A Spate of War Books

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 959, 30 April 1930, Page 8

A Spate of War Books

AUTHORS AGAIN UNDER FIRE

IN 16 issues, between the beginning of December last and the end of March, a leading literary weekly, published in London, reviewed 18 novels about the war and advertised for sale 2 others on the same subject. In the same period the cable columns of New Zealand newspapers have at intervals been filled with vehement denunciations of the war-hook and equally vehement attacks on the denouncers. What is one to think about it all.

“And it all started -with ‘All Quiet on. the Western Front,’ ” the average reader would say. It is true that the trouble did start with Remarque’s hoot, but curiously enough it wasn’t by any means the first of the war books. Nearly 10 years earlier Henri Barbusse had published “Under Fire,’* a book which should have been just as provocative as “All Quiet but for some reason passed unscathed under the noses of the self-appointed censors. Not much later C. E. Montague wrote “Disenchantment” which, though it was less gross, was an equally violent attack on war and its methods. There were also A. P. Herbert’s “The Secret Battle” and R. A Voiglit’s “Combed Out.” But all the present trouble undoubtedly started with “All Quiet ....’’ The book, perhaps, came at a moment when a new fashion had crawled out of heaven or hell and was waiting to be followed. Probably the number of war-books written in the 12 months or so since comes near to a thousand. At least 150 have been written by Englishmen and at least 100 have been translated from the German into English. How many remain untranslated, how many have been written in France, and how many in America, it is impossible to say. Roughly one might divide war-books into two classes—those that describe the War from the point of view of the author, making the War the central theme of the whole book; and those that describe it simply to make it serve a purpose in the story. For example, “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “Her Privates We,” “The Case of Sergeant Grischa,” and “Goodbye to All That,” are books that make the War their centre, while “The

Cavalry Went Through,” “Medal Without Bar,” “The Spanish Farm” trilogy, and “Death of a Hero.” use the War to cause changes in the characters who are the centres of the story. If you like, the first class tends to become autobiographies or histories, while the second class are the true novels. It is, of course, the first class that has aroused so much opposition and argument. It may be that the authors were “asking for it” when they dared to express their own personal emotions and thoughts. People, and that elastic term includes all professional soldiers or former professional soldiers and all anonymous critics, apparently refuse to understand that the books they condemn are only personal records and not general statements. It must be said in excuse for “people” that at first an effort was made to preserve the idea that “All Quiet ..." was a statement of fact, but it has been announced over and over again with later books, particularly with Graves’s “Good-bye to All That,” that the authors were only expressing their own thoughts and their own memories. The strongest charge that seems to be levelled against the war-book writers is that they are muck-rakers. Probably they are, but who can say that the muck didn’t exist? John Citizen says he served for three years on the Western Front and didn't see any of the horrors Mr. Z., the author, writes about. But John Citizen was probably a private or a company officer, and therefore could see only a limited section of the whole battle area. What happened away from his own particular section may have been just what Mr. Z described. Because some phases of the War were bad it doesn’t follow that all of it was, and because some phases might have been worse it doesn’t follow that all were tolerable.