War Book Vogue

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 891, 7 February 1930, Page 14

War Book Vogue

A Poet’s Survey

In the following article published in the “Manchester tiuardian," Edmund Rlunden, the poet, undo authors, of Undertones of War," writes on the 1929 vogue for the war book. AN INTELLIGENT literary student from a far country who had happened to pass the last year in England would be mostly clearly justified in returning to his academic brethren and reporting “Gentlemen, you have heard of the Great War of 19141918, and indeed our present taxation reminds even us of it regularly. But we did not hear much of its influence on the course of creative art, especially literature. Judge, then, of my surprise to find that the silence of Europe on the subject of her millions under arms, filling sandbags and exchanging high explosives and desolate crater-lands, has been broken. Wherever I looked or talked in reading circles in England it was impressed on me that at last the war hook had come into its own. On the bookstalls I saw piles of volumes, accompanied with flaring announcements of the terrible, the humorous, and the real: in railway carriages 1 saw even girls of tender age—so far as a stranger could guess-*—hungrily reading their copies of these Quite expensive publications; I noted that the proportion of hooks among these which originated in Germany, formerly bo unpopular in Great Britain, was very considerable. Buying a

copy of Bunyan's ‘Holy War’ from a stall in a country market, I was eagerly asked ‘Have you read “A 1 Quiet on the Western Front”?’ Further, it was not necessary to search the literary periodicals for eulogistic reviews and bold advertisements of the new kind of books. Newspapers were printing their text in instalments with immense headlines and illustrations. I think, gentlemen, that I may therefore say with some confidence a series of writers in Europe has portrayed war in its essential aspects at last.”

If this imaginary lecturer had come to the present writer, or, better, if he had had the good fortune to talk the matter over with Mr H. M. Tomlinson or Mr Sassoon, he would at least have had some historic doubts respecting the delayed but overwhelm ing arrival of the war hook. If he had varied his round of the British Mus eum reading-room with a few half hours in the library of the Imperial War Museum he would have felt that the whole Question demanded a thesis of which he would complete the firs: fifty pages. I confess that I should fall by the wayside long before that The thorns are extraordinarily long hereabouts. I handed in my wire cutters too many years back. Why is it that Mr A. P. Herbert’s “Secret Battle,” which appeared ten years since, when its setting and its tragic problem were exactly what we had all been discussing with passionate concern —why was this per fectly developed truth of war so little noticed? How many readers dis covered Wilfred Owen, with his keen poetic sense for the intimate miser ies and exalted imagination of the total catastrophe of modern war? Why so few'? Who listened to the voice of “A Bead Officer” (Arthur Graeme We3i), despite the “absolute frankness, stark realism, obvious truth and sincerity” of his Diary?

The war was too near, it will be answered. Its ammonal still smelt hideous on our road. We could not separate our tired selves from it enough to contemplate it. We suddenly found it ended, and then the struggle of peace and keeping a roof overhead began, ar.d dominated us. We wished to forget it. But now, after a sufficient interval, when peace is not Quite so wild and merciless and we can hardly conceive the prospect of our spending a night in a wet ditch with the possibility of being in a "box barrage” at five in the morning, we can be stirred by the memory. What a sportsman old Sergeant Willis was, with his “Now, Fritz, hold that!” And how one slept in that orchard at Gonnehem! Yet even here the sudden ravour shown in England and abroad ♦o the war book is not wholly explained; for the readers who have thronged the libraries for this or that “success” are not able to remember war experience or to associate what they read with the world that they know. I should be the last person to hint dissatisfaction with the recent reception of war books, but I feel this: the large sale of several of them is founded on “a psychological curiosity.” The element which always made fiction so instantly superior in the numbers of its readers to other forms is at work even in this presumed revelation of truth. Excitement seeks excitement, and call it enlightenment.

On this one thing may be suggested. Women are prominent in the "Western Front” as it is presented by some realists, and the audience herf is urged to accept the secret, to sec-v-hat we were really at. to hear what •vra would never tell. The fact is that

the fighting man very seldom saw a woman, and when he did his bust ness was chiefly to prevent her from pouring out upon him her boredom with the war, and soldiers, and billeting, and inconvenience. She sold him tin blanc and rouge and “eggs and ships” and “silkeards.” She was as tough as the spelling of her name. He was one of the thousands who came, paid, and went. He had other things in his mind. He was not then susceptible. His love affair was with his battalion and (though it may sound odd) with a paper in his hand which read: “The following N.C.O.’s and men are detailed . . .” But now he would seem dry reading without his apocryphal Don Juanism. Realism must work in magic-carpet fashion? The war was a Dance of Death? One turns up old trench notebooks and one finds a terrifying realism, but minute and continuous, on this fashion: "Owing to the great difficulty in getting sufficient water up it may be very difficult to make the change of water ordered. A Company men say they have been working without rest carrying stores and water for 30 hours. I am writing O.C. A Company to try and arrange.” It is possible that the number of readers who explore and compare what they read with sound, unpretentious criticism is never immense. The art of writing is scarcely harder than that of reading. Hence the 1929 tumult of war books has not left me with solid convictions of a change in the spirit of man. If one could hear that, for example, Captain Cyril Fall’s “History of the Ulster Division” was being seen in the laps of young ladies in trains there would be reason for welcoming the new era. If those who saw the late war (smiling at them over the dreadful ridge) had power to contrast their former endurances and duties with what they are induced to praise in late descriptions, the romances of “realism” would not be smothering the documents. Meanwhile some of us revisit nightly the ground and time in which Europe, pursuing dreams not wholly dishonourable, defied individual loss and death. A few shelves of books make the crossing for us. The appeals of Mr Sassoon’s “Old Huntsman” and “Counter-attack” are vocal there even now, since the position and atmosphere of 1916 and 1917 are reproduced so urgently in his verse. “The Old Front Dine,” by Mr Masefield, does not fail to revive those wonderful, natural idealists on both sides of No Man’s Land in the summer of 19916; and C. E. Montague, with Muirliead Bone’s drawings or by himself, catches the finest lights and shades of the panorama. I believe that "Journey’s End” as a hook will out live “Journey’s End” on the stage. There are others, but the list of “accessions” is not extensive. The countersign must be given. It continues to be “Wind favourable for %hi 7.%baTie:R ?”