their comical inability to speak the language and unwillingness to see outside their own political position leads to their isolation from rapidly unfolding events around them. They start to see the countryside as an unappreciated haven, and their passionate antimilitarism leads them to downplay the ominous appearance of a freshly dug grave and the disappearance of the family with whom they were staying: ‘Unknowing of the wild fury that in its scathing of the civilized world was shattering their most cherished illusions, they sought in vain for an explanation’ (Wm, 68–9). They desire the shattering of civilisation but not on these terms; the need to obey military orders curbs their instincts for rebellion. Wartime thought is necessarily conservative and nationalistic; other concerns become secondary in the defence of existing dominant systems and structures. Spengler’s assessment of socialism is pertinent: it ‘owes its popularity only to the fact that it is completely misunderstood even by its exponents, who present it as a sum of the Kantian imperative, a slackening instead of a tautening of directional energy’ (DW, 1, 351). While their analysis of the interests behind the war is astute, William and Griselda’s idealism makes them underestimate the durability of systems against which they agitate; the war led Hamilton to believe firmly in the aggression of human nature.54 In wartime, theory gives way to pragmatism. This shift recalls Hamilton’s pre-war involvement with Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, whose slogan was at one point ‘Deeds not Words!’55 Hamilton debated internally the respective value of militancy and constitutional suffragism.56 The war does violence to women and civilians as well as fighting troops, and in the novel the possibility of negotiation ends with Griselda’s

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brutal rape and murder by the German Army. She and William are separated when captured, and in captivity she is raped by her jailer, though ‘the animal details, her cries and her pitiful wrestlings’ are left to the imagination (Wm, 128). As his wife is violated, William is forced ‘for the first time in all his days […] to bend his back and use his muscles in downright labour of the body’ (Wm, 110). Both their bodies are used by enemy troops in the capitalist war. Shortly after Griselda is returned to William, terrified and dishevelled, she is run over by a motorbike and suffers a drawn-out, agonising death. Her death represents Hamilton’s disenchantment with pre-war idealism and the snuffing out of this version of the challenge to patriarchy. Harriett Blodgett sees her as ‘emotionally and physically destroyed by her encounter with real war instead of the play war of politics’.57 When William returns to London and meets his former associates he symbolises the necessary physicality of war: ‘In the face of the fact that was William their theories wilted and failed them’ (Wm, 204). Once war has been experienced physically idealism cannot be sustained and William becomes ‘a man disillusioned, in whom the imaginings of his pre-soldier days had died as completely as his faith in his pre-war creed’ (Wm, 238). Montague makes a similar point in his depiction of Victor in his novel Rough Justice (1926), whose fine words are no longer potent in war: rhetoric is overtaken by action.58 To stand apart from the crowd in wartime still seems an untenable position in 1919. William’s pre-war beliefs and experience of the war mean that he is fuelled by bitterness. Even when the physical requirements have been lowered far enough for the diminutive William to enlist, he finds himself unsuited to commit violence and forced to revert to administration. This heightens his disenchantment: ‘Few men could feel pride in the labour of dealing with daily official communications – the duty of copying out vain repetitions and assisting in the waste of good paper’ (Wm, 220–1). The falsehood of official narratives is implied, along with the futility of obsessive documentation when every action leaves bodily and physical traces. He does not wish to stop fighting: ‘He was still in his heart a soldier, even though a soldier disillusioned; his weariness of the military machine, his personal grievance against it, were not to be compared to the fiery conversion that had followed on the outbreak of war. The one concerned matters of detail only; the other his fundamental faith’ (Wm, 239). Despite his extreme disenchantment, William continues to believe it is right to serve, although



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based on personal enmity rather than duty to the nation. He rejects duty and doing one’s best as differentiating factors between men in a deathbed conversation with a chaplain, and concludes: ‘The question is … if you’ve been much use when you’ve done it’ (Wm, 250). He still seeks individual action and agency, and refuses the notion of contributing to the wider war effort as significant. His disdain for convention means that he dies a lonely death: ‘He was buried without mourners, save those detailed for the duty; who, none the less, stiffened in salute of his coffin and called him farewell on the bugle. His death, duly entered in the hospital books, was reported to the Casualty Department; and the Graves Registration clerks took note of his burial and filed it for possible enquiries’ (Wm, 250). Mourning is reduced to a mechanical performance, and the burial of his body is followed by the burial of paper traces, the ‘waste of good paper’ to which he had been forcibly returned. Hamilton’s novel demonstrates clearly the difficulties of reconciling vital pre-war enchantments with the realities of post-war Britain. The establishment and / of disenchantment Dissenting positions within the establishment lead to the early expression of disenchantment. Well-connected literary and political figures are able to publish due to their status and facility to express displeasure in accepted language. A. P. Herbert’s The Secret Battle and C. E. Montague’s Disenchantment remain loyal to the institutions questioned. Herbert was educated at Winchester and Oxford, he enlisted in the army and served at Gallipoli and in France. He was a barrister who never practised but agitated for legal reform: his Uncommon Law (1935) satirised the quirks and infelicities of the legal system.59 His main fame was as a humorist, but his first novel, The Secret Battle, addresses the deadly serious subject of the need for reforms of martial law. The secret battle is to master negative emotions and remain dutiful. Samuel Hynes astutely notes that ‘Herbert’s problem was to find a way of retelling this story to an audience that had just lived through four years of martial rhetoric and heroic values, in a way that would make Harry Penrose an understandable, sympathetic character’.60 He achieves this by making Harry, the protagonist, both dissenting and orthodox, and making The Secret Battle ‘the history of a man and not of the war’ (SB, 107). Harry’s atypicality

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allows a conservative reader to see him not as a symbol of problems with the way the war was fought, but an isolated incident within a mostly successful war. Disenchantment is heightened according to location as the narrative moves from Gallipoli to the more populous Western Front, and the unfeeling mechanism of bureaucracy is again criticised. The novel draws on the story of Sub-Lieutenant Edwin Dyett, who was executed for desertion under similar circumstances, a case which was taken up in John Bull and subsequently raised in parliament.61 Herbert’s novel offers a nuanced point of view that has yet to be forced to fit with public and official war narratives. The strength of Harry’s beliefs sets him up for his involuntary expression of disenchantment. He questions the ability of superiors to lead sympathetically and successfully, but Harry never speaks against the system as a whole. The narrator is even-handed, and soon observes that ‘in the actual scenes of war one likes to cling to one’s illusions while any shred of them remains’ (SB, 28). Harry’s attempts to retain his public-school enchantments meet a cynical, logical journalist-turned-soldier: Eustace was never tired of exhibiting the frailty and subterfuge of all men, particularly in their relations to the war; the Nation arrived for him as regularly as the German submarines would allow, and all his views were in that sense distinctly ‘National.’ If any of us were rash enough to read that paper ourselves, we were inevitably provoked to some comment which led to a hot wrangle on the Public Schools, or Kitchener, or the rights of the war, and the pleasant calm of the dusk was marred. For Eustace could always meet us with a powerfully logical case, and while in spirit we revolted against his heresies, we were distressed by the appeal they made to our reluctant reasons. Harry, the most ingenuous of us all and the most devoted to his illusions, was particularly worried by this conflict. (SB, 28)

Herbert directly enacts the battle of reason against the powerful illusions for which many men went to war. The enchantments of duty and physical activity inspire Harry to return to the army on the Western Front after being invalided at Gallipoli: ‘There were no more romantic illusions about war, and, I think, no more military ambitions. Only he was sufficiently rested to be very keen again, and had not yet seen enough of it to be ordinarily bored’ (SB, 114). Enduring hardship strips away only romanticism, not ideals themselves.



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The terrain of the Dardanelles is dangerous but permits individual acts of heroism to shape battles.62 Despite the hardships of heat, dust and dysentery, ‘The Romance of War was in full song. And, scrambling down the cliff, we bathed almost reverently in the Hellespont’ (SB, 20). Harry’s loyalty to classical culture evokes the crossings of the Hellespont by Xerxes and Alexander the Great as they waged war on each other; the proximity to Samothrace recalls the statue of Winged Victory. In the previous century Byron swam the Hellespont, imitating the journey of Leander, and it had been a key passage as the Russian Empire looked to expand. To negotiate the journey to the Western Front by mechanised transport and the mechanisation of men through training contrasts with the approach to Gallipoli by boat. The trenches lack a similar accretion of romance: ‘In France there was a long transition of training-camps and railway trains and billets, and he moved by easy gradations to the firing-line’ (SB, 11). The narrator observes that ‘the Gallipoli Peninsula was never part of the Western Front, and no man came back from that place on leave; lucky, indeed, if he came at all’ (SB, 42). The lack of efficient transport, combined with the greater distance from Britain, adds to the dangers of more open warfare and disease, such as that which killed Rupert Brooke. Peter Hart has firmly removed the romance from the Gallipoli mythology.63 The narrator attempts to shift the historical focus away from understanding the Western Front as the worst type of horror: ‘Every Englishman has a picture of the Somme in his mind and I will not try to enlarge it. […] Yet with all its horror and discomfort and fear that winter was more bearable than the Gallipoli summer. For, at the worst, there was a little respite, spasms of repose’ (SB, 130–1). The mass formations on the Western Front and their corresponding bureaucracy are objects of disenchantment, but they also offer a greater chance to recuperate: rest periods echo distantly paid holidays in working life, a relatively new idea which itself derives from greater administration and the increase in administrative work. This repose does not allow Harry to survive, and the relentlessly regimented rhythm of the Western Front breaks him – shifting between relative safety and seemingly omnipresent danger. Harry’s condition is exacerbated by mechanised warfare. The desire to move away from the falsehoods of wartime propaganda is repeated in late wartime and post-war narratives, but an individual, contextual interpretation of the facts is needed. This problem is

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not precipitated by the war. Conrad describes a similar situation in Lord Jim (1900), in which the title character complains: ‘They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him as if facts could explain anything!’64 Harry’s trial in The Secret Battle is bitterly ironic, as the plain facts lead to his execution. The trial is caused by petty vendettas pursued against him. He is reported by the jealous Burnett to the jobsworth Philpott for cowardice, despite the fact that Burnett was sheltering from the bombardment. To compound the situation, Burnett’s resentment results from humiliation due to Harry’s bravery. However, Burnett has progressed through the ranks while Harry has been invalided: the court-martial critiques the system itself and the sort of people who progress. Implicit is that the upper echelons are not fit to judge. The narrator comments tersely that ‘they had not seen too much war’ (SB, 202). The jury is not of peers but of superiors – by rank if not moral – and Military Law accepts no mitigation: interpretation is nothing next to fact. The narrator does not explicitly criticise the judges themselves, but specialism within the army does not allow them to understand through experience and the need for uniformity does not allow them to show sympathy: ‘They conceived that their duty was “laid down in The Book,” to look at the “hard facts,” and no further. And the “hard facts” were very hard’ (SB, 203). However, reality does not simply equal fact: emotional and physical experience is just as much a part. Jerrold sees the end of the novel as the failure of ‘good descriptive journalism’, ‘an unfortunate departure’ from ‘that great romance’ of the early days of the war which precedes it.65 This is both the point and misses the point: he seems to have no appreciation of pathos or irony. In 1919 military service is still valued and its procedures respected. The narrator tells us, in conclusion: This book is not an attack on any person, on the death penalty, or on anything else, though if it makes people think about these things, so much the better. I think I believe in the death penalty – I do not know. But I did not believe in Harry being shot. That is the gist of it; that my friend Harry was shot for cowardice – and he was one of the bravest men I ever knew. (SB, 215–6)

Hynes asserts that ‘bravery and cowardice are matters of nerves, not of morals’, but the idea of bravery is a social construction which was challenged by the First World War.66 Physical condition(ing) enables the soldier to continue to espouse those enchantments, but



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bravery is not merely physiological; the idea of nerves was only beginning to develop, and contributes to changing ideas about heroism. Hynes claims that Harry is ‘not a hero in the traditional sense, but a victim, a man things are done to; in his war world, heroism is simply not a relevant term’.67 Traditional heroism does not endure, but it remains relevant: Harry’s awareness of his failure to live up to military ideals causes his decline, and those ideals define heroism. The war changes heroism from daring bravery to stoical endurance: the need to remain stoical can no longer be relieved by catharsis, but repression must continue in the service of the war machine as individuality is eradicated. David Trotter links the slow decay of previous enchantments with the damage to Harry’s nerve and the rotting corpses of the trenches.68 The Secret Battle does not speak against the system but, like later works such as Journey’s End, the trials of the protagonist mean that it is often interpreted as an anti-war text when its rhetoric is ultimately conservative. Between the publication of these novels and Montague’s Disenchantment in February 1922, Britain remained unsettled. Triumphalism and positivity were undercut by the economic and related problems which continued to beset the country. Spending on the war was still a burden: repayments to the US were ongoing and ‘waste’ in the military was under attack.69 Additional pressure on already scarce resources was caused by an outbreak of footand-mouth disease.70 Post-war recovery, development and expansion were encouraged by Britain remaining off the Gold Standard; when the system was reinstated in 1925 deflation followed, as John Maynard Keynes had predicted.71 The reintegration of returning combatants into the turbulent labour market was a continuing problem. The number of unemployed peaked at over two million in 1921, and the Daily Mail was still reporting that ‘two million men are out of work’ a week before the publication of Raymond’s and Montague’s volumes.72 This issue was neatly summarised by a letter to The Times of 4 February 1920, signed ‘Ex-Battery Commander’: ‘On leave from the Front we were welcome and honoured guests […] In mufti we were no longer heroes, we were simply “unemployed”, an unpleasant problem.’73 Many of those unemployed during demobilisation were ex-servicemen, and returning combatants often felt that they were being denied jobs by the retention of women in the workplace. This has subsequently been disproved statistically,74 but the apparent feminisation of the

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country was felt as a further slight by returning combatants as the proposed ‘fit country for heroes’ refused to become a reality.75 George A. Greenwood, writing around the time Montague completed Disenchantment, believed that the increase in standards of living and education heightened industrial unrest and discontent with unemployment.76 A 1919 article on ‘War and Democracy’ in the Saturday Review, quarried by Montague for Disenchantment, noted that ‘so far from being a land fit for heroes, [England] is still unfit for human habitation.’77 The big, old institutions which enchanted Frankau, Herbert, Montague and Raymond were losing their lustre, and their ability to ensure security and stability. Conditions had developed to a point at which disenchantment could be expressed overtly. Foregrounding disenchantment C. E. Montague was a respected journalist, critic and author before the First World War, but his responses to the conflict are his enduring legacy. He was a questioning, educated Liberal, and his Irish ancestry gave him an alternative perspective on his privileged English education.78 H. G. Wells put it pithily: ‘Montague was a curious mixture of sixth-form Anglican sentimentality (about dear old horses, dearer old doggies, brave women, real gentlemen, the old school, the old country and sound stock: Galsworthyissimus in fact), with a most adventurous intelligence. He was a radical bound, hide bound, in a conservative hide.’79 Montague was on the editorial staff of the Manchester Guardian, the preeminent Liberal newspaper of the day.80 His readership was not extensive, but it was influential: Geoffrey Taylor asserts that he was ‘at that time a celebrated stylist, though his work is too mannered for today’s tastes.’81 This assessment gives modern readers little credit. While Montague’s style is prolix and highfalutin, it is clear and compelling. The combination of Montague’s establishment position and his style, which softens the message, allows him to criticise stridently the way the war was conducted. However, he does not seek a break from existing structures, but looks for reform. Montague was mostly out of step with the Manchester Guardian’s line on the war. Having unpopularly opposed the Boer War, the paper followed the Liberal intellectual tradition of questioning warmongering. Montague initially agreed, and wrote on 4 August



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1914 about ‘the war-feverish condition in which Parliaments sometimes abdicate all their own most imperative duties and most valuable rights and agree off hand to anything that is proposed to them with a portentous air of urgency too deep for words – even a few words of businesslike explanation’.82 War is a disease injurious to anything except official interests, and government is infectious; it is a vicious circle. In the first week Montague wrote about the vital role of the non-combatant, but he soon decided to support the conflict in the interest of a speedy resolution.83 He was consequently isolated within the editorial cohort. C. P. Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian and also Montague’s father-in-law, wrote to L. T. Hobhouse, a correspondent and also professor of sociology at the University of London, about the ‘impossibility of getting any harmony of feeling between what I could write and what Montague had written and was writing’.84 He remained out of step during and after the war; previous harmony was never quite resumed, although he remained on the newspaper’s staff until 1925.85 Even in a Liberal newspaper, Montague was a solitary and sometimes contrary figure. Montague dissented from Liberal orthodoxy to fight, but believed that he was defending chivalry, athleticism and religious faith: those enchantments led him to enlist. However, he faced an immediate problem: he was three years over the initial age limit of 44. Many younger men lied about their age to join the army, and older men sometimes did the same.86 Montague was disadvantaged by his shock of white hair, and H. W. Nevinson later wrote poetically that ‘Montague is the only man I know whose white hair in a single night turned dark through courage’.87 He eventually enlisted in December 1914 with the 24th (Sportsman’s) Battalion, Royal Fusiliers; he was a keen mountaineer, and relished the physicality of the army training (Figure 2.1).88 This Battalion had a high number of older volunteers, who often shared the same enchantments, derived from an educational and social background which inculcated the ethos of bravery and chivalry. This made disenchantment almost inevitable. Montague perhaps also experienced a personal disenchantment that he was unable to endure for more than three months in the front line.89 However, the consequent variety of his service gave him a wide range of experience on which to draw. He experienced the dangers of front-line service, the frustrations of being behind the lines, and as Intelligence Officer conversed with

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Figure 2.1  C. E. Montague (second from left) with group outside ‘Hut 17’, 1915

civilian visitors, giving him a rare insight into a variety of different viewpoints (Figure 2.2). Disenchantment is an extended prose work, but it did not begin as such. During the war, like most authors who served in the conflict, Montague found little time to write creatively, although he produced official journalism.90 Montague was a complex thinker, and to explore this war fully required extended narratives. The problem of composition remained for him after the war. Disenchantment takes an unusual form. It is roughly chronological but without an obvious protagonist or plot, neither explicitly factual nor fictional; Mark D. Larabee calls it a ‘polemic memoir’.91 The form betrays its origins, expanded and revised from Manchester Guardian leader articles; it was marketed by Chatto and Windus as ‘belle-lettrist’. It is, therefore, an extended Liberal commentary on the war and the nation, coloured by the events which followed it and in a genealogy of disenchantment from Masterman’s pre-war work to George Dangerfield’s seminal The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935). Hynes asks ‘Why was it delayed so long?’, and answers that ‘the post-war world had to take form before Montague could set down the whole process of loss’.92 This is not true. The pieces which comprise the volume were written in those turbulent years. Arnold



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Figure 2.2  C. E. Montague, 1917

Bennett wrote to praise Montague on the volume, but complained that he had already read much of it.93 The delay is in their collection as a sequence and adaptation to make a unified whole. However, Montague believed he was operating at the extremes of what it was acceptable to say: ‘The real books on the war are only beginning. All that has passed away is the war’s journalism, its discants and fanfaronades, its base or jolly falsifications.’94 That much had previously been published in shorter form permits the strident critique. Montague still believed that the war needed to be won: ‘While so many things were shaken one thing that held fast was the men’s will to win. It may have changed from the first lyric-hearted enthusiasm. But it was a dour and inveterate will. At the worst most of the men fully meant to go down killing for all they were worth’ (Dis, 49).

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Too much time and energy had been invested in the war to countenance defeat, and a focus on regeneration and recovery would come after the war. The need to carry on is asserted in simple, single-clause sentences. The terse form makes the conservative analysis immediate, particularly compared with Montague’s typical prolixity. The necessity of victory is repeatedly emphasised: ‘This war had to be won; that was flat. It was like putting out houses on fire, or not letting children be killed; it did not even need to be proved; that we had got to win was now the one quite certain thing left in a world of shaken certainties’ (Dis, 75). War is aligned with the pathos of domestic tragedy and the security of family ties. Even as previously solid institutions start to crumble, the drive towards victory must not be impeded. Auberon, the protagonist of the later novel Rough Justice, reinforces this view (RJ, 217–18), but Montague’s attitude is perhaps summed up by Auberon’s father, Thomas Garth: ‘The English world that he loved, and believed in, seemed now to be failing, and failing first at the top’ (RJ, 49). The bravery of the fighting troops is contrasted with poor leadership, as the pyramid threatens to collapse. Despite its title, Montague’s work leaves open the possibility of re-enchantment. Montague’s measured, complex syntax allows him to present an interconnected range of problems within a subtle argument. However, this means at times that criticism is masked by expression. A. C. Ward, an early critic, recognised that ‘his literary urbanity softened the attack’.95 The polysyllabic lyricism contrasts markedly with the bitterly terse prose which appeared at the end of the decade. Montague sometimes elaborates to a fault: Imagine the headquarters Staff of a district command watching a test for battalion bombing officers and sergeants at the close of a divisional bombing course in 1915: the instructor in charge a quickwitted Regular N. C. O. who has shone at Loos and is now decorated, commissioned, slightly shell-shocked, and sent home to teach, full of the new craft and subtlety of trench war; the pupils all picked for the job and devouringly keen, half of them old cricketers, all able-bodied, and now all able, after hard practice during the course, to drop a bomb on to any desired square yard within thirty-five yards of their stance; and then the Staff, tropically dazzling in their red and gold, august beyond words, but genial, benign, encouraging, only too ready to praise things that they would see to be easy if only they knew more about them and were not like middle-aged mothers watching



From hope to Disenchantment, 1919–22 99 their offspring at football – so a profane bombing sergeant describes them that night to his mess. (Dis, 42)

This 168-word sentence with its nineteen punctuation marks is exceptional, but it shows how Montague’s style enables his cutting critique. It also emphasises why he was critically rather than popularly acclaimed. In this single sentence, Montague addresses many recurrent themes of First World War fiction. He talks about the training camps of the early days of the war; the Regular Army’s hostility to enlisted men, and the often-corresponding staff officers against fighting troops; the iniquities of modern warfare; the public school ethos and sporting values. Montague was wary about entitling the volume Disenchantment, and the manuscript revisions show that he deleted the word several times.96 The direct title gives a misleadingly strong idea of its contents; I find Peter Buitenhuis’s assertion that it ‘is perhaps the bleakest expression of disillusionment’ difficult to countenance.97 Brian Bond states that he ‘remained intensely patriotic and proud of Manchester’s contribution to victory, but regretted the loss of idealism during the war, the harsh terms of the peace with Germany and the cynical atmosphere in post-war England’.98 Like Herbert, Montague does not question the right of existing institutions to rule, but he demands that lessons be learnt from the war. The best aspects of the pre-war world remain important in reshaping the world after the war. The cynical professionalism of the Regular Army damages the innocence of enlistment and the training camp for Montague. Where Raymond and Ian Hay continue to look back fondly, to Montague: ‘It seems hardly credible now, in this soured and quarrelsome country and time, that so many men of different classes and kinds, thrown together at random, should ever have been so simply and happily friendly, trustful, and keen. But they were, and they imagined their betters were too. That was the paradise the bottom fell out of’ (Dis, 12). The fractious post-war world is ­separated from the early war by time and experience. The imagination of many was shaped by adventure stories, but those representations of war were difficult to reconcile with life and death on the Western Front. Reverence for hierarchy is disenchanted by the apparent failures both of military leadership and government, and the classless utopia of enlistment is unsustainable once the new group is forced to fit existing military

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structures.99 The  ­experiential bond of enlisted men retains some power, but enthusiastic a­ mateurism c­ ontrasts with the fact that for the Regular Army military service was already work. Combatants become wise to the danger of the front line: ‘In the training-camps in 1914 the safe working presumption about any unknown man was that he only wanted to get at the enemy as soon as he could. Now the working presumption […] is that a man wants to stay in, out of the rain, as long as you let him’ (Dis, 65). The enthusiasm of enlistment becomes diluted by the compulsion of conscription, and the training camps become hiding places. However, to see the war as futile would cheapen military service. He acknowledges the plurality of wartime experience: ‘There were many men who liked it wholly’ (Dis, 85). For some, enchantments are not eradicated or even challenged. Extreme solutions are unpalatable to the idealistic and inquisitive Montague: ‘Few of our disenchanted men doubt that the lightning cure of the Communist is only just another version of the lightning cure of the Tory, the authoritarian, the peremptory regimentalist’ (Dis, 201–2). Montague suggests that ‘when a man enlisted during the war he found himself living the life of the common man in a Communist State’. It is, however, a despotic socialism led by greedy, weak rulers. Soldiers abdicate responsibility to these rulers and become ‘ex-Economic Man, or Economic Man popped off all the hooks that had fastened him into a place in the system called capitalistic by those who least admire it’ (both Dis, 84). War is inseparable from capitalism, but Montague understands combatant experience as a release from that world. Communism is here an unsustainable position for Britain. Hamilton also suggested that ‘in the war we lived very largely the collective, the socialist life; and one of the salient facts that emerged was that there are very few people who can be trusted to deal honestly with property held in common.’100 Disenchantment is a combatant condition for Montague, and must be resolved by moderate Liberal reform. The overpowering of individual agency by calculable warfare is a key factor in Montague’s disenchantment. War is still principled, but ‘when armies are millions of men, and machinery counts for more than the men, the few divine accidents of exceptional valour cannot go far’ (Dis, 156). Mechanisation subsumes individual quality and reduces the possibility for divine intervention; chivalry atrophies. There are few ways to stand out:



From hope to Disenchantment, 1919–22 101 What are the two armies’ and the two nations’ relative numbers? What is the mean physique on each side? And the mean intelligence? How far has each nation’s history – social, political, religious, industrial – tended to make its men rich in just pride, self-reliance, high spirit, devotion, and hardihood? How many per cent on each side have been sapped by venereal disease? How much of their work have its officers troubled to learn? These are the questions. The more men you have in a war, and the longer it lasts, the more completely has it to lose the romance of a glorious gamble and sink – or, as some would say, rise – to the plane of a circumstantial, matter-of-fact liquidation of whatever relative messes the nations engaged have made of the whole of their previous lives. (Dis, 157)

Montague believes that the cumulative social history of the nation, including its wars, contributes to the construction of the abstract enchantments which he values. However, everything must be quantified to achieve victory in modern war. Romance is not shared but diluted. Moral weaknesses which lead to venereal disease hinder, and are counted only to be disregarded, implicitly endorsing contemporary eugenic practices. The involvement of large numbers in war does not improve the way it is conducted, but reduces it to calculability. Montague perhaps puns on ‘mean’ as a synonym for scant, or ungenerous, as well as highlighting the victory of the average. Elitist discourse is applied to the experience of war, and the power of nations is further than ever from the individual. Montague continued to write about the war in Fiery Particles (1923), a collection of short stories, and his war novel Rough Justice demonstrates the conflict between pre-war enchantments and post-war disenchantments. The novel uses an adapted family saga structure similar to Ford’s series and Aldington’s Death of a Hero. The manuscript shows, however, that the pre-war section of the novel is an afterthought, roughed out in a mere five pages, compared to notes and drafts for the war section which run to hundreds of sheets.101 The public-school narrative is merely a generic frame that gestures to the enchantments being re-evaluated. In previous narratives the trials and tribulations of public school life overtly equip the protagonists to serve nation and empire. Here, the protagonist Auberon questions the direct analogy of sport with war, in a moment of self-analysis: ‘As if people played Rugger to kill! Or as if a good boat-race were torture, and all the crews martyrs!’ (RJ, 129) Sporting prowess is no longer necessarily heroic, and glory in

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martyrdom is impossible in this war – there are too many martyrs for the individual to be fetishised. War is not a game, and the serious amateurism of sports and the training camp, which Auberon relishes, gives way to the dreary professionalism of the modern Army and the reality of war. The individual’s place in the war machine means that death also comes as a mundane result of mechanical processes. Auberon’s father, Thomas Garth, represents Montague’s older self, and the decision of his son and friends to volunteer leaves him with a sense of foreboding: ‘Garth had no hope. Our jolly little sporting wars were over. This would be scientific killing, on the grand scale – a herding of millions of the young of Europe into model abbatoirs, like the pigs at the Chicago factories.’ (RJ, 223) Death becomes workaday, as wearyingly repetitive as cleaning and eating (RJ, 314–15). The best young men of a generation are dehumanised, and D. H. Lawrence also describes the ways men become ‘meat and bones’ in war (LCL, 107). The reconsideration of death and its representation in war fiction was echoed in novels appearing in the same year by Mottram and Ford, discussed in Chapter 4, and stretched readerly expectations to include more vivid depictions of the front line. Daniel Pick likens the systems of the Western Front to the modern abbatoir,102 and this image is repeated in the ­description of Auberon’s wounding: Auberon felt the whizzing thing graze his left hip, and when he looked down he saw a hand lying on the ground, with its raw end like a sheep’s severed neck at a butcher’s door. Things strike you queerly; Auberon gave a foolish little laugh when he saw that the palm he had washed that morning was now that futile thing, so absurdly thrown out of its working relations with him and everything else. (RJ, 298)

The narration carries on the image of butchery and the abbatoir, and is remarkable for its ferocity. The intersection of progress in weaponry and in medicine meant that amputations were more common than ever before and ‘created a new constituency of d ­isabled people’.103 Previously published fictional works had rarely, if at all, dealt with death, mutilation, or amputation. The graphic depiction of injury in warfare would become the norm by the end of the decade, but the presentation of the act of mutilation as it happened saw Montague again testing the horizon of expectations. Disfigurement is quickly followed by happy ending, as Auberon d ­ iscovers that the



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woman raised as his sister is adopted, enabling them to marry and moving forward by returning to muscular Christianity. Montague explicitly links the Armistice with disenchantment. The joy brought by the ‘last happy thrill of the war’, is tempered by the cost at which it has come: ‘What a victory it might have been – the real, the Winged Victory, chivalric, whole and unstained! The bride that our feckless wooing had sought and not won in the generous youth of the war had come to us now: an old woman, or dead, she no longer refused us’ (both Dis, 178). Montague looks back to antiquity to represent the ideal victory which might have been won earlier and, as Ana Carden-Coyne argues, ‘the classical body informed western identity, celebrating the beauty of muscularity as the exemplar of unity and wholeness’.104 Ironically, the statue of Winged Victory (Nike of Samothrace) held by the Louvre is incomplete, missing its head and a wing: Montague’s allusion highlights the inability of classical ideals of beauty to endure in modernity, and draws the parallel with Auberon’s amputated hand. Four years after the Armistice, Montague’s narrator tells us that ‘now the marred triumph would leave us jaded and disillusioned, divided, half bankrupt; sneerers at lofty endeavour, and yet not the men for the plodding of busy and orderly peace; bilious with faiths and enthusiasms gone sour in the stomach’ (Dis, 176). Victory in the war came at an immense cost and the Armistice offered little relief. The souring of faith in the values of the public-school ethos leads, for Montague, to a lack of drive for successful reconstruction, and an underlying sense that these deteriorations will lead to the failure of the peace. The war is viewed throughout Disenchantment from the ‘general post-war condition of apathy, callousness and lassitude’ (Dis, 66), in which the ‘common man’ is ‘sane in his disenchantment’ (Dis, 205). Paul Edwards argues that ‘Disenchantment is as much symptom as diagnosis, for it is itself disenchanted and resorts a little desperately to the values and culture Montague seems to know cannot be resurrected’.105 The disenchantment of the post-war world starts to permeate representations of the conflict which defined it. Montague’s concerns about the overuse of the title word are echoed in reviews of his work. Although his prose style was praised, the content of the book was criticised in several quarters. Orlo Williams, reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement, asserted that ‘apart from the aesthetic pleasure which all readers must derive from the writings of such a master of English, we

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confess to being uncertain whether the digestion of these gloomy pages will be of great benefit to anybody’. He summarised succinctly: ‘This is a book which certainly does not belie its title.’106 The Daily Telegraph reviewer praised the style and ability to ask difficult questions;107 S. P. B. Mais, in the Daily Express, commented that Montague was ‘usually a most diverting artist’ but, reviewing Disenchantment alongside a work on man’s failure to adapt to the machine age, noted that ‘neither of these two clever Cassandras can do more than wail their jeremiads. Can we really help matters by merely facing the facts? Surely some sort of action is necessary as well.’108 Reviews of the book certainly found it hard to look past the title, and it seems the reading public did too. Grieves comments that Montague’s ‘readership […] was committed rather than extensive’: sales of Disenchantment were steady but unspectacular, reaching around 6500 by the end of March 1925.109 The audience that did read Disenchantment, however, included opinion-formers, literary and public figures who shaped the development of post-war prose. John Masefield praised it as wise and hopeful in the Manchester Guardian,110 and Arnold Bennett, H. W. Nevinson, George Bernard Shaw and H. M. Tomlinson all wrote to Montague offering high praise.111 Only a month later Montague wrote to Nevinson that: ‘I simply crave for any praise of it from people who have seen the war and who understand – partly as a sort of glycerine to put on my skin where it’s chapped by letters from the kind of Regular Army man who is honestly puzzled that anyone should say such nasty things about him and his friends.’112 However, the critical reception of the book did not stop Montague’s writing on the war. Disenchantment was far from the dominant way of understanding the war. Rough Justice was significantly more popular, coming in a recognisable literary form and offering a happy ending of sorts. It was a closer cousin to the bestsellers of Frankau and Raymond, but with a more complex narrative about the harsh impact of war and the difficulties of recovery. Its success was assisted by the increasing interest in war fiction. While not a runaway success, the novel sold over 10,000 copies in its first two months of publication, and continued to sell well in its first year.113 The novel was widely praised, and Arthur Waugh, in the Daily Telegraph, wrote that it contained ‘a valiant confidence in the holy spirit of man’.114 Montague’s position as an established writer and a known figure



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in British letters meant that once the climate for reception of more questioning novels about the war started to become less hostile, his work was able to find a significant popular readership. England’s glory (continued) The First World War is often seen as a tipping point in the slow secularisation of the nation. Weber, Spengler and Collingwood all uphold spirituality and religion, and Weber in particular bemoans that rationalism leaves no room for wonder. Before the war, Masterman quotes approvingly the Bishop of Birmingham on suburban people: ‘Their religious opinions are in complete chaos’, and Masterman observes the ‘ebbing vitality’ and ‘disintegrating process’ (CE, 89). His friend Ford Madox Ford later commented succinctly that ‘Christianity as a faith died a few days after the 4th of August, 1914’.115 However, Richard Aldington shows the difficulty of dissociation from religious principles in Death of a Hero (1929). On enlisting the protagonist, Winterbourne, tells an orderly: ‘I haven’t any official religion. You’d better put me down as a rationalist.’ He is tersely reminded of the ever-present danger of death on the Western Front and the need for memorialisation, implicitly for the mourners as much as the dead: ‘Bloody well find one, then. Yer’ll want suthin’ over yer fuckin’ grave in France, won’t yer? […] No religion! Strike me fuckin’ pink!’ (DH, 239). Religion has become a residual performance for the orderly; he shows no enthusiasm for its ability to offer hope and consolation in the face of danger. Alan Wilkinson argues that in the First World War ‘a shared death had become more important than a shared religion’.116 However, that residual performance remained powerful. While some writers started to question the way the war had been conducted, there was still a popular appetite for novels which used a Christian narrative structure and showed the value of religious faith. Ernest Raymond’s Tell England (1922) reinforces the importance of heroism, honour, courage and physical exertion as a form of moral improvement. Modris Eksteins claims the inadequacy of existing modes, but Hugh Cecil observes that ‘book for book, the British public over a thirty-year period (i. e. from the beginning of the 1920s to the end of the 1940s) seem to have preferred the patriotic to the disenchanted type of war book’.117 Just as it had been seen as glorious and purgative by some initially, so the association of

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military service with honour continued.118 Raymond’s novel shows little desire to question existing enchantments. Its ability to reassure made it the most popular war novel of the 1920s. Spengler suggested that a ‘creation is “popular” that gives itself with all its secrets to the first comer at the first glance[,] that incorporates its meaning in its exterior and surface’ (DW, 1, 326). While this is not the case for Frankau, as I have demonstrated above, it is more difficult to defend Tell England from such charges. A heartfelt genre fiction in the tradition of G. A. Henty and Percy F. Westerman, it epitomises the war novel which is now seen as outmoded. The publication of the first of Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories in the same year reveals the public’s appetite for adventure. It is testament to the fact that, as Masterman wrote before the war, there ‘may remain, in the memory of a more exacting age to come, a pleasant recollection of those who upheld, in time of tranquility, a standard of manners and a tradition of kindliness, duty, and courage before life’s lesser ills’ (CE, 66). Raymond, a public school educated clergyman, uses terms which bridge sporting and military discourse and characterise the public school ethos, while also showing the lasting effects of the war on the novelistic vocabulary. The protagonist Rupert Ray describes his progression through Kensingtowe, the public school he attends, by telling us that ‘Time carried us a year nearer the Great War’ (TE, 91), and he describes his relationship with his house master as ‘War, then, war, open or understood!’ (TE, 49). The analogy for war is cricket, and the end of Ray’s school career is described in the chapter headed ‘The Great Match’, beginning with the ominous words ‘The next year was 1914’ (TE, 142). The following chapter aligns the events more explicitly: ‘It was on the day when those two pistol-shots were fired at an Austrian Archduke in the streets of Serajevo that the Masters’ match was played out at Kensingtowe. By the early evening the reverberation of the revolver reports had been felt like an earthquake-shock in all the capitals of Europe; and in a failing light the last wicket had fallen at Kensingtowe’ (TE, 155). The relatively tiny movements of the shooting cause a seismic reaction, whose impact is felt by the quintessential Englishness of cricket, which symbolises fair play: the war is just ‘not cricket’ but supersedes it. The echoes of Newbolt’s ‘Vitaï Lampada’ are transparent: ‘Ten to make and the match to win – / […] An hour to play and the last man in.’119 The public school ethos was important to many volunteers and officers and, even for those who did not



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­ ecessarily subscribe to its tenets, its language was the dominant n discursive form of the war. Radley, the cricketing Master, talks of the young men having ‘a head full of glittering illusions’ (TE, 158), and Ray’s comment on the start of the war emphasises the initial misapprehension as to its character: ‘Oh, what fun! We’ll give ’em no end of a thrashing. I hate Germans’ (TE, 162). Dennis W. Allen points out the ‘emphasis on the values of sport and physical fitness, and the continual descriptions of cricket matches, rugby scrummages, and foot races’ in Victorian public school and muscular Christian novels.120 However, the simplistic expression used here, child-like to the point of childishness, shows illusion simply as innocence; these illusions are interrogated increasingly as the post-war decade progresses, and become seen as complex, enduring social constructions which must be reshaped to avoid another war. In Tell England death is still a form of martyrdom. Raymond’s novel introduces the issue of death, but still champions enthusiastically and explicitly the formative experience of the public schools. Hynes’s assertion that the novel ‘breaks into two quite independent parts, divided at the war’s beginning’ cannot hold; it is more the case that, as he later comments, ‘schoolboyish patriotism never leaves the book’.121 The need for consolation meant that the narrative of sacrifice in a worthy cause was not yet consistently questioned. The book is set in Gallipoli and, like The Secret Battle, uses the model of the edited memoir of a deceased comrade. Aldington also uses the structure from Greek tragedy in Death of a Hero. The claim for editing also heightens the claims to realism, as in Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands before the war. The muscular Christian rituals of Kensingtowe make death an aspiration. Ray is envisioned in the novel in ‘a picturesque and rather heroic position’ (TE, 31), and has ‘the pride and the relish of the martyr’ (TE, 47). His friend Doe also has to ‘choose whether […] he should gratify his desire for glory, or by a martyr’s silence he should give himself the satisfaction of playing a fine hero’ (TE, 88). Ray acquiesces to the necessity of death, and states on the penultimate page of the novel that ‘I see a death in No Man’s Land to-morrow as a wonderful thing’ (TE, 319). The portrayal of glorious death was a major casualty of the development of war literature through the decade, but those enchantments exist, and indeed thrive in wartime – even in many theorists whose apparent focus is disenchantment.122 Ray’s is an explicitly Christian narrative, and his death at Gallipoli is

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justified with the implicit reward of a place in heaven. Death is sentimentalised, and its description conspicuously avoided; mourning remains taboo in popular fiction even after it becomes officially ceremonialised. The repression of mourning is in line with ideals of English stoicism. When Rupert tries to grieve at the death of Doe, he is told by Padre Monty that ‘there’s only one unbeautiful thing about his death, and that is the way his friend is taking it’. (TE, 299) Rupert is soon persuaded by Monty’s dogma: There’s beauty in thinking that the same material which goes to make these earthy hills and that still water should have been shaped into a graceful body, and lit with the divine spark which was Edgar Doe. There’s beauty in thinking that, when the unconquerable spark has escaped away, the material is returned to the earth, where it urges its life, also an unconquerable thing, into grass and flowers. It’s ­harmonious – it’s beautiful. (TE, 299)

This statement of redemption and rebirth for deaths in service negates Rupert’s momentary resistance to the Christian narrative, and re-engages him. Alex Vernon suggests that military chaplains face a moral dilemma, but there is little conflicting emotion in Tell England.123 Where Macaulay and Hamilton can only see mourning as partial consolation, here it can still bring beauty and harmony, and the terms used echo Matthew Arnold’s desire for ‘sweetness and light’.124 Fears and self-doubts are worked out by the physicality of sporting and then military exertion, but once the Armistice is declared no displacement activity exists, and no method remains to alleviate doubts. Nordau rejects the secularisation of modernity (Deg, 530), and it is clear that a majority still derives consolation from religious belief in the years following the war. Jay Winter sees the endurance of traditional forms as a coping strategy and a way of mourning.125 As fiction about the conflict becomes more critical, the narrative of virtue in life leading to reward in death in the form of acceptance into heaven is disrupted, and increasingly rejected. In the immediate post-war period there is a variety of competing voices, and the dominant understanding of the war remains through hegemonic systems. Religion continues to console, capital can revivify, army service is worthwhile. The spate of regimental histories emphasises the need for official, justificatory narratives, the best-known perhaps being Kipling’s A History of the Irish Guards (1923). I cannot agree with Samuel Hynes’s claim that ‘though the



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anti-war myth of the war had come to dominate post-war English thinking, it had not entirely displaced the other, early-war one. It was still possible, in 1922, to quote Rupert Brooke and the Waggon Hill lines without irony – possible, that is, if you were Ernest Raymond.’126 It was possible for many more than Raymond. The runaway success of Tell England, and the continuing sales of novels like Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant, shows clearly that the mood of disenchantment had yet to take popular hold. Escapism was as much a focus as processing wartime experience, exemplified by the success of E. M. Hull’s The Sheik (1919), which had over 100 editions in four years, not to mention the seminal film starring Hollywood sex symbol Rudolph Valentino.127 Barbara Cartland’s first novel Jig-Saw (1925) was marketed explicitly as an antidote to thoughts about the war and industrial unrest. While the world of letters was starting to elucidate the problems about the war, those who were doing so were operating at the margins of what it was possible to say. These works can hardly be described as anti-war. Even Disenchantment does not decry the value of warfare, but bemoans the post-war state. Popular and conservative works such as Frankau’s and Raymond’s continued to sell, and those which started to express retrospective discontent with the war also reinforced existing structures and paradigms. Critics such as Anne Wright have previously taken 1922 as the end date for a period of crisis; even recently, Jed Esty has talked about the impact of ‘the big blasts of 1914–22’.128 This might be true for canonical works of modernism, but the big blasts about the war and their concomitant excesses were yet to come. Those who had remained outside of the war continued to offer the strongest forms of dissent, and the following two chapters show the increase of disenchantment and its popularity, through key modernist writers D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Ford Madox Ford, and the middlebrow novelist R. H. Mottram. Notes 1 Anon, ‘The Hour of Victory’, Manchester Guardian, 11 November 1918, p. 4. 2 See Andrew Frayn, ‘Armistice Day and a Mythologised, Distant Version of the First World War’, Guardian, 12 November 2011, p. 17. Longer version online at www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/ nov/12/armistice-day-first-world-war (accessed 18 December 2013).

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3 Lloyd George’s speech was given in Wolverhampton on 23 November 1918 and reported in most newspapers one or two days later. See, for example, ‘Mr. Lloyd George on His Task’, The Times, 25 November 1918, p. 13, and the leader comment ‘The Election: Prime Minister on the Issues’, p. 9. For statistics which demonstrate the relative success of this programme see Judy Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life In Britain, 1900–50 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 65–6. Sarah Cole notes that this phrase suggests a problematic separation between country and hero, acknowledging the need for reintegration. Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 190. 4 Woodrow Wilson’s speech in Manchester in December 1918 is quoted by Charles Loch Mowat, Britain Between the Wars: 1918– 1940 (London: Methuen, 1955), p. 1. The Manchester Guardian described Wilson as ‘the leader of the world’s peace’ on 27 December 1918, referring to his enthusiastic public reception in London. 5 See Martin Gilbert, First World War (1994; London: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 508–11, 513–18. 6 Ford Madox Ford, ‘Preparedness’ (1927), in War Prose, ed. Max Saunders (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999), p. 72. 7 See Allyson Booth, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 109–10. 8 See Andrew Rothstein, The Soldiers’ Strikes of 1919 (London: Macmillan, 1980) for a personal account. Adam R. Seipp sees demobilisation not only as the removal from the military, but the release from authoritarian control in The Ordeal of Peace: Demobilization and the Urban Experience in Britain and Germany, 1917–1921 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 9 Andrew Price-Smith goes so far as to argue that the epidemic tipped the balance of power in favour of the Allies due to the order in which it hit the fighting troops. Contagion and Chaos: Disease, Ecology, and National Security in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), ch. 3. 10 Philip Gibbs, Realities of War (London: Heinemann, 1920), p. 447. 11 Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities (London: Headline Review, 2002), p. 267. 12 Richard Aldington, ‘The Present Discontent’, The Sphere, 27 September 1919, 366. 13 Susan R. Grayzel, Women and the First World War (Harlow: Longman, 2002), p. 106. 14 See Michael Whitworth, Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 43; Deborah Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls:



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Women Workers in World War I (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), ch. 2, ch. 7. 15 Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars (London: Pandora, 1987), p. 138. 16 The ceding of control by the government back to the pre-war mine owners had exacerbated the problems of unequal pay and varying conditions. For an account of the 1921 dispute and its role in building up to the General Strike, see Keith Laybourn, The General Strike of 1926 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 9–26. 17 A. G. Gardiner, Introduction to George A. Greenwood, England To-Day: A Social Study of Our Times (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922), p. 7. 18 Chris Baldick, The Oxford English Literary History, volume 10, 1910–1940: The Modern Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 338. See also Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: British, American, and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914– 1933 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press), p. 148. He lists some lesser-known novels of the war on p. 155. 19 On the value of narratives which show the ‘mess of immediacy’, see also Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 2. 20 Douglas Jerrold, Georgian Adventure: The Autobiography (London: Collins, 1937), p. 295. Frankau provides a succinct summary of his service in Self-Portrait: A Novel of His Own Life (London: Macdonald, 1944), p. 153. 21 Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory, p. 19. Compare George Parfitt, Fiction of the First World War: A Study (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 71. My own copy is from the 23rd edition, printed in 1922, and in the ninety-third thousand. 22 On the man’s duty to support, see Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987), p. 191, and Angela Woollacott, ‘Sisters and Brothers in Arms: Family, Class, and Gendering in World War I Britain’, in Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott, Gendering War Talk (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 138. 23 Annie Vivanti Chartres depicted the rape of a mother and daughter during the invasion of Belgium in Vae Victis (1917). See Nicola Beauman, ‘“It is not the place of women to talk of mud”: Some Responses by British Women Novelists to World War I’, in Dorothy Goldman (ed.), Women and World War I: The Written Response (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 135–6. 24 Frankau, Self-Portrait, p. 48. ‘New Books: War Verses’, Manchester Guardian, 17 April 1916, p. 3. On Kipling, see John McBratney,

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‘India and Empire’, in Howard J.  Booth (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 23–36, and David Bradshaw, ‘Kipling and War’, Cambridge Companion to Kipling, pp. 80–94. 25 Frankau, ‘The Voice of the Slaves’, in The Guns (London: Chatto & Windus, 1916), p. 4. 26 Frankau, ‘Ammunition Column’, The Guns, p. 29. 27 Frankau, ‘The Voice of the Guns’, The Guns, p. 34. 28 Frankau, Judgement of Valhalla, p. 44. 29 Ibid., p. 45. 30 Ibid., p. 46. 31 For a range of practices, see Jeffrey S. Reznick, Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain During the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 32 For Frankau’s sceptical take on shell-shock, see Self-Portrait, pp. 174–80. 33 Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 200. Houlbrook draws on Alison Light, Forever England. 34 Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers?: Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press 1918–1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 33. 35 See Jean-Louis Robert, ‘The Image of the Profiteer’, in Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (eds), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 4. 36 Frankau, Self-Portrait, p. 99. 37 Alun Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Robert Colls and Phillip Dodd (eds), Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1986), p. 63. 38 R. G. Collingwood, ‘Art and the Machine’, in The Philosophy of Enchantment: Studies in Folktale, Cultural Criticism, and Anthropology, eds David Boucher, Wendy James and Philip Smallwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), p. 300. 39 See Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), ch. 2. 40 Parfitt, Fiction of the First World War, p. 71. 41 Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, p. 294. 42 Lis Whitelaw, The Life and Rebellious Times of Cicely Hamilton: Actress, Writer, Suffragist (London: The Women’s Press, 1990), p. 115. 43 Cicely Hamilton, Marriage as a Trade (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1909), p. 5. 44 The novel was based on a play produced the previous year. See



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Harriett Blodgett, ‘Cicely Hamilton, Independent Feminist’, Frontiers, A Journal of Women Studies 11:2/3 (1990), 103. 45 Whitelaw, Life and Rebellious Times, p. 117. 46 Cicely Hamilton, Life Errant (London: J. M. Dent, 1935), p. 246. 47 Maroula Joannou, ‘Hamilton, (Mary) Cicely (1872–1952)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/38633 (accessed 12 July 2012). For Hamilton’s take on her time as an actress, see Life Errant, ch. 4. 48 Whitelaw, Life and Rebellious Times, p. 149. Hamilton gives her account of the war in Life Errant, chs 8–13. 49 Hamilton, Life Errant, p. 151; see also Joannou, ‘Hamilton, (Mary) Cicely’. 50 Harriet Blodgett, ‘Cicely Hamilton: Independent Feminist’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 11:2/3 (1990), 101. 51 See Whitelaw, Life and Rebellious Times, pp. 91–3. 52 Peter Brooker and Peter Widdowson, ‘A Literature for England’, in Colls and Dodd (eds), Englishness, p. 153. 53 This is exemplified by the difficult publication history of Robert Tressell’s classic novel of socialism, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, first published in 1914 and republished in 1918. See Peter Miles, Introduction to Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, ed. Miles (1914; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. ix–xi, xxxi–xxxvii. 54 Whitelaw, Life and Rebellious Times, p. 72. Hamilton later wrote a novel, Theodore Savage (London: Leonard Parsons, 1922), about the possibility of disaster resulting from science. Susan B. Grayzel offers a brief reading of Theodore Savage in At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 93–5, 103–6. 55 Hamilton, Life Errant, p. 75. 56 Ibid., p. 66. 57 Blodgett, ‘Cicely Hamilton, Independent Feminist’, 102. 58 See Andrew Frayn, ‘“What a Victory it Might Have Been”: C. E. Montague and the First World War’, in Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy (eds), The Silent Morning: Memory, Culture and the Armistice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 140–4. 59 See Reginald Pound, ‘Herbert, Sir Alan Patrick (1890–1971)’, rev. Katherine Mullin, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, September 2010. www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/31222 (accessed 15 September 2012). 60 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (New York: Collier Books / Macmillan, 1990), p. 305.

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61 Anthony Babington, For the Sake of Example: Capital CourtsMartial  1914–1920 (London: Leo Cooper in association with Secker & Warburg, 1983), pp. 95–106. The story has more recently been retold by former Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo in the ­simplistic and sickly Private Peaceful (London: HarperCollins, 2003). 62 Herbert wrote a satirical poem, ‘Twitting the Turk’, in the early part of his service. See Punch, 1 December 1915, p. 450. 63 Peter Hart, ‘Gallipoli: A Stone Unturned’, in A Part of History: Aspects of the British Experience of the First World War, intro. Michael Howard (London: Continuum, 2008), ch. 5. 64 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim: A Tale, ed. J. H. Stape and Ernest W. Sullivan II (1900; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p.  27. See David Trotter’s reading of the courtroom scene in Lord Jim in Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 160–1. 65 Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, p. 130. 66 Hynes, War Imagined, p. 305. 67 Ibid., p. 306. 68 David Trotter, ‘The British Novel and the War’, in Vincent Sherry (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 39–40. 69 The Geddes report, criticising overstaffing and overspending in the army, was published on 10 February 1922 and reported in the newspapers on that day, and over the course of the following weeks. The Daily Mail was particularly engaged with the issue of ‘waste’, publishing articles such as the leader ‘The Wasters Must Be Put Down’, 13 February 1922, p. 8, ‘Army Waste’, 14 February 1922, p. 12, ‘Air Force Waste’, 15 February 1922, p. 5, and ‘Compulsory Waste’, 16 February 1922, p. 6. 70 See, for example, ‘Alarming Spread of Foot and Mouth Disease’, Daily Telegraph, 1 February 1922, p. 11; ‘Foot-and-Mouth Disease: Still Slaughtering’, Daily Mail, 14 February 1922, p. 12. 71 D. J. Markwell, ‘J. M. Keynes, Idealism, and the Economic Bases of Peace’, in David Long and Peter Wilson (eds), Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: Inter-War Idealism Reassessed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 193. 72 ‘The Wasters Must Be Put Down’, Daily Mail, 13 February 1922, p. 8. 73 ‘Ex-Battery Commander’, ‘Our Debt of Honour: The Claim of Ex-Officers’, The Times, 4 February 1920, p. 10. 74 Joshua Cole, ‘The Transition to Peace, 1918–1919’, in Winter and Robert (eds), Capital Cities at War, p. 208.



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75 See, for example, Gail Braybon, Women Workers in the First World War (1981; London and New York: Routledge, 1989). 76 George A. Greenwood, England To-Day, pp. 150–1. 77 ‘War and Democracy’, The Saturday Review, 19 July 1919, pp. 52–53. From John Rylands University Library of Manchester, C. E. Montague Papers, CEM/3/1, p. 112. Future archival references are to the C. E. Montague Papers unless otherwise stated. 78 See Oliver Elton, C. E. Montague: A Memoir (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), p. 1. 79 H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866) (1934; London: Faber & Faber, 1984), p. 682. 80 The Manchester Guardian continues today as the Guardian, and is still owned by the Scott Trust, which safeguards the liberal principles of the Scott and Montague cohort. See ‘The Scott Trust | Guardian Media Group PLC’, www.gmgplc.co.uk/the-scott-trust/ and associated pages. 81 Geoffrey Taylor, Changing Faces: A History of the Guardian 1956–88 (London: Fourth Estate, 1993), p. 3. 82 Montague, ‘The Nerves of Parliament’, Manchester Guardian, 4 August 1914, p. 6. These unsigned leading articles are identified as by Montague on the basis of their inclusion in his cuttings books. There are twenty-five large-format volumes, of which CEM/1/1/1/22 covers 1914 and 1919–20. 83 Montague, ‘The Non-Combatant: What He Can Do’, Manchester Guardian, 7 August 1914, p. 4. 84 Quoted by Keith Grieves, ‘C. E. Montague and the Making of Disenchantment, 1914–1921’, War in History 4:1 (1997), 39. On Hobhouse’s Liberal politics, see Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 23–7. 85 Grieves, ‘Making of Disenchantment’, 39. 86 For narratives of younger men, see for example Anonymous, Experiences of a War Baby. By One (London: John Hogg, 1920); James Hanley, Boy (London: Boriswood, 1931). 87 Henry W. Nevinson, Last Changes, Last Chances (London: Nisbet, 1928), p. 139. 88 Grieves, ‘Making of Disenchantment’, 39. 89 Elton, C. E. Montague, p. 98. 90 C. E. Montague to Madeleine Montague, 29 July 1918, quoted by Elton, C. E. Montague, p. 215. 91 Mark D. Larabee, Front Lines of Modernism: Remapping the Great War in British Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 91.

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92 Hynes, War Imagined, p. 307. 93 Arnold Bennett to Montague, 18 February 1922. CEM/2/2/2/2. 94 Montague, ‘A Prefatory Note on War Books’, p. 1. CEM/2/1/3/2. 95 A. C. Ward, The Nineteen-Twenties: Literature and Ideas in the PostWar Decade (London: Methuen, 1930), p. 11. 96 Disenchantment manuscript, p. 25, p. 31. CEM/2/1/3/1. 97 Buitenhuis, Great War of Words, p. 151. 98 Brian Bond, The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 29. 99 See also Hynes, War Imagined, p. 308. 100 Hamilton, Life Errant, p. 246. 101 CEM/2/1/9. 102 Pick, War Machine, pp. 178–88. 103 Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion, 1996), pp. 33, 37. 104 Ana Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 112. 105 Paul Edwards, ‘British War Memoirs’, in Vincent Sherry (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 17. 106 Orlo Williams, ‘Disenchantment’, in the Times Literary Supplement, 16 February 1922, 106. 107 ‘Current Literature: Disenchantment’, Daily Telegraph, 24 March 1922, p. 4. 108 S. P. B. Mais, ‘A Mixed Bag of New Books’, Daily Express, 18 February 1922, p. 4. Mais also reviews Tell England in this same article, criticising the first (public school) half of the book for being ‘so completely false that I suspected the author of ironical intent.’ J. A. Mangan states that Mais, who had been part of the public school system as boy and master, was ‘One of the fiercest antagonists of the schools’. Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School, new edn (London: Frank Cass, 2000), p. 108. 109 Grieves, ‘Making of Disenchantment’, 55. See Accounts with Chatto & Windus, CEM/2/3/3. 110 John Masefield, ‘Disenchantment’, Manchester Guardian, 16 February 1922. CEM/2/4/3. 111 Arnold Bennett to Montague, 18 February 1922. CEM/2/2/2/1; H. W. Nevinson to Montague, 22 February 1922. CEM/2/2/2/4; G[eorge] B[ernard] S[haw] to C.E. Montague, 21 February 1922. CEM/2/2/2/3; H. M. Tomlinson to Montague, 20 February 1922. CEM/2/2/2/2. Tomlinson was an official war correspondent and editor of the Nation.



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112 Montague to H. W. Nevinson, 23 March 1922, quoted by Elton, p. 238. 113 Harold Raymond to Montague, 14 January 1927. CEM/2/2/7, p. 15. Raymond was one of the partners in Chatto & Windus at the time of publication. 114 H[ubert] G[riffith], ‘Among the New Books: Great Work by One of the Finest Living Writers’, Daily Express, 11 March 1926, p. 6; H.  W.  Nevinson, ‘Books of the Day: England’s Basis’, Observer, 7 March 1926, p. 5; Arthur Waugh, ‘Books of the Day: Rough Justice: Making an Englishman’, Daily Telegraph, 9 March 1926, p. 14. 115 Ford Madox Ford, Provence: From Minstrels to the Machine (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), p. 304. The growth of spiritualism in the period was a corresponding enchantment. Distant deaths in the war led the bereaved to seek consolation and contact with the dead in the absence of conventional mourning rituals, including authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and W. B. Yeats, as Alex Owen explains in The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Modern. See also Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 3. 116 Alan Wilkinson, ‘Changing English Attitudes to Death in the Two World Wars’, in Peter C. Jupp and Glennys Howarth (eds), The Changing Face of Death: Historical Accounts of Death and Disposal (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 153. 117 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (1989; Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp.  215–18; Hugh Cecil, ‘British War Novelists’, in Cecil and Peter H.  Liddle (eds), Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced (London: Leo Cooper, 1996), p. 803. See also Brian Bond, The Unquiet Western Front, p. 29; Rosa Maria Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1993). 118 Larabee, Front Lines of Modernism, pp. 157–8. 119 Henry Newbolt, ‘Vitaï Lampada’, in Collected Poems 1897–1907 (London: Nelson, n.d. [1908]), pp. 131–3. 120 Dennis W. Allen, ‘Young England: Muscular Christianity and the Politics of the Body in Tom Brown’s Schooldays’, in Donald W. Hall (ed.), Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 115. 121 Hynes, War Imagined, pp. 332, 333. 122 See Jane O. Newman, ‘Enchantment in Times of War: Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, and the Secularization Thesis’, Representations 105:1 (2009), 133–67.

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123 Alex Vernon: ‘Introduction: No Genre’s Land: The Problem of Genre in War Memoirs and Military Autobiographies’, in Vernon (ed.), Arms and the Self: War, the Military and Autobiographical Writing (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005), p. 9. 124 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Jane Garnett (1869; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 52. 125 J. M. Winter, ‘The Great War and the Persistence of Tradition: Languages of Grief, Bereavement and Mourning’, in Bernd Hüppauf (ed.), War, Violence and the Modern Condition (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), pp. 33–45. 126 Hynes, War Imagined, p. 333. 127 See Bingham, Family Newspapers, p. 29; Nicola Beauman, ‘“It is not the place of women to talk of mud”: Some Responses by British Women Novelists to World War I’, in Dorothy Goldman (ed.), Women and World War I: The Written Response (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), p. 129. 128 Joshua [Jed] Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 3; Anne Wright, Literature of Crisis, 1910–1922: Howards End, Heartbreak House, Women in Love, and The Waste Land (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984).

3

Modernism, conflict and the home front, 1922–1927

Modernist and avant-garde authors were quick to respond to the war in both prose and poetry. My argument so far has focused firstly on reactions against authority and the conservative, authoritarian practices and discourses of wartime, and secondly on the difficulties of post-war reintegration. Few authors discussed to this point are canonical, but they interrogate similar concerns as high modernist literature. The disenchantments of war are also the disenchantments of modernism in object and language. Richard Aldington was editing and writing poetry at the training camp in the UK and on the Western Front (see Chapter 5). Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr (1918) and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920) describe Anglo-German antagonisms, and both Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) address the problems of living in the post-war world.1 Even James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), set ten years before the start of the war, has been analysed in its context.2 Despite its unfamiliarity and profound effects, the war must be understood through existing language and metaphors. Writers were forced to reconsider their use of language and form, and technological developments were stimulated by the war. To acute critics of the machine age, it was no surprise that the war used technology to do damage to men who were already made mechanical by the strict rules of labour in capitalism. These authors see as a result of that damage the opportunity to create new ways of living and writing which address modern issues such as mechanisation, mass culture and gender politics. In this chapter I examine the 1920s novels of D. H. Lawrence and  Virginia Woolf, which are haunted by the spectre of war. Neither was a combatant, but both consider the relationship between the war and industrial modernity. Lawrence explicitly

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sees the war as a product of social conditions, and questions the purpose of capital, class and industry. War offers the radical potential of awakening humans to their disenchantment. However, men fail to take responsibility for their own situation, and blame abstract systems. Lawrence criticises work for work’s sake, and physical labour’s link with capital. Through the narrator of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), he feels the war as impact: ‘The bruise was deep, deep, deep – the bruise of the false and inhuman war. It would take many years […] to dissolve the vast black clot of bruised blood […]. And it would need a new hope’ (LCL, 50). Both authors are disenchanted with the world before the war, but the war intensifies those feelings; gender is a focus. Lawrence criticises the atrophied version of masculinity which results from wage slavery, and he sees military service as part of the same system, a cowardly, superficial performance which allows men to avoid the causes of their disillusion. While many of his textual analyses are to the point, I cannot agree that there is such a radical shift as Jae-Kyung Koh suggests, although he acknowledges Lawrence’s disillusionment repeatedly.3 Woolf reacts against continuing patriarchal oppression and the flattening-out of class structures, at once progressive and conservative. The war at the time seems distant, and an unnamed interlocutor complains to the narrator of ‘The Mark on the Wall’ that ‘it’s no good buying newspapers. … Nothing ever happens! Curse this war! God damn this war!’4 Woolf’s experience was not of rupture but of process. Just after the Treaty of Versailles was signed, she wrote about ‘the gradual disappearance of things from shop windows; & the gradual, but still only partial reappearance of things’.5 She focuses on the everyday effects of the war in England, and almost a year after the armistice she was focused on the present: ‘The strike broke into our life more than the war did’.6 Class struggle is felt more immediately as a result of the war than war itself. Both Lawrence and Woolf seek the transformation of the existing social order as a result of the war, albeit in very different forms and with different aims. Lawrence and the First World War Lawrence was disenchanted with the impact of the war on the individual; he understood it as an extreme symptom of modernity. He told Edward Marsh during the war that ‘I am not a pacifist’,7



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and Richard Somers, the thinly-fictionalised version of Lawrence in Kangaroo (1923), states that ‘he had no conscientious objection to war’.8 Lawrence was not pacifist, but he opposed this war. For Lawrence the mediation of experience through machines separates men from vitality and each other. In ‘With the Guns’, published in the Manchester Guardian only two weeks after the declaration of war, he wrote that it ‘would be […] an affair entirely of machines, with men attached to the machines as the subordinate part’.9 The authoritarian structures of war erode individuality: ‘There were no individuals, and every individual soldier knew it.’10 He criticised the ‘Average Man’ in his essay ‘Democracy’, calling him ‘this little standardized invention’ who ‘is somehow very unsatisfactory’.11 Lawrence did not have any enduring enchantments about chivalry and heroism, but he was not immune from popular attitudes in certain contexts during wartime: ‘I am mad with rage myself. I would like to kill a million Germans – two million.’12 This murderousness is informed by the suspicion which was aroused by his German wife, Frieda, and the violent passions of their relationship. Lawrence uses the language of war to express his contempt for it. The language of violence permeates cultural production, from official discourses to popular culture to avant-gardism; indifference is untenable. Lawrence was passed unfit for the army, but following the introduction of conscription even low category men were subjected to repeated examinations: exemptions from service, even if not on active duty, became fewer. Lawrence objected to England’s key role in the development of industrial modernity.13 After the war he came to see England as ‘the one really soft spot, the rotten spot in the empire’, a civilisation decaying from its core (OCH, 183). He emphasises his disenchantment with the ingrained control of industrial capitalism. Mechanical is a damning epithet when Lawrence applies it, as he did to Lloyd George.14 Similarly, in Women in Love he describes Gerald Crich as ‘the God of the machine’ who causes ‘the convulsion of death [to run] through the old system’.15 Gerald dies a ‘clenched, mechanical body’; mechanisation even subsumes its deity.16 Lawrence blames the Victorians for the rationalism which denigrates instinctive vitality, and he seeks essential connection rather than superficial engagement.17 Like Ford, the England he idealises is individualist and artisan, ‘the old, brave, reckless, manly England’ (OCH, 183). In the Memoir of Maurice Magnus Lawrence looks to ‘the ­poignant

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grip of the past, the grandiose, violent past of the Middle Ages, when blood was strong and unquenched and life was flamboyant with splendours and horrible miseries’ (MM, 48). He seeks a past in which violence indicates passion and there are clear hierarchies, and also looks to ancient civilisations such as the Greek. He rarely returned to England after departing in November 1919, and left for the final time in September 1926. For Lawrence war’s ability to bring humankind to the brink of disaster contains within it the potential for a new beginning.18 This is also the search for a new form of representation: death is the event which can only be represented, never experienced first.19 In his wartime stories such as ‘England, My England’ and ‘The Thimble’ the proximity of death leads to revelation. Lawrence expanded both stories after the war, which shows the development of his disenchantment.20 ‘England, My England’ became the title story of a post-war collection (1922 US; 1924 UK), and the slight ‘The Thimble’ (1916) became The Ladybird, published alongside two other novellas which deal with similar themes, The Fox and The Captain’s Doll (1923).21 In the intervening years he wrote Women in Love, and works of history and literary criticism which became intertwined with personal responses to the war.22 New forms of unspoken communication were needed, and Lawrence returned to the concept of ‘blood-consciousness’, a primal, nonverbal connection. I examine the idiosyncratic Memoir of Maurice Magnus (1924), in which the subject is a symptom of modernity’s problems, and the ‘Nightmare’ chapter of Kangaroo (1923), in which Lawrence thinly fictionalises the humiliation of his military assessment. His prose works such as ‘On Being a Man’ (1924) point to the roots of his disenchantment in issues of gender in modernity. His last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), is also an assessment of the condition of England. Lawrence’s thinking evolves continually through his writing in all forms, and the war is never far from the surface. England, which England? Revising disenchantment Lawrence’s disenchantment is foregrounded syntactically in the 1921 revisions to ‘England, My England’, published in 1922.23 The protagonist is named Evelyn in the earlier version and Egbert in the later version; the latter recalls the ancient King of Wessex.24



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However, within that is a distaste for his southern ancestry against the northern vigour of his wife’s industrious family.25 He has a barely adequate unearned income which enables him to sit outside the disenchantment of industrialisation and feels keenly his outsider status, which leads to conflict with his father-in-law. The third paragraph of the 1915 version reads: ‘Always this conflict of authority, echoed even in the children! His heart was hard with disillusion. He worked on in the gnawing irritation and resistance.’ (EME, 219) His heart’s disillusion is at the heart of the paragraph, neither the immediate nor the closing sentiment. Disillusion is resistance against economic structures, which for Egbert consist of hierarchies both in family and politics, and the link between the two. The corresponding paragraph in the later version is recast: ‘His heart was hard with disillusion: a continual gnawing and resistance. But he worked on. What was there to do but submit!’ (EME, 5) Disillusion and submission now bracket the paragraph, enclosing the problem at the heart of modernity: the necessity of labour to earn money to survive, and the dissociation from the means of production. His eventual submission to the war and capital leads to his emasculation, no longer able to make his wife submit (EME, 29). The mechanisation of violence and the violence of mechanisation eradicates individuality, and the ensuing degeneration is for Lawrence a modern problem, transposed from the city onto war. Military service makes the protagonist efficient but listlessly conformist: ‘He hated it and yet he was fulfilling himself. He hated it violently, and yet it gave him the only real satisfaction he could have in life now. Deeply and satisfactorily it fulfilled him, this warring on men. This work of destruction alone satisfied his deepest desire.’ (EME, 226) The insistence on the uncomfortable coexistence of violence and satisfaction is the fulfilment of primal action and the pleasure of fitting in. Killing is normalised within the group, but Evelyn’s actions are unwitnessed in the story. The chance to destroy men offers Evelyn, and perhaps Lawrence, a degree of optimism about war’s impact: a cataclysm which leads to a new society remains possible. The pointed gendering of the war suggests that these men are anything but, and the dead wood must be cut back to stimulate new growth. Remarkably, the 1915 version contains a more graphic depiction of violence than the later rewrite: violence mitigates wartime disenchantment. Evelyn’s death is shown graphically and, as he dies,

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he kills three Germans who discover him. Three times during his murderous spree he is described as transcendent and killing seems revelatory, recalling Lawrence’s own bloodlust in correspondence. Evelyn’s violence provokes a futile reprisal: ‘The German cut and mutilated the face of the dead man as if he must obliterate it. He slashed it across, as if it must not be a face any more; it must be removed. For he could not bear the clear, abstract look of the other’s face, its almost ghoulish, slight smile, faint but so terrible in its suggestion, that the German was mad, and ran up the road when he found himself alone’ (EME, 232). Evelyn’s transcendent tranquility is intolerable to the German. However, he wins a victory of sorts in the mathematically reckoned death count. In the later version there is no such consolation. Egbert is equally conscious in his dying moments, but there is no revenge and ‘the frail deathagony effort to catch at straws of memory, straws of life from the past, brought too great a nausea’ (EME, 33). To remember the world before militarisation is sickening even in death when, by folklore, life flashes before one. Memories are reduced to fragile straws, themselves constituted from dead matter shorn of its natural vitality, and cannot be accessed. On the day he sent ‘The Thimble’ to his agent, Lawrence wrote to Lady Cynthia Asquith that ‘war is a great and necessary disintegrating autumnal process’.26 In The Ladybird, the lengthened version, previous enchantments are no longer accessible: the world is founded on decay. The war interrupts the friendship between Count Dionys Psanek, a diminutive Eastern European noble who fights for the Central Powers, and Daphne Apsley. They are reunited before the end of the war when he is wounded and interned in an English prisoner of war hospital, resurrecting in him ‘something far older and pre-European, Slav, perhaps gypsy even, with its deepest roots in Egypt rather than in Greece and Rome’.27 Lawrence reaches back past the cultural accretions of European civilisation and looks for alternative traditions; Dionys’s name alludes to fertility and rebellion.28 Lawrence’s views complement Oswald Spengler’s assessment that ‘the primitive Culture is not fragmentary, but something strong and integral, something highly vital and effectual’ (DW, 2, 34). On his release Dionys stays with the Apsleys, and they discuss the kinetic similarity between the spinning world and a beetle rolling a ball of dung. Daphne, her husband Basil, and her mother Lady Beveridge offer, respectively,



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qualitative, descriptive and absolutist opinions on the image. Dionys is the only one to engage critically: ‘Perhaps [the Egyptians] meant that it was the principle of decomposition which first set the ball rolling’ (Lb, 210).29 Lawrence returns to the metaphor in ‘On Being a Man’: ‘The backward-rolling ball of civilisation will change us, with a vengeance!’ (OBM, 222). The world is perpetually in a state of decay; the faecal origin of the world is a transparent metaphor which denies the Christian fall myth. Dionys combines this with an understanding of entropy: although the world is losing energy, the heat emitted is life-giving.30 Even though the world is founded on decay, man must create the conditions for revitalisation by destroying the mechanised world and its people. Lawrence wrote early in January 1915 that ‘the war is for those who are not needed for a new life’.31 He suggests that combatants who do not question the systems which underlie the war select themselves for slaughter. In The Ladybird, Dionys worships ‘The blessed God of destruction. […] The God of anger, who throws down the steeples and the factory chimneys. Ah, Lady Daphne, he is a man’s God, he is a man’s God’ (Lb, 186). His god destroys the phallic representations of industrial modernity, which symbolise the atrophied versions of masculinity against which Lawrence consistently rails.32 Similarly, in Kangaroo Richard Somers longs ‘for a smash up in this social-industrial world we’re in’.33 Even a more moderate critic such as Masterman, speaking in favour of the war for very different reasons, describes ‘a smashing to pieces, on a scale compared to which every previous war has been mere child’s play, of a laboriously created industrial civilisation of centuries’.34 Dionys seeks a targeted programme of destruction in contrast with the devastation in the war by ‘Indiscriminate, ridiculous cannon’ (Lb, 187). He later asserts that ‘the machine of war has got out of our control’ (Lb, 207). The decline of civilisation can be arrested by relinquishing mechanisation in favour of individual vitalism. However, Dionys asserts that ‘We have all lost the war. All Europe’ (Lb, 208). The end of the war is not an end to conflict: the hegemony of industrialism and its practices continues. A. G. Gardiner wrote that ‘Europe is strewn with the wreckage of civilization’, but it was only the material manifestations of the civilisation that were destroyed.35 Lawrence implicitly criticises attempts to cling to narratives about glorious victory and, with it, English particularism. In this war there are not even pyrrhic victors: the

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conditions which led to the war are still in place and make further conflict likely. However, that sentiment is expressed in the mouth of the foreigner, Dionys, allowing English readers to distance themselves from dissent. Individual deaths seem trivial in the interests of finding an alternative form of progress. To face the possibility of death brings power and knowledge for Lawrence, who wrote in 1914 that ‘if we are left maimed and halt, if you die or I die, it will not matter, so long as there is alive in the land some new sense of what is and what is not, some new courage to let go the securities, and to be, to risk ourselves in a forward venture of life, as we are willing to risk ourselves in a rush of death’.36 Mechanisation brings with it the security of repeated actions; inherent in the system is an aversion to the forms of risk which can bring change. That change endures in the land, meaning that the site of vitality is not necessarily in man. Later, in the 1920s, Lawrence states that ‘When we understand our extreme being in death, we have surpassed into a new being’.37 The Belgian writer and thinker Maurice Maeterlinck said just before the war that ‘we exhaust all our forces, which ought to face death boldly, in distracting our will from it’.38 Distraction prevents men and women from realising and improving their position, which cannot be achieved without risk. In recent theories, Maurice Blanchot is less sure: ‘Dying sometimes gives us (wrongly, no doubt) not the feeling of abandoning ourselves to the disaster, but the feeling that if we were to die, we would escape it.’39 Death, drawing on Christian narratives, is seen not as disaster but release from earthly travails. In the context of war and the modern world, it ends the battle with mechanical living and returns the body to its final connection with the land. In The Ladybird, Daphne initially wrestles with her hopes and fears about the safety of her husband, Basil. She finds him ‘like death: like risen death. She felt she dared not touch him. White death was still upon him’ (Lb, 192).40 The description carries Biblical echoes, but Basil is no Christ. He fails to embrace the proximity of death, which drives Daphne towards Dionys’s vitality. In the hospital, Dionys wonders: ‘Why did they not let me die? […] I wanted death now’ (Lb, 166). That desire suggests that death is better than life in the post-war world. Daphne embraces the disregard for her own life which, paradoxically, allows her to live. She has ‘a wild, wild yearning, actually to go, actually to be given.



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Actually to go, actually to die the death, actually to cross the border and be gone, to be gone’ (Lb, 213).41 The insistent repetition of ‘actually’ and ‘go(ne)’ and the future perfect tense drives towards a perfect future in which decisive action has been completed. Death has offered its release.42 Writing at almost exactly the same time, Spengler understands ‘the sterility of civilized man […] as an essentially metaphysical turn towards death. The last man of the worldcity no longer wants to live – he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death’ (DW, 2, 103–4). His view differs from Lawrence’s, but their understandings are complementary. Spengler sees life as merely the anaesthetised experience of the modern world. On this they agree: the loss of such extreme emotions as terror detracts from the range of human experience and is part of the mechanisation of men’s systems of thought and feeling, as well as labour. Lawrence searched for a method of human contact that did not rely on socialised interactions. He does not equate knowledge with intellect, but sees it as the ability to connect non-verbally. Once people become primarily reflective, rather than engaged, they have submitted to the degradation of modernity. Spengler puts it succinctly: ‘Experience-lived may be quite wordless, while systematic knowing can only be through words’ (DW, 1, 158). R. G. Collingwood believes that the effective functioning of civilisation requires a complex combination of intelligence, memory and emotion.43 Lawrence evokes the need to connect outside the ­structures of modernity in his concept of blood-consciousness: One lives, knows, and has one’s being in the blood, without any reference to nerves and brain. This is one half of life, belonging to the darkness. And the tragedy of this our life, and of your life, is that the mental and nerve consciousness exerts a tyranny over the blood-consciousness [….] Now it is necessary for us to realise that  there is this other great half of our life active in the darkness, the blood-relationship […. W]hen I take a woman, then the bloodpercept is supreme, my blood-knowing is overwhelming. There is a transmission, I don’t know of what, between her blood and mine, in the act of connection. So that afterwards, even if she goes away, the blood-consciousness persists between us, when the mental consciousness is suspended; and I am formed then by my blood-consciousness, not by my mind or nerves at all.44

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Blood is internal and mostly unseen in the body, but without it life would not be possible. Blood-consciousness precedes the intellect and can be accessed in sexual connection, which addresses the need for regeneration and rebirth. To return to The Ladybird, connections are productive and fearful: ‘The moment there is real blood contact, as likely as not a strange discord enters in. She is not what he thought her. He is not what she thought him.’ (Lb, 215) Blood connections seem uncanny as they break from and surpass socialised connections, and that strangeness offers the possibility for a new epistemology. Lawrence undoes conventional constructions of space in The Ladybird to depict the connection between Dionys and Daphne and looks back before ‘the development of the conscious ego in man […] since Greece first broke the spell of “darkness”’.45 Dionys sings in a ‘half-unconscious […] dream-voice’ (Lb, 212), which draws Daphne to him.46 His form of patriarchal authority is from outside of industrial modernity, and is physically compelling: The darkness inside the room seemed alive like blood. He had no power to move. The distance between them seemed absolute. Then suddenly, without knowing, he went across in the dark, feeling for the end of the couch. And he sat beside her on the couch. But he did not touch her. Neither did she move. The darkness flowed about them thick like blood, and time seemed dissolved in it. They sat with the small, invisible distance between them, motionless, ­speechless, thoughtless. (Lb, 215)47

Darkness obscures conventional spatial limits. Dionys and Daphne do not touch, but the distance between them is invisible and cannot be crossed by thought. Solitude and modern spaces are equated: the isolation of the individual is also found outwith the city.48 To Lawrence darkness offers potential as well as closure: ‘We are balanced like a flame between the two darknesses, the darkness of the beginning and the darkness of the end.’49 Sandra Gilbert sees Dionys as a ‘votary of the mysteries of the blood, a prince or priest’ of blood-consciousness.50 The insistent conservative conventionality of Western civilisation damages the interpersonal connection by subjugating it to law and social pressures. In the Memoir of Maurice Magnus Lawrence asserts that ‘the blood-passions are sacred […] the recklessness, the blood-recklessness, is sacred’ (MM, 94). The search for that connection continued to frustrate.



Modernism, conflict and the home front, 1922–27 129 Disenchantment deepens: Lawrence through the 1920s

Lawrence sees Western civilisation as the diseased body. He declares himself in late 1916 ‘at war with the whole body of mankind’, and consistently sees conflict in bodily terms.51 Sontag posits that diagnosis increases rapidly when ‘every form of social deviation can be considered an illness’, but for Lawrence to fail to deviate is a sign of capitulation to the endemic sicknesses of Western modernity.52 In his Memoir of Maurice Magnus (1924) Lawrence combines biography and cultural commentary to address the perceived decline of civilisation, nobility and manliness.53 An impresario he met in Italy after the war, Magnus’s poor husbandry is criticised by Lawrence: ‘He will not degenerate outwardly. Certain standards of a gentleman he would keep up: he would be well dressed, he would be lavish with borrowed money, he would be as far as possible honorable in his small transactions of daily life’ (MM, 72).54 Lawrence is sympathetic towards Magnus’s rejection of slavery to capital and his ability to endure disgrace, but his refusal to ‘degenerate outwardly’ is itself subservience to social pressures. Paul Sheehan argues that for Lawrence ‘becoming a social individual is a form of slavery’;55 it is to become a mass man, overrun by staid norms, generic products and bland artefacts. After reporting Magnus’s death, Lawrence launches into a remarkable harangue in which his subject signifies the most extreme contemporary ills. He asks whether Lucifer is ‘any more fallen than these horrible pallid spiritual gods of Magnus and the late war?’ (MM, 96). Both are degraded, washed-out figures lacking vitality, although it is doubtful Lawrence believed Magnus was ever angelic. He also alludes to the impact of the war on previous enchantments. The spiritual is connected with the physical, and Lawrence returns to the metaphor of disease: Humanity in Europe fell horribly into a hatred of the living soul, in the war. There is no gainsaying it. We all fell […] into hideous depravity of hating the human soul; a purulent small-pox of the spirit we had. It was shameful, shameful, shameful, in every country and in all of us. Some tried to resist, and some didn’t. But we were all drowned in shame. A purulent small-pox of the vicious spirit, vicious against the deep soul that pulses in the blood. (MM, 100)56

The majority of people choose, in Lawrence’s view, to succumb to the disease of repression which leads to war. On repetition, the spirit

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becomes a vicious enemy of the connection necessary for improvement. The war is a cultural formation, a symptom of capital, and Lawrence bluntly emphasises the shame of the failure to resist it. In St Mawr, the American Mrs Witt expresses her concern in similar terms: ‘In America the cohesion was a matter of choice and will. But in Europe it was organic, like the helpless particles of one sprawling body. And the great body in a state of incipient decay.’57 Mass living is to blame for the dirt and disease which led to war, and Lawrence’s cure focuses on reinstating physicality to life. The wartime combination of authoritarian rule and social pressures inspired Lawrence’s most vivid description of civilian horror. Lawrence wrote to Ottoline Morrell about the problems caused by ‘the emotional greedy mob’.58 Kangaroo (1923) is mostly set in Australia, where reintegration appears largely successful but war intrudes as a traumatic flashback.59 This is similar to Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps of the same year, in which the shellshocked and violent Joe intrudes on the narrative.60 Lawrence’s humiliation at repeated physical examination and ensuing rejection by the army is fictionalised in the ‘Nightmare’ chapter of Kangaroo. Somers does not wish to serve, but his rejection is as humiliating as the inspection itself. Carl Krockel suggests that ‘Lawrence-asSomers’, itself a problematic formulation, experiences ‘a repressed sense of helplessness and guilt from not being able to contribute to the war effort’.61 This is not the case. He actively rejects this war and its eradication of individualism: ‘Somers tiresomely belonged to no group. He would not enter the army, because his profoundest instinct was against it. […] It was the whole spirit of the war, the vast mob-spirit, which he could never acquiesce in.’62 Mass culture is criticised, but ‘mob-spirit’ is worse still, implying the potential violence of mass formations. In the act of stubborn resistance, Somers ‘arrives at a hard truth’, Squires states: ‘The politicized work of men hides the potent mystery of manhood beneath an organizational flowchart of hierarchies and obedience.’63 The arrival of conscription means that the mob is resistible only as a barely-sanctioned peripheral figure. Somers describes conscription as ‘a reign of terror, under a set of indecent bullies like Bottomley of John Bull and other bottom-dog members of the House of Commons. Then Somers had known what it was to live in a perpetual state of semifear: the fear of the criminal public and the criminal government.’64 The government takes decisions which subsume people to the war



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machine and the bullies perpetuate nationalist propaganda which keeps them there. Neither group is necessarily vulnerable itself: many MPs and newspaper proprietors profited from the war both financially and in terms of reputation. Somers’s fear is not of the war itself, but of compulsory collectivity, and he angrily rejects those who accept uncritically oppressive wartime rules: ‘I despise them. They are canaille, carrion-eating, filthy-mouthed canaille, like dead-man-devouring jackals. […] I wish to God I could kill them off, the masses of canaille.’65 The repetition, followed by the tautology of the final clause, places mass living at the centre of Lawrence’s disenchantment. Lawrence continues to link disillusionment with the war and masculinity in his non-fictional prose. In ‘On Being a Man’ he asserts that war ensures that ‘those that lived came back disillusioned’ (OBM, 220). They ‘go forth, panoplied in their own idea of themselves. Whatever they do, they perform it all in the full armour of their own idea of themselves.’ (OBM, 217–18) The full armour of self-conception is unable to defend bodies and minds against the physical reality of war. For Lawrence, disenchantment is not a product of the war: ‘They are not really disillusioned. Their disillusion is made conscious, that is all. They were disillusioned all the while. They never really believed in anything. […] Their own self-conscious ego was their own manhood. They were disillusioned. But they turned the blame on democracy and other abstractions. They refused to realize the actuality’ (OBM, 220). Lawrence’s insistent style often relies on repetition for force, and the changing tenses push the roots of disillusion further back into the past. The pre-war enchantment of stoicism means that wartime experiences do not provoke any debate about its underlying causes. ‘So much for war-heroes and disillusion’, Lawrence sneers, building to his climactic denigration of the modern warrior: ‘Heroes, heroes, heroes, and never a man among ’em’ (OBM, 220, 222). The repetition underlines the vast number of heroes and, in doing so, the new heroism of the modern soldier which is founded on endurance. He characterised the English state of mind in his late essay ‘The State of Funk’ as ‘terrified about money, finance, about ships, about war, about work, about Labour, about Bolshevism, and funniest of all, they are scared stiff of the printed word’.66 War comes almost hidden in the middle of the long list, as Lawrence reiterates that war is a product of industrialism and its concomitant procedures.

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He rails against heroism as the performance of conventional masculinity: real heroism is to take a dissident position. Impotence, decline, mechanisation, disenchantment Lady Chatterley’s Lover is famed for its depictions of gender relations and sexuality. The impact of the war on masculinity and sexuality therein is more extreme than The Ladybird or similar stories such as ‘Glad Ghosts’. Sexual vitality is needed to restore tired paradigms and institutions; the narrator asserts that ‘It’s the one insane taboo left: sex as a natural and vital thing’ (LCL, 264). The war makes the aristocratic Clifford Chatterley paraplegic and impotent, and his wife Connie eventually leaves him for Mellors, the gamekeeper who shares with Clifford a military past, but in imperial outposts. Clifford’s injuries are an unavoidable reminder of the effects of the war, but it is his unfailing adherence to the commercial which makes him a representative figure for the decline of the aristocracy, its leadership and values. Montague bemoans the impotence of the individual in war, and Lawrence gives that problem bodily form: he wrote in a late poem that ‘Man invented the machine / and now the machine has invented man’.67 Mellors is an outspoken individualist, and the novel probes the efficacy of capitalism and the necessity to conform to its institutions; its pernicious impact on rural Britain is also noted in St Mawr.68 In his late work Lawrence continues to challenge the narrative of progress through technology and capital. Lawrence believes in hierarchical systems, but for him the current one is not fit for purpose. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover we see the culmination of Lawrence’s engagement with social hierarchies, particularly the aristocracy. The narrator seeks a group of leaders to drag humankind from stagnant waters: ‘Everything connected with authority, whether it were in the government or in the army or in the universities, was ridiculous to a degree. And as far as the governing classes made any pretensions to govern, they were ridiculous too’ (LCL, 10). Existing authorities are no longer respected but derided, and the groups named shaped the way that the war was conducted. The narrative of aristocratic decline appears in novels from the late nineteenth century such as Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). Henry Maudsley had written as early as 1883 about the possibility that degeneration was not just



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the purview of the working class, and Nordau drew attention to the capricious nature of heredity in his attack on Ibsen.69 At the beginning of the war, Lawrence describes ‘the inevitable isolation, detachment of the aristocrat’, and his need to ‘struggle towards re-union with the rest of mankind’.70 In ‘Aristocracy’ Lawrence attempts to shift the definition of the term to effect that reunion. He posits that ‘If a man, whether by thought or action, makes life, he is an aristocrat’.71 Making life alludes both to sexual reproduction and strong leadership: whoever can establish, or imitate a new connection between mankind and the circumambient universe is, in his own degree, a savior. Because mankind is always exhausting its human possibilities, always degenerating into repetition, torpor, ennui, lifelessness. When ennui sets in, it is a sign that human vitality is waning, and the human ­connection with the universe has gone stale.72

Lawrence sees in that decay the possibility for change. His assessment evokes Spengler’s prognosis of cyclical decline. However, he also looks to the future: ‘There will form a new aristocracy, irrespective of nationality, of men who have reached the sun. […] And together they will form the aristocracy of the world. And in the coming era they will rule the world; a non-fraternity of the living sun, making the embers of financial internationalism and industrial internationalism pale upon the hearth of the earth.’73 The new aristocracy Lawrence proposes does not respect the entirely constructed values of the nation state. It relies on a direct and profound contact with the life-giving sun. Those enchantments are explicitly contrasted with the deadening and, Lawrence hopes, dying embers of capitalist industrialism. The Chatterleys are complicit in these institutions, and the war does family and institutions irreparable damage. Clifford’s elder brother Herbert is killed, and his father dies longing for an heir to the Chatterley name. Clifford embodies disenchantment, not only with modernity but through the ages: ‘He turned his slow, rather full eyes, that had been drowned in such fathomless disillusion, on Connie, and she trembled a little. He seemed so old – endlessly old, built up of layers of disillusion, going down in him generation after generation like geological strata; and at the same time he was forlorn like a child’ (LCL, 23). Clifford has the accumulated age of his lineage, built up like sedimentary rock, unmoving just as he is now; he is a

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paradoxical anachronism, old before his time and yet infantilised. He is disenchanted by the disjunction between his emotional development and social status in a now-outdated system. He becomes a ‘perverted child-man [who] was now a real business-man’, steely and ‘quite inhuman’ in the service of business (LCL, 291–2). The failure to face systemic problems is both unmanly and childish, to the point where humanity is lost. Spengler suggests that ‘nobility is a living symbol of Time’, and notes as part of his conception of decline: ‘That which strikes the true peasant with a deep and inexplicable fear, the notion that the family and the name may be extinguished, has now lost its meaning. The continuance of the blood-relation in the visible world is no longer a duty of the blood, and the destiny of being the last of the line is no longer felt as a doom’ (DW, 2, 335). The hubris of rationalism and a lack of spirituality mean that people no longer see procreation as essential. The age of a name ceases to be so important when reputations can supposedly be remade generation after generation by hard work, good fortune or both. Lawrence continues to believe in the possibility of regeneration, however, and William Greenslade excludes him from Degeneration, Culture and the Novel because ‘The persistent grip of degeneration on late nineteenth-century culture derived essentially from the fear of what was repressed. It is the absence of that fear that marks Lawrence out as singular.’74 Lawrence is not quite without fear, as shown in his attitude towards money and reaction against authority, but his willingness to face his fears marks him out by seeing the potential of war for awakening. The experience of disenchantment is mediated through the machine; Mellors attempts to resist, but Clifford cannot extricate himself and does not wish to. He is marked out in the rural community by his wounding in the war. Impotent and dependent, isolated but unable to stand alone, he requires the help of women, servants and machines. His bathchair separates him from the earth and his wounding is a metaphor for the condition of the world after the war: the system which has led to and perpetuates mass culture is damaged, but still in control. Spengler posits that nobility, ‘wholly plantlike, proceeds everywhere from the land, which is its primary property and with which it is fast bound’ (DW, 2, 350). Clifford still relies on the land for his money, but others mine it for him. He cannot find vitality by communing with it directly. He requires a gamekeeper, who is responsible for the animals of the estate, which



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category comes to include Connie. Kate Millett sees Mellors as ‘a natural gentleman and therefore Lord [sic] Chatterley’s superior’.75 However, he is conscious of it as performance; he leaves the institutional veneer of the army for a different type of conformity which, after the war, can again permit dissent. He rejects the blandishments of received pronunciation and euphemistic, neutered vocabulary and aligns himself with the working class, involved throughout the decade in bitter industrial disputes, in Lawrence’s terms taking action to change for the better. Mellors rejects socialisation and returns to work with the land. He participates in capitalism as little as possible: ‘I hate the impudence of money, and I hate the impudence of class’ (LCL, 276).76 Mellors’s suggestion for progress needs more than one enlightened man: he knew that the seclusion of the wood was illusory. The industrial noises broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it. A man could no longer be private and withdrawn. […] The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines. There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanised greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform. (LCL, 119)

It is now impossible to stand outside mechanised modernity. The overwhelming sound of the urban encroaches on the wood; the silence and darkness which are necessary to revive the world are inaccessible. The novel’s conclusion highlights the difficulty of standing outside industrial capitalism. The need to exchange takes precedence. As he waits to be reunited with Connie, Mellors finds himself living with an engine-driver on Engine Row and labouring near the miners shorn of their vitality. He writes to Connie of ‘the mass-will of the people, wanting money and hating life’ (LCL, 300). Koh sees Mellors as a regenerative figure, but it is difficult to support that view given these comments at the end of the novel.77 Actions which are performed merely to support the existing order do not necessarily constitute living, in the Lawrentian sense: ‘A thing isn’t life, just because somebody does it.’78 While Mellors’s final letter to Connie offers some hope, it is decidedly ambivalent. His aggressive resistance to disenchantment becomes something on the cusp of failure.

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Lawrence did not see the war as rupture; it continues to act on the natural world, men, authority and sexuality. Carl Krockel sees Lawrence’s writings of the 1920s as ‘working through’; however, Lawrence is never able to work through the impact of the war as he does not conceive it as separate to material conditions.79 Lawrence was buffeted by the war almost as much as any combatant, and the suspicion he was under put him in physical danger. He attended an Armistice party in London, but declaimed a jeremiad: There was no hope of true peace. The war was not over, since hate and evil had become stronger than ever; so it would soon break out once more. The Germans would rise again. Europe was done for, and England most of all. Even if fighting did not start again soon, the evil might be worse because the hate would be dammed up in men’s hearts, and might break out eventually in forms worse than open war.80

Men who ‘play the game’ are disappointed to find out that war is the same game as peace. Lawrence continues to believe that change can take place, but not under current conditions: ‘The late war […] was so foul, and humanity in Europe fell suddenly into such ignominy and inhuman ghastliness, that we shall never fully realize what it was. We just cannot bear it. We haven’t the soul-strength to contemplate it’ (MM, 99). Lawrence’s characters are stuck: they must realise the problems to change, but until men become more vital there will not be the strength to face the reality of the situation and reinstate a less degraded version of humanity. Lawrence and Woolf are often seen as radically different authors, even antagonistic to one another’s aims. Woolf herself neatly sums up: ‘Thus Mr Lawrence, Mr Douglas, and Mr Joyce partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility’.81 Lawrence believes in the need for radical change which maintains an element of hierarchy, while Woolf seeks a flatteningout of patriarchal structures to give greater prominence to women’s experience. However, there were many overlaps and interconnections between groups in the London modernist network. Jesse Wolfe suggests that Lawrence was hostile to Bloomsbury, but connected in various ways,82 and Anne Fernihough explores the connections between Lawrence and Bloomsbury criticism and theory on a textual and theoretical basis; she ‘challenge[s] the notion of a Lawrence-Bloomsbury opposition’.83 Nancy Topping



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Bazin ­ suggests that they have similar theories of epistemology and consciousness.84 On a more prosaic note, the Woolfs and the Lawrences nearly swapped houses towards the end of the war, following the Lawrences’ ejection from Cornwall and Virginia Woolf’s illness.85 The two authors have complementary understandings of the war, and both take a holistic view of its causes. Woolf and the war Unlike Lawrence, Woolf welcomed peace. However, she found it difficult to separate from her views on ‘the masses’. From early October, when rumours of peace began to circulate, she blamed ‘the dampness of the Harmsworth press’ for stalling her mood: ‘Certainly it made our hearts jump at Asheham this morning. But as the Times insists on minimising it, not much exhilaration remains.’86 Given that a further month’s negotiation was required to bring about the Armistice, The Times was right to play down these early rumours. Writing in her diary only two days before its announcement, Woolf commented: ‘The general state perhaps is one of dazed surfeit; here we’ve had one great relief after another; you hear the paper boys calling out that Turkey has surrendered, or Austria given up, & the mind doesn’t do very much with it; was the whole thing too remote & meaningless to come home to one, either in action or in ceasing to act?’87 The tranquilising effect of the announcements after such an extended period of alert and privation combines with the geographical distance from the Western Front to alienate. On Armistice Day itself, she warmed up for writing a letter to her sister Vanessa by noting in her diary at 11.25 am that ‘The rooks wheeled round, & were for a moment, the symbolic look of creatures performing some ceremony, partly of thanksgiving, partly of valediction over the grave’.88 Gratitude is buried in the middle of the sentence, and the dominant image is of the ominous, circling black birds. Alison Light, in her innovative study of Mrs Woolf and the Servants, suggests that Woolf ‘found the final outbursts of flags and frenzy at the Armistice particularly depressing after the mindless slaughter’.89 However, few in 1918 thought of the war as ‘mindless slaughter’, even if they were disillusioned. In any case, to celebrate the end of the killing does not seem unreasonable. Woolf does not get swept up in celebrations, but takes a balanced view of the cost of the war and her relief at its end: ‘Peace seems to

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make much more difference than one could have thought possible, though I think the rejoicing, so far as I’ve seen it, has been very sordid and depressing.’90 Only the next day she needed to go into London from Hogarth House, in Richmond-upon-Thames: Disillusionment began after 10 minutes in the train. A fat slovenly woman in black velvet & feathers with the bad teeth of the poor insisted upon shaking hands with two soldiers; “Its thanks to you boys &c &c”. She was half drunk already, & soon produced a large bottle of beer which she made them drink of; & then she kissed them, & the last we saw of her was as she ran alongside the train waving her hand to the two stolid soldiers. But she & her like possessed London, & alone celebrated peace in their sordid way[.]91

Woolf bemoans the display of emotion, unwilling to acknowledge that perhaps gratitude towards those who served was understandable. As a result, the next day she wondered ‘whether it matters if we’re at war or peace. But I suppose the poor wretches haven’t much notion how to express their feelings.’92 The irony of the last phrase invokes the propriety which underpinned pre-war values. It is not simply a matter of expressing one’s feelings, for Woolf, but of doing so in the ‘right’ way. Her problematic engagement with class continues in her novels of the 1920s. Judy Giles has noted that Woolf saw the division between servants and those who kept them, but believed that ‘the gulf thus separating such women was, for her, unbridgeable in anything but the most superficial way’.93 Woolf’s politics are feminist, but she does not link this with other forms of oppression. The visibility of working-class celebration is a challenge to pre-war enchantments which had previously seemed solid. The signing of the peace treaty at Versailles brought further gloom, and ten days later she reported her meeting with John Maynard Keynes: ‘He is disillusioned he says. No more does he believe, that is, in the stability of the things he likes. Eton is doomed; the governing classes, perhaps Cambridge too. These conclusions were forced on him by the dismal & degrading spectacle of the Peace Congress, where men played shamelessly, not for Europe, or even England, but for their own return to Parliament at the next election.’94 Keynes’s enchantments are negated by the greed both of the reparations and the self-promotion of those who conducted negotiations. Gone is the paternalism of Victorian politics, replaced by a naked



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Figure 3.1  The Peace Day parade in London, 1919

self-interest. The Manchester Guardian’s editorial also noted that ‘the writing out of the Treaty of Versailles has brought many doubts and disillusionments’, while maintaining the hope that peace will endure.95 Woolf’s response to the Peace Day celebrations which were declared on 19 July 1919 (Figure 3.1) was similarly underwhelmed: ‘Whether its worth taking a new nib for that purpose I dont know. […] I’m desolate, dusty, & disillusioned. Of course we did not see the procession.’96 In 1918 and 1919 Woolf returns repeatedly to the language of disillusion. She disdains the thrall of the servants to the pomp and ceremony of that parade: ‘Thats the reason of my disillusionment I think. There’s something calculated & politic & insincere about these peace rejoicings. Moreover they are carried out with no beauty, & not much spontaneity.’97 Woolf criticises the conformity just as she criticised the spontaneous celebrations of Armistice Day. It is not a question of giving free rein to the celebratory impulse, but of the continuing inability of mass celebrations of a mass war to fit in with the practices and aesthetic traditions of the elite. There is also, perhaps, a latent element of fear

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at the prospect of such gatherings, which was given credence by the riots in Luton that day.98 Woolf’s fiction about the war is oblique and fragmented. Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) can be read as a war trilogy, although Woolf focuses on its oftenunseen aspects. Women are often criticised in wartime and post-war fiction, but here they hold families together while men are absent. Woolf adds a further dimension to Lawrence’s critique of capitalism, and seeks to address ingrained gender inequalities. She is alienated from the war, ‘this preposterous masculine fiction’,99 but profoundly affected by it. In a sympathetic reading of Jacob’s Room, Judith Hattaway points out that ‘the difficulty in gaining depth of focus or clarity of pattern is its subject. Jacob’s Room shows an order cracking to create the possibility of new formations.’100 These are sought in style and content, as Woolf moves away from the realism of The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919).101 She wrote in 1920 that ‘To try the accepted forms, to discard the unfit, to create others which are more fitting, is a task that must be accomplished before there is freedom or achievement’.102 Revitalisation must do respectful diligence to existing forms before experimenting; reform is desirable only after alternatives are exhausted. Indeed, she links disillusion with changes to literary style in describing Joseph Conrad as ‘A Disillusioned Romantic’.103 Lawrence’s characters remember the war in bodily traces, but in Woolf’s work combatants rarely return; when they do, the post-war world is overpowering. Woolf considers how to memorialise the war dead, and consistently attempts to enclose absence in Jacob’s Room and in the parenthetical formulations of To the Lighthouse. She also highlights the crucial role of women, ‘(in whom the obsolete exist so strangely side by side with anarchy and newness)’.104 This formulation shows the marginalised, enclosed position of women, but also the possibilities for change which arise from that liminality. Woolf sought to change the established narratives of history, and wrote immediately after the war that ‘the history of the war is not and never will be written from our point of view’.105 She continued to work on alternative histories and biographies, from her very early essays, through ‘The Lives of the Obscure’ (1925), to Orlando (1929).106 Woolf notes that ‘in all the libraries of the world the man is to be heard talking to himself and for the most part about himself’.107 She later wrote about ‘the incoherence, the fresh natural



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sequences’ of life-writing and narratives, and Jacob’s Room uses this technique to probe the novel form.108 Jacob’s is the usually heard voice of the conflict, from a highly educated male elite usually privileged to speak for themselves and to wield power by speaking on behalf of others, although he is prevented from taking his place in that lineage by his premature death.109 Silence is usually associated with women’s lives, as Rachel Bowlby points out, but here it is Jacob who is muted.110 Instead, his story is told by those over whom he might have wielded power, an invocation to move away from Carlylean histories of great men, which Jacob criticises in a university essay (JR, 48).111 Jacob’s absence demands that the blanks be filled, but also provokes questions about those who narrate his life. His evanescence and then absence in death – a death which is itself absent – leaves open a narrative space into which others might step. The narration of Jacob’s story by multiple voices means that even when he is visible he is rarely audible: ‘And perhaps Jacob only said “hum”, or said nothing at all. True, the words were inaudible. It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly’ (JR, 59). His speech is uncertain, unheard, or even unspoken; in intimate spaces Jacob is as silent as he is in public. The narrator cannot even be certain what Jacob said. Oratory is devalued as a result of wartime falsehoods and broken promises, and direct connection recalls Lawrence’s blood-consciousness. On one of the rare occasions Jacob’s speech is reported, in Clara Durrant’s diary, his narrative tails off: ‘Jacob was telling a story about some walking tour he’d take, and the inn was called “The Foaming Pot”, which, considering the landlady’s name … They shouted with laughter. The joke was indecent’ (JR, 95). Jacob’s joie de vivre is usually unseen, but away from the subduing influence of family and lovers the boisterous energy of the group spurs him on to be personable, humorous and engaging. However, his lewdness is performance and, in free indirect discourse, his conservatism is evident: ‘Jacob doubted whether he liked [indecency] in the raw. He had a violent reversion towards male society, cloistered rooms, and the works of the classics’ (JR, 110). He typifies the endurance of conservatism, but his elusive characterisation means that Jacob’s Room is a counterpoint to novels which espouse Jacob’s position, such as Tell England. Bowlby observes pithily that ‘the prestige of men of power is effectively correlated not with a difference of talent or worth, but with the lack of any difference […. T]hey are

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machines, without any degree of individual agency’.112 Men derive their power from their ability to reflect others back to themselves, or at least a reflection they would wish to see. Rachel Hollander argues that the novel ‘represents the inaccessibility of the truth of individual experience in the city, but without implying some alternative community where relations with others are transparent or communication complete’.113 In modernity the individual is viewed with suspicion, both the potential antidote to conformity and spurned by conforming and conformist society. The post-war impossibility of reverting to pre-war conditions is traced back onto Jacob, and the impossibility of reversion leads to disenchantment. Disenchantment in Jacob’s Room derives from social changes which result in fraught gender relationships. Jacob’s silent presence on a train leads Mrs Norman to opine internally that ‘it is a fact that men are dangerous’ (JR, 35), although he undercuts her assumption by assisting her, reinforcing the possibility of danger whilst shielding it. Men are always potentially dangerous to women because of physical, social and legislative power. The narrator sees young men as violent: ‘Youth, youth – something savage – something pedantic. […] Don’t palter with the second rate. Detest your own age. Build a better one’ (JR, 145). Woolf’s narrator draws attention to the inadequacy of the zeitgeist, and to continue through existing systems of succession is not the solution. However, the iconoclasm of young men is only temporary: ‘It is those damned women,’ said Jacob, without any trace of bitterness, but rather with sadness and disappointment that what might have been should never be. (This violent disillusionment is generally to be expected in young men in the prime of life, sound of wind and limb, who will soon become fathers of families and directors of banks.) (JR, 209–10)

Privileged men pass through disillusionment on their way to conformity within patriarchy and capitalism. Woolf’s use of parenthesis consistently suggests chronological separation. It marks out disillusionment as a phase and perhaps aligns it with the First World War, particularly when compared with the later parenthetical deaths in To the Lighthouse. Jacob is already disillusioned, but the narrator believes it avoidable: ‘If one strove hard enough to reach the top of the hill it need not come to him – this disillusionment from women in middle life’ (JR, 221). For men like Jacob, hard work leads to the



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financial success that removes him from the domestic sphere, and Woolf insinuates that this separation can no longer hold. That separation is emphasised by the result of Jacob’s affair in Greece with the American tourist Sandra Wentworth Williams. The narration shifts from Jacob to Sandra halfway through a paragraph, simultaneously a formal move from masculine histories to letterwriting. The intimacy between Jacob and Sandra is stressed: The perambulator was going through the little gate in the railing. She kissed her hand; directed by the nurse, Jimmy waved his. ‘He’s a small boy,’ she said, thinking of Jacob. (JR, 237)

Sandra associates the child with Jacob, which implies that Jimmy is the result of their affair. Just as Jacob is absent throughout the novel, he is an absent father here. The child combines the apparent dynamism of Americanisation with British traditions, suggesting a form of revitalisation which, given Woolf’s contempt for mass culture, seems doomed to failure. Jacob’s Room participates in contemporary debates about the possibility of return and the need for memorialisation. The title indicates possession but not necessarily presence. The novel passes through a number of his rooms and its circular structure, beginning and ending with Jacob’s absence, represents empty enclosure formally. Jacob is drawn away from the family’s nanny at the beginning of the novel by a skull, and he sobs as he runs with it. However, his cries are unheard: he is silently, to others, fascinated by this symbol of death, and his tears are both the socially accepted signifier of grief and prolepsis for his death at the end of the novel. Having run away with the skull, his distancing echoes the distant deaths of combatants on the Western Front and, indeed, on other fronts, from those who remained in Britain. The skull is also a motif in the wood of his room, which is specifically linked with the eighteenth century, looking back before the rise of industrial capitalism to a time when Jacob’s class was unchallenged; the motif recurs in To the Lighthouse (TL, 124). Ferrer suggests that ‘the entire landscape of this novel […] is a great corpse in the process of decomposing’.114 It is also the productive decay of the form itself. Memories of the dead are stimulated by uncanny absences in familiar locations: Woolf believed that ‘the lives and characters of its owners [… distil] their atmosphere into’ a room, and space is linked closely with identity.115 The ending of Jacob’s Room finds his

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room with ‘everything just as it was […] Nothing arranged. All his letters strewn about for anyone to read. What did he expect? Did he think he would come back?’ (JR, 246). His friend Bonamy is unable to comprehend Jacob’s need for optimism, and the fragmented, brusque syntax attests to his grief. Optimism is most evident on the part of those who are in mortal danger; it is necessary to continue. Although most men did return, individual experience rarely takes account of aggregated statistics and the immediacy of death is overpowering. However, Jacob’s absence does not seem total. The stasis of the empty room is combined with minute, unprompted movements: ‘Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker armchair creaks, though no one sits there’ (JR, 247). The phrase is repeated verbatim from the first description of Jacob’s university rooms (JR, 49).116 The objects which move are natural, separated from their life source yet still capable of revivification. Once the door or window is open, the air is refreshed; the (presumably cut) flowers offer the prospect of revival with careful treatment, while even the wicker, literally cut and dried, has unprompted movement left in a single fibre. The flickers of life in the empty room suggest the hope that some good can come from war deaths. Jacob’s Room calls to mind the Cenotaph, the empty tomb which remembers officially the British casualties of the First World War in Whitehall, London.117 This blankness attests to the shift in responsibility for mourning from the individual to the state.118 Mourners needed to be free to interpret for themselves the centrally designed monuments. To see the Cenotaph as a blank space awaiting inscription evokes the form-filling of the conflict and, more widely, bureaucracy: a space is provided to be filled in a manner for which direction is provided. The empty tomb, like Jacob’s Room, is always-already filled with existing cultural accretions; it does not offer the potential for divergent interpretation which it tacitly claims. The same might be said for the standardised individual graves, far away in France, for which the Cenotaph stands in. Similarly, Jacob’s silence evokes the remembrance ceremony, a space for participants to inscribe their own narrative which offers the possibility of telling new stories or, at least, telling existing stories from new and different points of view. Woolf wrote that ‘One is tempted to impute to the dead the qualities we find lacking in ourselves.’119 The dead become palimpsests, unable to construct



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themselves. Christine Froula sees Jacob as ‘at once an elusive being no net of words can capture and – d ­ elivered by his education to a modern war that overwhelms individual will – a puppet moved hither and thither by fate, one of the war dead, a ghost’.120 While Woolf gestures to ways of moving forward, Jacob’s death allows him to evince pathos and mourning as a totem of those past enchantments about which Keynes worried in 1919. Men, masses, militarism: Mrs Dalloway The shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith is conspicuous in Woolf’s subsequent novel Mrs Dalloway, her most overt engagement with the war’s impact. Even so, further references to the war were written out of the published version.121 As Jacob haunts his room after death, so Septimus is haunted by his former comrade Evans. The ghostly presence is one of the factors that leads to his suicide: the war remains Septimus’s actuality.122 He questions the enchantments for which he fought, and Madelyn Detloff suggests that Septimus ‘refuses to accept British civilisation (with its ambulances, industries, and social niceties) is worth the death of his killed friend’.123 His disenchantment is incomprehensible to the doctors Holmes and Bradshaw. Sir William Bradshaw ‘not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion’ (MD, 84).124 Bradshaw’s and England’s prosperity comes at the expense of those who most need the nation and others’ support. Their extensive experience does not extend to the recent phenomenon of shell shock, and they mistreat Septimus by matching new experience with old knowledge.125 This suspicion leaves open the possibility, Michael Whitworth argues compellingly, that Septimus is misdiagnosed.126 Explicitly identified as ‘a clerk, but of the better sort’ (MD, 71), it is ironic that Septimus cannot be treated by homogenised methods. Clarissa Dalloway becomes aware of Septimus only after his death, and yet: ‘She felt somehow very like him – the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went on living’ (MD, 158). She both understands his pain and is glad that he is no longer a part of her world. Mrs Dalloway’s death in earlier versions of the novel is displaced onto Septimus, who Woolf views as her double.127

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The distance between combatant and civilian experience is thrown into sharp relief by their post-war proximity in the novel, Karen L. Levenback argues.128 Septimus’s death is the disappearance of a painful reminder of the war, and of the spectre of mental illness.129 Woolf linked the war with mass cultural formations and capitalism: ‘War even is conducted by companies and communities rather than by individuals.’130 The narrator sees the clerking class as a threat to individualism, and damns Septimus with faint praise as ‘one of those half-educated, self-educated men whose education is all learnt from books borrowed from public libraries, read in the evening after the day’s work, on the advice of well-known authors consulted by letter’ (MD, 71). His partial and autodidactic education is implicitly valued against the elite education of Richard Dalloway and Peter Walsh in Mrs Dalloway, and Jacob in Jacob’s Room.131 Woolf was politically engaged, and believed in workingclass education,132 but she denigrates the masses crossing Waterloo Bridge in terms which recall her description of the Peace Day parade, and also Eliot’s description of London Bridge in The Waste Land.133 Despite their very different philosophies, Eliot, Lawrence and Woolf share similar problems with capitalist modernity, and Woolf describes extensively homogenisation and mass production.134 The contempt for the masses is reiterated in Mrs Dalloway: They hunt in packs […,] scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness. They desert the fallen. They are plastered over with grimaces. There was Brewer at the office, with his waxed moustache, coral tie-pin, white slip, and pleasurable emotions – all coldness and clamminess within,– his geraniums ruined in the War – his cook’s nerves destroyed; or Amelia Whatshername, handing round cups of tea punctually at five – a leering, sneering, obscene little harpy; and the Toms and Berties in their starched shirt fronts oozing thick drops of vice. (MD, 76)

Names are generic or unmemorable, and where they are definite they are reduced to an egregious type by unflattering description. The serving girl is branded obscene without evidence, and the evident sexuality of her male counterparts indicates proliferation, as in Septimus’s name, and the fear of the packs which result; the doglike description recalls Lawrence’s canaille. The need to remember the dead is implied, but memories veer from the banality of dead plants to the inconvenient delays to Brewer’s food. The supposed



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elite is no better, and Richard Dalloway exhibits the traits required in politics: ‘A bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes, but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a spark of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type’ (MD, 63). Mass thought is not class-bound, but a product of patriarchal rule and the uncreative thinking it provokes, in which limitations and stupidity are prerequisites for getting on, and niceness, the ultimate blandishment, is prized over distinction. Like Lawrence’s Mellors, Peter Walsh in Mrs Dalloway is a soldier returning from India, and his otherness allows him to express his discontent freely. However, Peter situates the root of his disenchantment in his own actions and does not see the need to change the civilisation in which he has not succeeded. He reflects on his inability to conform to patriarchal and military structures, and is provoked to consider the quality of military training on seeing ‘boys in uniform, carrying guns […] and on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England’ (MD, 43). Their faces are stony, carved, values inscribed on them without any necessary understanding. As Whitworth points out, ‘the terms in which he describes them contradict his admiration’, and Peter Kalliney sees his adjustment of gait to keep step as comical.135 Pre-war enchantments will continue to provoke disenchantment in the post-war generation. Where Sandra Wentworth Williams’s baby in Jacob’s Room offers the possibility for change, in this novel of only three years later the next generation has already been conditioned by the values of its forebears. Peter Walsh is left behind the younger soldiers, despite their lack of robustness, and he pauses at: the exalted statues, Nelson, Gordon, Havelock, the black, the spectacular images of great soldiers stood looking ahead of them, as if they too had made the same renunciation […], trampled under the same temptations, and achieved at length a marble stare. But the stare Peter Walsh did not want for himself in the least; though he could respect it in others. He could respect it in boys. They don’t know the troubles of the flesh yet, he thought[.] (MD, 44)136

The nineteenth-century generals are undesirable role models, but the enduring respect they demand and their formative influence is shown in the stony faces of the boys, already on the way to

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becoming those statues: venerated, dead, immortalised in stone, yet only names at the bottom rather than images atop a pedestal. This speaks to the change both in the mode of warfare and memorial practices. Woolf warns not to ‘celebrate the glories of the British Empire’ in a contemporary essay.137 Military demeanour is boyish, immature; the leap in Peter’s logic shows his respect for convention, but also his own struggle with authority.138 His attitude toward the boys seems more empathetic than respectful per se, and is perhaps a displacement of respect for fellow soldiers who died in the First World War. The ‘troubles of the flesh’ refer both to Peter’s romantic entanglements, which dog his career, but also the fleshly reality of warfare.139 The boy soldiers understand that memorialisation demands solemnity, but their complicity in those procedures means that those enchantments which are implicitly criticised will also endure for at least another generation. Given this I cannot, as Levenback does, see Peter as suffering from ‘war-blindness’.140 Woolf separates the war and the present from the immediate past, both chronologically and qualitatively, while seeking a connection.141 In her short story ‘A Society’, the war divides the body text, an absence comprised of three asterisks.142 In his study of Woolf’s links with the Victorians, Steve Ellis sees Peter’s use of his pocketknife in Mrs Dalloway as symbolising the cutting-off of the First World War,143 and Woolf wrote in 1923 that ‘We are sharply cut off from our predecessors. A shift in the scale – the war, the sudden slip of masses held in position for ages – has shaken the fabric from top to bottom, alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of the present. Every day we find ourselves doing, saying, or thinking things that would have been impossible to our fathers.’144 Where other modernists seek the novelty of rejecting parental values Woolf, despite her criticisms of patriarchy, desires an ongoing connection with the previous generation. The ‘slip of masses’ perhaps alludes to a literal seismic shift, but also the jolt to the established order caused by the war is blamed on the release of masses from what, she implies, is their rightful position in the social hierarchy. In A Room of One’s Own Woolf conceives the post-war world in terms of disillusion and decline: Shall we lay the blame on the war? When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other’s



Modernism, conflict and the home front, 1922–27 149 eyes that romance was killed? Certainly it was a shock (to women in particular with their illusions about education, and so on) to see the faces of our rulers in the light of the shell-fire. So ugly they looked – German, English, French – so stupid. But lay the blame where one will, on whom one will, the illusion which inspired Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to sing so passionately about the coming of their loves is far rarer now than then. One has only to read, to look, to listen, to remember. But why say ‘blame’? Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place?145

Woolf addresses the dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment. Those values which now seem illusory were fervently believed at the time, and were not immediately shattered by the war. Her sense of loss is also felt in her formal wrestling with the novel, which term she posits might be substituted by ‘elegy’.146 The parenthetical deaths in the central ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse occur within the parenthesis of war, represented formally. Maud Ellmann likens the parenthesis of ‘Time Passes’ to the emptiness of Jacob’s Room.147 Andrew Ramsay dies on active service: ‘[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]’ (TL, 145). Lily Briscoe repeats the news to herself twice parenthetically (TL, 169, 210). The only consolation is that the young men die quickly. The brief explication demonstrates how the war impinges on the civilian consciousness and encloses wartime deaths in order to move forward. Woolf used a similar form in her diary: ‘On Sunday we heard of Cecil’s death & Philip’s wounds.’148 The single-sentence paragraph which gives this distressing information stands alone within an otherwise drably domestic account of her week, both moving past the event quickly and drawing attention to it formally. Andrew’s absence earlier in the novel is also parenthetical: ‘The Window’ chapter is fully enclosed, as the experience of Andrew, the child, Nancy, the servant, and Minta Doyle’s matrilineal heirloom is separated from the narrative (TL, 81–6). The last time Andrew features alive, again unseen, Prue calls to him to ‘just put out the light in the hall’ (TL, 137). This evokes the statement, perhaps apocryphal, by Sir Edward Grey, the UK Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of war, that ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time.’149 It is also Andrew’s own descent into

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darkness, as mass warfare continues the existing disenchantment of industrialised Europe. As the country lauds and memorialises the men fighting and dying out of sight, Woolf seeks to make visible the women who die out of sight every day, their work taken for granted. Andrew’s death on military service is outnumbered by women’s deaths in the novel. Mrs Ramsay’s untimely death leads to the pathos of her absence: ‘[Mr. Ramsay stumbling along a passage stretched his arms out one dark morning, but, Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, he stretched his arms out. They remained empty.]’ (TL, 140). Her death is also relived by the housekeeper Mrs McNab in parenthesis (TL, 148).150 The silent recollection of these deaths evokes solidifying mourning and commemorative practices in the 1920s.151 While men face dangers in wartime, which women cannot, Woolf draws attention to the dangers faced by women as a matter of course: ‘[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said. They said nobody deserved happiness more.]’ (TL, 144). Prue’s death is equally unexpected, but is understood as mundane, rather than exceptional. Woolf pleads for an appreciation of women’s roles as the legislative improvements that were partly precipitated by the war failed to lead to practical advances. Tracy Hargreaves argues that ‘Woolf’s narratives also reconstruct war as an unstable category, and the ramifications of this instability are radically significant, since everyone could be “in the war”’.152 Lawrence and Woolf certainly both felt this. Woolf offers a tacit defence of her 1920s’ novels as she criticises the ongoing dominance of men’s writing: ‘This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.’153 She seeks to tell the history of what Erich Auerbach describes as the ‘minor, unimpressive random events’ to which she holds, while world events are only fleetingly felt.154 The difference still tacitly persists, and it is only recently that literary criticism has started to look outside soldiers’ narratives for war stories. Both Lawrence’s and Woolf’s disenchantments result from their concerns about the structure of Western society. They speak against the homogenisation of culture and, in a wider sense, of life. The popular is not rejected per se, but generic art is the problem. The war is a mass formation, which suffers from the same issues. The c­ ivilian



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experience of war shares structural similarities with combatant experience; the war is a symptom of industrial modernity. Lawrence rues the invasion of privacy which results from increasingly authoritarian rule, and Woolf bemoans the fact that nothing changes for women, despite her belief in existing values: ‘I cry out, I confess, for the old decorums’.155 The strength of the dominant systems, in both cases, subjugates those who are or desire to live differently and be different. They differ radically on the details, but both authors seek to  interpret the war positively in one sense: they wish to use ­the disillusionment with modernity as a catalyst for change. Neither is wholly convinced that this will happen, but both continue to search. Lawrence and Woolf both understand the war in a contiguous but distinct reality, whose interpretation must be separated. Woolf’s desire to see the war as rupture is the desire to see new ways of structuring the world. Late in life she talked about that rupture as a construction, as the possibility of change seemed more remote.156 They want to change the social order, but propose markedly different solutions. Sustained disenchantment is at this point a countercultural formation, as is high modernism. It operates in opposition to mass culture but must be read in conversation with popular interpretations of the war in novels such as Tell England. Their marginality can be seen in relative sales figures. From the mixed critical success of Jacob’s Room, Woolf felt her success increase through the decade. She wrote shortly before its publication that ‘its just on the cards Mrs Dalloway is a success […] – I don’t expect it! I expect a slow silent increase of fame, such has come about, rather miraculously, since Js R.’157 Mrs Dalloway was still a very muted success, but Woolf achieved a good sale for To the Lighthouse, and wrote in her diary that ‘We have sold (I think) 1690 before publication – twice Dalloway’.158 The readership was becoming more accepting of Woolf’s form and also of her critiques of society. The sales of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover are difficult to calculate, and indeed Lawrence does not sit easily with the general narrative of this book about increasing sales for disenchanted works. It is a succès de scandale as much as of esteem, but even without the scandal its subject matter would stimulate interest: sex sells. Both Lawrence and Woolf write about the war repeatedly, and their 1920s’ works form a compelling serial response to the war. In the following chapter, I discuss works from approximately

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the same years which were explicitly conceived as war series, by two combatant authors. Notes 1 On Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and the war, see Christine Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 64–7. 2 See, for example, Robert E. Spoo, ‘“Nestor” and the Nightmare: The Presence of the Great War in Ulysses’, Twentieth Century Literature 32:2 (1986), 137–54; James Fairhall, ‘Ulysses, the Great War, and the Easter 1916 Rising’, in David Bevan (ed.), Literature and War (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), pp. 25–38; Mark A. Wollaeger, ‘Posters, Modernism, Cosmopolitanism: Ulysses and World War I Recruiting Posters in Ireland’, The Yale Journal of Criticism: Interpretation in the Humanities 6:2 (1993), 87–132. 3 Jae-Kyung Koh, D. H. Lawrence and the Great War: The Quest for Cultural Regeneration (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 27–8, 41. 4 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1917), in The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Susan Dick (London: Hogarth, 1985), p. 83. 5 Woolf, 12 July 1919, in The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 1, 1915– 1919, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth, 1977), p. 291. The spelling and grammar in Woolf’s diaries is idiosyncratic, and I have not regularised it. 6 Woolf, 7 October 1919, Diary, vol. 1, p. 304. 7 D. H. Lawrence to Edward Marsh, 29 January 1917, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, volume III: October 1916–June 1921, ed. James T.  Boulton and Andrew Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 84. 8 D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 236. 9 D. H. Lawrence, ‘With the Guns’, in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 81. 10 Ibid., p. 82. 11 D. H. Lawrence, ‘Democracy’, in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 64. 12 D. H. Lawrence to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 14 May 1915, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, volume II: June 1913–October 1916, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 340. See also ‘The Reality of Peace’, in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, p. 40.



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13 Lawrence to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 12 February 1917, Letters, vol. 3, p. 91. 14 Lawrence to Amy Lowell, 7 December 1916, Letters, vol. 3, p. 48. 15 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (1920; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 223, 228. 16 Lawrence, Women in Love, p. 455 and see also p. 464. See Alan W. Friedman, ‘D. H. Lawrence: Pleasure and Death’, Studies in the Novel 32:2 (2000), 211–12; N. Katherine Hayles, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 102. 17 See D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Deadly Victorians’, in The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. David Ellis (Ware: Wordsworth, 2002), p. 521 (hereafter CP). 18 Although only discussed in a small number of letters, his desire for  and failure to create Rananim, his paradisiacal community, highlights his disenchantment with the modern world. See, for example, George J. Zytaruk, ‘Rananim: D. H. Lawrence’s Failed Utopia’, in Gamini Salgado and G. K. Das (eds), The Spirit of D. H. Lawrence (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1988), pp. 266–94; Nathan Waddell, Modernist Nowheres: Politics and Utopia in Early Modernist Writing, 1900–1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 198–9. 19 Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin, Introduction to Bronfen and Goodwin (eds), Death and Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 4. 20 Mark Kinkead-Weekes notes Lawrence’s consciousness that ‘England, My England’ showed anti-war sentiment, and elucidates the biographical background in D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 252–6. 21 Laurence Steven, ‘From Thimble to Ladybird: D. H. Lawrence’s Widening Vision?’, D. H. Lawrence Review 18:2–3 (1986), 239–53; Kinkead-Weekes, Triumph to Exile, pp. 684–703 on England, My England and the three novellas. 22 On Women in Love and the war, see Hugh Stevens, ‘Women in Love, Psychoanalysis and War’, in Howard J. Booth (ed.), New D.  H. Lawrence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 80–97, and Stevens, ‘The Plumed Serpent and the Erotics of Primitive Masculinity’, in Stevens and Caroline Howlett (eds), Modernist Sexualities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 222; Paul Sheehan, Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 111–18.

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23 See Bruce Steele, Introduction to Lawrence, England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Steele (1922; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. xxxii–xxxiv. 24 On Egbert’s engagement with tradition, see Koh, D. H. Lawrence and the Great War, p. 26. 25 Koh, D. H. Lawrence and the Great War, pp. 154–5. 26 Lawrence to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 2 November 1915, Letters, vol. 2, p. 424. ‘The Thimble’ is loosely based on aspects of the Asquith family. 27 Kinkead-Weekes, Triumph to Exile, p. 693. 28 Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘Potent Griselda: “The Ladybird” and the Great Mother’, in Peter Balbert and Phillip L. Marcus (eds), D. H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 145; Kinkead-Weekes, Triumph to Exile, pp. 693–4. 29 See also Lawrence, ‘All That We Have is Life’, CP, p. 367. 30 See Michael Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), particularly ch. 2, ‘Things Fall Apart: The Secret Agent and Literary Entropy’, pp. 58–82. Lawrence addresses the importance of the sun in his essay on ‘Aristocracy’, in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, pp. 367–76, particularly pp. 370–4. 31 Lawrence to Arthur McLeod, 5 January 1915, Letters, vol. 2, p. 255. 32 See also poems such as ‘New Houses, New Clothes’, ‘Things Men Have Made’, ‘Things Made by Iron’, ‘Whatever Man Makes’, all CP, p. 365, ‘Work’, CP, pp. 367–8; ‘The Reality of Peace’, pp. 32–3. 33 Lawrence, Kangaroo, p. 180. 34 C. F. G. Masterman, After Twelve Months of War (London: Darling and Son, 1915), p. 10. 35 A. G. Gardiner, Introduction to George A. Greenwood, England To-day: A Social Study of Our Time (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922), p. 6. 36 D. H. Lawrence, ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’, in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 13. 37 Lawrence, ‘Reality of Peace’, p. 34. 38 Maurice Maeterlinck, Death (London: Methuen, 1911), p. 4. 39 Maurice Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 2. See also Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 40 There is a strong similarity between the description of Basil and Cynthia Asquith’s husband, of whom Lawrence wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell that ‘all his soul is left at the war. The war is



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the only reality to him. All this here is unreal, this England: only the trenches are Life to him.’ [20  June 1915], Letters, vol. 2, pp. 359–60. On the hierarchy between them see Judith Ruderman, D. H. Lawrence and the Devouring Mother: The Search for a Patriarchal Ideal of Leadership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984), pp. 74–5. 41 This piece focuses on heterosexual connection, but see also Howard J. Booth, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Male Homosexual Desire’, Review of English Studies 33:209 (2002), 86–107. 42 Lawrence’s treatment of this desire reaches its culmination in the later story ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’, in which the protagonist leaves her staid life to seek the primitive unknown and becomes a sacrificial victim. See Friedman, ‘D. H. Lawrence: Pleasure and Death’, pp. 214–16. 43 R. G. Collingwood, ‘Man Goes Mad’ (1936), in Philosophy of Enchantment: Studies in Folktale, Cultural Criticism, and Anthropology, ed. David Boucher, Wendy James and Philip Smallwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), p. 329. 44 Lawrence to Bertrand Russell, 8 December 1915, Letters, 2, p. 470. See also Lawrence to J. D. Beresford, 1 February 1916, Letters, 2, p. 520; Lawrence to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 15 February 1916, Letters, vol. 2, p. 539. Dolores LaChapelle discusses blood-consciousness as a philosophy in D. H. Lawrence: Future Primitive (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1996), pp. 81–99. 45 Lawrence, ‘Art and Morality’, in Study of Thomas Hardy, p. 145. 46 See also Lawrence, ‘The Primal Passions’, CP, p. 395, in which the speaker seeks the ‘strange essential communication of life’, which comes in a variety of quasi-worshipful forms. 47 Hugh Stevens notes the problems of ‘the verbal and conscious celebration of nonverbal unconscious states’, which must take place in the modernity which needs to be usurped. ‘The Plumed Serpent and the Erotics of Primitive Masculinity’, p. 228. 48 See Sheehan, Modernism, Narrative and Humanism, p. 41. 49 Lawrence, ‘Life’, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, p. 16. 50 Gilbert, ‘Potent Griselda’, p. 145. Judith Ruderman suggests that Dionys speaks for Lawrence, and is a conduit for his ‘wildest fantasies concerning women’. D. H. Lawrence and the Devouring Mother, p. 79. 51 Lawrence to Gordon Campbell, 21 December 1916, Letters, vol. 3, p. 63. 52 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 57. 53 Keith Cushman, Introduction to Lawrence, Memoir of Maurice

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Magnus (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), p. 9. On Magnus, see Louise E. Wright, Maurice Magnus: A Biography (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). See KinkeadWeekes, Triumph to Exile, pp. 703–9 for an account of the abortive attempt to publish the memoir in December 1921. 54 On the ‘fear of penury’ see ‘Education of the People’, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, pp. 91–3. 55 Sheehan, Modernism, Narrative and Humanism, p. 115, drawing on Lawrence, ‘John Galsworthy’, in Study of Thomas Hardy, p. 180. 56 See also the description of ‘England in 1929’, ‘like to become incurably diseased inside’ (CP, p. 448), and the impact of ‘Boredom, Ennui, Depression’ as pain on the whole body (CP, p. 520). 57 Lawrence, St Mawr, in St Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney (London: Granada, 1983), p. 126. 58 Lawrence to Lady Ottoline Morrell, [17 February 1915], Letters, vol. 2, p. 288. 59 Carl Krockel, War Trauma and English Modernism: T. S. Eliot and D.  H. Lawrence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 140. 60 Arnold Bennett, Riceyman Steps: A Novel (1923; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), particularly ch. 8. 61 Krockel, War Trauma and English Modernism, p. 144. 62 Lawrence, Kangaroo, p. 236. 63 Michael Squires, ‘Modernism and the Contours of Violence in D. H. Lawrence’s Fiction’, Studies in the Novel 39:1 (2007), 92. 64 Lawrence, Kangaroo, p. 235. 65 Ibid., p. 277. 66 D. H. Lawrence, ‘The State of Funk’ (1930), in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 219. 67 Lawrence, ‘Men and Machines’, CP, p. 533. 68 Lawrence, St Mawr, p. 53. 69 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848– c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 210, drawing on Maudsley, Body and Will (1883); Max Nordau, Degeneration, intro. George L. Mosse ([1892] 1895; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), p. 352. 70 Lawrence, ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’, p. 95. 71 Lawrence, ‘Aristocracy’, p. 369. 72 Ibid., p. 370. 73 Ibid., p. 376. 74 William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880– 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 9.



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75 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), p. 244. 76 See also ‘How Beastly the Bourgeois is’, CP, pp. 348–9, ‘MoneyMadness’, CP, p. 400, ‘Kill Money’, CP, p. 401, and ‘The Middle Classes’, CP, pp. 440–1. 77 Koh, D. H. Lawrence and the Great War, pp. 183–7. 78 Lawrence, ‘Morality and the Novel’, Study of Thomas Hardy, p. 151. 79 Krockel, War Trauma and English Modernism, pp. 128–55. 80 Kinkead-Weekes, Triumph to Exile, p. 481. 81 Virginia Woolf, ‘An Essay in Criticism’ (1927), in The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 4, 1925–1928, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth, 1994), p. 454. 82 Jesse Wolfe, Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 25. 83 Anne Fernihough, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 12. See particularly chapters 4–6. 84 Nancy Topping Bazin, Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1973), p. 3. See also Rachel Bowlby, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 42. 85 Lawrence to Leonard Woolf, [20 January 1918], Letters, vol. 3, p.  199. On the development of suspicion against the Lawrences, see Kinkead-Weekes, Triumph to Exile, pp. 318–20, 400–5. For an extended account of Woolf’s mental illness, see Stephen Trombley, All That Summer She Was Mad: Virginia Woolf and Her Doctors (London: Junction, 1981). 86 Woolf, 7 October 1918, Diary, vol. 1, p. 199. 87 Woolf, 9 November 1918, Diary, vol. 1, p. 215. 88 Woolf, 11 November 1918, Diary, vol. 1, p. 216. 89 Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 142. 90 Woolf to Vanessa Bell, 13 November 1918, The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume 2, 1912–1922. The Question of Things Happening, ed. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), p. 292. 91 Woolf, 12 November 1918, Diary, vol. 1, p. 216. 92 Woolf to Bell, 13 November 1918, Letters, vol. 2, p. 293. 93 Judy Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900–50 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 132. On Woolf and ‘the servant problem’, see pp. 141–51. 94 Woolf, 8 July 1919, Diary, vol. 1, p. 288. 95 Anon, ‘Peace Day’, Manchester Guardian, 19 July 1919, p. 8.

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96 Woolf, 19 July 1919, Diary, vol. 1, p. 292. There were many processions in the London suburbs in addition to those in the centre. See Anon, ‘Festal Suburbs: Local Patriotism Exhibits its Fervour’, Observer, 20 July 1919, p. 12. 97 Woolf, 19 July 1919, Diary, vol. 1, p. 292, and see the entry for the following day. 98 Sarah Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 210–11. 99 Woolf, January 1916, Letters, vol. 2, p. 76. 100 Judith Hattaway, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room: History and Memory’, in Dorothy Goldman (ed.), Women and World War I: The Written Response (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 24–5. 101 See Laura Marcus, Virginia Woolf (Plymouth: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 1997), ch. 1 for a reading of these texts. 102 Virginia Woolf, ‘Men and Women’ (1920), in The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume III: 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth, 1988), p. 195. 103 Woolf, ‘A Disillusioned Romantic’ (1920), Essays, vol. 3, pp. 229–33. 104 Woolf, ‘On Being Ill’ (1926), in Essays, vol. 4, p. 320. 105 Virginia Woolf, ‘The War from the Street’, Essays, vol. 3, p. 3. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar address the issue from a feminist point of view in No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Volume 3: Letters from the Front (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), ch. 1. 106 Woolf, ‘The Lives of the Obscure’ (1925), Essays, vol. 4, pp. 118–45. See Marcus, Virginia Woolf, pp. 7–8; Rachel Bowlby, ‘Untold Stories in Mrs Dalloway’, Textual Practice 25:3 (2011), 397–415. 107 Woolf, ‘Men and Women’ (1920), Essays, vol. 3, p. 193. Also, the beginning of ‘A Society’ declares that the books written by men ‘are for the most part unutterably bad!’ Complete Shorter Fiction, p. 118. On ‘Recovering a Female Tradition’, see Rachel Bowlby, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations, pp. 25–7 and ‘Rewriting History’, pp. 34–7. See also Janet Wolff’s seminal ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, Theory, Culture, Society 2:3 (1985), 37–46. 108 Woolf, ‘Life and the Novelist’, Essays, vol. 4, p. 403, and note her letter to Jacques Raverat, 30 March 1923: ‘I am still reconstructing your past from fragments, mostly false, I daresay’, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume 3, 1923–1928. A Change of Perspective, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), p. 24. See also Steve Ellis, Virginia Woolf and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 43; Hattaway, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room’, p. 15; Alison Light, Forever



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England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 2–5. 109 This also echoes the death of Woolf’s brother Thoby Stephen in 1906, coincidentally the year in which Jacob goes up to Cambridge, and the death of Rupert Brooke. See Theodore Koulouris, Hellenism and Loss in the Work of Virginia Woolf (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 33–6, 216–22. On Brooke, see Virginia Woolf, ‘Rupert Brooke’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume II: 1912–1918, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth, 1987), pp. 277–84; Woolf to Katherine Cox, 12 January 1916, Letters, vol. 2, p. 75; Woolf to Cox, 13 August 1918, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 267–8; Woolf to Mrs M. R. Brooke, 21 August 1918, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 271–2. Levenback asserts the importance of Brooke’s death and outlines Woolf’s objections to Edward Marsh’s biography in Virginia Woolf and the Great War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1999), pp. 14–16. D. H. Lawrence, in contrast, described Brooke’s death as fatuous, ‘the real climax of his pose’. Letters, vol. 2, p. 330. 110 Bowlby, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations, p. 13. See also Gilbert, ‘Potent Griselda’, particularly pp. 130–42. Note also H. D.’s novel Palimpsest (Paris: Contact Editions, 1926). Judy Giles discusses the problems of writing women’s history in Women, Identity and Private Life, pp. 8–15, 20–30. Woolf uses a similar structural device in The Waves (1931), in which the central absent character, Percival, shares with Jacob a similar background and martial associations. 111 See also Woolf, Diary, vol. 1, p. 223 (3 December 1918), and see also her plea against generalisation and invocation of the multiple reflection in ‘The Mark on the Wall’, Complete Shorter Fiction, pp. 77–83. For critical analysis see Gillian Beer, ‘The Victorians in Virginia Woolf: 1832–1941’, in Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 92–111; on Woolf, great men, and the literary tradition, see Andrea Zemgulys, Modernism and the Locations of Literary Heritage (Cambridge University Press, 2008), ch. 6 and Marie Laniel, ‘Revisiting a Great Man’s House: Virginia Woolf’s Carlylean Pilgrimages’, Carlyle Studies Annual 24 (2008), 117–32. Michael Whitworth sees Jacob’s Room as a parody of both the biography and bildungsroman forms. Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 106–8. 112 Bowlby, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations, p. 112. 113 Rachel Hollander, ‘Novel Ethics: Alterity and Form in Jacob’s Room’, Twentieth-Century Literature 53:1 (2007), 50. 114 Daniel Ferrer, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 43.

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115 Woolf, ‘Street Haunting’, Essays, vol. 4, p. 489. 116 See also Hattaway, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room’, p. 23. 117 On memorials as a context for Woolf’s writing, see Bette London, ‘Posthumous Was a Woman: World War I Memorials and Woolf’s Dead Poet’s Society’, Woolf Studies Annual 16 (2010), 45–70. On the Cenotaph and Jacob’s Room see Allyson Booth, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 34–6, 44–6. The link with the Cenotaph is developed in Mrs Dalloway. The first version of Mrs Dalloway ‘opened with a procession of the sons of dead officers laying a wreath on the Cenotaph’, Marcus, p. 72, drawing on Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 461. In the published version, Peter Walsh observes cadets doing the same (MD, 43). 118 See Joanna Scutts, ‘Battlefield Cemeteries, Pilgrimage, and Literature after the First World War: The Burial of the Dead’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 52:4 (2009), 388–91. 119 Woolf, ‘Reading’, in Essays, vol. 3, p. 149. 120 Froula, Bloomsbury Avant-Garde, p. 63. 121 See Jane Lilienfeld, ‘“Success in Circuit Lies”: Editing the War in Mrs Dalloway’, Woolf Studies Annual 15 (2009), 113–33. 122 Levenback, Virginia Woolf and the Great War, pp. 49–50. 123 Madelyn Detloff, The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 38. 124 On Bradshaw as a fictionalised version of Henry Head, see Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978), pp.137–47. For a discussion of Bradshaw’s importance to the novel, see Vincent Sherry, ‘The Great War and Literary Modernism in England’, in Sherry (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 132–4. 125 Sheehan, Modernism, Narrative and Humanism, p. 130. 126 Whitworth, Virginia Woolf, pp. 169–76. 127 See Woolf, ‘An Introduction to Mrs Dalloway’ (1928), in Essays,vol. 4, p. 549. Daniel Ferrer asserts that this is ‘false – or at least […] not literally true’ in Madness of Language, p. 89. His assertion rests on surviving textual and MS evidence; however, there may have been such a version which has not survived, or it may simply have been Woolf’s mental conception. Woolf noted in correspondence that ‘Septimus and Mrs Dalloway should be entirely dependent upon each other’. Woolf to Gerald Brenan, 14 June 1925, Letters, vol. 3, p. 189. See also Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, pp. 227–33. 128 Levenback, Virginia Woolf and the Great War, pp. 47–8.



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129 See also Woolf, ‘Body and Brain’, in Essays, vol. 3, pp. 224–7. Septimus’s death can be seen in the light of Woolf’s endorsement of eugenics. See Donald Childs, Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats and the Culture of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 16, 38–57. Sarah Cole offers a similar reading in Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World War, p. 181. 130 Woolf, ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’ (1927), Essays, vol. 4, p. 433. 131 Mr Tansley is denigrated in similar terms in To the Lighthouse; see, for example, p. 100. Mr Tansley can usefully be read against ‘The Common Reader’ (1925), Essays, vol. 4, p. 19. 132 Detloff, Persistence of Modernism, p. 8; Melba Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, The Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 5. 133 Woolf, Jacob’s Room, p. 154. See also Woolf, ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ (1927), in Essays, vol. 4, p. 488, and Woolf’s criticism of the upper middle class in ‘Cleverness and Youth’ (1920), Essays, vol. 3, pp. 176–8. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), p. 65. 134 See also Lawrence, ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’, ch. 2, ‘An Attack on Work and the Money Appetite and on the State’; ‘The Inheritance’, CP, pp. 73–4, and ‘Cry of the Masses’, CP, p. 491. 135 Whitworth, Virginia Woolf, p. 162; Peter Kalliney, Cities of Affluence and Anger: A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), p. 79. 136 See Marcus, Virginia Woolf, pp. 75–9. See also Anna Snaith and Michael Whitworth, Introduction to Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 20–1 on Peter Walsh and the production of this particular space. 137 Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’ (1924), Essays, vol. 3, p. 425. Note also her late essays on the ‘London Scene’ for Good Housekeeping (1931–2). See Snaith and Whitworth, Introduction, pp. 23–8. 138 Kalliney, Cities of Affluence, p. 80. Kalliney’s analysis of Peter Walsh is astute, and the section ‘Staging the Imperial City’, pp. 78–85, is compelling. 139 Michael Whitworth identifies Peter Walsh as Uranian. Virginia Woolf, pp. 138–40. 140 Levenback, Virginia Woolf and the Great War, p. 54. 141 See also Ellis, Virginia Woolf and the Victorians, p. 44; Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 210. 142 Woolf, ‘A Society’ (1921), Complete Shorter Fiction, p. 128. See also Gillian Beer, ‘The Body of the People: Mrs Dalloway to The Waves’, in Common Ground, p. 53.

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143 Ellis, Woolf and the Victorians, p. 66. 144 Woolf, ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’ (1923), Essays, vol. 3, p. 357. 145 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 23. On this passage, see also Alison Light, Forever England, pp. 2–5. 146 See Froula, Bloomsbury Avant-Garde, ch. 4; Gillian Beer, ‘Hume, Stephen, and Elegy in To the Lighthouse’, in Common Ground, p. 31; Maud Ellmann, The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 63. 147 Ellmann, Nets of Modernism, p. 91. 148 Woolf, Diary, vol. I, p. 83 (3 December 1917). Those named are Leonard Woolf’s brothers. 149 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (New York: Collier Books / Macmillan, 1990), p. 3. 150 For a sympathetic reading see Monica J. Miller, ‘Odds, Ends, and Others: Objects and the Narration of Woolf’s Servant Characters’, Woolf Studies Annual 16 (2010), 111–31. See also Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, pp. 200–3. 151 Koulouris relates the silence of the ceremony to ‘Greekness’, Hellenism and Loss, p. 120. 152 Tracy Hargreaves, ‘The Grotesque and the Great War in To The Lighthouse’, in Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate (eds), Women’s Fiction and the Great War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 134. 153 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 111. 154 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, fiftieth anniversary edn ([1946]; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 546. 155 Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, Essays, vol. 3, p. 435. 156 Levenback, Virginia Woolf and the Great War, p. 5. 157 Woolf, 19 April 1925, in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3, 1925–1930, ed. Anne Oliver Bell and Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), p. 9. 158 Woolf, 5 May 1927, Diary, vol. 3, p. 134. Approximately another 850 copies sold within the first month of publication, a good rate for a literary novel. See Woolf, 23 June 1927, Diary, vol. 3, p. 141.

4

Sagas and series, 1924–1928

Ford Madox Ford and R. H. Mottram both wrote at the i­ ntersection of the Victorian and the modern.1 Ford was the older man by ten years and had been a professional author since his first publication in 1891. Mottram was a bank clerk in Norwich, some of whose early poems were published by Ford in The English Review.2 Both believed in values which to younger modernists seemed staid, and Mottram later described himself as ‘a Victorian by birth and training’.3 These enchantments led both writers to the Western Front, although neither spent long in the front lines. While Lawrence and Woolf primarily examine the impact of the war on the home front Ford and Mottram, in the Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–28) and The Spanish Farm Trilogy (1924–27) respectively, focus on combatant experience. Their works participate in the ongoing changes to the realist form, and both adapt the then-popular saga: Ford tells a long history of the war, while Mottram’s narratives are from concurrent and intersecting viewpoints.4 John Onions asserts that ‘their respective approaches to character and history are nearenough antithetical’,5 but each features a bureaucrat protagonist, a quintessential modern figure,6 and they express the enchantments and disenchantments of the First World War within new metaphors of time and space. These metaphors circulated from the early years of the century, were solidified in the key works of high modernism and here speak to the corresponding problems of military service and the post-war reorganisation of British society. I outline the formal concerns of both authors, and situate these in the context of contemporary engagements with space and time. The adapted saga form allows an extended, nuanced engagement with the conflict. The novels continue to process wartime experience: as they were published there was still no clearly established narrative

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about the First World War. The recognisable form asserts that these are serious, substantial responses to a major event. Mottram later commented that it ‘was an age of trilogies’, noting the trend for ‘connected series of novels’ and citing Ford, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy as examples.7 Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga (1906–21; single volume 1922) concerned itself with the social politics of the new urban professionals and was still selling well. A sequel, A Modern Comedy (1924–28; single volume 1929) was exactly contemporary with the war novels of Ford and Mottram. Indeed, Mottram was a friend of Galsworthy, who tried to help his protégé get published. Ford had previously profiled Galsworthy as the epitome of conservative Englishness, who ‘for many years enjoyed every social advantage of a public school-university-­country-housegood-people-and-pleasant-affluence type’.8 Both shied away from the comparison, but were drawn to that form to address the major historical event of the age.9 Technological and social developments left their mark on the novel, although a revised realism held sway. Mottram remained loyal to the realist novel, but was defensive about his Victorian affiliation: ‘People are still so much under the shadow of the great Victorian era, that many writers are still busy “debunking” it, in order (dare I suggest) to appear themselves less insignificant by comparison.’10 He attempted to reconcile his position by suggesting that ‘the tradition of the English novel is experiment’, although he disdained ‘the cataract of modern novels’.11 Galsworthy commented in his preface to The Spanish Farm, the first novel of the trilogy, that it ‘exhibits a new form, distinct even in this experimental epoch’; he had written to Chatto & Windus to recommend the work on similar grounds.12 John Rignall sees Mottram’s link with modernism as accidental, but this rather uncharitable assessment overlooks his links with the modernist literary scene.13 As Jay Winter observes, new and old forms and language continued to overlap.14 Parade’s End internalises narrative as Ford and other modernist authors move away from the grand narratives of the Victorian novel, in which reflection was as important as action.15 In the strictly conformist environment of the army, the mind offered the greatest, if not the only, possibility for complex shows of emotion and dissent. Ford wrote, just before beginning work on Some Do Not …, that ‘the novel of today is probably the only intellectual, poetic, or spiritual exercise that humanity is engaged in ­performing.



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It is probably, too, the only work of exact and dispassionate science.’16 He sees it as a new form compared to poetry and the short story,17 and he conceives that novelty in terms of quantifiable progress. Ford’s position in the literary establishment facilitates the acceptance of his comments about British military and political hierarchies, and the form helped forestall the criticism. Realism in the context of the First World War provoked other questions: how, when propaganda had failed to show what was really happening on the Western Front, could literature redress the balance? How could the complexity of experience in that long, narrow, shifting, impromptu modern walled city at war, be represented in fictional form? One answer came from the language surrounding recent scientific discoveries. Writing with knowledge of the Victorian and the early twentieth century, Ford and Mottram sought to reconcile bureaucracy, calculability and faith. The proof of Einstein’s theories challenged existing ontological and epistemological paradigms. Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Darwin had started to damage the enchantments of religion; now science itself was no longer the province of certainty, as Michael Bell argues: ‘The vast and solid pyramid of scientific knowledge was still there, but instead of being built up stone by stone on the basis of observation it was inverted to become a wide platform balancing on a fine metaphysical point. Science ceased to be the paradigmatic form of truth statement and became one of the possible human conditions.’18 Evolution was now traceable and so, potentially, was the origin of the world. However, the complexity of the calculations required meant that the natural world seemed more distant than ever. Just as Max Weber links disenchantment with calculability, Oswald Spengler asserts that ‘Every atomic theory, therefore, is a myth and not an experience’. (DW, 1, 387) To know the calculations does not impact on everyday life by physical experience, and neither can those theories be demonstrated in the workaday world. The French philosopher Henri Bergson acknowledged the merits of the Theory of Relativity, but like Weber, Spengler and others, he worried about the impact of rationalism and sought to reinstate the element of wonder which was previously most closely linked with religious faith.19 He resists scientism, and argues the necessity of asserting the psychology and philosophy of the individual: ‘Is it not better […] to confine ourselves, until further notice, to that one of the two points

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of view which sacrifices nothing of experience, and therefore – not to prejudge the question – nothing of appearances?’20 Einstein’s theories require abstract thought, but Bergson seeks to explain the complex interactions of the individual with and in the world. Not only is the world disenchanted, but so is language’s ability to represent human experience precisely. The British theoretical physicist Paul Dirac was conscious of this, and wrote that ‘the new theories […] are built up from physical concepts which cannot be explained in terms of things previously known […], which cannot be explained in words at all’.21 The ubiquity of the theory meant that its descriptive language became part of the discourse of the age, despite questionable levels of comprehension, as Michael Whitworth has argued in Einstein’s Wake. Press and popular expositions necessarily simplified the ideas. Whitworth points out that ‘Knowledge of atomic structure would be of little use to a novelist or poet were it not for the circulation of metaphors between scientific discourse and the discourse of everyday life’.22 These metaphors were used widely by contemporary authors and volumes such as C. E. Montague’s Fiery Particles (1923) highlighted their omnipresence. So complex and impenetrable was the General Theory of Relativity that the British astrophysicist A. S. Eddington, who achieved experimental proof of it, asked whether it was true that only three people understood the theory, is reputed to have asked the identity of the third.23 The disenchantments resulting from new understandings of time and space in the early twentieth century are displaced onto the experience of the conflict in Flanders. The fleeting contacts of the Western Front with other members of the same army and enemy troops evoke the alienation of the modern city. The mass army is a product of the urban environment, the famous pals’ battalions formed because of geographical closeness as much as kinship ties. Mottram looks to physical structures to highlight common experiences as the connectedness of events is no longer certain, and the army is also disconnected from the nation for which it fights. Noncombatants could assimilate reported details about the Western Front, as demonstrated in, for example, West’s The Return of the Soldier, but in the eyes of those who fought these were pale simulacra.24 Terry Phillips suggests that ‘The trenches of the Western Front are more like the mediaeval past of original Gothic, in that they constitute a world unknown to most who read about them and even to some who write about them’.25 Mottram’s use of a spatial



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point of narrative intersection adapts the established synecdoche in which house represents nation, looking back to Ben Jonson’s To Penshurst and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, and anticipating Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. For Mottram, the house is a site of enchantment which substitutes for the army, itself standing in and standing up for Britain. The spatial intersection draws on the Einsteinian discovery that light speed is finite, which means that simultaneity only appears real.26 Masterman wrote of the beginning of the war as ‘Europe falling to pieces like a great house falling’, echoed in Ford’s treatment in Parade’s End of the Tietjens family residence at the fictional Groby, in non-fictional North Yorkshire. The series’ temporal structure allows him also to engage with the wartime and pre-war metropolis and address the impossibility of return to an idealised rural England. The survival of the Spanish Farm against the disintegration of Groby attests to Mottram’s and Ford’s differing positions, on the conservative and progressive sides of the Victorian/modern cusp.27 For soldiers, the possibility of death is either present or imminent. For civilians, death is always proximate as personal and/ or national grief. In this war there was also the danger of civilian casualties resulting from the war in the air. As well as the material reality of the war, there was a contemporary philosophical interest in consciousness. Henri Bergson’s theory of the durée was widely disseminated in newspapers, learned journals and intellectual networks. He was championed by William James and Bertrand Russell, while T. E. Hulme helped transmit his philosophies to an influential group of non-specialists, including Ford.28 Time and Free Will (1889; trans. 1910) was published in translation as the early strands of modernist technique were being drawn together. Bergson posits the distinction between temps, spatialised scientific time or ‘clock time’, and durée, the individual experience of thoughts and sensations which contribute to the feeling of time passing. He asserts that duration is the ‘present only, or, if we prefer the expression, simultaneity. No doubt external things change, but their moments do not succeed one another […] except for a consciousness which keeps them in mind.’29 Time is a compound of complex multiplicities of the now, and instantaneous decisions and choices make it impossible to r­ecreate the conditions which produced them: ‘The thing and the state are only artificially taken snapshots of the transition; and this transition, all that is naturally experienced, is duration

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itself.’30 The war seemed disconnected from the immediate past, so a psychological and narrative model which privileged the present was attractive. Bergson struggled to reconcile civilisation with the war, and wrote about the problems of military mechanisation in Prussia in his propaganda The Meaning of the War (1914; trans. 1915). Like Weber, he continued to believe in the spiritual, and denigrated ‘scientific barbarism’.31 However, for others his theories of consciousness offered a way to rationalise the impossibility of return to previous enchantments. The First World War also brought a new protagonist for war stories: the administrator. The quintessential modern protagonist, an early representation is Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ (1853): the title character’s ceasing to copy is a prescient comment on the move towards globalisation and mass culture. Dickens also satirises the profession in the form of clerk Guppy in Bleak House (1853) and the bureaucracy of the pointedly named Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit (1857), whose work concludes the first book of the novel entitled ‘Poverty’. Further instances are seen in novels such as Anthony Trollope’s The Three Clerks (1857) and The Way We Live Now (1875), along with Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story ‘The Stockbroker’s Clerk’ (1893).32 The need for an expanded administrative class, which developed into a bureaucracy – for Weber, the latter is the pejorative version of the former – derived from the move away from artisan production and, more widely, individual agency.33 Men became part of a larger machine as labour was divided and collectivity tacitly enforced, and workers were needed to ensure its continuing, efficient operation. The commentator George A. Greenwood worried, in 1922, about the paralysing effect of a strike of middle-class administrators.34 In the mass armies of the First World War, administration was both a necessity and a source of resentment. The machine processes of industrialism require the input of men and raw materials to produce goods in peacetime; in war, one machine of men and material must be used to defeat another. Senior army officers were now largely separated from front-line fighting, as with managers and machinists, creating a division between instruction and action and with it the difficulties of making the two groups communicate. However, the machine is designed not to speak, merely to do. Writing in the late 1930s, R. G. Collingwood sees efficiency as a problem of war:



Sagas and series, 1924–28 169 this attack on liberalism is gaining ground elsewhere than in countries avowedly militaristic. It is a poison that is permeating the whole of our civilization. A generation has elapsed since Lord Rosebery wrote upon his banner the ominous word ‘efficiency’. During that generation there has been a ceaseless movement away from liberal principles in the direction of government by ‘orders’ originating in the offices of the Civil Service[.]35

Making labour efficient means rationalising, and that extends to questioning thought. The decline of liberalism is coincident with the rise of rationalism. The ‘orders’ of the Civil Service are on behalf of the government in order to control the people, by a class which often has experience of neither position. Mottram and Ford show the good intentions with which actions were often carried out, and the hindrances of rigid discipline which cannot take account of exceptional situations. David Trotter observes astutely that modernism ‘shares with the mainstream fiction of the period an interest in expertise and its discontents’.36 Here, the administrator is displaced from his suburban habitat onto the Western Front. Ford’s protagonist is a skilled administrator who realises the problems with the system and is always as a result the faulty cog within the machine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mottram, until 1927 a career bank clerk, sees the possibility offered by dogged adherence to administrative procedures. In his final volume The Crime at Vanderlynden’s, Stephen Doughty Dormer, his middle name signifying both his dullness and faintly laudable doggedness, resolves the eponymous event as the war continues around him. Mottram later recalled: ‘I wanted to tell a story about an office, not to work in one.’37 The bank clerk and the bombardment An unsuccessful poet before the war, after it Mottram could write about the major historical event of the age from first-hand experience. However, it was his lack of direct involvement in front-line conflict which facilitated his early prose response. Mottram quickly enlisted (Figure 4.1) despite (or perhaps even because of) the fact that, even as war became inevitable, he ‘didn’t believe it would happen’.38 His knowledge of French and German enabled him to obtain a position behind the lines, which took him ‘out of the trench battle in which my fate was hardly in doubt’.39 Mottram was out of the front line, although he commented retrospectively that ‘even

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Figure 4.1  R. H. Mottram (right) and other officers of 10th Battalion the Norfolk Regiment, after accepting his commission

forty miles away the bombardment made your head ache’.40 If his ‘head ache’ was worthy of mention looking back, he escaped lightly. The Spanish Farm is a site of resistance to the disenchantment which surrounds it and, as Rignall points out, an old outpost of the Spanish Empire which recalls previous conflicts.41 The first novel of the series focuses on Madeleine Vanderlynden, the youngest daughter of the farm’s tenant and effectively its manager; the central character of Sixty-Four, Ninety-Four! is Lieutenant Geoffrey Skene, with whom she has an affair of sorts; the final novel, The Crime at Vanderlynden’s, tells the story of Captain Stephen Dormer, who in 1918 investigates the desecration of a shrine at the Spanish Farm three years earlier. David Trotter links The Spanish Farm Trilogy with Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger tetralogy, with its different protagonist for each volume.42 The distinction of the location is quickly emphasised: ‘English officers and men who billeted in the Spanish Farm […] speak of it as one of the few places they can still distinguish in the blur of receding memories’ (SFT, 13). The farm is an oasis of uncanny tranquility offering ‘an impression of



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home – order, cleanliness, respect ruled here yet a little’ (SFT, 14). Despite its proximity to the front lines, its orderliness and other enchantments allude to the pre-war world, as nostalgia impinges on the present. It contrasts with the environment Skene endures on active service just a few hundred yards from the farm, where there was: ‘Nothing to be seen but vapour—freshly torn earth—broken pickets—shredded wire—bodies and water—and all visible surface whipped with vicious bullets’ (SFT, 320). The ravaged land is made almost insubstantial by repeated fire. In describing the trenches and No Man’s Land grammatical order is fractured, the descriptions separated by the most expansive typographical mark. In the midst of this disorder, the safety of the Spanish Farm offers the possibility for transgression, as the young woman stands in for the still-living patriarch and conducts an illicit relationship with a local nobleman. The limited privacy of home means that strict military authority cannot be enforced. Terry Phillips argues convincingly that ‘The Spanish Farm Trilogy, like many trench narratives, uses the discourse of the monstrous and demonic in an imaginative re-creation of this unrecoverable landscape which then becomes a crucible in which prevailing assumptions are often challenged’.43 The landscape seems unrecoverable physically and in memory, but the rigid army discipline provides control in the monstrous landscape and situation; the Spanish Farm itself is the place where military discipline does not hold sway, and so those who inhabit it feel at home in the domestic order, suggesting a life outside the war. The farm is ‘the implacable borderland so often fought over, never really conquered’ (SFT, 234). The saga form represents the rollercoaster ride of military service between the mundane and the extreme, and the disenchantment which results from the inability to affect one’s own destiny. The analogy is exact: once strapped into the rollercoaster, one must go where it goes. The machine of war seems separate from the men who make it function: ‘Skene was struck with horror … there, in face of the enemy, men sick, useless, clogging the wheels of the fighting machine!’ (SFT, 267). Compassion is impossible: men are but cogs in the machine, and when they cease to function properly they hinder its seemingly perpetual motion. Allyson Booth’s argument that attrition means that narratives become about steady routines as much as battles is compelling.44 Attacks are conceived by Dormer as mechanical: ‘With the precision of a machine, that procession was duplicated by another moving in

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the ­opposite direction. Lorries, ambulances, stretchers, men, men, guns, limbers, men, men, men. The raw material went up. The finished article came back’ (SFT, 609). Men are the raw material, and are as many in the list of items as the mechanical and man-made objects. Having constructed the machines, men need only to be processed: either the objective is completed, or lives ended. Even those who survive the war experience ejection from the machine. As he reaches the Dispersal Station in England, where he will leave the British Expeditionary Force, the narrator tells us that ‘Hundreds poured through it daily […] and passed away into civil life. The great machine of five years was reversing, spilling out civilians as it turned’ (SFT, 553). The only way to escape from the war machine is to stop its inexorable movement by putting it into reverse. Men then become visible again, able to be seen in themselves, not only as part of an unfathomably large process. However, despite the reversed machine, there is no chance of returning men to the state in which they entered it. The war’s duration was a significant cause of disenchantment. Madeleine, in free indirect discourse, describes ‘the daily growing aftermath of disillusionment in the war’ (SFT, 220) and similarly, the narrator of Sixty-Four, Ninety-Four! describes how ‘the exhaustion, the hopelessness, the failure of the winters after Loos and the Somme, the coming of conscription, the cold of January 1917, all had been driving the men’s optimism down and down’ (SFT, 458). The repetitive daily routine is periodically punctuated by brief moments of danger; routine became so normalised that informal truces were sometimes agreed that prevented firing at mealtimes.45 In spite of the moments of danger, the narrator of Sixty-Four, Ninety Four! describes ‘the futureless monotony of company routines’ (SFT, 357). Presentness is privileged, and the cumulative effect of blows to morale means that escape from the routine of service is unimaginable. The narrator of the first volume asserts at the turning point of the war in July 1918 that the war ‘could not be measured according to its “victories” of one side or the other’ (SFT, 209). Paradoxically, in the utterly calculable world of the machine war, victory cannot be measured. Many felt the lack of triumphalism, and Mottram wrote in Ten Years Ago (1928) that the post-war years ‘have not been, as one half expected, years of carpet slippers and comfort, and perpetual reminiscence’.46 The unnamed discussants of ‘The Winner’, an ironically titled linking



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piece in The Spanish Farm Trilogy, try ‘to make out how, after a War so bad, the Peace could possibly be so much worse’ (SFT, 562). The growth of disenchantment through the post-war decade is clear as the aftershocks of the war continue to rumble. Even in Mottram’s subsequent novel Our Mr Dormer, the prosaic story of a nineteenth-century Quaker banking dynasty, post-war ­disenchantment is expressed succinctly at the end of the novel: It then became evident that there was no going back to Peace. The world had gone forward, to Peace, it was true, but what a Peace. The changes of wartime had been greater than those of the previous quarter-century, the change of 1919–20 was even greater than those of the war. The ultra-conservative old institution, once it had begun to alter, could not stop, apparently.47

Any account of pre-war enchantments must now, it seems, end with the impact of the war. Mottram’s disappointment at the changes to ‘the institution’ is palpable. Disenchantment seeks movement in relation to the war, either as a conservative return to past ideas in the case of Mottram and, partly, Ford, or in the continuing move forward to a better version of the world which supersedes the ­problems of modernity. The necessity of bureaucracy in the army leads to disenchantment. The last volume of the tetralogy focuses on the attempts of Stephen Dormer to unravel the titular Crime at Vanderlynden’s. A dedicated administrator, Dormer is able to abstract himself from the realities of warfare: According to him, nothing could happen, because each offensive needed months of preparation. Months of preparation made possible a few weeks of activity. A few weeks of activity gained a few square miles of ground. Then more months of preparation, grotesquely costly, and obvious to every one for a hundred miles, so that the enemy had just as long to prepare, made possible a few more weeks’ activity and the gain of a few miles more. This was inevitable in highly organized mechanical war, fought by fairly matched armies, on a restricted field, between the sea and the neutral countries. He admitted it. But then came his lifelong habit of reducing the matter to figures. He roughed out the area between the ‘front’ of that date and the Rhine, supposing for the sake of argument that we went on no farther, and divided this by the area gained, on an average, at the Somme, Vimy and Messines. The result he multiplied by the time taken to prepare and fight those offensives,

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averaged again. The result he got was that, allowing for no setbacks, and providing the pace could be maintained, we should arrive at the Rhine in one hundred and eighty years. (SFT, 689–90)

Dormer reports dispassionately on the attritional nature of the war: it is uncertain that he is party to the bitter irony in his comments. His emotionless response as a well-fitting cog in the machine allows him to state only the facts of the matter; he is the embodiment of the contrast Weber makes between bureaucratic rationalism and charisma.48 He is a machine continuing to perform calculations, and his inexorably logical calculations lead to his bleak conclusion. His precision is valuable in enabling the war to continue: Zygmunt Bauman comments that among ‘all technical factors of mobility, a particularly great role was played by the transport of ­information’.49 Jonathan Wild sees Dormer as a breakthrough for the clerk in literature, presented ‘without comic or tragic adornment’, but that sheer lack of adornment makes him a difficult figure to engage.50 The transfer of information has become the be-all and end-all: preparation and administration are now abstracted from the action of war itself. Rignall sees the mechanical movement of men in war as uncanny.51 The impassive way Dormer relates the (im)possible length of the war, based on non-dynamic statistics, shows the dissociation between administration and practice. It also highlights the specialisation which occurs: Dormer seems to have no concept that he might fight or die in the act. The crime which Dormer spends the final volume pursuing is a metonym for the war: ‘The Crime at Vanderlynden’s was the War, nothing more nor less. That was exactly what he felt about it. No damage had been done to any furniture or valuables that he owned, but he had still to get out of it with his body intact and resume the broken thread of existence, where it had been snapped off, all those four years ago.’ (SFT, 756) The destruction of a shrine at the Spanish Farm signals the break with old enchantments. Dormer’s first concern is for the material goods he has with him, followed by concern for his body. While he views the timeline of his life as a broken thread, it is his pre-war expertise as an administrator which has allowed him to continue in a relatively safe location. While, as my discussion in Chapter 2 of Cicely Hamilton’s William—An Englishman showed, administrators were not totally safe, the chances of survival behind the lines were significantly better.



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The mode of selection led to concerns about physical degeneration. If the men with the best physique were sent to the front line, how could there not be deterioration? Few considered the unpalatable truth that Dormer and his ilk were actually the fittest for the age. The Spanish Farm Trilogy and its component novels demonstrate an increasing market for disenchanted accounts of the conflict. The Spanish Farm was received positively in 1924,52 as was the subsequent volume the following year.53 Gerald Bullett noted in the Times Literary Supplement that Mottram wrote ‘in a spirit of disillusionment but not of bitterness’.54 The Sunday Times reviewer asserted that there was ‘a strong general resemblance between’ Sixty-Four, Ninety-Four! and Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu, perhaps the founding text of the disenchanted response to the war.55 The Observer reviewer likened Mottram to Siegfried Sassoon.56 Reviewers were conscious of the darkening tone of the trilogy. Although by the publication of The Crime at Vanderlynden’s the Observer reviewer felt that ‘Mr. Mottram found his material running out’, they noticed that he ‘has chosen his instance carefully to emphasize what a nightmare of futility the war was to the average man’.57 There is a marked shift from lack of bitterness to futility, which coincides with the shift in focus from the trenches to administration. The Daily Telegraph reviewer demonstrates the developing resentment of the human cost of the war as the 1920s progressed, a shift away from traditional narratives of the good life leading to a ‘good death’. The review asserts the need to ‘make us see war as it really is – not an affair of bugles and banners, but of mud and misery, the gallantry of the spectacular cavalry charge replaced by the gallantry of a dumb endurance or a reckless cheerfulness; an affair of orders and machinery which works creakily and ponderously on frequently illoiled bearings’.58 Gerald Gould recommended the collected Spanish Farm Trilogy in the Observer as ‘a large volume of permanent value and immediate popularity’.59 While old enchantments endured, there was a clear sense of a coming change in understanding. Ford and the war Ford appreciates formal innovation and is wary of post-war change. Parade’s End is structured by chronology, and the novels move back and forth from the pre-war and the war in Some Do Not… (1924) to the wartime in No More Parades (1925), the war and

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the Armistice in A Man Could Stand Up— (1926) and the postwar aftermath in Last Post (1928).60 Robert Green suggests that in ‘each succeeding novel a shorter period has been “covered”’, enacting the formal shift from the nineteenth century to the modern novel.61 If Mottram’s work mainly shows a shift in thought with limited formal innovation, Ford demonstrates both changing paradigms and representation. Ford was not one of les jeunes, but he was versed in new ways of thinking and writing, and committed to the republic of letters.62 Perhaps erroneously, given his limited commercial success, he argued that ‘technique is the science of appeal’.63 He was born into Victorian cultural royalty: his grandfather was the painter Ford Madox Brown, whose forenames he took, and consequently he grew up amongst notable artists, authors and thinkers. An active part of the Victorian literary scene, his work shows the impact of the discoveries and social changes of the early twentieth century on literary form. His sometimes wilfully contrary position was encapsulated by his partner Violet Hunt, who stated that ‘F[ord] wants to run with the hare and hunt with the hound.’64 Ford’s distinctive artistic position gave him a range of literary resources on which to draw. He claimed to have been inspired to write the Parade’s End novels by the death of Proust on 18 November 1922, the day Ford and Stella Bowen were scheduled to meet him.65 Themes of memory, psychology, and time became focal points for Ford, although compared to Proust’s work there is a conspicuous lack of cake. For Ford this was a war of modernity, but past values were needed to understand it and stimulate recovery. An eighteenth-century Toryism marks out Christopher Tietjens as an object of suspicion. Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy argues that the Parade’s End novels are ‘a creative telling of and resistance to the determining conditions that shape modern subjects’ new mental and social habits’.66 I develop this claim in discussing Tietjens’s profession as administrator and his attempt to reconcile his views with the requirements of modern war. His role in divisional transport is vital in facilitating movement to and from the Western Front. The concern in Last Post is the impact of the war on Christopher Tietjens and England, and it works through the difficult process of reconstruction. The immediate post-war period was a time of personal as well as literary transition for the shell-shocked Ford. He had been blown high in the air, causing ‘a damaged mouth and loosened teeth’.67



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As Max Saunders comments, ‘so devastating and disrupting an experience takes time to assimilate, master, and reconstruct’.68 Ford needed to write to be able to provide himself with an income, but he suffered creative difficulty. He composed, or part-composed, several works about the war which remained unpublished. ‘True Love and a G.C.M.’ was started in September 1918 in response to Martin Secker’s request for a new novel; the completed section remained unpublished until 1999.69 A novel, ‘Mr Croyd’, was completed in 1920 and probably rejected by John Lane.70 He persistently found it difficult to represent the war in a first-person autobiographical account. Thus to Revisit (1921) mentions the war, yet pointedly reveals nothing of Ford’s own experience. Of his later memoirs, Return to Yesterday (1931) closes with the news of war breaking out, and It Was the Nightingale (1933) recommences with his leaving the army in 1919. No Enemy (1929) problematises this series of failed attempts at autobiography, as several sections are written in the first person. It is a partially fiction­alised memoir in which the two protagonists, Gringoire and the Compiler, offer distance from their narratives. Its highly aesthetic form and the inclusion of a section in French to get away from ‘the beastly colloquial English’ make it seem even less familiar than Disenchantment, and conceal criticisms.71 This obliqueness prevented Ford finding a publisher for No Enemy until the War Books Boom was in full flight and he had already published four other war novels. Parade’s End sets the changes caused by the war in a long historical context: Ford’s novels focus on both the continuities of history and the perceived rupture caused by the war. The beginning of the First World War was a red letter day for him: he wrote 4 August into The Good Soldier (1915) as the date on which all misfortunes befall Florence Dowell.72 He continues this view in his propaganda Between St Dennis and St George (1915), discussed in Chapter 1 above, and his post-war novel of Anglo-German relations The Marsden Case (1923).73 In Parade’s End Tietjens describes to Valentine Wannop, later his mistress, ‘the disillusionment it had cost him personally as soon as this country had come into the war’ (PE, 236), and his reputation is harmed by accompanying Edith Ethel Duchemin, the mistress of his friend Macmaster, on that day in order to prevent scandal from befalling them. The war demonstrates Tietjens’s assertion that a new model is needed for civilisation, and he is disappointed that England does not maintain

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its  isolation. However, he is not nostalgic for the pre-war world, characterised by crass officialdom and the internecine politicking of high society. Valentine, who comes from an old but now impoverished family, feels the change strongly when on Armistice Day she looks back: ‘Six years ago! What changes in the world! What cataclysms! What Revolutions!’ (PE, 522). She sees the greatest change as a feminist and pacifist, and someone who has worked as a servant. Her vitality and positivity offers the possibility of revitalising the old family, recalling Lawrence’s discussions about ‘Aristocracy’ and illustrating the cyclical nature of history. Tietjens’s political and moral values are rooted in eighteenth-­ century Tory feudalism, which he traces back to his public school education: ‘Other men get over their schooling. I never have’ (PE, 490). Tietjens is conscious that others see him as out of time. However, he focuses on the continuities of human experience: ‘The beastliness of human nature is always pretty normal. We lie and betray and are wanting in imagination and decide ourselves, always, at about the same rate. In peace and in war!’ (PE, 453). Tietjens does not view the eighteenth century as a Golden Age. He says explicitly that there has never been a fully enchanted age, and the desire to do good presupposes that others are disenchanted. He is a leader by example in the public school tradition, but more acutely self-aware than many of the products of that system. Sylvia, Christopher’s wife, puts it succinctly: ‘Times change; probably people do not, much’ (PE, 802). Her privileged social status means that she cannot comprehend the way war alters people’s position within structures; she cannot understand the way in which Christopher is subsumed in the army hierarchy, and willingly allows himself to be buffeted by the system. The war itself is fought according to principles which are out of date, but where others try to adapt these to the modern world, he sticks to his moral code. Tietjens refuses to relinquish his enchantments, a fictional demonstration in extremis of the endurance of the old order. He is marked out for suspicion by his idiosyncratic beliefs and the disenchantment of the world reverberates around him. He is a protesting voice in powerful and unprincipled communities, from the decadent society world Sylvia relishes to the drunken masculinism of the golf club, and the desire even from government departments, guardians of the country’s spiritual and monetary wealth, to fake statistics to achieve the preferred result. He is the ‘last surviving Tory’, but



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realises that ‘Feudalism was finished; its last vestiges were gone. It held no place for him’ (PE, 668). The fact that his brand of Toryism is almost extinct means that his political identity does not fit into contemporary taxonomies.74 A rumour surfaces, consequently, that Tietjens is a socialist, perhaps arising from the order by General Campion, his commanding officer and also his godfather, to look into socialist attempts to undermine military discipline. This recalls pre-war socialist concerns about capitalist war, and is ironic in the light of Montague’s conception of the army as a socialist structure. Sylvia is also a potential source for the rumour but, as ever, Tietjens is tolerant of others’ slurs whether from ill-will or misunderstanding: ‘If it’s Sylvia that called me a Socialist, it’s not astonishing. I’m a Tory of such an extinct type that she might take me for anything. The last megatherium’ (PE, 490). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the megatherium is an extinct sloth of ‘ungainly proportions’, or someone with very old-fashioned views. His eccentric position is evident from the comparison to Alfred Dreyfus, the French army officer who was falsely convicted of treason in 1894, but was eventually exonerated and served in the First World War.75 R. W. Lid puts it aphoristically that ‘it is no longer Ford’s hero who is baffled by society, but society that is baffled by the hero.’76 This analysis will not quite hold, either in terms of the novel or the 1920s more generally. Tietjens is not baffled by society: he understands the ways in which it works supremely, and rejects what he sees as its degradation. Society is not baffled by him, nor by the figure of the hero. Tietjens’s goodness is recognised in order to be rejected by civilian society, but his leadership and compassion are venerated in the army. The eighteenth-century public school values on which the idea of the hero is founded are no longer laudable in the twentieth century, to its detriment. However, the net effect is the same: Tietjens is out of step with the modern world, which leads to his rejection for nonconformity. The respect for tradition and the structures which accompany it in Parade’s End is extended, unusually, to military hierarchy. Eric Meyer suggests that ‘the destabilization of the stable national order represented by Tietjens comes to a head in Tietjens’s battles with General Campion’.77 However, Tietjens does not desire that; their struggles are attempts to reassert order on a chaotic environment. The portrayal of General Campion is sensitive and respectful: his professionalism enables him to see flaws in the system and tactics

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but requires his unquestioning loyalty. His colonial war experience evinces loyalty in his men despite his South African nickname: ‘To be called Butcher and have your men follow you in spite of it. It shows confidence, and it gives you, as commander, confidence! … One has to be prepared to lose men in hundreds at the right minute in order to avoid losing them in tens of thousands at the wrong! …’ (PE, 474). The hard, impersonal reality is exacerbated by the need to uphold inflexible regulations, and mitigated by the demonstration of Campion’s previous experience. The main problem arises from the need to trust individual leaders when those being directed have little opportunity to shape their own fate. Campion is not without compunction about the impact of his actions, but he cannot voice his reservations, to which we are privy: when it came to tactics – which it should be remembered concerns itself with the movement of troops actually in contact with enemy forces – General Campion had no doubt that that plan was the conception of the brain of a madman. The dishonour of such a proceeding must of course be considered – and its impracticability was hopeless. The dreadful nature of what would be our debacle did we attempt to evacuate the Western front might well be unknown to, or might be deliberately ignored by, the civilian mind. But the general could almost see the horrors as a picture – and, professional soldier as he was, his mind shuddered at the picture. (PE, 466)

Often grouped with civilians in terms of their lack of understanding, Ford shows the potential value of professional leadership in the military, but it is negated by the inflexibility of the military hierarchy and regulations. Rigid professional structures reduce the possibility of practical expertise reaching leaders.78 The idea of centralised management, in the form of the General Staff, was relatively new to the British Army, instituted in 1906. Hew Strachan notes that this is a double-edged sword: ‘Without these bodies, the armies of the First World War could never had been deployed or controlled. But they created a sense that war was a matter of management.’79 In Parade’s End Campion’s empathy is silenced by the need for discipline, and the power of the dominant structure wins out over the feelings and impressions of the individual. As Patrick Deer points out, ‘Even the General in all his glory is not immune to the sordid facts of war’.80 Novelty needs to be combined with a judicious appreciation of history and an enduring ethical code.



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While Tietjens continues to believe in tradition, his profession is the apogee of modernity. Weber contends that the ‘gentry has saved England from the bureaucratization which has been the fate of all continental states’, but Tietjens is an active part of that process.81 He deals professionally with categorisation and order in his role at the Imperial Department of Statistics. He is machine-like, a precise calculator of figures who constantly acquires and processes information. That ability sets him apart. Tietjens’s statistical work uses scientific methods, and he describes it as ‘exact observation; it was a man’s work. The only work for a man’ (PE, 127). Precision is gendered, and the assertion of its necessary masculinity is ironic given the later focus for Christopher on soldiering, and the common perception of him in the series as a cuckold. He values knowledge for its own sake, and possesses a formidable level of recall which allows him to marshal information quickly: ‘It was in that way his mind worked when he was fit: it picked up little pieces of definite, workmanlike information. When it had enough it classified them: not for any purpose, but because to know things was agreeable and gave a feeling of strength, of having in reserve something that the other fellow would not suspect’ (PE, 70). Valentine disparages him as ‘a great Panjandrum; saving the country with your statistics and all’ (PE, 136).82 Ford attempts to reshape masculinity away from the fetishising of physical labour for its own sake. In addition to Tietjens’s learnt knowledge Edith Ethel Duchemin realises that ‘He was then one of those formidable and to be feared males who possess the gift of right intuitions’ (PE, 93). His intelligence is vital and intuitive, the latter often understood as feminine. His analytical brain enables him to read social situations effectively, but he does not take conventional choices. The security of his birthright and education allows Tietjens to flout hierarchies. He will not submit to the requirements of the bureaucratic system, and retains his integrity; money will not ­override his principles. This goes against the code Weber posits: The honor of the civil servant is vested in his ability to execute conscientiously the order of the superior authorities, exactly as if the order agreed with his own conviction. This holds even if the order appears wrong to him and if, despite the civil servant’s remonstrances, the authority insists on the order. Without this moral discipline and self-denial, in the highest sense, the whole apparatus would fall to pieces.83

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In wartime Tietjens continues to disobey orders. However, now there are severe penalties for intransigence. He refuses to fake statistics for the government, and Macmaster comments to Edith Ethel: ‘He’s making calculations now. For the Government that no other man in England could make. But he’s going …’ (PE, 103). The ellipsis gestures towards madness, the Western Front, and perhaps both. Tietjens is supremely capable, both socially and intellectually. But there is always a but. He is unwilling to relinquish his principles in the service of capital, and this keeps him from rising to a level which matches his ability. Mark Tietjens and Vincent Macmaster, by contrast, epitomise the modern bureaucrat and thus the modern city dweller. The narrator states that ‘Enormously proud and shut in on himself, he was without curiosity of any sort. He lived in London because it was immense, solitary, administrative and apparently without curiosity as to its own citizens’ (PE, 204). The things which Christopher deprecates, so often held up as the most pernicious aspects of urban modernity, are to Mark ideal. While Christopher wrestles with the system Mark is known as ‘the Indispensable Official’ (PE, 374). Macmaster is more craven in playing the game, and his disdain for Tietjens’s eccentricity is highlighted by his approbation of work for work’s sake, unguided by ideals and principles: ‘Chrissie was asked by the Government – by Sir Reginald Ingleby – to work out what 3 X 3 comes to: it was that sort of thing in principle. He said that the only figure that would not ruin the country was nine times nine. …’ (PE, 61). Macmaster’s reductio ad absurdum highlights the disparity in calculability for the expert and the layman. Weber suggests that ‘errors in official statistics do not have direct economic consequences for the guilty official, but errors in the calculation of a capitalist enterprise are paid for by losses, perhaps by its ­existence’.84 However, Christopher’s flouting of convention means that he stands outside those rules: he is financially impoverished and put in mortal danger. As Macmaster wins his knighthood, having stolen the underestimate of the French material losses, Christopher prepares to leave for France. 85,86 Although Tietjens’s greater intelligence allows him to ‘plot much more intricate sequences of human action and reaction’ (PE, 139), Macmaster’s efficient narrative, ruthlessly executed, is the successful method. The novels draw attention to the flouting of rules by those in positions of power. Ford discusses this even before the war in The Simple Life Limited



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(1911) as the administrator Horatio Gubb defrauds the colony that he runs.87 Weber suggests that ‘the specialized knowledge of the expert became the foundation for the power position of the officeholder. Hence an early concern of the ruler was how to exploit the special knowledge of experts without having to abdicate in their favor but preserve his dominant position.’88 Macmaster is able to ascend to preferment because he is acutely aware of his own ­position – there is no conflict between his class position and his position in the bureaucratic hierarchy. Tietjens’s service in France leaves his knowledge base eroded. The sudden loss of concrete knowledge echoes the destabilising of empirical and ontological models, following recent revolutionary scientific discoveries. Memory is linked for Tietjens with space and physical experience, and it is profoundly altered by the death of O Nine Morgan in his arms, leading to his shell shock. The man ‘appeared to have draped half his face and the right side of his breast with crape’ (PE, 307), and then ‘Tietjens’ thoughts seemed to have to shout to him between earthquake shocks’ (PE, 308). Initially Tietjens is ‘a perfect encyclopaedia of exact material knowledge’ (PE, 5), and for pleasure ‘had employed himself in tabulating from memory the errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica’ (PE, 10).89 He tells Sylvia during an argument that ‘I’ve got as far as K in my reading of the Encyclopaedia Britannica every afternoon at Mrs Wannop’s’ (PE, 170). From correcting the encyclopaedia, he uses it to replace the information lost; the image anticipates Mr Ramsay striving to reach the letter ‘R’ in To the Lighthouse (TL, 40). However, he retains his processing ability: ‘Once provided with facts his mind worked out sound Tory conclusions – of quite startling and attractive ­theories – with extreme rapidity’ (PE, 241). Like a computer, Tietjens can interpret, but he no longer ‘knows’ the world and has to adapt to his changed social position. Ford represents the recreation of memory as a physical action to demonstrate that in the mechanised world even the most distinctive thinkers are not automata. Tietjens explicitly states, when asked by Sylvia what is wrong with his brain, that ‘a great portion of it, in the shape of memory, has gone’ (PE 168). The effect of war is represented in spatial terms and there is a simple, if arduous, solution for recovery. War is a modern, mass formation which requires administration, but when wartime conditions are not taken into account disenchantment results. To be effective structures need to be flexible and

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anonymous, pedantic bureaucracy is derided. Tietjens is invalided out of the front line through shell shock. He is described as ‘the devil of a paper soldier’ (PE, 610), but his discretion, understanding and humanity set him apart from the jobsworth administrators. The role leads Tietjens to ‘fatigue of mind caused by having to attend to innumerable concrete facts like the providing of households for a thousand men every few days’ (PE, 304). Previously Tietjens has viewed learning and assimilating information as pleasurable, but in wartime and of necessity it is wearying. His ability to internalise and disregard unwarranted criticism takes its toll, and the army fails to adapt to wartime conditions. General Campion reprimands him for having no fire extinguishers, although Tietjens has established they are impossible to obtain. Campion acknowledges that Tietjens is doing the best possible job in the conditions, but must reprimand him (PE, 445). Similarly, Blunden observes that ‘the military efficiency of headquarters was not troubled’ in requiring clean equipment paraded in the impossible mud.90 However, Tietjens believes in the value of discipline: discipline works in two ways: in the first place it enables the soldier in action to get through his movements in the shortest possible time; and then the engrossment in the exact performance begets a great indifference to danger. When, with various-sized pieces of metal flying all round you, you go composedly through efficient bodily movements, you are not only wrapped up in your task, but you have the knowledge that that exact performance is every minute ­decreasing your personal danger. (PE, 581)

To complete movements quickly in the front line means to put oneself in danger for the least amount of time. However, competence and composure lead to greater danger: ‘The brigade was selected to occupy positions where the enemy divisions might be expected to be hottest in attack, the battalion was selected to occupy the hottest points in that hottest sector of the line. The chickens of the C. O.’s efficiency had come home to roost’ (PE, 584). Efficiency exerts unwanted control over the men, although by the latter stages of the war Tietjens comments: ‘I should have thought these men knew their job so well – for this sort of thing – that they hardly needed orders. It cannot make much difference whether they receive orders or not’ (PE, 572–3). Of course this is not the case, and the need for discipline is reasserted. Continuing compulsion ensures that orders



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are carried out; the routine of giving and receiving orders means in itself that orders are not questioned. Space and movement The space of the Western Front is marked out as soon as it becomes the narrative focus in No More Parades: ‘When you came in the space was desultory, rectangular, warm after the drip of the winter night, and transfused with a brown-orange dust that was light. It was shaped like the house a child draws.’ The trench is depicted in drab colours, and the analogy with childish drawing shows the impermanence of the accommodation. In contrast to the accumulated weight of tradition of places and spaces in England, the Western Front is new, different and dangerous: ‘Solid noise showered about the universe, enormous echoes pushed these men – to the right, to the left, or down towards the tables’ (both PE, 291). The material and non-material are inseparable as noise becomes physical, created by bombs and shrapnel, and it is able to move people both physically through vibrations, and through fear of the sound’s origin. Theoretically a temporary imposition, the war becomes omnipresent: ‘We were part of the landscape and if what destroyed [larks’] nests whilst they sat on them was a bit of H. E. shell or the coulter of a plough it was all one to them’ (PE, 547). Tietjens recognises the violence inherent in controlling nature, and the munitions which now seem mundane rend the soil just as the plough does in peace, although without the same sense of order. The effect of the war on the landscape is felt in place names; it is no coincidence that Tietjens is based in Rouen, which becomes the badly anglicised near-homophone ‘Ruin town’ (PE, 402). Green argues that ‘In Some Do Not… man had built his environment, nature had been harnessed to Man’s control. Now [in No More Parades], though, Man has shrunk and has no rational power over his surroundings.’91 This is not quite true; man still has the tools to control nature, but is disconnected from the upper strata of the hierarchy which control him. Transport in wartime is the conduit for enchantment and disenchantment, particularly the railway, a dominant symbol of British modernity. Weber states that the railway is ‘intimately connected with the development of an inter-local traffic of mass goods. This traffic is among the causal factors in the formation of the modern

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state.’92 Collingwood argued that with ‘the coming of the railways, too, men began to tolerate the defacement of the country by the hard lines and the mechanical curves of permanent ways drawn across its face’.93 Collingwood’s romanticised view is one expressed since the railways began, memorably evoked in fiction by Timothy Cooper in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2). A  much later critic, Andrew Thacker, notes that ‘modernist writing can be located only within the movements between and across multiple sorts of space’.94 By this definition, almost all war writing can be described as modernist. Whether it is successful or not, war is predicated on movement. Whilst in this conflict it was not, for the most part, a war of movement, movement to and from the trenches was pivotal in continuing the war. New railways were built by and for the armies (Figure 4.2), and in the German retreat railways were often blown up to hinder the pursuing Allied troops (Figure 4.3). Strachan highlights the importance of the railways in military planning, but also notes that past the railhead, pedestrian, or sometimes equestrian, speed became the norm again.95 For most, the train took them on the first journey to the trenches with some excitement mixed with natural apprehension. It also offered the enduring hope of the final journey away from the lines. The possibility of removal to safety in rest, illness or peace was counterbalanced by the fear of return to the front, or to other dangerous locations. The protagonists of both series are in divisional transport, which informs their depictions of space. Ford was attentive before the war to the construction and production of space and realised the importance of transport.96 The system’s efficiency represents the ‘queer wayward genius of the English’, and Mottram’s narrator wryly asserts that ‘roads and railways, food, and patience alone could win in such a struggle’ (both SFT, 194). Men are the unspoken further requirement to keep this system working until victory is secured. Parade’s End begins with Tietjens and Macmaster on the train, and Tietjens’s train journey with Edith Ethel Duchemin lingers over the narrative as rumour. Tietjens is extricated from the war by his secondment to the transport: ‘The idea of commanding divisional transport was like a vision of Paradise to Tietjens. For two reasons: it was relatively safe, being concerned with a lot of horses … and the knowledge that he had that employment would put Valentine Wannop’s mind at rest’ (PE, 483).97 Horses are part of his role, but the railway and other motorised forms of transport dominate the



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Figure 4.2  The making of a new railway. An official British photograph from the Western Front in France

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Figure 4.3  The destruction of railways in Belgium by retreating Germans

novel, the clash between the old enchantments and the new symbolised by the crash of General Campion’s car into the horse and cart driven by Tietjens and carrying he and Valentine Wannop. Mark Tietjens is as profoundly affected by the war as his brother, and he sees his life through the lens of transport. It is only by unseen manoeuvering that he can help Christopher out of the front line. This is perhaps not entirely altruistic: Mark wishes to appoint the most capable men because: Transport is the soul of a war: the spirit of an army had used to be in its feet, Napoleon had said. Something like that. But those fellows had starved the army of transport; then flooded it with so much it couldn’t move; then starved it again. Then they had insisted on his finding enormously too much transport for those other fellows who used it for disposing of smuggled typewriters and sewing machines that came over on transports. … It had broken his back, that and solitude. There had not been a fellow he could talk to in the Government towards the end. (PE, 719)

The war is either lacking transport or surfeited with it, consistently immobile, compounded by profiteering. Mark’s isolation within



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the government is completed by the Armistice: for almost all of Last Post he is silent and motionless on an outdoors bed at Groby. His paralysis comes as the seemingly perpetual motion of the war machine stops.98 It is unclear whether Mark has had a heart attack, or whether he has simply decided to stop engaging with the world. His wife, Marie-Léonie, previously his mistress, contemplates whether the terms of the Armistice, which she broke to him, were directly responsible for his condition. She believes that he has suffered a heart attack but doubts her own interpretation of events: ‘He had been recovering from double pneumonia at the time. What the remark had been she could not exactly repeat; she was almost certain that it had been to the effect – in English – that he would never speak again. But she was aware that her own predilection was sufficient to bias her hearing’ (PE, 689). Just as Christopher is Christ-like throughout the series, Mark also comes to consider himself as such: ‘He was finished with the world. He perceived the trend of its actions, listened to its aspirations and even to its prayers, but he would never again stir lip or finger. It was like being dead – or being a God’ (PE, 728). He describes his condition as the curious combination of physical and emotional: ‘His confounded heart had been broken on Armistice Day in the morning’ (PE, 761). Mark sees his retreat into himself as a form of death, but as in so many instances in the novels, problems are caused by miscommunication. The taciturnity exhibited by Mark and Christopher contributes to their mental struggles: their facility for repressing memories and feelings helps them fit in with the contemporary enchantments of masculinity, but also renders them susceptible to the need for catharsis. The titles of the second and third volumes of the series, No More Parades and A Man Could Stand Up—, attest to the importance of controlling movement, which is a double-edged sword in wartime. The end of war is precipitated by formalised movement which brings to an end the limited but crucial movement of the front line. Tietjens links parades with the end of the war, having observed the ceremony being planned in the War Office early in the conflict: Well, the end of the show was to be: the adjutant would stand the battalion at ease; the band would play Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant would say: There will be no more parades. … Don’t

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you see how symbolical it was – the band playing Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant saying There will be no more parades? … For there won’t. There won’t, there damn well won’t. … No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country … nor for the world, I dare say … None … Gone … Na poo, finny! No … more … parades! (PE, 306–7)

The end of parades is optimistically seen as the end of the outdated performance of heroism and finery in the war: while Hemingway’s denunciation of ‘the big words’ in A Farewell to Arms (1929) has become famous, Ford made a similar point in 1925. Tietjens acknowledges that discipline and appearance are important in the maintenance of morale, but should be secondary to military practicalities. As he was writing the first Parade’s End volume, Ford wrote in an essay on Joseph Conrad: ‘If you call it “style” you will be at once in a frame of mind more monumental and much less intimate. Style implies a man in parade uniform; writing, the same man in working dress.’99 He believed style must relate effectively to content. Sondra J. Stang argues compellingly that it is not that ‘the idea of ceremony is contemptible, but by itself, with nothing behind it it is the outward show of nothing. Having no meaning, it has no reason for being.’100 Looking back from the mid-1920s to the mid-war, the end of the war is the end of hope. The disenchantment of the post-war years is combined with the problems of the war in this retrospective view. The end of the war is also the desired end of compartmentalisation, the division of labour, the performance of togetherness and consequently the turning to face the realities of the post-war world, which have already become apparent from the world in which Ford writes. Last Post, the final volume of the tetralogy, is concerned with valediction. It mourns the military dead, Mark himself, and also the English enchantments which Tietjens most values. Macmaster, educated in the institutions which promote those values but only through the good offices of the Tietjens family, can see their decline before the war. The intrusion of suffrage on the homosocial, sporting, English environment of the golf club leads him to opine that ‘for these Tories at least, this was really the end of the world. The last of England!’ (PE, 59). Macmaster, the careful critic, alludes to the painting of the same name (1855) by Ford’s grandfather Ford Madox Brown, which depicts a man and his wife leaving the



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country to start a new life, the woman clutching a barely visible baby.101 Mark Tietjens repeats the phrase as he talks to Christopher before he goes to war: ‘This is the last of England. … There’s only my department where they never made mistakes’ (PE, 218). Marie Léonie also links the Last Post with the last of England (PE, 727). However, once Christopher Tietjens leaves the Imperial Department of Statistics, as Deer points out, he ‘has also broken with his nation’.102 McCarthy astutely points out that ‘the old order of Tory England was never so clear as Tietjens imagines’.103 While this is certainly true, its enchantments were profoundly endorsed both by social and political elites and by conservative voters and thinkers. British people and places which survive the war are largely unaltered: ‘The land had not changed. … There were still the deep beech-woods making groves beside the ploughlands and the rooks rising lazily as the plough came towards them. The land had not changed. … Well, the breed had not changed. … There was Christopher. … Only, the times … they had changed’ (PE, 762). The land and its owners remain powerful in spite of the dramatic events of 1914–18. Mark, in whose free indirect discourse this comment is made, acknowledges the disjunction between the lack of obvious physical change in England, particularly in the rural world which retains its idyllic charm. The change is more ethereal, unseen, to social systems and structures as a result of the upheavals of the war. Spengler suggests that ‘the great Estates are […] emblems in flesh and blood, whose entire being, as phenomenon, as attitude, and as mode of thought, possesses symbolic meaning’ (DW, 2, 333). The fragmented discourse of Christopher, the combatant, leads to the acknowledgement of change, the fragmentation itself alluding to the cracks and fissures of the old order which Mark represents. Memorialisation impinges regularly on the final volume, but it is not yet the object of veneration by all. Many sought to forget and move past the war. The repeated sound of the Last Post is for the dead generally and, implicitly, the nation. It compels Valentine to consider other forms of loss: Some drunken man on the church steps opposite had begun to play the bugle. Long calls. … Tee … Teee … TEEE … Ta-heee … To-hee … Continuing for ever. … Valentine had begun to cry. She had said that it was dreadful.

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But you could not object. It was the Last Post they were playing. For the Dead. You could not object to their playing the Last Post for the Dead that night. Even if it was a drunken man who played and even if it drove you mad. The dead ought to have all they could get. […] this girl had gone through something terrible that night with the wife, and being too proud to show emotion over her personal vicissitudes she pretended to find an outlet because of the sounds of that bugle. … Well, it was mournful enough. She had understood it when Christopher, putting his face in at the crack of the door had whispered to her that he was going to stop the bugle because its sound was intolerable to Mark. (PE, 773)

Valentine resents the reminder of the war, but is compelled by social convention to join in the remembrance. The call seems infinite and interminable, but Christopher stops the act of memorialisation in deference to Mark, who is still living, if almost as life-in-death. The displacement of the birth of Tietjens and Valentine’s child beyond the end of the text offers, Meyer argues, ‘a recuperative strategy that is only partially successful in giving the novel a stock “realist” sense of ideological closure’.104 The similar deferral of resolution in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, published in the same year, also addresses the difficulty of writing hopefully about the war, and of moving past it, even a decade after the Armistice. More conservative in form and content, Mottram’s novels sold better than Ford’s, whose reception was mixed; there seems to have been little consistent development in sales of the four novels.105 Some Do Not… was roundly criticised, with the occasional acknowledgment of its necessarily dark character, and No More Parades, with its focus on the war, garnered the greatest positive response.106 However, he was popular enough to enter into preliminary negotiations about the film rights, although this seems not to have come to anything.107 Like Montague, Ford’s review reception was better than his sales. Ford was well known to other writers of the modernist circle such as Aldington, who had been his secretary around the beginning of the war; his extensive literary connections meant that his name and work were widely disseminated among and well received by other writers, particularly the early volumes. L. P. Hartley described Some Do Not… as ‘moving and organic’, and commented that ‘We find it hard to believe that the War and the years before the War produced the colours and patterns Mr Ford’s kaleidoscope gives them; that they were as wicked or as witty or



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as wrong-headed’.108 He later perceptively described A Man Could Stand Up— in terms of ‘the discreteness of human consciousness’, suggesting that ‘applied to the war, it imparts the right febrile atmosphere’.109 Hugh Walpole, a well-regarded author at the time, described No More Parades as ‘the most remarkable picture of our Army in France that fiction has yet given us’.110 Other influential figures such as Cyril Connolly and Rachel Annand Taylor both praised the earlier volumes of the tetralogy and their ‘magnificent war-passages’ in the act of critically reviewing Last Post, Connolly asserting that it ‘suffers from being so hopelessly a sequel’.111 Although the Parade’s End novels were by no means a runaway commercial success, their reasonable sales figures over a period of around five years, and their influential readership, helped introduce the disenchantment of combatants to a wider audience. The Spanish Farm Trilogy appealed to a similar readership, though perhaps Mottram’s more conservative aesthetic and literary situation would have provoked reconsiderations of the conflict in less likely places than Ford, with his links to progressive writing. Ford’s interest in new forms means that he has come to be seen as a prescient writer, but it was not good for his finances at the time. Both he and Mottram were early adopters of a position which would later become commonplace, part of its building towards popularity. Unusually, we can see the extended process of negotiation with literary marketplace in their works. The collected edition of Mottram’s novels appeared nine years after the Armistice, and Ford’s Last Post in early 1928. Both helped to pave the way for the outpouring of war literature at the end of the 1920s.

Notes 1 I follow critical convention by talking about Ford Madox Ford throughout, although he only adopted this name in 1919. For a succinct account of Ford’s name changes see Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), vol. 1, p. 1. 2 Mottram’s early poems were published under the pseudonym J.  Marjoram in 1907. This publication was facilitated by Ford, in his role as reader for Alston Rivers. See R. H. Mottram, Another Window Seat, or Life Observed: Volume Two, 1919–1953 (London:

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Hutchinson, 1957), p. 76. See also J. Marjoram, ‘Afternoon Tea’, English Review 1:3 (1909), 392–4. 3 R. H. Mottram, The Window Seat: or Life Observed (London: Hutchinson, 1954), p. 43. Rosa Maria Bracco comments on Mottram’s position between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1993), p. 8. 4 On the formal shift, see Eric Meyer, ‘Ford’s War and (Post)Modern Memory: Parade’s End and National Allegory’, Criticism 32:1 (1990),  83–4; also Robert Green, Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 130–1, 147–9. 5 John Onions, English Fiction and Drama of the Great War, 1918–39 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 99. 6 Jay Winter gestures to the vastness of wartime administration as a source of record in ‘Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919: Capital Cities at War’, in Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (eds), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 8–9. 7 Mottram, Another Window Seat, p. 52. 8 Ford Madox Ford, ‘Literary Portraits: III. Mr John Galsworthy’ (1907), in Critical Essays, ed. Max Saunders and Richard Stang (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), p. 34. See also ‘Literary Portraits: VI. Mr John Galsworthy and The Dark Flower’ (1913), Critical Essays, pp. 114–18. 9 Mottram to Harold Raymond, 8 October 1926; Mottram to Raymond, 27 August 1926. Both letters at University of Reading, Chatto & Windus Archives, CW39/12; Sondra J. Stang, Ford Madox Ford (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977), p. 96. 10 Mottram, The Window Seat, p. 10. 11 R. H. Mottram, ‘Tradition in the Novel’, in Tradition and Experiment in Present-Day Literature: Addresses Delivered at the City Literary Institute (London: Humphrey Milford for Oxford University Press, 1929), pp. 1, 14. 12 John Galsworthy, Preface to Mottram, The Spanish Farm (London: Chatto & Windus, 1924), p. ix; John Galsworthy to Chatto & Windus, 31 October 1923, from University of Reading, Chatto & Windus Archives, CW14/3. 13 John Rignall, ‘Continuity and Rupture in English Novels of the First World War: Frederic Manning and R. H. Mottram’, in Lynne Hapgood and Nancy L. Paxton (eds), Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900–30 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 50.



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14 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 3. 15 See, for example, Philip Davis, The Victorians, 1830–1880, The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), particularly ‘The Rise of Prose’, pp. 222–34. 16 Ford Madox Ford, ‘A Haughty and Proud Generation’ (1922), in Critical Essays, ed. Max Saunders and Richard Stang (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), p. 208. 17 Ibid., p. 210. 18 Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 16. 19 Mary Ann Gillies, ‘Bergsonism: “Time out of Mind”’, in David Bradshaw (ed.), Concise Companion to Modernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 98. 20 Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe, ed. Robin Durie (Manchester: Clinamen, 1999), p. 44. 21 Paul Dirac, Principles of Quantum Mechanics, fourth edn (1930; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. vii. 22 Michael H. Whitworth, ‘Physics: “A Strange Footprint”’, in Bradshaw (ed.), Concise Companion to Modernism, p. 208. 23 Jürgen Neffe, Einstein: A Biography, trans. Shelley Frisch ([2005]; Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 233. 24 Seamus O’Malley, ‘The Return of the Soldier and Parade’s End: Ford’s reworking of West’s Pastoral’, in Paul Skinner (ed.), Ford Madox Ford’s Literary Contacts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 155–64. 25 Terry Phillips, ‘The Rules of War: Gothic Transgressions in First World War Fiction’, Gothic Studies 2:2 (2000), p. 233. 26 Michael H. Whitworth, ‘Physics’, p. 214. 27 C. F. G. Masterman, After Twelve Months of War (London: Darling and Son, 1915), p. 5. 28 On dissemination and championing, see Mary Ann Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), p. 28; see also Gillies, ‘Bergsonism’, pp. 95–115; Sanford Schwartz, The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, pp. 277–305; Bertrand Russell, ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’, in The Monist 22 (1912), 321–47. On Hulme’s influence, see Shiv K. Kumar, Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1963; Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), p. 12; Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, vol. 2, p. 368.

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29 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson ([1889] 1910; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921), p. 227. 30 Ibid., p. 172. See also Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1991), p. 37. 31 Henri Bergson, The Meaning of the War, trans. H. Wildon Carr (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1915), p. 33. 32 Jonathan Wild details the developing representation of such figures in literature in The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 33 The labyrinthine structure of local government epitomised this. See Jean-Louis Robert, ‘Paris, London, Berlin on the Eve of War’, in Winter and Robert (eds), Capital Cities at War, pp. 38–9. 34 George A. Greenwood, England To-Day: A Social Study of Our Times (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922), pp. 79–83. 35 R. G. Collingwood, ‘Man Goes Mad’ (1936), in The Philosophy of Enchantment: Studies in Folktale, Cultural Criticism, and Anthropology, ed. David Boucher, Wendy James and Philip Smallwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), p. 321. 36 David Trotter, Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 130–1. 37 Mottram, The Window Seat, p. 185. 38 R. H. Mottram, ‘The “Great” War, as They Called it’, in The Twentieth Century: A Personal Record (London: Hutchinson, 1969), p. 32. 39 Mottram, The Window Seat, p. 141. 40 Mottram, ‘The “Great” War’, p. 65. 41 Rignall, ‘Continuity and Rupture’, p. 50. 42 David Trotter, ‘The British Novel and the War’, in Vincent Sherry (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 46. 43 Phillips, ‘Rules of War’, 242. 44 Allyson Booth, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 108. 45 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 105. 46 R. H. Mottram, Foreword to Ten Years Ago: Armistice and Other Memories Forming a Pendant to ‘The Spanish Farm Trilogy’ (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928), p. vii. 47 R. H. Mottram, Our Mr Dormer (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927), p. 288. 48 See, for example, Trotter, Paranoid Modernism, pp. 131–2. Booth



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talks about the dangers of ‘clean abstraction’ behind the lines with reference to the Somme in Postcards from the Trenches, p. 94. 49 Zygmunt Bauman, Culture as Praxis, new edn (London: Sage, 1999), p. xxiii. 50 Wild, The Rise of the Office Clerk, pp. 137–9. 51 Rignall, ‘Continuity and Rupture’, p. 58. 52 ‘Books of the Day: New Novels’, Observer, 25 May 1924, p. 4; ‘New Fiction: The Spanish Farm’, Sunday Times, 25 May 1924, p.  9; ‘Books of the Day: New Novels’, Daily Telegraph, 10 June 1924, p. 4. 53 ‘Books of the Day: New Novels’, Daily Telegraph, 27 March 1925, p. 13; A.N. M[onkhouse], ‘New Books: A Cosmic Stupidity’, Manchester Guardian, 25 February 1925, p. 7. The subtitle of the review refers to a quotation from the novel, in which we are told that the war ‘had outlasted all patience and all interest, [and] become a cosmic stupidity’ (SFT 553). 54 Gerald Bullett, ‘New Novels: Sixty-Four, Ninety-Four’, Times Literary Supplement, 26 February 1925, p. 136. 55 ‘The World of Books: Pictures of War’, Sunday Times, 22 March 1925, p. 9. 56 ‘Books of the Day: Sixty-Four, Ninety-Four!’, Observer, 8 March 1925, p. 5. 57 ‘Books of the Day: Mr. Mottram’s Trilogy’, Observer, 7 February 1926, p. 5. 58 ‘Books of the Day: New Novels’, Daily Telegraph, 19 February 1926, p. 15. 59 Gerald Gould, ‘Novels of the Year’, Observer, 1 January 1928, p. 5. 60 For a sequential account of the narrative of Parade’s End, see Arthur Mizener, ‘Chronological Sequence of Events in Parade’s End’, in Stang, Ford Madox Ford, pp. 132–7. 61 Green, Ford Madox Ford, p. 159. 62 Ford, ‘Les Jeunes and Des Imagistes’ (1914), Critical Essays, pp. 150–8. 63 Ford, ‘Literary Portraits: XXIV. The Year 1908’ (1908), Critical Essays, p. 50. 64 Hunt, diary entry for 14 August 1917, in Robert Secor and Marie Secor, The Return of the Good Soldier: Ford Madox Ford and Violet Hunt’s 1917 Diary (Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 1983), p. 72. 65 Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, vol. 2, pp. 125–6. See also Ford Madox Ford, It Was the Nightingale, ed. John Coyle (1934; Manchester: Carcanet, 2007), p. 180.

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66 Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, ‘“The Foul System”: The Great War and Instrumental Rationality in Parade’s End’, Studies in the Novel 41:2 (2009), 181. 67 Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, vol. 2, p. 2. 68 Ibid., p. 196. 69 Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, vol. 2, p. 47. ‘True Love and a G.C.M.’ was published finally in War Prose, ed. Saunders (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999), pp. 77–139. 70 Ford approached the Viking Press in the USA with the same material in the late 1920s, and eventually obtained an advance for it from Stanley Unwin as he was dying in 1939. Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, vol. 2, p.  96; Ford to Eric Pinker, 11 September 1929, Richard M. Ludwig (ed.), Letters of Ford Madox Ford (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 188. 71 Ford, No Enemy, p. 144. For extended analyses of No Enemy, see Skinner’s Introduction to the Carcanet edition; Stang, Ford Madox Ford, pp. 48–54; Mark D. Larabee, Front Lines of Modernism: Remapping the Great War in British Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 41–57. 72 See Andrew Frayn, ‘“This battle was not over”: Parade’s End as a Transitional Text in the Development of “Disenchanted” First World War Literature’, in Andrzej Gasiorek and Daniel Moore (eds), Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transformations, International Ford Madox Ford Studies 7 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), p. 202. 73 Ford Madox Ford, Between St Dennis and St George: a Sketch of Three Civilisations [as Ford Madox Hueffer] (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915), p. 60; Ford Madox Ford, The Marsden Case: a Romance (London: Duckworth, 1923), p. 261. See also Frayn, ‘Ford and World War I’. 74 Ford identified himself as a Tory before the war, but his was a ­dissenting Toryism: he does so in a plea for Irish Home Rule. Ford, ‘A Tory Plea for Home Rule’ (1911–12), Critical Essays, pp. 98–109. 75 Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 57–8. 76 R. W. Lid, Ford Madox Ford: The Essence of His Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), p. 118. 77 Meyer, ‘Ford’s War and (Post)Modern Memory’, 86. On Christopher Tietjens and tradition, see Carol Ohmann, Ford Madox Ford: From Apprentice to Craftsman (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1964), pp. 117–18. 78 Allyson Booth notes the dissociation of leadership from eyewitness accounts in Postcards from the Trenches, p. 92.



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79 Hew Strachan, ‘Military Modernization, 1789–1918’, in T. C. W. Blanning (ed.), The Oxford History of Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 88. 80 Patrick Deer, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 51. 81 Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 93. 82 Ford wrote to Bowen that ‘I’m not a Grand Panjandrum or a Moral Censor’. 8 October 1918, in The Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen, ed. Sondra J. Stang and Karen Cochran (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 23. 83 Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, p. 95. 84 Weber, ‘Bureaucracy’, in From Max Weber, p. 235. 85 Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War, p. 55. 86 John A. Meixner, Ford Madox Ford’s Novels: A Critical Study (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), p. 236. 87 For a reading of The Simple Life Limited, see Nathan Waddell, Modernist Nowheres: Politics and Utopia in Early Modernist Writing, 1900–1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), ch. 4. 88 Weber, ‘Bureaucracy’, in From Max Weber, p. 235. 89 Ford self-deprecatingly describes himself as ‘a sort of Encyclopaedia’ in recounting his army lecturing. Ford to Stella Bowen, 24 August 1918, in Stang and Cochran, Correspondence, p. 8. 90 Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1928), p. 46. 91 Green, Ford Madox Ford, p. 156. 92 Weber, ‘Bureaucracy’, in From Max Weber, pp. 213–14. See also Deg, pp. 38–9 on the development of railways and the impact of the rail network on publications. 93 Collingwood, ‘Man Goes Mad’, p. 332. 94 Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 8. 95 Strachan, ‘Military Modernization’, p. 87. 96 See also Anna Snaith and Michael H. Whitworth, ‘Introduction: Approaches to Space and Place in Woolf’, in Snaith and Whitworth (eds), Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 17. 97 Compare the similar characterisations of the safety of the transport in SFT, pp. 305, 511.

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98 Ford, similarly, wrote to Bowen on Armistice Day that ‘Peace has come, and for some reason I feel inexpressibly sad. I suppose it is the breaking down of the old strain!’ Ford to Bowen, 11 November 1918, in Stang and Cochran (eds), Correspondence, p. 32. 99 Ford, ‘Mr Conrad’s Writing’ (1923), Critical Essays, p. 228. 100 Stang, Ford Madox Ford, p. 96. 101 Green links the scale of Parade’s End to the huge paintings of Ford Madox Brown such as Work (1852–65). Ford Madox Ford, p. 150. 102 Deer, Culture in Camouflage, p. 51. 103 McCarthy, ‘“The Foul System”’, p. 182. 104 Meyer, ‘Ford’s War and (Post)Modern Memory’, p. 94. 105 See, for example, Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, vol. 2, pp. 288–98; Ford to Bowen, 27 November 1926, in Stang and Cochran (eds), Correspondence, p. 239. 106 Unsigned review, Nation & Athenaeum, 24 May 1924, in Frank MacShane, ed., Ford Madox Ford: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 89; unsigned review, ‘New Books’, Daily Mail, 25 April 1924, p. 5; ‘New Novels’, Daily Telegraph, 29 April 1924, p. 4; ‘Among the Books: Pseudo-Realism’, Daily Express, 3 May 1924, p. 5; Orlo Williams, ‘New Novels: Some Do Not…’, Times Literary Supplement, 24 April 1924, p. 252; unsigned review, ‘New Novels: The Gentleman at War’, Manchester Guardian, 9 October 1925, p. 9; unsigned review, ‘Books of the Day: Realism of the Spirit’, Observer, 11 October 1925, p. 4. 107 Ford to Bowen, 15 November 1926, in Stang and Cochran (eds), Correspondence, p. 224. 108 L. P. Hartley, ‘An Elusive Allegory’, Spectator 132, 3 May 1924, p. 720. 109 L. P. Hartley, Review of A Man Could Stand Up—, Saturday Review, 142, 13 November 1926, p. 592. See Harvey, p. 368. 110 Hugh Walpole, ‘The Novels of 1925’, John O’London’s Weekly, 5 December 1925, p. 374. 111 Rachel A. Taylor, Review of Last Post, Spectator, 140, 4 February 1928, p. 168; Cyril Connolly, Review of Last Post, New Statesman, 30, 4 February 1928, p. 533. See Harvey, pp. 376–7.

5

Popular disenchantment: the War Books Boom, 1928–1930

The War Books Boom of 1928–30 was not the time when Britain became disenchanted; it was when disenchantment became a popular mode of expression. As I have demonstrated above, disenchantment grows steadily from the late nineteenth century, is mapped on to the war and then heightened by its impact. Many works usually categorised as disenchanted are less closely aligned with the futility myth than their reputation suggests.1 Where authors such as Ford, Lawrence and Woolf had a limited degree of popularity, many of the works discussed in this chapter were genuine bestsellers. Even Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, perhaps the most stridently disenchanted text of this boom, sold quickly into the teens of thousands.2 I start this chapter by discussing some of the cultural stimuli for the early stages of the War Books Boom. At the end of 1927, Cyril Falls had already seen a revival of interest in war memoirs. However, Janet S. K. Watson notes that the ‘war was culturally important, now, not for what it had achieved, but for what it had cost. Resistance to this perspective of betrayal and disenchantment was vociferous but ultimately overwhelmed.’3 That loud disavowal demonstrates the ongoing power of those enchantments which many thought were ended by the war, and I discuss some rejections of the primacy of ­disenchantment in the conclusion. Disenchantment results in part from a double-entry book-keeping view of the war. Ford Madox Ford started to talk about literature using this language in his series of critical articles ‘Stocktaking: Towards a Revaluation of English Literature’ (1924), and Rebecca West wrote in her popular novel War Nurse (1930), discussed at the end of this chapter: ‘I wish I could use scientific bookkeeping on this thing and find out how the account stands: how much my

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generation lost or gained through the war’ (WN, 261). Perhaps the only surprise, in an age of literary innovation, is that nobody sought to express an account with society in that form, as B. S. Johnson later did in Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry. Oswald Spengler invokes Werner Sombart’s assertion that ‘double-entry book-keeping rests on the basic principle, logically carried out, of comprehending all phenomena purely as quantities’ (DW, 2, 490). Disenchantment is the clash between belief systems, one based on intangibility and absence, the other on calculability and material evidence. The problem, for Spengler, is that value is no longer comparative but absolute, conceived from the ‘wrong’ starting point of exchange-value rather than use-value. He observes that ‘money, like number and law, is a category of thought’ (DW, 2, 482). The problem arises when these are combined to act as a system in which faith must be placed. The notion of costing the war attempts to rationalise it. War dead are thus no longer venerated for acting on behalf of others in defence of grand principles and values, but pitied for being duped into an unwinnable conflict. No longer is victory sufficient reward, but the emotional toll must be added to a running account of the war’s costs. The onset of financial depression added potency to that metaphor. Heroism is tested in disenchanted novels, and there was a sense that it was changing even before the war. C. F. G. Masterman links the decline of heroism with suburbanism, calling it ‘a vision of life in which the trivial and heroic things are alike exhibited, but in which there is no adequate test or judgment, which are the heroic, which are the trivial’ (CE, 80). Abstract qualities are no longer interpretable. Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman posit that ‘In emphasising bodily suffering and the solitude of the dying, these texts move away from the great deeds of heroes.’4 Heroes in First World War literature still commit impressive feats, but these are acts of survival. I incline more to Andrew Rutherford’s suggestion that heroism is not left behind, but ‘stripped of romantic glamour [… and] redefined convincingly in terms of grim courage and endurance in the face of almost unbearable suffering and horror’.5 Where dutiful service previously underpinned a more dynamic version of military service, in the First World War to continue is in itself admirable.



Popular disenchantment: War Books Boom, 1928–30 203 Persistent pastoral

Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War was published at the tenth anniversary of the Armistice. It was an early success in the British War Books Boom, the peak of which was in late 1929 and 1930.6 I argue that it should be seen as a work of 1928, part of a transitional phase. Blunden criticises the war, but still wants to see it in poetic terms. The pastoral style he uses, as in his earlier poetry in The Shepherd (1922), shows little desire for unadorned directness.7 He describes being under fire: ‘The red sparks of German trench mortars described their seeming-slow arcs, shrapnel shells clanged in crimson, burning, momentary cloudlets, smoke billowed into a tidal wave, and the powdery glare of many a signal-light showed the rolling folds’.8 The polysyllabic language and rolling, extended sentence structure smooth any criticism and obscure the physicality of the experience. The archaism of the ‘seeming-slow arcs’, their sibilant alliteration with ‘shrapnel shells’, and the alignment of smoke with natural phenomena situate Blunden’s work as poetry despite its ostensible prose form. Like C. E. Montague several years earlier, even clear expressions of disenchantment are obscured by elliptical style: This was Neville Lytton. Tall, of a fine carriage, his outward and physical appearance expressing an intellect rather than a body, he at once attracted me. He was outspoken in his loathing of war, he did not rely on his rank to cover all points of argument or action, and his gallantry in going through the dirtiness, the abnegations of service, the attack upon all his refinement, was great.9

Loathing for war is diluted by the six clauses of the sentence, which is buried in the middle of a paragraph. Furthermore, Lytton’s other qualities are described in heroic terms. Despite his stance, he does his duty. The circle that cannot be squared in disenchanted First World War fiction is that these men do their duty until the bitter end: disenchantment must not be confused with anti-war sentiment or a belief that the war was futile. Blunden’s very literary Englishness accounts for his critical popularity at the time.10 His biographer, Barry Webb, suggests that: ‘Unlike many of his contemporary writers he did not develop a markedly new wartime poetic voice, but remained a predominantly pastoral poet within a war setting’.11 Webb draws attention to the formal disjunction between Blunden and later writers in the

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War Books Boom. A. C. Ward and Siegfried Sassoon made similar observations.12 Cyril Falls reviewed the novel sympathetically for its distaste for war and its refusal of ‘defeatism’, but Aldington rated the novel below Ernest Hemingway and Robert Graves.13 Mark D. Larabee sees Blunden’s aestheticism as a response to difficulties of representation.14 Blunden later sought to separate himself from the most vitriolic fiction in lauding D. H. Bell’s A Soldier’s Diary of the Great War (1929) as ‘a quiet war-book (infinitely above those which aren’t really about the war at all but shout down one’s sense of proportion until Nature revolts and flings the Orrors out of the window.)’15 The natural world still offered consolation, but others discussed in this chapter found it difficult to use this vocabulary to write about the experience of mechanised war. Cyril Falls, an early critic, commented in 1930 that ‘One of the first books of this sort in the recent great flood was Mr Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War. It was recognised as a masterpiece, and is still the best English book of its kind; but it did not set the standard. This was done by the German All Quiet on the Western Front.’16 The novelty of nothing new While the ten-year distance from the war should not be conceived as a gap, it was a significant milestone. Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen Nichts Neues, perhaps the most famous First World War novel, was first serialised in the original German on the tenth anniversary of the Armistice and was a major success.17 Eschatological and sometimes merely scatological, Remarque’s novel was attacked by the German political left for not going far enough, and by the Nazi right for undermining German national values.18 The attendant controversy guaranteed its commercial success and Remarque fuelled the fire of publicity by his reluctance to engage with it.19 The novel sold over a quarter of a million copies in the six weeks following its volume publication in January 1929. Its success in Germany led quickly to its translation into many languages; it appeared in English in March 1929 under the enduring title All Quiet on the Western Front. For Remarque there is no doubt about the rejection of previous enchantments. Familiar tropes from earlier works are changed, as protagonists die, conditions at home are no better than at the front and schools fail their pupils. The protagonist Paul Baümer is still a



Popular disenchantment: War Books Boom, 1928–30 205

schoolboy at the start of the novel, and the form-master Kantorek and his type are blamed for war enthusiasm when they are not required to serve: ‘There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of them convinced that they were acting for the best, in the way that was the most comfortable for themselves.’20 The 1930 film version gives the scene added prominence, heightening the sense of generational conflict. Men who do not or cannot serve continue to exhibit a bluff masculinity, but there are no easy solutions for those who fight or can empathise. On his return from the front on leave, Baümer rejects figureheads such as Kantorek, who receives his comeuppance when he becomes a home guardsman, subject to the authority of the boys he encouraged to go to war.21 Revenge comes by various petty humiliations, but it is small recompense. Andrew Rutherford asserts that the ‘characters were debased and brutal before they ever went to war’,22 but it would be fairer to say that ingrained martial enchantments hastened their enlistment either by desire or tacit social compulsion, and ensured that the experience of war could not live up to those ideals. Remarque spares nothing in his descriptions of hardships at home and at the front. The privations of life for many are seen in his ­cancer-stricken mother, struggling to make her rations go far enough to indulge her son. Death is as pernicious and random at home as it is at the front when mitigating factors are emptied out from warfare. Baümer observes that ‘we’ve never heard of cancer being cured’,23 and there seems little chance of survival for him or his mother: I should never have come home. Out there I was indifferent, and a lot of the time I was completely without hope. I can never be like that again. I was a soldier, and now it is all suffering, for myself, for my mother, for everything, because it is all so hopeless and never-ending. I should never have come home on leave.24

The situation at the front has no complicated emotional ties: the alienation of modern life means for Baümer that military service is tolerable. The leave period is torturous as it combines the momentary relief of not being under fire with the disenchantment of a reunion in which pre-war conditions are altered for the worse. The war never ends for Baümer and his mother, and he dies, in October 1918, accepting his fate. The pathos is heightened by the knowledge that peace is imminent. Death is a release for Baümer, but it now lacks any heavenly association. Eksteins observes that the novel ‘seemed to

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encapsulate the whole modern impulse as it manifested itself in the postwar world: the amalgamation of prayer and desperation, dream and chaos, wish and desolation’.25 In All Quiet on the Western Front the negatives seem to take precedence. It was not about realistic description, but a reimagining from a late 1920s’ point of view. The British readership was almost as divided as the German on the novel’s merits.26 The success of A. W. Wheen’s translation came as Journey’s End was beginning its West End run. The international successes of both indicated a huge potential market for disenchanted literature. Authors were quick to seize on this opportunity, and Watson states that ‘when reviewers considered the aggregate effect of these books (in conjunction with the less sophisticatedly literate ones that rapidly and in great numbers joined them) […] some became greatly concerned’.27 The public memory of the conflict turned towards the disenchanted, and the tone was increasingly bitter and intemperate. The ire was primarily associated with former combatants, which gave the impression of credibility. Military identification was often present on the cover. Frederic Manning first published Her Privates We (1930) under his regimental rank and number. This, and other similar works such as War is War, by ex-Private X (A. M. Burrage), and So This is War! The Truth about the Western and Eastern Fronts Revealed by Bombardier ‘X’, demonstrates a desire to see ‘typical horrors’, if that is not an oxymoron. However, these writers were often professional authors, not Tommies as implied: the difficulty of finding and publishing a working-class account of the war is exemplified by the need for Robert Graves to act as literary midwife to Frank Richards’s Old Soldiers Never Die (1933).28 In the case of Manning and Aldington, credibility was enhanced for some by the demotic language but to others they were unnecessarily vulgar. Other successful and enduring novels were Subaltern on the Somme, published under the pseudonym Mark VII by Max Plowman (1929), and in the following year Henry Williamson’s Patriot’s Progress, and Richard Blaker’s lengthy Medal Without Bar. Long-forgotten but popular novels of 1930 included C. R. Benstead’s Retreat, Ronald Gurner’s Pass Guard to Ypres, and the pulp author Ernest McKeag, who published under many pseudonyms, continued to write improving tales of adventure in the Navy such as Chums of the Northern Patrol (1929), Hurrah for the Navy! and Dare-Devils of the Dardanelles (both 1930).



Popular disenchantment: War Books Boom, 1928–30 207 Journey’s End, boom’s beginning

The notable British success early in the War Books Boom was R.  C.  Sherriff’s play Journey’s End. First performed in December 1928 and running in the West End from January 1929, it did not precipitate the boom, but was a major stimulus. It was an early play about the war, although there was a 1928 adaptation of Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier.29 Journey’s End became one of the defining theatrical productions of the era, surviving for 594 consecutive performances at the Savoy and seen by the King in the Armistice week of 1929.30 A special performance was given on 10 November 1929 for 320 holders of the Victoria Cross: an attendee commented that ‘It is the most realistic thing of the war I have ever seen’.31 It was a consistent sell-out, the text sold into the 100,000s, and it was translated and performed internationally.32 It was one of the last major successes of the golden age of theatre, and became an early success in the growing film industry; Colin Clive reprised his role as Stanhope in the 1930 film. Seen as a British equivalent of All Quiet on the Western Front, it was very different in tone and content. Heroism is reconceptualised in Journey’s End to match attritional warfare. Sacrifice is no longer glorious and the physicality of war experience is overpowering: knightly rules of conduct no longer apply. However, for all its billing as an anti-war text the message of Journey’s End is conservative.33 Sherriff was surprised that it was understood as pacifist: he later described it as ‘a war play in which not a word was spoken against the war, in which no word of condemnation was uttered by any of its characters’.34 Despite the conditions in which they find themselves, the duty to each other and the nation is still powerful. Raleigh, Stanhope, and Osborne are three generations of public school educated, games-playing, stereotypically masculine men. The first two go to war straight from school and, Onions argues, ‘without having had time to consider the convention’s validity.’35 Stanhope has become conscious that heroism in wartime lasts only ‘as long as the hero’s a hero’ (JE, 30). He is idolised by Raleigh as the public school hero, captain of sports teams and an older brother figure, but his faith is quickly tested when he finds Stanhope drunk in the trenches. When they discuss the matter Stanhope leaves Raleigh under no illusion why he drinks: ‘To forget, you little fool – to forget! […] You think there’s no limit to what a man can bear?’ (JE, 85). Osborne, the senior man, has

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come to understand the cruelty of machine war. He tries to protect Raleigh from disenchantment, warning Trotter that there is ‘no need to tell him it’s murder’ (JE, 62). He can only protect Raleigh’s interpretation of the war briefly, and can do nothing to protect him from physical danger. The reality soon becomes apparent. When they go on a raid together Osborne is killed, but a bloodied Raleigh returns to the joy and approval of the Colonel who sent them on the  suicidal mission. Its effect is clear: ‘Raleigh comes slowly down the steps, walking as though he were asleep […. He] looks across at the Colonel and tries to speak. He raises his hand to his forehead and sways’ (JE, 76). The trauma from witnessing death and the acute sense of immediate loss are combined with the deadening physical and mental effect of being under fire. Raleigh barely reaches a mature understanding of the war and the world before his death. The only character we can be certain survives is Stanhope, badly shell shocked and chronically alcoholic. This was, Hibberd notes, ‘a revelation to people whose knowledge of the trenches had been derived from newspapers.’36 Stanhope needs to drink to keep going, but he remains in the trenches. The sanctity of the group is more important than individual survival. Stanhope’s treatment of Hibbert, who repeatedly tries to desert, shows no compassion: ‘You may be wounded. Then you can go home and feel proud – and if you’re killed you – you won’t have to stand this hell any more. I might’ve fired just now. If I had you would have been dead now. But you’re still alive – with a straight fighting chance of coming through’ (JE, 58). Stanhope seeks to control the possibility of Hibbert’s subversion and rebellion by threats of the violent death from which Hibbert is trying to escape. Stanhope reasserts the possibility of individual agency: ‘I mean to come through – don’t you?’ (JE, 59). While he understands how machine war works, the linguistic resources with which he can address the situation are hopelessly outdated. The language of death as release, pride and self-determination clashes with such images as Raleigh’s silent response to his first experience of war. Still – there is no suggestion that men should not fight. Death and suffering remain prices these combatants are willing to pay, however d ­ esperate their situation seems. The power of those enchantments which drive duty must not be underestimated. The shifting response to the war is demonstrated clearly: a work which upholds a traditional set of values is read against the war.



Popular disenchantment: War Books Boom, 1928–30 209

Journey’s End shares with many of the books of the War Books Boom the fact that it is not so anti-war as its reputation suggests. The memoirs of the soldier-poets are less directly critical of the impact of the war than Remarque and Aldington. That the works of Blunden, Graves and Sassoon were framed as memoirs, albeit thinly fictionalised, restricted them to a narrative form in which their protagonist survived. Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929) concludes with his post-war life as a newly married man studying at Oxford, a shopkeeper, and then a university lecturer in Egypt. Sarah Cole observes the inaccuracy of reading it as a rejection of preceding values.37 His business and marriage are unsuccessful, but his financial ineptitude comes down to a faintly comical case of naivety and mismanagement. He is able to call on family and friends to bail him out. When he and his wife, Nancy Nicholson, find the property they want, Graves’s mother spends £500 to buy it for them, then a significant sum.38 He experiences personal disappointments in the post-war world, but is able to trade on social, cultural and financial capital in order to get on. Testament to those enduring enchantments is that Graves volunteered to serve in the Second World War.39 The success of these memoirs and quasi-biographical accounts was far greater than the same authors’ poetry, although Sassoon’s notoriety perhaps fuelled his success in prose. I focus, in this chapter, on two works which are not hamstrung by the memoir form and consequently represent disenchantment in extreme form. Aldington’s anger One of the original Imagist poets and a well-connected figure in London modernist networks, Richard Aldington was also a journalist, editor, translator and critic. His first novel, Death of a Hero (1929), draws on his experiences in the First World War, and the title suggests that narratives about heroism have become generic and devalued. The war artist Paul Nash contributed a striking tinted cover (Figure 5.1). Aldington has often been criticised for his portrayal of women in Death of a Hero on the grounds that it is fictionalised autobiography. David Ayers, Bernard Bergonzi, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have all made such claims.40 Aldington pre-emptively denied this to H. D.41 While this may be disingenuous, the novel is not a roman à clef – it is a biting satire, and demands to be read as such. The animus for Aldington is not

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Figure 5.1  The Paul Nash-designed dustjacket for Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero. Nash had been an official war artist for the last year of the war, and produced such remarkable canvases as The Ypres Salient at Night (1917–18), We Are Making a New World (1918), and The Menin Road (1919)



Popular disenchantment: War Books Boom, 1928–30 211

directed at either Fanny or Elizabeth, the female protagonists, but the institutions which force them into these positions, particularly the institution of marriage and corresponding Christian moral values about sex. The first part of the novel brutally satirises Victorian conventions, mores, and values, laying the blame for the war and attitudes which supported it firmly at the feet of the antecedents. Max Saunders sees satirical life-writing as a distinctively modern form, and notes D. H. Lawrence’s influence on Aldington’s transformation from Imagist poet to satirical novelist.42 Death of a Hero is even more vituperative than most of Lawrence’s harangues, and this is its point: anger at the war must now be given full rein. Aldington did not enter the army until almost two years into the war, although he was immediately conscious of its dangers.43 He went to the Honourable Artillery Company’s gates to enlist at the outbreak of war, but was told that a previous hernia operation debarred him from service.44 Only 22 at the outbreak of war, the chance of his not being required to serve soon became remote; he enlisted just before conscription came into force in June 1916. David Wilkinson summarises his military career: ‘Aldington was in uniform during the Great War for almost three years. His army career took him from a Company Runner to Regimental Signals and Intelligence Officer in seventeen tortured months.’45 He was toughened physically, but pushed to the limits of his mental endurance. Aldington was a burly, imposing figure and not averse to hard physical work, but the humiliation and degradation of military training affected him significantly. The organisation of the army echoed that of the public school system, of which Aldington wrote to Amy Lowell in November 1917 that he had ‘hated the discipline’.46 Aldington’s coping strategy was to become, according to H. D., ‘more and more detached’.47 This detachment was perhaps mistaken by others for stoicism, and his progress through the ranks suggests that he managed to conceal his feelings about the army and the conflict. Promotion gave him an extended break from the front line in the latter half of 1917 as he returned to England to complete the Officers’ Training for his commission, before finally returning to the Western Front in April 1918 to take part in the series of battles which inform the last section of Death of a Hero. The post-war decade was, for Aldington, a continuing struggle to readjust to civilian and literary life. He needed to write to earn his living, but was unable to produce the same quality or quantity

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of work. His marriage to H. D. broke down. He moved out of London into rural Berkshire, close enough to the city to be visiting regularly, but far enough away to have space to attempt to process wartime events. He wrote, in 1919, about ‘The Present Discontent’, a measured criticism of mass culture and the cynicism of the age.48 He corresponded with F. S. Flint and T. Sturge Moore about his fevered mental state and crisis of confidence in his creative ability; he was best known in the 1920s as a critic.49 Aldington continued to identify creatively as a poet, and in his 1923 poem ‘Eumenides’ the speaker asks: ‘What is it I agonise for? / […] it is my own murdered self— / A self which had its passion for beauty.’50 This assessment suggests that pre-war methods are inadequate to conceive and represent the war. Aldington showed a marked distaste for commercial prose, although that distaste decreased as he prepared the manuscript of his first novel and subsequently found success as a novelist in the 1930s. Aldington made a number of attempts at understanding his experiences in the First World War in prose throughout the 1920s. He believed this was cathartic and later commented that writing Death of a Hero ‘purged my bosom of perilous stuff which had been poisoning me for a decade’.51 Aldington addresses his difficulty starting the novel in the preface: ‘I began this book almost immediately after the Armistice, in a little Belgian cottage – my billet […. T]hen came demobilization, and the effort of readjustment cost my manuscript its life’ (DH, 7). In his later memoir Life for Life’s Sake he recalled that ‘I wrote and destroyed part of such a book in 1919; and in 1925 and 1927 I made other abortive starts’.52 Aldington was struggling with psychological issues, and also searching for an appropriate language and form. He wrote in a 1926 review of Herbert Read’s In Retreat that ‘those who have attempted to convey any real war experience, sincerely, unsentimentally, avoiding ready-made attitudes (pseudo-heroic or pacifist or quasi-humorous), must have felt the torturing sense of something incommunicable’.53 Aldington shows a nuanced understanding of the issues surrounding the war, and situates himself between an unattainable ideal of heroism and absolute pacifism; as for many others, his position was a complex mixture of willingness to fight, and a belief that the war was enduring for too long. In the same review, Aldington devotes the final two thirds of the article to a plain, uncritical review of Read’s military experience as detailed in the book. Recounting another’s war



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experience perhaps operates as a vicarious catharsis, setting out the experiences of another in précis while unable to find an appropriate form for his own. Aldington quickly realised the significance of Remarque’s and Sherriff’s successes, and believed he could improve on them aesthetically. He sent the manuscript of Death of a Hero to his American publisher in May 1929 with a cable exhorting prompt publication to capitalise on the successes of Journey’s End and German novels about the war.54 Aldington saw Journey’s End, but was more interested in the success of Remarque’s novel. H. D. sent him the English translation and he read it immediately, acknowledging that ‘there can be no doubt whatever that it’s a great book and a great thing to have done’. However, he wrote to Charles Prentice, his publisher, praising its power but complaining that it confused brutality with strength; he told H. D. that ‘the work of art demands a sort of restraint, and the choosing of typical rather than exceptional horrors’.55 That Aldington might have considered Death of a Hero typical is testament to the war’s impact on him. Death of a Hero required expurgation to be publishable. Literary and artistic obscenity was in the public eye: well-publicised trials of Radclyffe Hall and D. H. Lawrence had taken place in the previous year. Major cuts to the novel were necessary to avoid prosecution in the UK, even more so than to the US edition.56 Aldington criticised ‘this new phase of suppression in England’,57 and his narrator in Death of a Hero condemns the attacks on Lawrence while lauding him as a man and a writer. Aldington did not want to be obscene and banned. He asserted in his Prefatory Letter that ‘it is better for the book to appear mutilated than for me to say what I don’t believe’ (DH, 7), although his rationale was not necessarily noble: he needed to make his living by the pen. The way Aldington cut his novel was calculated to draw attention to it. He borrowed the idea of asterisking redacted passages from Djuna Barnes, whose Ryder was published the previous year. He realised the power of suggestion was even stronger than directness. Aldington wryly looked back later at attitudes to literature, sex and censorship, and suggested that he ‘overlooked the morbid emotions of a repressed public which […] worried itself sick trying to fit the same few words into the context’. This would perhaps support John Sutherland’s suggestion that ‘the majority of the 1.5 million American copies must have gone to conveniently gullible

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thrill seekers,’ though of course it is impossible to ascertain the number of readers who were lured in this way.58 The war was not the primary focus of the expurgations. Some simply entailed the removal of four-letter profanity, for the purpose of which Aldington coined the rather obvious euphemism ‘mucking’, in place of ‘fucking’ and its variants; the Oxford English Dictionary credits Aldington with the first recorded use of this substitution and it occurs on thirty-six occasions in the novel. On two further occasions the word is expurgated fully: they refer to the physical act, rather than using the word as a meaningless modifier (DH, 48). The more difficult decisions concerned excisions which needed to be made on ‘moral’ grounds. The UK edition removed almost 1,000 words, over four times as many as the US edition. The outspoken and permissive views on sex and sexuality were viewed by Prentice as most likely to lead to a prosecution. The longest passage excised in the UK first edition, which survives completely unaltered in the US edition, is a discussion of the value of ‘sexual intercourse, frequent and pleasant’, combined with a satirical attack on ‘the virtuous British journalist’ (DH, 154). In this instance, Prentice’s rationale is clear. Muscular Christian values, the enchantments which Aldington derides, endure firmly enough for strong criticism to need expurgation. The excised passages earlier in the novel were discussions of free love, sexual experience and sexual awakening. Part III, the war section, contained the fewest cuts; the only expurgation longer than a single sentence is the description of a visit to a prostitute. Aldington was criticised, but for his demonstrative tone rather than for his account of the war. It was not, as Ayers claims, simply a matter of removing a ‘few Anglo-Saxon terms’. For Aldington, writing about the war could not be overstated. He wrote to H.D. about All Quiet on the Western Front, that the war had been ‘so brutal that its brutality cannot be exaggerated.’59 The impossibility of hyperbole implies that there can be no stylistic excess in discussing the impact of the war. Bernard Bergonzi clearly misunderstands the structure of the novel when he describes it as ‘a wilfully formless book, which Aldington unashamedly used as a vehicle for his own lengthy first-person reflections on life and ideas’. John Morris has similarly questioned the extent to which Aldington ‘sacrifice[s] the novel […] to the angry exposition of ideas and feelings’, and notes Walter Allen’s denunciation of Death of a Hero as ‘a formless novel, incoherent and hysterical’.



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These critical reactions feed off, as Claire M. Tylee points out, its ‘violat[ion of] the conventions of the classical novel: “good taste”, emotional restraint, detachment’.60 He later wrote in ‘Notes on the War Novel’ that ‘“War writers” should utterly ignore the technique of the professional novelists’.61 For Aldington, the war cannot be understood with detachment, as those who were detached from soldiering were spared from enduring what was daily life for the combatants. Simmel wrote in 1918 about the experience of ‘a new phase of the old struggle – no longer a struggle of a contemporary form, filled with life, against an old, lifeless one, but a struggle of life against the form as such, against the principle of form’.62 The war seemed difficult to assimilate, but it was less a case of rejecting form than seeking an appropriate way to represent what was for most a violent and violently destructive experience. Aldington does adapt the novel form, changing the usual sequence. He has an epistolary preface, puts the epilogue to the beginning, and finishes with a poetic epigraph. These things hardly make the novel ‘formless’ or ‘incoherent’. It is not unusual for a novel to have a preface; the tragedy form goes back to the classics, and Aldington cited Euripides, whose Alcestis he translated in 1930, as the model.63 Poetry has a long tradition as the culmination to prose works, and Blunden did the same a year earlier in his ‘Supplement of Poetical Interpretations and Variations’ to Undertones of War. Like Ford’s Parade’s End, the structure of Aldington’s novel is similar to the family saga form, telling the story of George Winterbourne and his parents; the variations Aldington employs hardly take it out of the realm of the comprehensible. Death of a Hero questions whether heroism is possible in modern warfare; for Aldington it can no longer exist in the enchantments of public school chivalry. The novel is the ironic death of a number of heroes: the death of a previous notion of heroism, the actual death of the protagonist and the death of the novel’s hero standing in for all military deaths in the war. As David Ayers observes, it comments on the post-war disillusionment occasioned by the failure of the government to keep promises made to war veterans.64 Heroism equates for Aldington with pointlessness or foolishness. He uses the word sardonically in referring to George’s death, bemoaning the ‘sickening, putrid cant’ (DH, 35) which led to the war, likening George Augustus to the hero of a novel by the bombastic Victorian author Edward Bulwer Lytton (DH, 42, 44, 54), or to ‘the husband

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of patient Grissel, or some other hero of romance’ (DH, 64). The word is more commonly used to refer to those who oppress and degrade George, or had not been at the front line: ‘People at a distance thought of the fighting as heroic and exciting, in terms of cheering bayonet charges or little knots of determined men holding out to the last Lewis gun. That is rather like counting life by its champagne suppers and forgetting all the rest.’ Heroism in knightly terms is impossible for front-line troops to achieve. Very different qualities were needed to survive on the Western Front, primarily ‘determination and endurance, inhuman endurance’ (both DH, 267). Even better, men should not have to be subjected to these conditions again, a desire which was starting to look unlikely even as Aldington completed this novel. In Death of a Hero the enchantment of camaraderie in a homosocial environment brings a mixture of pride, pleasure and concern about the impact on masculinity. There is a desire to move away from religious legislation of sexuality, and an apparent fear of homosexuality as an alternative.65 From early in the prologue, the narrator is keen to set the tone for trench relationships: Friendships between soldiers during the war were a real and beautiful and unique friendship which has now entirely vanished, at least from Western Europe. Let me at once disabuse the eager-eyed Sodomites among my readers by stating emphatically once and for all that there was nothing sodomitical in these friendships. [… N]o vaguest proposal was ever made to me; I never saw any signs of sodomy, and never heard anything to make me suppose it existed. However, I was with the fighting troops. I can’t answer for what went on behind the lines. (DH, 30–1)

The emphatic tone in railing against the ‘eager-eyed Sodomites’ shows a desire to reinscribe pre-war forms of masculinity. George resists pre-war attempts to make him attend the Officer Training Corps (OTC) lessons and create, in his headmaster’s terms, ‘a thoroughly manly fellow’; ironically, he rejects the credo that ‘The Army will make a Man of him’ (DH, 79). He is therefore denounced as ‘contemptible and unmanly to a degree we have never experienced in this School’ (DH, 81). Aldington’s comment on homosexuality also attracted censorship from Prentice. An explicit link between the public school and homosexuality is made in the first US edition, as the prefect who comes to take George out of the Geography



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class and to the OTC is described twice as ‘rather sodomitical’, where in all the UK editions the prefect is merely ‘pimply’.66 The different reading in the UK edition suggests that homosexuality is an appropriate topic when being attacked, as in the Prologue, but is considered worthy of censure when represented with little comment as a part of the system which created government officials and army officers. Trudi Tate suggests that ‘soldiers became objects of erotic interest for the man watching, even as Aldington anxiously repudiates the very idea of homosexuality’. He continues this repudiation in a later essay, noting that ‘Homosexuality is not a subject I wish to treat myself, although it would provide a novelist with situations dramatic, pathetic and tragical’. Derek Patmore later noted that Aldington ‘was always aggressively anti-homosexual and, like so many Englishmen of his type, gloried in his supposed manhood’.67 The tirade against homosexuality raises questions about the very possibility of that which it seeks to deny, and Santanu Das asserts that Aldington’s ‘rather shrill foregrounding of the war as an exclusively male experience cloaks a deep anxiety about gender and sexuality’.68 Aldington’s keenness to stress the platonic friendship between men in the army, so often characterised as camaraderie, increases as the novel progresses. George summarises his position in indirect discourse: These men were men. There was something intensely masculine about them, something very pure and immensely friendly and stimulating. They had been where no woman and no half-man had ever been, could endure to be. […] They looked barbaric, but not brutal; determined, but not cruel. Under their grotesque wrappings, their bodies looked lean and hard and tireless. They were Men. (DH, 253)

Aldington’s concern to maintain the unsullied aggressive masculinity of the army sits uneasily with the lionising of the pointedly capitalised ‘Men’ as an idealised race, and contrasts markedly with D. H. Lawrence’s view, discussed in Chapter 3. The focus on physicality derives from concerns after the war about the recuperation of wounded men, both mentally and physically. Not only were men ‘unmanned’ by being unable to master the situation in which they found themselves, but in many cases they returned home incomplete. Fleshly losses and mental illness threatened older constructions of manliness. For the novel’s protagonist, George Winterbourne, there is no

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‘after the war.’ The novel culminates with his apparent suicide on 4 November 1918, just a week before the long-awaited Armistice. The date coincides with the death of Wilfred Owen, which taps into public understandings of the ‘pity of war’; Aldington wrote a poem in memory of Owen in 1931, published in The Eaten Heart (1933). There was a profound personal relevance for Aldington. He had a near miss in his final engagement on 4 November when a piece of shrapnel struck the case of his binoculars. Aldington’s later account of that final battle shows its significance for him. He felt ‘an uprush of confused poignant emotions […] And one’s own insignificant little life, saved, but in ruins.’ In May 1918 he wrote to H. D. asking: ‘Do you think there is any point in keeping on? Twice last week I tried to get killed – and was unlucky or lucky, whichever you like.’69 Suicidal thoughts remained with him into the 1920s.70 Where in early disenchanted texts succour can still be found in national values and the importance of duty, here there are no consolations. In Death of a Hero George continues until he cannot stand to do his duty any longer and then stands up to meet his own death. The novel invites us to believe that his death was no accident, and Aldington later observed with bitter irony, in a text written in collaboration with Derek Patmore, that ‘we were all killed in the war. At the Armistice we rose again from the dead and ascended into heaven.’71 The unnamed narrator survives with symptoms similar to those Aldington experienced during his lengthy process of readjustment. However, it is overstating the case to argue, as David Ayers does, that the narrator ‘cannot in effect be differentiated from Aldington’.72 There are elements of Aldington in the strident narrator and the passive George. Post-war exhaustion and survivor guilt loom large in the tirades of the narrator against non-combatants of all types and he harangues the reader to remember those who died. He writes the life of George Winterbourne as ‘an atonement, a desperate effort to wipe off the blood-guiltiness. Perhaps it is the wrong way. Perhaps the poison will still be in me. If so, I shall search for some other way. But I shall search. I know what is poisoning me. I do not know what is poisoning you, but you are poisoned. Perhaps you too must atone’ (DH, 36). Aldington’s message is an extreme version of the typical ‘they died so that we might live’, as he wrestles with the intractable problem of how to represent death accurately.73 The need to atone extends to the desire for death in place of those killed in the conflict. The narrator says to the war dead: ‘But at least



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you died. You did not reject the sharp, sweet shock of bullets, the sudden smash of the shell-burst, the insinuating agony of poison gas. You got rid of it all. You chose the better part’ (DH, 201). Pain, leading to death, is in this instance an active choice, and preferable to the ongoing agony of survival. Alister Kershaw, Aldington’s friend and assistant in his later years, wrote of a meeting with Henry Williamson, author of The Wet Flanders Plain (1929) and The Patriot’s Progress (1930), describing how ‘they reminisced with a sort of horrible nostalgia about this or that battle, they swapped ghastly tales of dead comrades trodden underfoot, of the survivor’s ignoble relief’.74 For Aldington, as with many other veterans, the post-war decade offered little respite. Reviews of Death of a Hero contained as much criticism as praise. The strident, bitter tone of the narrator was, unsurprisingly, criticised by conservative commentators on both aesthetic and moral grounds, but the style and veracity of the final section was generally admired. St John Ervine wrote in the popular conservative Daily Express that ‘for sheer petulance and ill-temper I doubt if Death of a Hero can be matched,’ and goes on to express his displeasure at the tone of the novel: ‘Mr Aldington must pardon his readers if they judge him to be a peevish person in sad need of being turned over one’s knee and severely spanked.’ This description is equally peevish and carries an odd undercurrent of homoerotic sadomasochism. There were ambivalent reviews in the Daily Telegraph and by Edmund Blunden in the Times Literary Supplement.75 Aldington was not keen to be reviewed by Blunden, whose pastoral Undertones of War did not suggest a sympathetic response. Despite these reservations Blunden wrote that ‘the quality of Mr Aldington’s book is its indignation and study of revenge […] there is no coolness or detachment here’. It was unusual for this aspect of the novel to be praised. Prentice was unimpressed by the review, published anonymously, but Blunden offered more praise than most reviews, noting the war section as ‘some of the closest and strongest narration of Western Front warfare that has been produced’. One early appreciation of the novel believed that it would go on to achieve enduring popularity and significance. A. C. Ward suggested in The Nineteen Twenties (1930) that when ‘critical objections and patriotic superlatives of abuse have been exhausted against Death of a Hero, Richard Aldington’s book will still remain as important a document as any published in the nineteen-twenties.

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It exactly expressed the mood of thousands in England, and served as a drainage channel for the suppressed indignations which had troubled them.’76 The characterisation of the novel as a drainage channel emphasises its function as a way of removing a surplus of war experience. Ward suggests that the experience of the war is no longer able to be contained and expressed as symptoms. Although the intent behind the novel, stated and reiterated by Aldington, was cathexis, he remained unable to drain completely the problematic aspects of military service from his mind. Manning and mortality Two authors who knew each other and were in sympathy about aesthetic values, Aldington and Frederic Manning wrote about the First World War in markedly different ways. Where Aldington takes a long view of the war and expresses his criticisms in technicolor, Manning is a model of understatement and uses the trench memoir form in The Middle Parts of Fortune, highlighted by the subtitle ‘Somme & Ancre 1916’.77 The Middle Parts of Fortune begins in medias res and ends ex medias res, and from the start of the novel Bourne has ‘shaking hands’ and a fatalistic attitude: ‘The light revealed a candle-end stuck by its own grease to the oval lid of a tobacco-tin, and he lit it; it was scarcely thicker than a shilling, but it would last his time’ (MPF, 2). The trench diary form asserts that the experience of war cannot be compared with past or future, and the anxieties and pressures of front-line conflict are present immediately. Previous enchantments are not expressed at first, although in free indirect discourse Bourne later notes that soldiers ‘swung between the extremes of a sticky sentimentalism and a rank obscenity’ (MPF, 92). His unheroic death is a logical end to the narrative. The novel is broadly similar to Journey’s End in structure and characters, but the death of its alcoholic protagonist leaves no doubt as to the anti-war message. Deaths come regularly as a result of the machine war, and the only relief is to continue to drink to get drunk at every possible opportunity. Manning’s controlled style contrasts with the dramatic peaks and troughs of Aldington’s novel. The enchantment of male camaraderie is no longer so powerful in The Middle Parts of Fortune: the fellow-feeling between Bourne and other troops does not reach the same easy kinship described by Hay and Raymond. I disagree with Mark Facknitz’s suggestion that



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‘Manning and his novel reject the values of class privilege and tradition in favor of a democratic and iconoclastic stance’.78 Rignall also sees Bourne as declassé, posing a challenge to social hierarchy.79 However, the class distinction between Bourne and the other men is entirely apparent. Though he never seeks to appear superior to his comrades, Bourne finds ‘himself looking at his companions as it were from a remote distance’ (MPF, 71), and analyzing his differences from them. He feels alienated, but is compelled to make the best of his circumstances. He discusses his feelings with the chaplain: I don’t suppose I have anyone, whom I can call a friend. I like the men, on the whole, and I think they like me.[…] I have one or two particular chums, of course; and in some ways, you know, good comradeship takes the place of friendship. It is different: it has its own loyalties and affections; and I am not so sure that it does not rise on occasion to an intensity of feeling which friendship never touches. It may be less in itself, I don’t know, but its opportunity is greater. Friendship implies rather more stable conditions, don’t you think? You have time to choose. Here you can’t choose. (MPF, 143)

The element of choice separates camaraderie and friendship, as Sarah Cole points out: it is ‘the difference between a world that valorizes the individual and one in which human beings become fodder for a voracious war machine.’80 The alienation of mass living is felt just as strongly in the army. Wartime experience heightened that feeling due to the restrictions to social freedom which group men only by rank. Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield put it succinctly: ‘The First World War had done little to alter the visible signs of class.’81 While Ford’s protagonist Tietjens is forced to endure the uncomfortable post-war meeting of the combatant group, neither Bourne nor Winterbourne makes it back to Britain to enact this problematic reunion. Bourne is a flawed hero in the new mode which recognises the changed role of men in this war of technological rationalism. Bourne rejects the impossible enchantments by which others try to live in favour of a pragmatic engagement with the immediate world around him. He is, perhaps, the paradigmatic rational, modern protagonist, reacting to material reality rather than trying to impose a pre-war worldview, and controlling his reactions by chemical means. The level of endurance required is superhuman, and Bourne is a high-functioning alcoholic: he aces the shooting

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test while inebriated (MPF, 65). Inebriation does not bring him joy, as it does the regimental sergeant-major: ‘As soon as we got into a boozer we started mopping up the beer, and he had drink for drink with us, beer or stout; but then he said he was tired of long drinks, and suggested that we had better have some gin and bitters. We improved quite a lot on that, but it didn’t seem to make any difference to Bourne’ (MPF, 59–60). Drinking is used both to ‘break this bloody monotony’ (MPF, 101), and as a form of emotional and perhaps physical anaesthetic in the face of danger: the depressant effect calms the nerves. Bourne tells us that the wine ‘has set my blood alight, it has warmed all my five senses simultaneously. I feel like a human being again’ (MPF, 151). Despite appearances, he is emboldened by alcohol, but comports himself in a way which reaffirms social boundaries. Jean-Charles Sournia states that at the front ‘both wine and rum were freely dispensed with a view to inspiring courage, damping down ill-feeling and preventing revolt.’82 It was a form of enchantment which did not rely on belief: the process of consumption and chemical effect supersedes any form of belief in the causes for which the war was supposedly fought. Jonathan Marwil points out that ‘simple ego may have had rather more to do with the decision to portray Bourne as being able to outdrink any of his companions, and with no discernible effect’.83 Alcoholism cost Manning a commission on enlistment; he was later court-martialled and severely reprimanded for drunkenness, before being discharged as unfit for further service.84 Aldington later wrote to H. D. that ‘unluckily Fred became such a dipso, it became very painful to know him’.85 Whether his alcoholism was the cause or the effect of his continuing ill-health is impossible to establish, but it had a marked effect on him and his writing. Fear in the novel drives combatants towards the energetic release of violence, which brings with it the possibility of ultimate release in death. While deaths of young people like Martlow were commonplace in the nineteenth century and its fiction, these occur mainly through illness or poverty. Martlow’s death is swift, violent and unselective, which arouses Bourne’s anger: He was all right. As Bourne lifted the limp body, the boy’s hat came off, showing half the back of his skull shattered where the bullet had come through it; and a little blood welled out on to Bourne’s sleeve and the knee of his trousers. He was all right; and Bourne let him settle to earth again, almost indifferently, unable to realize what had



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The inability of youth and enthusiasm to win out over mechanised war is made apparent, and Bourne momentarily remains numbed. He quickly processes the stages of mourning, moving from numb incomprehension to blind fury as he intones: ‘Kill the buggers! Kill the bloody fucking swine! Kill them!’ (MPF, 398). There is no direct object of Bourne’s anger, and his inability to kill all of his opponents, othered as homosexual or animalistic, attests again to the lack of agency on the part of the individual to affect the course of the conflict. Manning’s use of demotic language stands out, whereas in Aldington’s novel it merely adds to the maelstrom. Bourne’s violent response seeks cathexis as a form of grief, given that there was no time for respectful, contemplative forms of mourning in battle. The impossibility of revenge, suggested by Hamilton in William—An Englishman, is reiterated here. Manning dwells on the physical details of Bourne’s death, in contrast to Aldington’s stylised and symbolic description of Winterbourne’s death. It is in a routine raid, another death on the ever-growing casualty list of the war. The narration moves away from Bourne as he again goes over the top into No Man’s Land with Weeper Smart: Bourne felt a sense of triumph and escape thrill in him. Anyway the Hun couldn’t see them now. Something kicked him in the upper part of the chest, rending its way through him, and his agonized cry was scarcely audible in the rush of blood from his mouth, as he collapsed and fell. […] Bourne struggled wearily to speak, and the blood, filling his mouth, prevented him. Sometimes his head fell on Weeper’s shoulder. At last, barely articulate, a few words came. ‘I’m finished. Le’ me in peace, for God’s sake. You can’t …’ ‘A’ll not leave thee,’ said Weeper in an infuriate rage. He felt Bourne stretch himself in a convulsive shudder, and relax, becoming suddenly heavier in his arms. (MPF, 450–1)

Manning’s gory description of the death of his protagonist is markedly different to the other war books discussed, in its bare, factual precision, echoing the last words of Christ on the cross.86 This death shows that Manning’s is a more conservative novel than Aldington’s. Even in death Bourne is forced to confront the

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i­mpersonal nature of this war. Manning also suggests that heroism can endure, as Weeper Smart risks his life to carry Bourne’s body back to the trenches (MPF, 452). Death and heroism can co-exist, but their relationship has been altered dramatically. Much was made of the anonymous publication of Manning’s novel as ‘Private 19022’, and particularly the lowly military rank of the author. It was claimed in both the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express as a great war novel. The Times and the weekly Spectator and John O’London’s praised it highly.87 However, Manning’s anonymity lasted barely a couple of months. An endorsement from T. E. Lawrence, who claimed to have guessed the author’s identity, certainly helped its sale.88 The positive response from all quarters showed a readiness to see the realities of war and move on; Manning synthesised his content with an appropriate tone and structure following a decade of searching for ways to represent the First World War. By the time the novel had been out for two months, Davies’s advertisement stated that the novel was in its fifth impression.89 Manning’s novel proved an enduring success and, while William Boyd’s claim that ‘there are no English novels that came out of the Great War with a similar status’ is rather overstated, its popular and critical success at the time places it in a privileged literary position in the response to the conflict.90 Women on active service: nursing narratives The height of the War Books Boom saw the acknowledgment of women as active participants in word and deed. Margaret Higonnet’s anthology Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I shows the vast range of women’s experience represented in print. Some were journalists, such as Eunice Tietjens, Cecile Dorian and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, who was wounded on the battlefield when a French journalist, alongside whom she was touring, picked up a grenade, which exploded. She spent seven months in hospital, but was seen initially as an intrusive casualty, an interloper in an all-male environment.91 The author, critic and suffragist May Sinclair also wrote A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915). More popular, however, were narratives of women’s nursing experience in the war. This was as close as women could get to the fighting, barring the unique story of Flora Sandes, a St John Ambulance volunteer who was separated from her unit and ended



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up serving with distinction in the Serbian army.92 Nursing offered a hands-on experience of the damage war could do to the body, and was close enough to the front to be in the firing line. Patricia D’Antonio suggests that a ‘powerful combination of character and competence took these women away from traditional expectations, and gave them the chance to participate as few other women could in the tumultuous events of their times. War tested nurses, as it did fighting men.’93 These tests were manifold, from the psychological distress of seeing extreme casualties on a daily basis to the attempts to find relaxation within range of the front, to the need to remain optimistic and confident in the power of the British Army. Diaries such as those of Sister Edith Appleton show the continuing admiration for troops, and desire to end the war by combat, as late as September 1918.94 I discuss briefly a range of nursing narratives from 1916–30, then focus on Not So Quiet…: Stepdaughters of War, written by Evadne Price under the pseudonym Helen Zenna Smith, and War Nurse, a romance published anonymously by the Cosmopolitan Book Company in the US, written by Rebecca West. Both of these novels were commissioned, which demonstrates the commercial imperative, and they employ a relatively stock romance format which is adapted to account for wartime experience and the growth of disenchantment which focused solely on the war. Meg Albrinck argues persuasively that ‘these characters construct their gendered identities as negotiations between the official British discourse of gender during World War I (which can be examined in propaganda and the popular press) and their own lived experience’.95 These works reinforced existing narratives about the role of women as caregivers, whilst also, in the novels of 1930, attributing to them a sexual licence and agency which acknowledged the temporary freedoms granted during wartime, and slowly brought into the post-war world. Early nursing narratives were among the most shocking accounts of the Western Front to emerge. Ellen La Motte’s The Backwash of War: The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an American Hospital Nurse (1916) was suppressed in wartime – for understandable reasons, given the provocative subtitle. The suppression of the work aligns with the narratives of delayed composition put forth by Aldington and many other writers of First World War prose.96 The negotiation between author and marketplace was

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not simply one of sales figures, but an acute sense of what could be published, both in terms of censorship and obscenity, and tacit social controls. One such work delayed was by La Motte’s superior Mary Borden, whose The Forbidden Zone (1929) had a troubled route to publication. She was an American society heiress, settled in Britain at the outbreak of war, and already a published author under the pseudonym Bridget McLagen. Her wealth enabled her to set up her own field hospital, which opened in July 1915.97 She attempted to get a version of her book published during the war, and it was accepted by Collins in 1917, but subject to censorship which Borden decided she would not countenance.98 The precedent of La Motte did little to facilitate the publication of such accounts in wartime: Enid Bagnold’s A Diary Without Dates: Thoughts and Impressions of a V. A. D. (1918) led to her dismissal.99 It was not until the War Books Boom that Borden was able to find a publisher for her volume. Its unusual form was perhaps one reason: it is a mixture of prose and poetry which, like many First World War memoirs, treads an uncertain line between fact and fiction. The title refers to the ground behind the front line where the hospital was situated, and Claire M. Tylee posits that it ‘comes to stand for not simply a stretch of land but an emotional space as significant as No-Man’s-Land; it was the area where common human feeling was banned, where the agony was too great to respond to as an ordinary woman without breaking down’.100 Just as Aldington represents suicide as a rare possibility for agency, nurses have to deal with the consequences of attempts that fail. The first story in La Motte’s collection, ‘Heroes’, starts with the nauseatingly graphic description of an attempted suicide: ‘He fired a revolver up through the roof of his mouth, but he made a mess of it. The ball tore out his left eye, and then lodged somewhere under his skull.’101 La Motte finds unbearable the paradox of nursing him to recovery only to be court-martialled, and assists the suicide by removing bandages to let wounds be infected, following a hint from her superior.102 Similarly, Borden’s ‘Rosa’ tells the story of suicide, and sees the bitter irony that if the patient survives, he will be court-martialled and sentenced to death. The nurses collude in his attempts to infect the wound so that he dies: ‘Towards evening he grew delirious, but he tore off his bandage all the same, in the middle of the night. He managed to do that. It was his last effort, his last fumbling desperate and determined act. His fixed idea pre-



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vailed through his delirium, his will triumphed.’103 It is possible that they are different representations of the same incident. For Ariela Friedman, the book’s unnamed first person protagonist becomes ‘a healing machine’ but the problem seen in any medical treatment in war, that to recover is to return to fight, finds extreme form here. Outside military discipline nurses have responsibility for the life and death of their patients, and the choice is not a simple one: the Hippocratic Oath is in abeyance.104 Evadne Price was commissioned to write a response to All Quiet on the Western Front, as the title of her novel, Not So Quiet…: Stepdaughters of War (1930), clearly indicates. The subtitle illustrates women’s problematic relationship to war, only partly related. Price persuaded the publisher to allow her to write about nursing, and based her narrative on the diaries of Winifred Young, an ambulance driver.105 Its familiar title and popular form helped it become a bestseller.106 Women of the Aftermath (1931) was effectively a sequel: it discusses the horror and fascination at the disabled just after the war.107 In Not So Quiet… details of injury are not spared, and are expressed tersely: ‘War is dirty. There’s no glory in it. Vomit and blood.’108 Smithy, the quasi-autobiographical protagonist, explicitly speaks out against the worth of the war: ‘I become savage at the futility. A war to end war, my mother writes. Never. In twenty years it will repeat itself. And twenty years after that.’109 Her analysis is strangely prescient, and this is an early popular statement of the war’s futility; previously this has been implied in the representation of Western Front conditions or problematised by the enchantment of masculine camaraderie. Price’s heroine comes to perform a version of masculinity, with short hair, forceful language and overt sexuality. Albrinck comments that ‘living near the front makes traditional scripts of femininity more difficult to perform. [… T]heir location and their duties force them to live lives on many borders – between home and front, soldier and civilian, masculine and feminine behaviour.’110 Ambulance drivers like Smithy needed to dress in long, thick, shapeless coats (Figure 5.2), and they were also responsible for the maintenance of their vehicles. The language of mechanisation remains and even healing becomes routine. Price insistently draws attention to the monotony of war: I have become accustomed to being a machine, to living by the clock,  to having my amusements and my religion set before me in

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Figure 5.2  Women ambulance drivers, as described in Not So Quiet …, running for their vehicles to meet a casualty train

carefully-measured doses, to sleeping certain hours, to working certain hours, to exercising certain hours, to working certain hours, to taking aperients on certain days whether they are necessary or not, and to donning the cheery indomitable personality of a member of the women’s army each morning with my uniform, and discarding it only when the bugle signals ‘Lights Out.’ I am a slot machine that never goes out of order. Put so much rations in the slot and I will work so long, play so long, and sleep so long. The administration is perfect. Everything is regulated. Even my emotions. I am serious at given moments, such as church parade; I laugh at given moments, when there is a visiting commission, or at any entertainment where the programme tells me the item is comic in order that I may not register incorrectly.111

Although nurses have the power of life over death, they are still subject to the controls of the machine age, the job performed mechanically and movements regulated by the clock. Even emotions, not easily quantifiable, are controlled as part of those processes. The novel ends with a direct hit on the hospital trench from an air raid, the nurses who have served the injured are now



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killed themselves. Smithy reports that the ‘trench is like a slaughterhouse’, again calling to mind the analogy of modern war with the mechanised abbatoir.112 She survives, but is rendered emotionally numb by the impact of the raid: ‘Her soul died under a radiant silver moon in the spring of 1918 on the side of a blood-spattered trench.’113 The machine war has claimed her as a victim, submitted to life in death. Popular disenchantment: War Nurse Rebecca West’s second novel which focused on the war, War Nurse (1930), was written for the US market, although swiftly published in the UK. A popular romance for the mainstream market, it attests to the popularity of war novels at the time. Representations of disenchantment are now widely accepted, still using similar language and metaphor to that which had found a limited audience earlier in the decade. Tylee sees the novel as implausible and poorly structured, but she does credit its evocative language.114 Targeted at women and written in the same language as male-authored service narratives, War Nurse shows the contribution of women in the war effort, and does not shy away from difficult questions. In War Nurse, as in the other nursing memoirs and fiction discussed here, the desire to help substitutes for the ability to fight. The novel focuses on the romances of a young American nurse, Corinne Andrews. She goes to France partly to spite her father but, more pertinently, as a response to bereavement. Her first love, Oswald Fanshawe, is missing, with the unspoken proviso ‘presumed dead’, and she states belligerently: ‘I did it just because I felt sore and mean. I wanted to fight somebody’ (WN, 38). She takes on her father, and stands in for the missing Oswald as an act of remembrance: ‘I would get over Oswald’s death not just by forgetting it, which would be to lose him, but by entering into an equality and comradeship with him by participating in the war’ (WN, 39). Her service as a nurse is a way to enter into the masculine-dominated world of the war: ‘In those days nobody and nothing really existed except the men’ (WN, 65). Corinne’s wish to fight shows her desire to engage with the enchantments which drove the war. D’Antonio suggests that ‘the military importance of trained nursing opened up new ways of celebrating female heroism. Women might now earn distinction in the field of battle, just as men always had (although,

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it should be noted, were never awarded medals that had the same prestige as those awarded to men).’115 The parenthetical caveat is a major one. Nursing was a transgressive space, but the focus remained on the men who fought. War Nurse is remarkable for the injury sustained by Corinne as a result of nursing. She finds herself under increasing physical strain, and the hospital is hit in an air raid. She does not suffer a visible injury or mutilation, but as a result of the blast she has to prevent an obese man falling out of bed. Suddenly ‘there was blood everywhere. I was lying in it.[… B]y repeated lifting of over-heavy weights, I had gradually torn my uterus from my body. It had been hanging by a thread when I went into the ward; and when I lifted the fat man the rupture was complete’ (WN, 197–8). The injury which leaves Corinne unable to have children is precipitated by an event she understands as the end of the world, and as something which forestalls her chances of marriage. This reverses the typical unmanning in First World War novels, such as that of Roy Evans-Mawington in Not So Quiet, who writes to Nell that ‘there will never be any perambulator on that lawn of ours, Nell. You understand?’116 Nell does. She rejects her superpatriot mother and, as a result, the supposed necessity of motherhood. However, in War Nurse the sexual freedom which Corinne enjoys in France is due to geographical distance. On her return to the US, the shackles are fastened again: ‘I felt I couldn’t do what [Waldron] wanted here, in New York. I could break the code in which I had been raised; but I couldn’t break it where I had been raised. [… T]he attitude toward sex of the American men and women who were at war was largely conditioned by the fact that there were three thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean between them and home’ (WN, 239). The carpe diem spirit did not translate into more enduring sexual freedoms, and was predicated on the understanding that it was a temporary lifting of restrictions. Sexual freedoms develop following the legalisation of improved rights for women, but ­conservative social values are slow to catch up. Corinne finds professionalisation a brake on the happiness that labour and sexual transgression by working brings her. She is conscious that work dominates her life, but enjoys it: ‘Beyond [working] I didn’t seem to be existing. I never felt or thought anything personal to myself in my working hours, and out of working hours I never wanted to do anything but sleep and sleep and sleep. Yet I wasn’t living a dead, mechanical life by any means. Somehow



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my days were full of exaltation and happiness’ (WN, 48–9). As with soldiering, reward comes from having done one’s duty. Initially, the fact that the hospital is privately funded, like Borden’s, means that it does not have the same rigid discipline as military authority. Corinne can help the war effort and relax on leave in Paris. Her disenchantment starts when the US enters the war and takes over the hospital: the rationalisation that follows precipitates the loss of such benefits. Corinne bemoans the ‘meddlesome efficiency’ (WN, 155), and argues that ‘when the authorities tried to check extravagance they were apt to crush out real achievement’ (WN, 152). She understands that the size of the war requires economies of scale, and realises immediately on the entry of the US into the war that ‘the war had got so big that it had lost control of itself’ (WN, 152). She repeats and develops the accusation: ‘The war was too big. The negligence of headquarters was inevitable, and not in the least blameworthy’ (WN, 185). Individuals can no longer be seen by the hierarchy, and the geographical and hierarchical distance from decision-makers causes disenchantment. However, this is a function of the system itself, and blame is not attached to those who are in charge. The war is a malign automaton responsible for the eradication of qualities which cannot come within its scope: ‘Every European soldier had lost his belief that the world was a pretty good place. […] Of course any situation which put one in the way of feeling such unnatural emotions was bound to make one crazy, and it was acting on everyone alike to produce a whole crazy world’ (WN, 149–50). Craziness comes from a lack of thought and consideration, and the compulsion to fit in with official systems during the war, which ‘discredited the use of the individual intelligence, and it put a premium on energy, just as energy. You had to keep people dumb and busy’ (WN, 220). That energy serves to power the war machine, but is without meaning outside of work. Such is her disenchantment with the post-war world that Corinne momentarily wishes for another war. She describes how she worked without concern for her own safety, values the opportunities the war offered her and the lessons she learnt. However, this is set against the fact that ‘you can’t say a good word for the war’ (WN, 262). She comes to talk about ‘the real hatefulness and futility of the war. The world ought to pass more and more into the power of people who have lovely minds and would make it into a lovely place. Instead, every time there is a war we call back the roughnecks

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and the toughs and give them all the say-so’ (WN, 264). The simpering tone cannot detract from its clear point. It is now a popular position to understand the war as futile. However, in some popular representations of the war, the enchantments remain. Sherriff and Graves assert the value of carrying on; for West’s heroine the war offers freedom away from societal and, in her infantilised state, parental controls. The novel concludes: ‘Almost, I find myself wishing there would be another war’ (WN, 265). From a twentyfirst-century point of view this wish is almost unfathomably eerie. The War Books Boom was the culmination of the ongoing attempts to interpret and move beyond the war. Narratives about the war, unstable for most of the decade, were now solidifying into a coherent and widely accepted line which focused on disenchantment. After the international success of both Journey’s End and All Quiet on the Western Front, Aldington and Manning achieved critical and popular acclaim with works that would not even have been considered for publication at the start of the decade. Popular books in the same mode proliferated, and the shift which takes place in the 1920s is perhaps best seen in the move of bestselling novels from the glory in duty of Raymond’s Tell England to a need to calculate the precise worth of the lives lost in the conflict. Notes 1 On the construction of this myth, see Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2005), ch. 4. 2 See the letters books in the Chatto & Windus archives at the University of Reading for details of sales figures, particularly the letters from Charles Prentice, Aldington’s editor at Chatto & Windus, sent in late September and early October 1929, in letter book 25. 3 Janet S. K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 195. 4 Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman, War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War, trans. by Richard Veasey ([2002]; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 13. 5 Andrew Rutherford, The Literature of War: Five Studies in Heroic Virtue (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1978), p. 65. 6 Paul Fussell notes that ‘the first edition sold out in one day.’ The Great War and Modern Memory, twenty-fifth anniversary edn (1975; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 256. The book went



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through four impressions by the end of 1928 from its publication in November that year; there had been seven impressions by September 1930. It was republished by Penguin in March 1937, and went through four impressions in the subsequent eighteen months. 7 See Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, pp. 254–69. 8 Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1928), p. 14. 9 Ibid. p. 30. 10 On the review response, see Watson, Fighting Different Wars, pp. 198–9. 11 Barry Webb, Edmund Blunden: A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 50. 12 A. C. Ward, The Nineteen-twenties: Literature and Ideas in the PostWar Decade (London: Methuen, 1930), p. 87; Siegfried Sassoon to Edmund Blunden, 20 December 1928, quoted by Webb, Edmund Blunden, p. 170. 13 Cyril Falls, ‘Undertones of War’, Times Literary Supplement, 6 December 1928, p. 949. Aldington to Charles Prentice, 28 July 1930. University of Reading, Chatto & Windus Archives, CW48/4. Future archival references are to the Chatto & Windus Archives unless stated. 14 Mark D. Larabee, Front Lines of Modernism: Remapping the Great War in British Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 26–31. 15 Blunden to A. H. Buck, 29 May 1930, in More than a Brother: Correspondence between Edmund Blunden and Hector Buck, 1917– 1967, ed. Carol Z. Rothkopf and Barry Webb (London: Sexton, 1996), p. 81. 16 Cyril Falls, War Books: A Critical Guide (London: Peter Davies, 1930), p. x. 17 Richard Arthur Firda, Erich Maria Remarque: A Thematic Analysis of His Novels (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), p. 43; Modris Eksteins gives international sales figures and details some of the languages into which the novel was translated. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (1989; Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 276. 18 Eksteins, Rites of Spring, pp. 287–8. 19 Ibid., p. 279. 20 Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. Brian Murdoch ([1929]; London: Vintage, 1996), p. 9. 21 Ibid., pp. 124–8. 22 Rutherford, The Literature of War, p. 87. 23 Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, p. 139.

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24 Ibid., p. 132. 25 Eksteins, Rites of Spring, p. 294. 26 Watson, Fighting Different Wars, p. 202. 27 Ibid., p. 207. 28 Robert Graves, Introduction to Frank Richards, Old Soldiers Never Die (1933; London: Faber and Faber, 1964), pp. 1–7. 29 J. S., ‘The Return of the Soldier’, Manchester Guardian, 13 June 1928, p. 5. The adaptation was by John van Druten, whose Young Woodley (1925) was initially banned in the UK for its criticisms of the public school system. 30 John Onions, English Fiction and Drama of the Great War, 1918–1939 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 92; see ‘Problems Before Peace Movement’, Manchester Guardian, 15 November 1929, p. 14, which details Sherriff’s presentation of the manuscript of Journey’s End for auction by the League of Nation to raise funds, noting that ‘Mr Sherriff had to go away because the King was attending to-night’s performance’. 31 The number of attendees is provided by Andrew Kelly, Cinema and the Great War (London: Routledge), p. 67; quotation from ‘Eleventh Anniversary of the Armistice: V.C.s and Journey’s End’, Manchester Guardian, 11 November 1929, p. 11. 32 R. C. Sherriff, No Leading Lady: An Autobiography (London: Gollancz, 1968), p. 192. Kelly, Cinema and the Great War, p. 67. 33 The cover of the 2000 Penguin edition calls Journey’s End ‘a great anti-war classic’. 34 Sherriff, No Leading Lady, p. 73. 35 Onions, Fiction and Drama of the Great War, p. 93. 36 Dominic Hibberd, The First World War (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 193. 37 Sarah Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 148. 38 Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, rev. edn (1929; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 324. 39 Ibid., p. 358. 40 David Ayers, English Literature of the 1920s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 23; Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War, third edn (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), p. 174; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Volume 2: Sexchanges (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p.  291. Michael Copp criticises feminist critics of H. D. for misreading Death of a Hero in An Imagist at War: The Complete War Poems of Richard Aldington, ed. Michael Copp (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), p. 20. Copp particularly



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alludes to Barbara Guest’s biography of H. D., Herself Defined: The Poet H. D. and Her World (Garden City: Doubleday, 1984), which accentuates and tacitly criticises his attempts ‘to keep himself going by hard work,’ (p. 34) and the speed with which he took up ‘so useful a connection as Orage [editor of the magazine the New Age]’. (p. 50) His social status and literary career are treated disdainfully, as Guest enhances H. D.’s position partly by comparison with the disappointing and disappointed portrait of Aldington she puts forward; her statement that ‘He was clever, if never the literary genius he wished to be’ (p. 34) places him in implicit opposition to his then wife. 41 Richard Aldington and H. D.: Their Lives in Letters 1918–1961, ed. Caroline Zilboorg (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 212. 42 Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 427, 431. 43 See, for example, Richard Aldington: An Autobiography in Letters, ed. Norman T. Gates (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), p. 18. 44 Richard Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake: A Book of Reminiscences (1941; London: Cassell, 1968), p. 148. 45 David Wilkinson, ‘“Dying at the Word of Command”: The Last Days of Richard Aldington’s War’, in Alain Blayac and Caroline Zilboorg (eds), Richard Aldington: Essays in Honour of the Centenary of His Birth (Languedoc-Rousillon: Université Paul Valery, [1993]), p. 7. 46 Richard Aldington: Autobiography in Letters, p. 27. 47 H. D. to F. S. Flint, undated letter [third week in October 1916], in Cyrena N. Pondrom, ‘Selected Letters from H. D. to F. S. Flint: A Commentary on the Imagist Period’, Contemporary Literature 10 (1969), 582. 48 Richard Aldington, ‘The Present Discontent’, The Sphere 27 September 1919, p. 306. 49 Aldington to T. Sturge Moore, 14 November 1920. Senate House Library, University of London. Aldington to F.S. Flint, 17 May 1919, in Michael Copp (ed.), Imagist Dialogues: Letters between Aldington, Flint and Others (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2009), pp. 253–4. 50 Richard Aldington, ‘Eumenides’, in The Complete Poems of Richard Aldington (London: Allan Wingate, 1948), p. 154. 51 Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake, p. 308. 52 Ibid., p. 301. One of the abortive starts Aldington made on his war novel exists in the form of a one and a half page manuscript, held by the Pierpont Morgan Library. This is markedly different from Aldington’s later attempts to write about the war in prose form. The

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fragment was presented in 1932 to A. S. Frere, Aldington’s friend and an editor for Heinemann; the title inscription ‘False Start of Death of a Hero (1925)’ was presumably added at this later date. 53 Richard Aldington, ‘Books of the Quarter’, The New Criterion 4:2 (1926), 363. 54 Aldington quotes his cable of the previous day in a letter of 11 May 1929 to Charles Prentice, a partner and editor at Aldington’s UK publisher Chatto & Windus, CW48/3. Prentice was Aldington’s main contact, and they became good friends. Aldington would later write about him in Pinorman: Personal Recollections of Norman Douglas, Pino Orioli and Charles Prentice (London: Heinemann, 1954). 55 Their Lives in Letters, p. 215; Their Lives in Letters, p. 219; Aldington to Prentice, 5 June 1929, CW48/3; Their Lives in Letters, p. 219. 56 There were twelve separate cuts in the US edition further to the expurgation of variations on the word ‘fucking’, amounting to 222 words. The UK edition had 29 more excisions, which removed 997. 57 Aldington shared his US publisher, Covici-Friede, with Hall, and he later recalled meeting her in Paris through Friede. See Life for Life’s Sake, p. 307. Lawrence’s Pansies (1929) was prosecuted, and the Warren Gallery exhibition of his paintings the following year was also subject to legal proceedings. See David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 488–93. Richard Aldington, ‘Notes on the War Novel’ (1929), in Death of a Hero, ed. C. J. Fox (Ottawa: Golden Dog, 1998), p. xv. Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms was also banned briefly in the US. 58 Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake, p. 315; John Sutherland, Offensive Literature: Decensorship in Britain, 1960–1982 (1982; Totowa: Barnes and Noble, 1983), p. 12. 59 Ayers, English Literature of the 1920s, p. 19; Their Lives in Letters, p. 219. 60 Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight, p. 173; John Morris, ‘Richard Aldington and Death of a Hero – or Life of an Anti-hero?’, in Holger Klein (ed.), The First World War in Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976), p. 184; Morris quotes Allen on p. 185; Claire M. Tylee, The Great War and Women’s Consciousness (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), p. 237. 61 Aldington, ‘Notes on the War Novel’, p. xix. 62 Georg Simmel, ‘The Conflict in Modern Culture’ (1918), in On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 377. 63 Aldington to Prentice, 26 March 1930, CW48/3. 64 Ayers, English Literature of the 1920s, p. 20.



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65 Sarah Cole discusses male relationships in early twentieth-century literature and history in Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World War. See particularly ch. 3. 66 Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero, first US (expurgated) edition (New York: Covici-Friede, 1929), p. 77. 67 Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 83; Richard Aldington, ‘Freedom of the Press’, in Artifex: Sketches and Ideas (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935), p. 101; Derek Patmore, Introduction to Brigit Patmore, My Friends When Young: The Memoirs of Brigit Patmore (London: Heinemann, 1968), p. 30. 68 Santanu Das, ‘“Kiss Me, Hardy”: Intimacy, Gender, and Gesture in World War I Trench Literature’, Modernism / Modernity 9:1 (2002), 64. 69 Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake, p. 176; Their Lives in Letters, p. 49. 70 Aldington to T. Sturge Moore, 11 November 1920, Senate House Library, University of London. 71 Richard Aldington and Derek Patmore, Life of a Lady: A Play in Three Acts (London: Putnam, 1936), p. 6. 72 Ayers, English Literature of the 1920s, p. 22. 73 Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin, Introduction to Bronfen and Goodwin (eds), Death and Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 6–7. 74 Alister Kershaw, The Pleasure of Their Company (St. Lucia, Australi: University of Queensland Press 1986), p. 105. 75 St John Ervine, ‘I Say There Are Too Many War Novels’, Daily Express 3 October 1929, p. 8; S. P. B. Mais, ‘Fiction in 1929: The Flood of War Stories’, Daily Telegraph, 3 January 1930, p. 5. 76 Ward, The Nineteen-twenties, p. 161. 77 See title page of MPF. The two volumes are sequentially paginated, so volume number is not given in text; Volume I contains chapters I–X, and ends on p. 226. 78 Mark A. R. Facknitz, ‘“The Undiscovered Country, From Whose Bourn…”: Shakespeare and Conrad in Frederic Manning’s Great War’,  Precursors & Aftermaths: Literature in English, 1914–1945 1:1 (2000), 81. 79 John Rignall, ‘Continuity and Rupture in English Novels of the First World War: Frederic Manning and R. H. Mottram’, in Lynne Hapgood and Nancy L. Paxton (eds), Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900–30 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 58. 80 Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World War, p. 145. 81 Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s

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Experiences in Two World Wars (London: Pandora, 1987), p. 137. See also Gerard de Groot, Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War (London: Longman, 1996), p. 19. 82 Jean-Charles Sournia, A History of Alcoholism, intro. Roy Porter, trans. Nick Hindley and Gareth Stanton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 111. 83 Jonathan Marwil, Frederic Manning: An Unfinished Life (London: Angus & Robertson, 1988), p. 260. 84 ‘Second Lieutenant Frederic Manning’, Australian War Memorial, www.awm.gov.au/people/1081228.asp (accessed 30 April 2013). 85 Richard Aldington to H. D., 18 February 1949, Their Lives in Letters, p. 302. 86 Compare John 19:30: ‘When he had received the drink, Jesus said, “It is finished.” With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.’ 87 Martin Moore, ‘War As Seen By the Man in the Ranks’, Daily Telegraph 17 January 1930, p. 15; St John Ervine, ‘Do Our Publishers Really Know Their Job?’, Daily Express 30 January 1930, p. 6. Verna Coleman, The Last Exquisite: A Portrait of Frederic Manning (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1990), p. 176. 88 Peter Davies was astute in issuing a pamphlet entitled ‘Colonel Lawrence and others on Her Privates We by Private 19022’ to bookstores by way of promotion. See Marwil, Frederic Manning, p. 257. 89 See advertisement, Times Literary Supplement 20 March 1930, p. 228. 90 William Boyd, Introduction to Frederic Manning, Her Privates We (1929; London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999), p. xv. 91 Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Shadowshapes: The Journal of a Wounded Woman October 1918 – May 1919 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920). Thanks to Jane Eblen Keller for drawing my attention to these figures. 92 Sandes wrote two memoirs of her experience, An English WomanSergeant in the Serbian Army (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1916) and The Autobiography of a Woman Soldier: A Brief Record of Adventure with the Serbian Army, 1916–19 (London: Witherby, 1927). See also Janet Lee, ‘A Nurse and a Soldier: Gender, Class and National Identity in the First World War Adventures of Grace McDougall and Flora Sandes’, Women’s History Review 15:1 (2006), 83–103. Jenny Gould summarises the options in ‘Women’s Military Services in First World War Britain’, in Margaret Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel and Margaret Collins Weitz (eds), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 114–25.



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93 Patricia D’Antonio, ‘Nurses in War’, Lancet 360 (Dec 2002), s1. 94 War Diaries: A Nurse at the Front: The Great War Diaries of Sister Edith Appleton, ed. Ruth Cowen (London: Simon & Schuster, 2012), p. 246. 95 Meg Albrinck, ‘Borderline Women: Gender Confusion in Vera Brittain’s and Evadne Price’s War Narratives’, in Narrative 6:3 (1998), 272. 96 Tylee, Great War and Women’s Consciousness, pp. 93–4. 97 Jane Conway, A Woman of Two Wars: The Life of Mary Borden (n. p.: Munday Books, 2010), ch. 4. 98 Ibid., p. 77. 99 See Tylee, Great War and Women’s Consciousness, p. 190, on this and other V. A. D. narratives. 100 Tylee, Great War and Women’s Consciousness, p. 98. 101 Ellen La Motte, ‘Heroes’, in The Backwash of War: The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an American Hospital Nurse (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), p. 3. 102 See Leo van Bergen, Beyond My Helpless Sight: Suffering, Dying and Military Medicine on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 230. 103 Mary Borden, ‘Rosa’, in The Forbidden Zone, ed. Hazel Hutchison (1929; Hesperus, 2008), p. 70. 104 Ariela Friedman, ‘Mary Borden’s Forbidden Zone: Women’s Writing from No-Man’s-Land’, Modernism / Modernity 9:1 (2002), 119. 105 Albrinck, ‘Borderline Women’, 271. 106 Ibid., 271, 288; Tylee, Great War and Women’s Consciousness, p. 197. 107 See Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World War, pp. 198–200. 108 Helen Zenna Smith (Evadne Price), Not So Quiet…: Stepdaughters of War (1930; The Feminist Press, 1989), p. 56. 109 Ibid., p. 90. 110 Albrinck, ‘Borderline Women’, 280. 111 Price, Not So Quiet…, pp. 214–15. 112 Ibid., p. 237. 113 Ibid., p. 239. 114 Tylee, Great War and Women’s Consciousness, p. 194. 115 D’Antonio, ‘Nurses in War’, p. s8. 116 Price, Not So Quiet…, p. 231.

Conclusion

The latter part of 1930 saw a noticeable tailing off in the ­publication of war fiction; authors and publishers knew the boom could not last. Aldington wrote to his publisher to that effect in January that year, and having signed a contract for his short story collection Roads to Glory (1930) in March he vowed to leave the war as a subject after it was published.1 Whether he did so is a matter for conjecture. The Colonel’s Daughter (1931) and All Men Are Enemies (1933) both deal with the impact of the war, but not military service. The focus moved from combatant novels, but the war was not jettisoned as a subject. A factor in the end of the War Books Boom was the insistent attack on the omnipresence of disenchantment. As Dan Todman suggests, ‘Books which concentrated on the horrors of war without also ascribing positive meanings to it aroused considerable opposition at the time from socially and politically conservative commentators’.2 Two important figures in this response were Cyril Falls and Douglas Jerrold. Falls was a military historian and literary critic who wrote the first study of First World War prose, War Books: A Critical Guide (1930). He wrote that ‘The Great War has resulted in the spilling of floods of ink as well as of blood. There cannot be an aspect of it which has not by this time a considerable literature of its own.’3 Falls noted astutely the shift in character of war books from wartime to the end of the following decade. That shift was particularly unpalatable to Douglas Jerrold, a right-wing author and editor who later expressed fascist sympathies and was personally involved in General Franco’s coup of July 1936 which started the Spanish Civil War.4 Jerrold’s concern in The Lie About the War (1930), which attacks many of the works discussed in this study, is to reinscribe notions of chivalry and honourable sacrifice. He seeks to reassess



Conclusion 241

novels such as Aldington’s and Manning’s which start to question the war’s worth. He accuses the writers of overplaying their hand by accentuating the war’s horrors and downplaying the less tangible mitigating factors.5 Despite praising the war scenes of Goodbye to All That, Falls criticised Graves on similar grounds.6 Jerrold’s more in-depth analysis is predicated on a series of misreadings of the writers he considers disenchanted. He claims that these novels imply that disenchantment was a condition of 1914: ‘Was the ordinary soldier […] so ignorant of war and its meaning that what he felt to be not merely just but overwhelmingly just in 1914 he saw at once to be unjust and futile as soon as he came under fire? […] It is simply untrue […] to suggest that they were lambs, let alone deluded lambs, led to the slaughter.’7 Jerrold gets the dates wrong, but his basic point is sound. Most believed in the values for which they went to war; the reassessment comes gradually. Jerrold accuses disenchanted writers of concentrating on individual experiences of war, rather than valuing that experience as part of military strategy: related not to the will of their Commanders, the moral, physical and economic resources of their nationals and the aims of their statesmen, but to the limited horizon of the individual soldier, the wanderings and sufferings of the squad, the platoon, or the company, not only appear to be, but are, utterly futile and without meaning. By the simple device of omitting from the book the relationship of the part to the whole, the writers of these books make every incident and every tragedy seem futile, purposeless and insignificant. This is the ultimate, dastardly lie.8

Again, Jerrold’s idea has merit but his working is faulty. The relationship between the individual and the nation is uncertain, and bureaucracy helps create distance between the two, as charisma and abstract virtue decline in influence in decision-making. Ironically, Jerrold’s overstating his own case hinders his point: few of the novels he criticises are so relentless. It is no surprise that he favours Blunden and Sherriff, who retained some ideals of the public school ethos, and wrote in forms which other writers demonstrated were inappropriate. The review of Jerrold’s and Falls’s studies in the Times Literary Supplement signals, to some degree, the end of the War Books Boom, as literary critical attention turns to these works. The reviewer, as

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yet unidentified in the archive, sympathises with the reactionary viewpoint: he characterises the ‘War Book’ in terms of: Brutality, cynicism, contempt for motives and for leadership in the council chamber and the field, an obsession with the discreditable – as drunkenness, sexual debauchery, cowardice, injustice – and an insistence upon the most horrible features of warfare – as ghastly wounds, flowing blood, stinking corpses, rats feeding upon the slain, lice, mud, whole units mown down by machine-gun fire, military executions – to the exclusion of all others.9

The article argues so stridently against disenchantment that the reviewer has to plead: ‘Let it not be supposed that we are striving to belittle the agonies and endurances of the troops in France.’10 Like Jerrold and Falls, the reviewer goes so far the other way that he fails to acknowledge that, as I have argued, disenchantment was a dialectical process in which people struggled to reconcile the enchantments which led them to war with their reactions to it. Films: a shift in form The First World War was the only twentieth-century conflict in which prose was the main form of contemporary cultural response. Subsequent conflicts have tended to be seen through visual media. Film and photograph-led magazines in particular were truly popular mass media, which engaged the working classes; television did not take hold until after the Second World War. As Sherriff would later comment, ‘The talkies were booming. Television hadn’t yet arrived, and the studios were in their golden age.’11 Authors were concerned about the potential negative impact of the cinema on book sales and production. The new medium was often deemed superficial and inhospitable to thought and reflection, anticipating the slightly later work of the Frankfurt School on the culture industry.12 Mottram was particularly concerned with the impact of the cinema, and in 1929 gave a lecture in Manchester on ‘the menace to culture of the stereotyped film’.13 A later speech in 1931 echoed this message of contempt for a medium which had been lucrative for him; he describes a concern for ‘moral fibre’, arguing ‘that the effective function of mechanical entertainment is to put away […] that leisure which was supposed to be one of the crowning blessings of civilisation. That is tragic. Recreation, relaxation, yes. But



Conclusion 243

stultification!’14 The sense of a need for endeavour to engage with culture comes from a notion of culture as self-improvement, rather than for enjoyment. However, a writerly interest in other forms of media is suggested by Sherriff’s pleasure at the radio review of Journey’s End; Mottram, Sherriff, and Aldington all took jobs in the cinema industry.15 Dan Todman looks to the HMV record catalogue of November 1930 to highlight that experiment was by that time in radio, and popular narratives found a home at the cinema.16 The cinematic form allowed for the display of shockingly realistic images, showing visually what the writers of the 1920s had tried to put into words. Not only were images offered, but the cinema was now able to speak to its audience.17 Q. D. Leavis, in Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), bemoans that ‘the distinguished man of letters has been dropped in favour of the American film-producer, a change all the easier since the “talkie” furnishes ready-made dialogue’.18 Dialogue was an important factor, but other sounds also contributed to the effect, and Pierre Sorlin says of All Quiet on the Western Front that: ‘Violent, unrestrained, the soundtrack transformed the movie theatre into a battlefield.’19 Where early accounts such as Montague’s moved literary discourse forward, cinematic responses spoke to a much larger audience than the most popular literary bestsellers. Laura Marcus attributes the success of the film partly to the fact that it ‘told the stories of ordinary infantrymen in the trenches of the Western Front’.20 There was also a history of popular war films: the documentary The Battle of the Somme (1916) was a huge success in Britain, and silent war films appeared throughout the 1920s. Film was a growth industry: more than 2,000 new auditoria opened between 1911 and 1915.21 After the war it was the place to be entertained, particularly for the working classes.22 The sheer numbers attending the cinema made audience response a good barometer of public opinion, although cinemas were also places to relax and meet people.23 The realism of All Quiet on the Western Front was, and remains, remarkable; it won Academy Awards for Best Picture, and for Lewis Milestone as Best Director, showing that it was perceived by the movie industry itself as possessing merit, as well as popular appeal.24 The film presents a paradigmatic disenchanted narrative. Paul Bäumer (Lew Ayres) and his friends are persuaded to enlist by the fine rhetoric of their schoolmaster, and their change of mood on finding the inflexible, sadistic former village postman Himmelstoss

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as Commanding Officer is evident. Disenchantment is seen clearly in the trench scenes, as troops come up against the enemy machine guns. The scene still retains its power to shock over eighty years later. James C. Robertson reports that the film was censored due to its representation of horrors in battle.25 The most severely cut versions lost up to forty-five minutes running time from Milestone’s director’s cut, most often removing the scene in which the soldiers spend the night with the French women, and parts of the scene featuring Bäumer in a shell-hole with the Frenchman he has stabbed.26 Such a brutally realist portrayal was not viewed positively by all. The Sunday Times reviewer was less than enthused: ‘Realism reaches its zenith in this picture. I hate it. It made me shudder with horror.’27 This conservative viewpoint echoes the views of Jerrold and Falls about the War Books Boom. Michael Paris argues that this was the dominant viewpoint, but the success of All Quiet on the Western Front makes it clear that even if old enchantments continued, disenchantment was now a favoured narrative about the First World War, although not the only one.28 The film, as with the book, was a true international success. It was, Andrew Kelly states, ‘the first film to have simultaneous runs in two London cinemas’,29 and played across Europe and the US. That it was disenchanted, and that disenchantment consists of a reaction against the machine age, is emphasised by the reaction to the film in Germany. On the rise but not yet in power, the Nazi leadership rejected All Quiet on the Western Front. Eksteins reports: ‘In Berlin, however, after several performances were disrupted by Nazi hooligans led by Joseph Goebbels, it was banned in December, ostensibly because it slandered the German image but actually because it was a threat to internal security and order owing to the controversy it provoked.’30 The reaction against officialdom could not be accepted in Nazi Germany; Remarque suffered serious retaliatory consequences, including the execution of his sister.31 Piers Brendon posits that Remarque ‘not only exposed the fatuity of [the Nazis’] martial rhetoric but also shattered their most cherished myth – that the “November Criminals” had stabbed the undefeated German army in the back’.32 From the perspective of those on the winning side, as Brian Bond states, the film undermines ‘the notion of a collective German war guilt’.33 This, to the writers discussed, would not have been surprising; trench literature often describes sympathy between opposing combatants.



Conclusion 245

The death of Paul Bäumer, at the end of the film of All Quiet on the Western Front, exemplifies the problem of disenchantment in one compact image. Drawing on an innocuous description of a butterfly in the novel, Milestone enlisted the help of the German cinematographer Karl Freund to create a poetic, understated ending.34 Over time and over budget, the two men shot a short scene showing Bäumer reaching out of the trench to grab a butterfly; so far over time were they that Milestone’s hand substitutes for that of Ayres.35 The image shows the destruction of the aesthetic, and the inability to return to the imagined pre-war scene. The inadequacy of Blunden’s use of the pastoral is again highlighted, occupying a literary sphere and rooted in symbolism. The nostalgia for nature, beauty and rural life has become outmoded as the machine, modernity and modern warfare become the dominant themes. The stark reality presented by Milestone, drawing on Remarque’s characters, becomes the epitome of disenchantment. Notes  1 Aldington to Prentice, 18 March 1930, University of Reading, Chatto & Windus Archives, CW48/4. The contract for Roads to Glory was dated 7 March 1930. A full list of publication dates of Aldington’s works from 1929–36, and the contracts under which they were published, is given in CW62/7.  2 Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2005), p. 20.  3 Cyril Falls, War Books: A Critical Guide (London: Peter Davies, 1930), p. ix.  4 Jerrold gives his remarkable account of those events in the final chapter of Georgian Adventure (London: Collins, 1937).  5 Todman, Great War, p. 21.  6 Falls, War Books, p. 202.  7 Jerrold, The Lie About the War, Criterion Miscellany No. 9 (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), pp. 27–8.  8 Ibid., p. 23.  9 ‘The Garlands Wither’, Times Literary Supplement, 12 June 1930, p. 485. 10 Ibid. 11 R. C. Sherriff, No Leading Lady: An Autobiography (London: Gollancz, 1968), p. 297. 12 See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment,

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trans. John Cumming ([1944]; London, New York: Verso, 1997), pp. 120–67. 13 ‘The Film’s Menace to Culture’, Manchester Guardian, 16 November 1929, p. 18. 14 ‘Mr. Mottram Attacks the Film Story’, Manchester Guardian, 10 December 1931, p. 8. 15 Parts of Mottram’s The Spanish Farm Trilogy were made into a film, Roses of Picardy (dir. Maurice Elvey: Gaumont, 1927). See R. H. Mottram, Another Window Seat, or Life Observed: Volume Two, 1919–1953 (London: Hutchinson, 1957), p. 72, and unpublished correspondence from Mottram to Charles Prentice, 18 January 1927, 24 January 1927. His letter of 18 January indicates that he visited the set of the film, and the letter of 24 January suggests that Prentice asked him to consider re-writing the story to tie in with the film; Mottram declined. Sherriff’s Journey’s End was filmed (dir. James Whale: Tiffany, 1930), and he later became a screenwriter, producing the screenplays for The Invisible Man (1933), Remarque’s The Road Back (1937), Goodbye Mr Chips (1939), and The Dambusters (1955). See No Leading Lady, particularly pp. 248–96 for Sherriff’s Hollywood experiences. Aldington’s All Men are Enemies was also filmed (dir. George Fitzmaurice: Fox, 1934), and he also worked in Los Angeles in the latter part of the Second World War, though with less success. See Charles Doyle, Richard Aldington: A Biography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 213–27. 16 Todman, Great War, p. 17. 17 Al Jolson famously told viewers of the first ‘talkie’, The Jazz Singer (dir. Alan Crosland: Warner Bros, 1927) that ‘You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!’ See Joel Rosenberg, ‘What You Ain’t Heard Yet: The Languages of The Jazz Singer’, Prooftexts 22:1/2 (2002), 12. 18 Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), pp. 15, 16. 19 Pierre Sorlin, ‘Cinema and the Memory of the Great War’, in Michael Paris (ed.), The First World War and Popular Cinema, 1914 to the Present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 18. 20 Laura Marcus, ‘The Great War in Twentieth-Century Cinema’, in Vincent Sherry (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 292. 21 See Nicholas Hiley, ‘The British Cinema Auditorium’, in Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp (eds), Film and the First World War (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995), p. 160. 22 Andrew Kelly, Cinema and the Great War (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 61. 23 Michael Paris, ‘Enduring Heroes: British Feature Films and the First



Conclusion 247

World War, 1919–1997’, in Paris (ed.), The First World War and Popular Cinema, p. 53. 24 All Quiet on the Western Front (dir. Lewis Milestone: Universal, 1930). 25 James C. Robertson, The British Board of Film Censors: Film Censorship in Britain, 1896–1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1985), p. 91. 26 See Kelly, Cinema and the Great War, pp. 56, 57, 50. 27 Quoted by Kelly, Cinema and the Great War, p. 50. 28 Paris, ‘Enduring Heroes’, pp. 53, 61. 29 Kelly, Cinema and the Great War, p. 50. 30 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (1989; Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 298. 31 Kelly, Cinema and the Great War, p. 44. 32 Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), p. 98. 33 Brian Bond, The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 38. 34 See Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front [Im Westen Nichts Neues], trans. Brian Murdoch (1929; London: Vintage, 1996), p. 92. 35 Kelly, Cinema and the Great War, pp. 48–9.

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Bracco, Rosa Maria, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1993) Braybon, Gail, Women Workers in the First World War (1981; London and New York: Routledge, 1989) ——(ed.), Evidence, History and the Great War (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003) Braybon, Gail and Penny Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars (London: Pandora, 1987) Brians, Paul, Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895–1914 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1987) Buitenhuis, Peter, The Great War of Words: British, American, and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914–1933 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987) Capdevila, Luc and Danièle Voldman, War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War, trans. Richard Veasey ([2002]; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) Carden-Coyne, Ana, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) Cecil, Hugh and Peter H. Liddle (eds), Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced (London: Leo Cooper, 1996) Cobley, Evelyn, Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993) ——Modernism and the Culture of Efficiency (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009) Cole, Sarah, Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) ——‘Enchantment, Disenchantment, War, Literature’, PMLA 124:5 (2009), 1632–47 Collingwood, R. G., The Philosophy of Enchantment: Studies in Folktale, Cultural Criticism, and Anthropology, ed. David Boucher, Wendy James and Philip Smallwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) Cooke, Miriam and Angela Woollacott (eds), Gendering War Talk (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) Das, Santanu, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Diner, Dan, Cataclysms: A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge, trans. William Templer with Joel Golb ([1999]; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008) Eksteins, Modris, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000) Elton, Oliver, C. E. Montague: A Memoir (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929) Falls, Cyril, War Books: A Critical Guide (London: Peter Davies, 1930) Ferguson, Niall, The Pity of War (London: Penguin, 1999) Ford, Ford Madox [as Ford Madox Hueffer], Between St Dennis and

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St George: A Sketch of Three Civilisations (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915) ——The Marsden Case: A Romance (London: Duckworth, 1923) ——No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction, ed. Paul Skinner (1929; Manchester: Carcanet, 2002) ——War Prose, ed. Max Saunders (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999) ——Critical Essays, ed. Max Saunders and Richard Stang (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002) Frankau, Gilbert, Self-Portrait: A Novel of His Own Life (London: Macdonald, 1944) Frantzen, Allen J., Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice and the Great War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003) Friedman, Ariela, ‘Mary Borden’s Forbidden Zone: Women’s Writing from No-Man’s-Land’, Modernism/Modernity 9:1 (2002), 109–24 Froula, Christine, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory, twenty-fifth anniversary edition (1975; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) ‘The Garlands Wither’, Times Literary Supplement, 12 June 1930, pp. 485–6 Gibbs, Philip, Realities of War (London: Heinemann, 1920) Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Volume 2: Sexchanges (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) Gillies, Mary Ann, Henri Bergson and British Modernism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996) Goldman, Dorothy (ed.), Women and World War I: The Written Response (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993) Graves, Robert, Goodbye to All That, rev. edn (1929; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960) Grayzel, Susan R., Women and the First World War (Harlow: Longman, 2002) ——At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) Greenslade, William, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Greenwood, George A., England To-Day: A Social Study of Our Times (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922) Gregory, Adrian, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1919–1946 (Oxford: Berg, 1994) ——The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) Gregory, Adrian and Senia Pašeta (eds), Ireland and the Great War: ‘A war to unite us all’? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002)



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Grieves, Keith, ‘C. E. Montague and the Making of Disenchantment, 1914–1921’, War in History 4:1 (1997), 35–59 Hamilton, Cicely, Life Errant (London: J. M. Dent, 1935) Hapgood, Lynne and Nancy L. Paxton (eds), Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900–30 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) Haupt, Georges, Socialism and the Great War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) Honey, J. R. de S., Tom Brown’s Universe: The Development of the Public School (London: Millington, 1977) Houlbrook, Matt, ‘Soldier Heroes and Rent Boys: Homosex, Masculinities, and Britishness in the Brigade of Guards, circa 1900–1960’, Journal of British Studies 42 (2003), 351–88 Hüppauf, Bernd (ed.), War, Violence and the Modern Condition (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997) Hynes, Samuel, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (New York: Collier Books/Macmillan, 1990) Jerrold, Douglas, The Lie About the War, Criterion Miscellany No. 9 (London: Faber and Faber, 1930) ——Georgian Adventure (London: Collins, 1937) Jones, Edgar, and Simon Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD: Military Psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War (Hove: Psychology Press, 2005) Kelly, Andrew, Cinema and the Great War (London: Routledge, 1997) Kendall, Tim, Modern English War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Klein, Holger (ed.), The First World War in Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976) Koh, Jae-Kyung, D. H. Lawrence and the Great War: The Quest for Cultural Regeneration (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007) La Motte, Ellen, The Backwash of War: The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an American Hospital Nurse (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916) Lankester, E. Ray, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (London: Macmillan, 1880) Larabee, Mark D., Front Lines of Modernism: Remapping the Great War in British Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Lawrence, D. H., Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert (1916; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) ——Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele (1923; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) ——Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed.

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Michael Herbert (1925; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) ——The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, volume II: June 1913–October 1916, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) ——The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, volume III: October 1916–June 1921, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) ——Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) ——The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. David Ellis (Ware: Wordsworth, 2002) Le Bon, Gustave, The Crowd ([1895]; New Brunswick: Transaction, 1995) Leed, Eric, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) Levenback, Karen L., Virginia Woolf and the Great War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999) Light, Alison, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991) ——Mrs Woolf and the Servants (London: Penguin, 2008) Lilienfeld, Jane, ‘“Success in Circuit Lies”: Editing the War in Mrs Dalloway’, Woolf Studies Annual 15 (2009), 113–33 Lowry, Bullitt, Armistice 1918 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1996) McCarthy, Jeffrey Mathes, ‘“The Foul System”: The Great War and Instrumental Rationality in Parade’s End’, Studies in the Novel 41:2 (2009), 178–200 Martin, Benjamin F., France and the Après Guerre, 1918–1924: Illusions and  Disillusionment (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999) Marwil, Jonathan, Frederic Manning: An Unfinished Life (London: Angus & Robertson, 1988) Masterman, C. F. G., From the Abyss: Of Its Inhabitants by One of Them (London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1902) ——After Twelve Months of War (London: Darling & Son, 1915) Mottram, R. H., ‘The “Great” War, as they called it’, in The Twentieth Century: A Personal Record (London: Hutchinson, 1969), pp. 32–69 Onions, John, English Fiction and Drama of the Great War, 1918–39 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990) Ouditt, Sharon, Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (London: Routledge, 1994) Paris, Michael (ed.), The First World War and Popular Cinema, 1914 to the Present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999)



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Parker, Peter, The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School Ethos (London: Constable, 1987) Phillips, Terry, ‘The Rules of War: Gothic Transgressions in First World War Fiction’, Gothic Studies 2:2 (2000), 232–44 Philpott, William, Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme (London: Little, Brown, 2009) Pick, Daniel, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) ——War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) Price, Evadne [as Helen Zenna Smith], Not So Quiet…: Stepdaughters of War (1930; New York: The Feminist Press, 1989) Rutherford, Andrew, The Literature of War: Five Studies in Heroic Virtue (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1978) Saler, Michael, ‘Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review’, American Historical Review 111 (2006), 692–716 Saltus, Edgar Evertson, The Philosophy of Disenchantment (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885) Saunders, Max, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) ——Self Impression: Life Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) Seipp, Adam R., The Ordeal of Peace: Demobilization and the Urban Experience in Britain and Germany, 1917–1921 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009) Sheffield, Gary, Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities (London: Headline Review, 2002) Shephard, Ben, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914–1994 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000) Sherriff, R. C., No Leading Lady: An Autobiography (London: Gollancz, 1968) Sherry, Vincent, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) ——(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Simkins, Peter, Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of the New Armies, 1914–16 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) Simmel, Georg, ‘The Conflict in Modern Culture’ (1918), in On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 375–93 Smith, Angela K., The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) Stevenson, Randall, Literature and the Great War, 1914–18 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)

254

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Strachan, Hew, ‘Military Modernization, 1789–1918’, in T. C. W. Blanning (ed.), The Oxford History of Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 76–100 ——The First World War, Volume I: To Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Tate, Trudi, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) Tate, Trudi, and Kate Kennedy (eds), The Silent Morning: Memory, Culture and the Armistice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013) Thom, Deborah, Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War I (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998) Todman, Dan, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2005) Trotter, David, Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Tylee, Claire M., The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women’s Writings, 1914–64 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990) Ward, A. C., The Nineteen-twenties: Literature and Ideas in the Post-War Decade (London: Methuen, 1930) Watson, Janet S. K., Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970) Weber, Thomas, Our Friend ‘The Enemy’: Elite Education in Britain and Germany before World War I (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008) Whitelaw, Lis, The Life and Rebellious Times of Cicely Hamilton: Actress, Writer, Suffragist (London: The Women’s Press, 1990) Winter, Jay, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Winter, Jay, and Jean-Louis Robert (eds), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London Berlin, 1914–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Winter, Jay, and Emmanuel Sivan (eds), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Wollaeger, Mark, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 1, 1915–1919, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth, 1977) Zilboorg, Caroline (ed.), Richard Aldington and H. D.: Their Lives in Letters 1918–61 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)

Index

administrator 27, 80, 88–9, 145–7, 163, 168 Aldington, Richard 20–1, 78, 119, 192, 204, 206, 222–5 passim, 240–1, 243 Death of a Hero 27, 45, 101, 105, 107, 201, 209–20, 232 ‘Eumenides’ 212 ‘Present Discontent, The’ 78, 212 Allatini, Rose Laure Despised and Rejected 26, 43, 59, 64–8 All Quiet on the Western Front (1930 film) 28, 205, 243–5 American Civil War 17, 21 Armistice (11 November 1918) 24, 77, 103, 136–9 Arnold, Matthew 13, 66, 108 Bagnold, Enid 60, 226 Barnes, Djuna 213 Battle of the Somme, The (film) 45, 243 Beith, John Hay 99, 220 The First Hundred Thousand 43, 46, 67 Bennett, Arnold 45, 96–7, 104, 164 Clayhanger 170 Riceyman Steps 130

Bergson, Henri 165–8, 195 n.28 Meaning of the War, The 168 Beyle, Marie-Henri see Stendhal Blackadder Goes Forth 25 Blunden, Edmund 24, 184, 209, 219, 245 Undertones of War 203–4, 215 Boer War (Second) (1899–1902) 11, 15, 17, 18, 94, 180 Borden, Mary 231 Forbidden Zone, The 226–7 Brittain, Vera 28, 60 Brooke, Rupert 7–8, 41, 49, 91, 109, 159 n.109 Brown, Ford Madox 176, 190–1 calculability 19, 27, 100–1, 124, 165–6, 182, 201–2, 232 capitalism 16–17, 26, 57, 65–6, 78–80 passim, 84–5, 100 critiques of 120–3, 129–35, 142–3, 146 Carlyle, Thomas 66, 141 Cenotaph 144, 160 n.117 Childers, Erskine 16, 107 Churchill, Winston S. 49 clerk see administrator Collingwood, R. G. 13, 105, 127 ‘Art and the Machine’ 85 ‘Magic’ 17

256

Index

Collingwood, R. G. (cont.) ‘Man Goes Mad’ 17–18, 21, 168–9, 186 Conrad, Joseph 140, 190 Lord Jim 92 conscientious objection 59, 64–7 continuity, war interpreted in terms of 5–6, 22–3, 50, 59–60, 78, 136, 177–81 Crane, Stephen Red Badge of Courage, The 20–1 Daily Express 104, 219, 224 Daily Mail 7, 11, 93, 114 n.69 Darwin, Charles 4, 165 degeneration 3–4, 13–15, 20, 121–2, 132–5, 175 Dickens, Charles 168 Doolittle, Hilda see H. D. Dorian, Cecile 224 Dyett, Edwin 90 Eddington, A. S. 19, 166 Einstein, Albert 19, 165–6 Eliot, George Middlemarch 186 Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land 119, 146 Falls, Cyril 201, 204, 240–2, 244 Fitzroy, A. T. see Allatini, Rose Laure Flint, F. S. 9, 64, 212 Ford, Ford Madox 20–1, 27, 43, 78, 102, 105, 163–9, 175–93, 201 No Enemy 177 Parade’s End 101, 163–5, 167–9, 175–93, 215, 221 propaganda by 46–7, 177 Forster, E. M. 9 Howards End 16, 57

Frankau, Gilbert 5, 7, 94, 104, 106 Guns, The 81 Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant 26, 79–86, 109 Fussell, Paul 4–5, 46, 48 futility, war and 16–17, 25, 79, 83, 85, 88–9, 100, 175, 201, 203, 227, 231–2, 241 Gallipoli campaign 10, 89–91, 107–8 Galsworthy, John 45, 94, 164 Graves, Robert 7–8, 23, 68, 78, 204, 206, 232 Goodbye to All That 209, 241 Grenfell, Julian 7–8, 41 Hall, Radclyffe 213 Hamilton, Cicely 4, 68, 108 William—An Englishman 26, 63, 79–81, 86–9, 174, 223 Hardy, Thomas 8–9, 45, 53, 132 Hay, Ian see Beith, John Hay H. D. 209–13 passim, 218, 222 Hemingway, Ernest 190, 204 Herbert, A. P. 99 Secret Battle, The 26, 80, 89–93 heroism 10–12, 21–2, 24, 66, 93, 105, 131–2, 179, 190, 202, 207–8, 215–16, 221–2 homosexuality 64–6, 216–17, 223 Hueffer, Ford Madox see Ford, Ford Madox Hughes, Thomas 12–13 Hulme, T. E. 48 Hynes, Samuel 4–5, 49, 67–8, 92–3, 96, 107, 108–9 imperialism 3, 10–11, 15–16, 41–2, 51, 65, 147–8 industrial action 2, 59–60, 78–9, 168



Index 257

Jerrold, Douglas 28, 85, 92, 244 Lie About the War, The 240–2 John Bull 41, 90, 130 Jones, David 28 Journey’s End (1930 film) 28, 207 Joyce, James 119, 136 Keynes, John Maynard 93, 138 Kipling, Rudyard 28, 46, 81, 108 Kitchener, Lord Herbert 43, 49, 84 La Motte, Ellen The Backwash of War 225–6 Lawrence, D. H. 9, 26–7, 62, 119–37, 146, 201, 211, 213, 217 ‘Aristocracy’ 133, 178 blood-consciousness 127–8, 141 ‘England, My England’ 122–4 Kangaroo 121, 122, 125, 130–1 Ladybird, The 122, 124–8 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 102, 120, 122, 132–5, 151, 192 Memoir of Maurice Magnus, The 121–2, 128–30, 136 ‘On Being a Man’ 122, 125, 131–2 ‘On Coming Home’ 121 ‘State of Funk, The’ 131 St Mawr 130, 132 ‘Thimble, The’ 122, 124 see also Ladybird, The ‘With the Guns’ 121 Women in Love 119, 121 Lawrence, T. E. 21, 224 Le Bon, Gustave 61, 66 Leed, Eric 6, 10, 18, 21, 65 Lewis, Wyndham 119 Liberalism 6, 94–6, 169 Lloyd George, David 77–8 Macaulay, Rose 108 Making of a Bigot, The 60

Non-Combatants and Others 26, 42, 43, 59–64, 68 Told by an Idiot 59–60 MacGill, Patrick 48 machine war 6, 17–18, 121–5, 168–9, 171–2, 207–8, 222–3, 227–9 Manchester Guardian 41, 77, 94–6, 121, 139 Manning, Frederic 21 Middle Parts of Fortune, The 27, 206, 220–4 (also known as Her Privates We) Marsh, Edward 8, 120 masculinity 11–13, 43–6, 48, 58, 121–2, 142–3, 207–8, 216–17 Masefield, John 42, 104 Masterman, C. F. G. 54, 66, 96 Condition of England, The 13–15, 105–6, 202 War Propaganda Bureau (Wellington House) 45, 48 memorialisation 77, 143–5, 190–2 militarism British 41–2, 53–4, 60–1, 147–8 Prussian 16, 41, 47 military bureaucracy 51–2, 88–9, 91–3, 168, 173–5, 180–5 Montague, C. E. 26, 94–105, 179, 192, 203, 243 Disenchantment 1, 21, 61, 80, 89, 96–101, 103–4, 109 Fiery Particles 101, 166 Rough Justice 88, 98, 101–4 Mottram, R. H. 5, 27, 102, 163–75, 242–3 Our Mr Dormer 173 Spanish Farm Trilogy, The 10, 13, 169–75, 186, 192–3 Ten Years Ago 172

258

Index

Nash, Paul 209–10 Nevinson, C. R. W. 42 Nevinson, H. W. 95, 104 Newbolt, Henry Twymans, The 11 ‘Vitaï Lampada’ 7, 106 Nietzsche, Friedrich 34 n.73 Nordau, Max Degeneration 13–14, 22, 108, 133 nursing 224–32 Owen, Wilfred 7, 23–4, 39 n.143, 68, 81, 218 pacifism 17, 42–3, 57, 59–61, 63–7, 83, 178, 207, 212 Paris Peace Conference (1919) see Versailles, Peace Conference and Treaty of Pick, Daniel 14, 102 Pope, Jessie 7–8 Pound, Ezra 119 Prentice, Charles 213–14, 216, 219 Price, Evadne Not So Quiet…: Stepdaughters of War 225, 227–9, 230 propaganda 40–8, 61, 130–1 British posters 43–5 Proust, Marcel 176 public-school ethos 11–13, 46, 83, 90, 99–103, 106–7, 116 n.108, 178–9, 207–8, 215–17, 241 Raymond, Ernest 26–7, 99, 220 Tell England 105–9, 141, 151, 232 Read, Herbert In Retreat 212–13 reconstruction 63–4, 77–9, 93–4, 173, 211–13 religious faith 3, 23, 62–4, 67–8, 82, 95, 105–8, 165–6

Remarque, Erich Maria All Quiet on the Western Front 2, 27, 204–6, 213–14, 232 rupture, war interpreted as 3, 5–6, 49, 57, 148–51, 168, 177–8 Russell, Bertrand 66 Russian Revolution (1917) 19, 78 Saler, Michael 3, 19 Saltus, Edgar Evertson 2, 10, 13–14 Sandes, Flora 224–5 Sassoon, Siegfried 7–8, 21, 23, 68, 81, 204, 209 scientism 2, 17, 165–6, 201–2 Second International, The 17 Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley 224 Shaw, George Bernard 53, 104 shell shock 23, 25–6, 53–8, 80, 82–4, 145, 176, 183–4, 208 Sherriff, R. C. 242–3 Journey’s End 2, 27, 206–9, 213, 232 Simmel, Georg 19, 215 Smith, Helen Zenna see Price, Evadne socialism 17, 26, 65–6, 80, 86–8, 179 Somme, Battle of the 2, 18, 49, 83, 91, 172–4 space, constructions of 55, 100, 128, 166–7, 170–1, 185, 191 Spengler, Oswald 4, 105, 133 Decline of the West 13–22 passim, 41, 66, 87, 106, 124, 127, 134, 165, 191, 202 Stendhal Charterhouse of Parma 20–1 strikes see industrial action suburban(ism) 56–8, 84–5, 105, 169, 202 suffrage, women’s 10, 77, 86–8, 190 suicide 49, 145, 218, 226–7



Index 259

Tietjens, Eunice 224 time, experience of 167–8, 172–3 Times, The 7, 11, 49, 93, 137 Tomlinson, H. M. 104 transport 91, 185–9 Versailles, Peace Conference and Treaty of 2, 60, 120, 138–9 Ward, A. C. 98, 204, 219 War Books Boom 1, 4, 27–8, 177, 201–42 war poetry 4–5, 7–10, 23–5, 81–2 Weber, Max 13, 22, 56, 105, 168 ‘Bureaucracy’ 17, 27, 182–3, 185–6 ‘Meaning of Discipline, The’, 12 ‘Politics as a Vocation’ 181 ‘Science as a Vocation’ 19, 165 ‘Structures of Power’ 11, 40–1

Wells, H. G. 45, 94 Tono-Bungay 48 Mr Britling Sees It Through 16, 25, 43, 48–53, 67–8 West, Rebecca 25 Return of the Soldier, The 43, 48, 53–9, 83, 166, 207 War Nurse 201–2, 225, 229–32 Williamson, Henry 206, 219 Wilson, Woodrow 77 Woolf, Virginia 9, 26–7, 109, 119–20, 136–52, 201 Jacob’s Room 140–5, 149, 151 ‘Lives of the Obscure, The’ 140 ‘Mark on the Wall, The’ 120 Mrs Dalloway 140, 145–8, 151 on peace celebrations 137–40 Room of One’s Own, A 148–9 ‘Society, A’ 148 To the Lighthouse 63, 140, 142, 143, 149–50, 183