Great War Fiction

Some people are having trouble leaving comments on this blog. I’ll try to sort it out.

Meanwhile, Brian Busby from Canada has sent this comment on my Poppies 2025 post, which the WordPress algorithm foolishly wouldn’t allow:

Things are a bit different in Canada. They seem mandatory for politicians and talking heads, as if one isn’t allowed on air without one. They are much, much more common than not on our streets.

This being the time of year when the weather turns, the great mistake comes in grabbing a warmer jacket, thus leaving the one with the poppy behind.

And then we have the issue of lost poppies. It’s nearly a national joke (but isn’t because of Remembrance Day). Ours consist of felt over plastic, held by a very slim pin. You are sure to lose it. I myself am on my second with two days to go. I expect these losses have something to do with changing times. Speaking from experience they remain on tweed, but are sure to disappear from a nylon rain jacket.

I don’t mean to make light of this. I wear the poppy for my family, all the men and women who served and, strange to say, take some comfort in the number of poppies I see on the streets of our little Ontario town.

Two years ago this week, I happened to be in New York City for a memorial service. I wore a poppy. New Yorkers would stop me on the street to remark upon it, knowing it was a sign that I was Canadian. They were complimentary, each and every one.

I never served, but every male member of previous generations in my family did. If no one had, I’d still wear a poppy.

Walking around Huddersfield town centre yesterday morning, I spotted only six people wearing poppies. They were all very old.

On television, by contrast, poppies are mandatory. A women on a panel show not wearing one was assailed by the indignant of the internet. Poor David Lammy in Parliament (who has a lot to worry about at the moment) forgot to wear his the other day, and was criticised and mocked.

For those very much in the public eye, the poppy is mandatory, and can become a fashion statement. On Strictly yesterday Tess and Claudia were both in stunningly plain black dresses, against which the red poppies showed up dramatically.

For such public people, the poppy is mandatory. In ordinary life now, less so, it would seem. A very pleasant lady was running a stall in our local Morrison’s, but was not, I think, doing very good business. Marion and I each bought paper poppies, but she had decorative (metallic, enamelled, bejewelled) for sale. I remarked that the TV people semed always to wear the posh decorative ones. I wondered whether they kept these to wear from year to year, rather than buying new ones every November. ‘I bet they do,’ said the stallholder, maybe thinking of her lackof customers.

Back in the twenties a joke figure was the man so mean that he ironed his poppy after use and kept it for next year, so avoiding having to put cash in the can. But these days, if you paid a lot for a smart one – well, you’d want to use it again.

Back in my youth, in the 1950s, with the Second war just over, almost all adult males with experience in the services, and almost everyone with memories of loss, poppies were mandatory for everyone, of all ages and classes. Now it’s eighty ears since that last big war (and several of the little interim ones are wars that we’d rather forget). Now only a small minority have experience of life in the forces, and poppies have personal meaning for fewer and fewer each year.

I’ve always divided memorials into ‘We remember’ ones and ‘You ought to remember’ ones. Village war memorials in 1919-1920 were very much we remember – the whole village commemoratinga shared loss. ‘You ought to remember’ memorials, are put there not by the community, but by an elite group, sometimes of outsiders. An example might be the Stolpersteine, the tripping stones placed in some German streets to remind citizens of the place’s unpleasant past. ‘We remember’ ones are the voice of the community. At their best they are unofficial. At times the market cross in the middle of Huddersfield becomes, without official sanction, a place where tributes are put. The first time I noticed this, soom after I moved here, there were notes absd flowers for Lee Rigby, who had just been killed. A card i recall was from the women working at a local bakery.. Other atrocities have been commemorated there too. In Victoria Station, Manchester, there is a huge, rather untidy collection of tributes to those (mostly young girls) who died at the Ariana Grande concert a few years ago. It is kept going, I think, by additions and renewals from the public.

A century ago, Poppy Day definitely began as a ‘We remember’ institution, the country uniting behind the Haig Fund and the wish to help the war-damaged. In 2025, though, I suspect the younger generation (and many of their elders) see it as nothing much to do with them – just other people telling them what they ought to remember.

[This is a version of the chapter I wrote for the Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War (2021) (edited by Ralf Schneider and Jane Potter).]

We read some war books because of their excellence as novels, others for what they tell us about the war itself. Ernest Raymond’s Tell England, while not without literary and documentary merits, is most interesting for what it suggests about the needs and enthusiasms of its readers. Reprinted fourteen times in 1922, and six times in the next year, by 1939 it had sold 300,000 copies, and subsequent editions stayed in print for forty years. (Raymond 1969, 69) The book’s material, however, would, over the next fifty years, be re-imagined, by Raymond and others; Tell England would become a major film in 1930, and Raymond would return to its subject, the Gallipoli landings, in two more novels, and in his autobiography.

The book appeared a a time when most publishers were convinced that there was no market for novels about the war. A nation counting its dead had little taste for the thrilling tales of military action that had encouraged public morale during the war years. War books that appeared now were mostly pious memorials, proud regimental histories and the memoirs of generals and politicians. There was no market for any novels that might try to cast a less than flattering light upon the soldiers who had given so much for their country. Tell England, however, managed to appeal exactly to the taste of the times.

A book of two halves.

The novel’s title refers to lines by the Greek poet Simonides that were frequently translated, quoted and adapted during the Great War, his epitaph for the three thousand Spartan dead, after the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C.E . The version quoted by Raymond is an adaptation of one of the best-known translations; this dates from the Boer War, and was popularised by E.B. Osborn, in the introduction to his influential 1917 anthology The Muse in Arms as ‘the famous epitaph above Waggon Hill, above Ladysmith’ (Osborn, xv). :

Tell England ye who pass this monument,
We died for her and here we rest content.

Tell England is a book of two halves; the first deals with boys at a public school, and the second follows two of them to the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign. The full title is Tell England: The Story of a Generation, and readers are clearly invited to find its characters representative, in the youthful vitality they express in the school chapters, and in the heroic selflessness that they achieve in war. Gallipoli was an operation with a special emotional appeal to many; it was a daring attempt, sponsored by Winston Churchill, to break the trench deadlock in the West by opening a new front in the East. Had the campaign been successful, the need to bolster its Eastern front would have diverted German troops from the West, Germany’s Turkish ally could have been taken out of the war, and, potentially, British troops could have taken Constantinople. The appeal of the attack was made more potent by the fact that Gallipoli was near the site of the legendary battlefields of Troy, tales of which were central to the classical education of British elites.

The book’s structure is crucial to its success. It begins with a Prologue by Padre Monty, who has undertaken the editing of manuscript written by Rupert Ray. As well as introducing us to the main characters in childhood, and hinting forward to Gallipoli, the Padre models for us the mood in which the book should be read:

I carried the manuscript into my room one bright autumn afternoon, and read it during the fall of a soft evening, till the light failed, and my eyes burned with the strain of reading in the dark. I could hardly leave his ingenuous tale to rise and turn on the gas. Nor, perhaps, did I want such artificial brightness. (Raymond 1922, 1)

After this prologue which goes on to describe something of the main characters’ early childhood in a tone of elegiac foreboding, the book is divided into two sections. The first half (“Five Gay Years of School”) contains most of the standard ingredients of public-school stories of their time, such as physical horseplay, practical jokes, punitive beatings and epic cricket matches. The book’s style, however, seemed to some old-fashioned in 1922; As Alec Waugh wrote in his review for the Sunday Times, “Tell England comes to us with the raiment of modernity, but its heart is with the sixties”. (Quoted Raymond 1969, 183) With its presentation of mothers and teachers earnestly concerned with the moral and spiritual well-being of the boys boys, it harks back to the way that school stories were written before the revolution in the genre effected by Stalky and Co and early P.G. Wodehouse.

Kensingtowe, the school described by Raymond, is a closed community where passions run deep. His hero and narrator, Rupert Ray, hates his housemaster, Fillet, as deeply and intensely as he admires the virile county cricketer and deputy housemaster, Radley. He also has powerful feelings of affection for his friend Edgar Doe, shown, for example, when he sees him with an unpleasant potential rival: “There, far ahead of us, was Doe in the company of Freedham, with whom he was turning into a doorway. A pang of jealousy stabbed me, and with a throb, that was as pleasing as painful, I realised that I loved Doe as Orestes loved Pylades.” (Raymond, 1922, 107) The school chapters end with a cricket match whose triumphal ending will be ironically echoed when the characters go to war.

The second half of the book takes Ray and his friend Doe to Gallipoli, late in 1915, after the failure of the original attack at Helles, to assist in the second landing, at Suvla Bay. The original readers would have realised keenly the irony that their idealism was doomed to disappointment when this assault on the peninsula also failed. Going out on the troopship Rangoon, they meet Padre Monty, a forceful and unorthodox Anglo-Catholic chaplain. He is first glimpsed carrying on his back a pack like an ordinary Tommy’s (significant because chaplains were officers, and officers did not usually carry their own baggage). His back is that “of a young man, lean, spare and vigorous”, and he is soon taking the place in Ray and Doe’s imagination of the hero-worshipped schoolmaster, Radley. He thrills them with stories of the Oxford Movement:

So Monty began the great story of the Catholic movement in the Church of England. He told us of Keble and Pusey; he made heroes for us of Father Mackonochie dying amongst his dogs in the Scotch snows, and of Father Stanton, whose coffin was drawn through London on a barrow. He knew how to capture the interest and sympathy of boy minds [….] We would have liked to be sent to prison for wearing vestments. (Raymond 1922, )

The great articles of Padre Monty’s High Church faith are the Mass and confession, and Ray undergoes the sacramental rite of confession, a ritual that purifies him for the upcoming test on the peninsula.

Doe is less eager to engage in confession, and part of the suspense of the last part of the book is the question of whether his heroism, of which we are left in no doubt, will be motivated by virtue, or whether it will be inspired by the desire to be showy (to impress himself as much as anyone else). The last chapters tell of the heroic retreat from the peninsula, and doubts about Doe’s character are laid to rest when he leads his men in a last heroic battle. Brought back seriously wounded, he dies a noble death: “Well, it can’t be helped. If I’d known when I started that it would end like this – I’d have gone through with it just the same. I haven’t got cold feet.” (Raymond 1922, 296) .

As the remnants of the Gallipoli force sail away, Padre Monty tells Ray: “You must write a book and tell ’em, Rupert, about the dead schoolboys of your generation,’ and he quotes the “Tell England” couplet that gives the book its title. (Raymond 1922, 314) the book he writes is the novel we have been reading; Ray finishes with his thoughts about his own possible death as the war continues:

Oh, but if I go down, I want to ask you not to think it anything but a happy ending. It will be happy, because victory came to the nation, and that is more important than the life of any individual. (Raymond 1922, 319)

Of his friend, he writes: “Monty was right when he said that Doe had done a perfect thing at the last, and so grasped the Grail. And I have the strange idea that very likely I, too, shall find beauty in the morning.” (Raymond 1920, 320). We are not told how Ray met his end, but are meant to remember the book’s prologue, and Monty’s reverent opening of “Rupert’s final manuscript.”

Raymond’s book was rejected by several publishers before Newman Flower of Cassell’s saw its potential. He gave the book a lively advertising campaign, and also a striking cover, which Raymond later described as: “the petals of the Red Rose of England falling one by one into the red flames of war.’ (Raymond 1968, 3). Reviews were mixed, and Raymond recalled some of the worst in his autobiography: Rose Macaulay in the Daily News called it the work of “a rather illiterate and commonplace sentimentalist”; The Evening Standard reviewer thought it “laughable – when it is not revolting by reason of the sentimentality with which the autobiography of Rupert Ray is sticky from cover to cover.” Hannen Swaffer in the Daily Graphic, on the other hand, acclaimed it as “The Epic of the Youth of England” and “a book which will live as long as our spoken tongue.” (Raymond 1968, 182-4)

The book became a best-seller, presumably because it confronted the painful conflict of emotions felt by so many at the time. On the one hand, the war was almost universally regarded as just and righteous, and one that Britain needed to fight; on the other hand, its cost was appalling, and the nation was especially conscious of the wastage of young men, often barely out of school. During wartime itself, novelists had attempted to deal with this subject. G.F. Bradby’s For This I Had Borne Him (1915) is a representative example; it imagines the boisterous and exuberant boy hero of Bradby’s 1906 novel Dick cheerfully enlisting for the Western Front, and going “laughing to his death at Festubert.” (Bradby, 189) The book’s narrator, a schoolmaster who had adopted Dick, expresses his pain and his consolation:

There are memories which must haunt us till we die, and wounds which will never heal. Only we will hold our heads high and look fearlessly into the future, remembering that, when the hour of trial came, the men and boys, whom we had loved and believed in, were not found wanting and turned not back in the day of battle. (Bradby, 196)

This rather bleak stoicism is all that Bradby can offer in the way of consolation; in Tell England, Raymond offers more. Bradby’s book is narrated by a mourning civilian; Raymond’s is presented as the manuscript of a serving soldier, and it offers a first-hand parable of spiritual transformation. The fallible and undisciplined schoolboys of the first half of the novel become the dedicated Christian warriors of the second, discovering a purity of purpose in what Raymond encourages us to think of as a Crusade. As one of his characters says: “It’s the Cross against the Crescent again, my lads. By Jove, it’s splendid, perfectly splendid! And an English cross, too!”

The book’s effectiveness comes partly from the curious history of its writing. The division of a novel into pre-war and wartime is conventional for books of the period, but few have such a marked difference of tone between the sections. In his autobiography, Raymond tells us that most of the first half had been written before the war, when Raymond, in his late teens, began teaching at preparatory schools. What he wrote then reflects both nostalgia for his own schooldays and the paternalistic view of the teacher. He abandoned the book — or what he later called ‘a shapeless mass of stuff’ (Raymond 1968, 132) — some time before 1912, when he became an Anglo-Catholic, discovered a religious vocation, and studied theology at Durham. He was ordained as deacon in 1914 and fully priested in 1915. Almost immediately, he became a chaplain attached to the 10th Manchesters, and sailed for Gallipoli in August. His authorial ambition returned and he decided to write about war, but in a special way:

But it was on the Peninsula that there broke before me a moment of vision. I saw what to do with the massed and untidy chapters of my school story — or with what seemed the best of them: they would form the first half of a two-part novel which would be a study of my own generation of schoolboys who, after their few years of school, happy or unhappy, had been called upon to bleed and die for England.(Raymond 1968, 133)

Forty-five years after the novel’s publication, Raymond commented on its lack of sophistication: “Another thing that is a cause of wonder to me as I re-read the book is the indubitable but wholly unconscious homosexuality in it,” since “‘homosexuality’ was a word which — absurd as this seems now — I had never heard.” He decided that “Its presence in the book is one more evidence of its author’s unusually slow progress towards maturity.”(Raymond 1968, 180-181)

The writing seems strikingly unaware of its own homoeroticism: the boys are conscious of their attractiveness; Rupert ray’s school chapters begin:: “‘I’m the best-looking person in this room,’ said Archibald Pennybet.” (Raymond 1922, 19). They form close emotional bonds with each other. Ceremonies of caning are described in lingering detail, and manly schoolmasters become hero-figures of erotic potency. When Doe and Ray have been beaten by the ‘hard’ assistant housemaster, Radley, Doe comes to Ray’s dormitory bed and tells him: “Do you know, I really think I like Radley better than anyone else in the world. I simply loved being whacked by him.” (Raymond 1922,37)

If Raymond’s sexual unsophistication made possible the uninhibited expression of intense boyhood emotions, his ignorance of military matters helped to make the structure of the book more effective. As a chaplain, he had not undergone the training that his heroes would have experienced before going to Gallipoli. Military historian John Keegan explains how the process of training is one of drilling and repetition, enabling men “to avert the onset of fear, or, worse, of panic and to perceive a face of battle which, if not familiar, and certainly not friendly, need not, in the event, prove wholly petrifying.”(Keegan, 21) The absence of any preparation for war makes the sudden lurch from peace to war in this book more dramatic.

[The sudden time-shift, ignoring any period of training and jumping straight from civilian life to the battle zone, is a favourite technique of twenty-first century novelists aiming to dramatically convey the shock of war. It is used effectively in Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong (1993) and Pat Barker’s Life Class (2007), for example. A Second World War novel manipulating its time-scheme in a similar way is Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001).]

Instead of military training, Raymond’s young officers are imbued with religious purpose by Padre Monty. If the depiction of public school life in the first half of the book owed much to the idealising nostalgia of a young man recently deprived of its pleasures, the second half may be read as the wishful thinking of a newly-ordained chaplain. Raymond’s memoirs make no mention of the dramatic spiritual conquests described in the novel, where the fierce hero-worship that the boys had given to Radley is now transferred to the priest. Monty is the priest that Raymond wishes he could have been.

Juxtaposed in one text, therefore, are a recognizable picture of the undisciplined passions of young men, and a depiction of them in terms saintly and heroic enough for a War Memorial, or a Service of Remembrance. The forced combination of two disparate genres, necessitated by the inclusion of material written years before the War (material untainted by awareness of what will follow, and therefore generating a less forced irony than the depictions of youthful ignorance in, for example, Cicely Hamilton’s William, an Englishman) produces a text that provides a way of interpreting the physicality and waywardness of youth as a kind of energy that could be transformed into spirituality. It offers readers a consoling opportunity to reinterpret their own memories of the dead.

Tell England, filmed.

In 1930 Tell England became the basis for a film directed by Anthony Asquith (son of the wartime Prime Minister). The film is by no means a straight adaptation of the novel, and demonstrates clearly the conflicting expectations of a war film at the start of the thirties. It dispenses with much that is important to the novel. The school chapters, which make up half the book, almost disappear, apart from a swimming contest in which Doe at first fails and then gloriously succeeds – a premonition of his wartime career. The High Church religion that meant so much to Raymond is also cut to a minimum.

In the novel the boys are sent to Gallipoli when it is already becoming a lost cause, so that the book becomes the story of saving something valuable from a defeat. The film, by contrast, wants to tell the whole story of the operation, so there is a lengthy sequence showing the initial invasion, presented in the style of the British Instructional Films war reconstructions of the twenties. The film was made with the co-operation of the Admiralty, and used borrowed warships; there is no mention of the delays and blunders that marred the initial invasion. The presentation is that it was a sound plan, except that the British underestimated the determination and courage of the Turkish soldiers. Everyone is allowed to come out of it with credit. This treatment of the operation is hard to reconcile with another influence on the film; Journey’s End had changed perceptions about portrayals of the war, and the makers of the film include some scenes that seem indebted to Sherriff’s play, showing the terrible pressures on young officers, and the dreadfulness of war.

These aims are incompatible, so the film becomes a mess, switching from neurosis to heroics within a minute, while taking care not to be too negative. More than in the novel, we are made aware of class distinctions. The young officers are all very upper-class, while the privates are comic and rather stupid, given to tedious Cockney banter. One of them sniffs a lot and says, “It’s me nose, sir – runs in the family.” One wonders whether this was part of the “additional dialogue” supplied, according to the credits, by A.P. Herbert, whose own Gallipoli novel, The Secret Battle, is so much better than this film.

Doe undergoes a crisis of nerves, but then redeems himself by conquering a whole nest of Turks and capturing their big gun single-handed, dying in in the attempt. It symbolises the film’s view of the whole operation – a moral victory, even in defeat. The film ends with a wondering Turk looking at Doe’s grave, on which is inscribed the Waggon Hill epitaph.

The Jesting Army and The Quiet Shore

Raymond returned to the subject of Gallipoli twice in novels, and again in his autobiography. The Jesting Army (1930) is prefaced by an author’s note insisting that it was “not offered in competition with other War books”, and that it had been “planned and sketched in outline long before the present fashion for War literature began.” Reviewing the book for the Times Literary Supplement, Cyril Falls, who had often been critical of the “disenchanted” war books that followed the success of All Quiet on the Western Front and Journey’s End, wrote

We have had of late a good deal of the war as seen by iconoclasts and cynics; ‘The Jesting Army’ is war as seen by a sentimentalist. Mr Raymond is indeed so sentimental that many readers will find the scowl which the cynics aroused replaced by a blush when they read his pages. (TLS, 18 Septenber, 1930, 732.)

In the novel Raymond traces the fortunes of a battalion from Gallipoli to Sinai to Passchendaele, and is full of praise and affection for an army that typifies an England which is “kindly above all nations”; “she alone among the nations, alone in history, so far as he could see, had learned to smite without hate.” (Raymond, 1930, 448) The book’s most striking character is Quickshaw, a chaplain even more dynamic and independent than Tell England’s Father Monty; at Passchendaele he disobeys orders by going over the top with the soldiers, rallying a retreating force and leading them in an attack. Beneath the surface of this positive epic, however, there is an anxiety about masculinity. The protagonist, Tony O’Grogan, is disturbed by the jeers of a fellow-officer that he has always been away when the battalion has engaged in conflict. Another officer, Skace, shoots himself in the hand rather than go into a battle he fears, and lets his men go into battle without him; faced with the prospect of a court-martial and a firing-squad, however, he takes the opportunity to commit suicide. This celebration of manly soldiery has its darker overtones.

The Quiet Shore (1958), shows Raymond directly addressing the theme of homosexuality. The main character is Gerry Browning, returning with his wife to the peninsula where he had fought forty years before. The visit arouses memories of the events of the campaign, and of Gerry’s intense feelings for Colin, a fellow-officer whom he hero-worshipped, to the point of love:

Let me say at once that the young man who thus looked at Colin’s face […] was still virgin at twenty-four and of somewhat inhibited sex, so that his hunger to love someone carried no physical desire; it was simply a hunger for the exquisite emotions of a purely cerebral love. Before seeing Colin I had twice found someone to fill my need, the first a new boy at school with a pretty face, and three years younger than I; the second a junior clerk at my store. Each was lost to me now, and day by day during my six months in the Army I had secretly looked for their successor. No doubt I was approaching full heterosexuality because I had searched also among the faces of girls – but the love I wanted would not rise at my call. And now I looked at Colin on the rail and instantly selected him as candidate for the long vacancy. (Raymond, 1958, 24)

He never reveals his love, and nothing physical occurs between the two, though their friendship is strong and mutual. Another officer presents an alternative version of homosexuality; like the louche Freedham in Tell England, Evverson is an ungainly person, with “a lanky narrow figure”, “a large nose in a weak face” and a step that is “oddly mincing”. His language (“Pleased to meet you,” and “Bless you.”) betrays his class origins, and he is not popular with those who feel that the Army “used to be a place for gentlemen.” (Raymond 1958, 78) Gerry’’s curiosity takes him to look at the small collection of books that Evverson hides away as though ashamed of them. As well as a volume of his own idealistic poetry, there is Plato’s Symposium; Browning surreptitiously borrows this and finds it ‘a revelation’:

In this delightful Dialogue, as gay as it was serious in its praises of Love, I found that my exact feeling for Colin – a love ardent but “without physical manifestations” – was not only allowed but highly advocated and honoured, and this by a mind of Plato’s calibre.(Raymond, 1958, 87.)

Evverson recognises Browning as a fellow homosexual, but is rebuffed. Later Browning is shocked to hear that Evverson is under close arrest, charged with “disgraceful conduct of an unnatural kind”. He had been found in incriminating circumstances with a Private Gottsched: “And the astonishing, silencing thing was that Private Gottsched was nearly as old as Evverson himself, and no personable fellow either.” (Raymond 1958, 130) Utterly humiliated by the prospect of being cashiered and sent home in disgrace, Evverson, like Skace in The Jesting Army, commits suicide, this time by rushing into enemy fire. His fate distresses and confuses Browning, who had recognised him as a sort of warped double of himself.

The novel gives a clear and full picture of the Gallipoli operation (Browning and Colin are among the first to land on Hellas beach, and are among the last to leave in the retreat); it gives a compelling picture of the appalling conditions – extremes of temperature, flies, dysentery – and there are some well-told episodes of fighting. The main impetus of the narrative, however, is the emotional one, as the older Browning, returning after forty years, tries to understand his feelings as a young man. The comment“No doubt I was approaching full heterosexuality” suggests that he places his earlier emotions as a phase to be gone through, but now he is a married man. Only gradually do we realise that the wife who is accompanying him to the peninsula had once been Colin’s fiancée, coming to see where he had died. Was marrying her a final way of expressing his love for Colin? Or is it a sign that he is able to find in a woman the qualities that he loved in Colin? By this stage in his career, Raymond is a skilful enough novelist to leave this question unanswered, and to leave us wondering. Perhaps The Quiet Shore should be read in the context of its time, as an older novelist’s reaction to the debate surrounding the 1957 Wolfenden report (which recommended decriminalising homosexual acts between adult men in private).

I’ve added another paper to the blog. It’s based on a talk I gave a few years ago, about escape narratives in the two World Wars.

It was written for a conference about ‘Reading to Escape‘ (organised by Shafquat Towheed of the Open University). I was thinking especially about the pleasures that the very popular escape books and films of the mid-century offered their readers – but also about how the conventions of the escape genre had been established in the earlier war.

You can read the paper here.

I’ve just added another paper to the list on the right. It’s one I delivered to an Arnold Bennett conference a few years ago. The topic of the conference was Bennett’s friendships – a good topic, since he had a talent for making friends and interesting acquaintances.

My paper is about Bennett’s friendship with the psychologist/anthropologist WHR Rivers, one of the most interesting men of his time. They met through Siegfried Sassoon, and found they had much in common. My paper suggests that Rivers’s ideas were a major influence on Riceyman Steps (especially on the depiction of Joe’s shell-shock, but not just that), and also on the story ‘Elsie and the Child’, which is a sort of short sequel to Riceyman Steps.

If I were writing the paper today, I’d probably also consider Bennett’s 1928 novel Accident, which also deals with trauma.

The paper can be read HERE.

P.S. There seems to be a problem with posting comments to the blog. I’m working on this.

I wrote about this for the Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War (2021) (edited by Ralf Schneider and Jane Potter), a work of pretty encyclopaedic scope. I think the was originally intended to appear in time for the War’s centenary, but there were the kind of publishing problems that often attend big projects, and it didn’t appear till rather late, and does not seem to have had much impact. I’ve received no feedback about my contributions, anyway.

I was given some suggestions about suitable texts to write about, and chose Ernest Raymond’s Tell England from the editor’s selection. I suggested The Pretty Lady, which was not on their list, because it is not only a very good novel, but one that, I would argue, gives a more comprehensive picture of wartime London than any other.

It is a book that has been sidelined by those who want a comforting picture of Bennett as merely a regional novelist. Its unsentimental look at the sex industry has not endeared it to the more moralistic critics. But if one wants to make claims for Bennett as a truly important twentieth-century novelist, this is where one should start.

In the handbook, chapters were prefaced by an abstract. This is the abstract I wrote for my Pretty Lady chapter:

Abstract: The Pretty Lady is the darkest of Arnold Bennett’s novels. It deals with the effect of the Great War on characters in the fashionable West End of London, revealing the hypocrisies of the time through its depiction of the relationship between Christine, a refugee French prostitute, and of her lover G.J. Hoape, a prosperous British rentier. The book can be read as a satirical response to the wartime moral panic that blamed women for the epidemic of venereal disease in soldiers; Christine, the prostitute, behaves with an honesty rare among the book’s other characters. The novel goes beyond satire, however, when the world it describes suddenly meets extreme violence, for example in a Zeppelin raid; it depicts the disturbing psychological effect of war on London and its inhabitants, who react in irrational and often self-destructive ways. Bennett analyses the war’s effect on two upper-class women, thrill-seeking Queenie and self-punishing Concepcion; he also shows the officer on leave who tries to escape his terror of returning by getting drunk. There are scornful descriptions of dishonest art and propaganda, and the novel justifies Bennett’s realist methods by using environments to reveal character and by presenting a society whose nature is made clearer by the proximity of “the incredible fact of death”.

If you think that would be interesting, the chapter can be read here. Arnold Bennett’s The Pretty Lady (1918)

I’ve neglected this blog over the past couple of years – mostly because my interests have strayed away from the Great War. I still have a strong interest in popular fiction, however, and my reviews of it appear regularly on the Sheffield Hallam Reading 1900-1950 blog.

I’ve been looking through my old essays and papers, recently, though, and have found some that might be of interest to readers of the blog (There are still a goodly number, looking through nearly twenty years of back files, even while new activity has been, to put it mildly, dormant.)

So in the next few weeks I shall be uploading some of these pieces, in the hope that they will find readers. I’ll be starting off with a couple about Arnold Bennett. Essays on Rose Allatini and Kipling will follow. Probably others.

I’ve had an email from a setup called Feedspot which says that Great War Fiction is ranked second among military book blogs. Which is very flattering, though a bit bothering. I’ve neglected the blog horribly over the past year, and it’s not what it was.

Does that mean that other military book blogs are in an even worse state? If so, that’s a pity.

Over the years, my attention has been diverted away from the Great War. I was getting too used to the material, and it wasn’t surprising me as often as it used to back in the day. It’s eighteen years since this blog began. You can’t blame me fro wanting to move on.

Not that I’ve totally neglected the War. Recently I’ve re-read two war novels – Philip MacDonald’s excellent Patrol and William J. Locke’s not-so excellent The Rough Road, and have written about them for the Sheffield Hallam Popular Fiction gatherings and website. Maybe I’ll blog about The Rough Road and its depiction of Tommies here too, when I’ve time.

I’m occasionally asked whether the blog is still in business, and the answer is yes – but don’t be surprised if it goes dormant for a while. Having focused very much on war literature for a long time, I need to broaden my horizons. At the moment my two obsessions are the poetry of Catullus and the terrific new novel James by Percival Everett (about the brightest novelist around these days). Neither of these have a lot to do with the Great War, so I won’t be writing about them here. But I haven’t gone totally away. Watch this space.

Here, from the Lyttelton Times, a New Zealand newspaper of 1911, is yet another proof of the strange side-effects of Rudyard Kipling’s immense celebrity:

After I retired as a teacher, I applied to Oxford Brookes to research a Ph.D. on the prose of the Great War. They were welcoming, and I had a good and productive time there. (I was very fortunate in having Jane Potter, who had written brilliantly on Great War fiction, as one of my supervisors.)

It is gloomy reading, therefore, to learn that there are going to be major cuts in the English Department there, as well as History, Film, Anthropology, Publishing and Architecture. The Music and Mathematics departments will be closed completely.

There are good people in the English Department at Brookes, and it is very sad to think of their jobs being at risk (and of the opportunities for students being reduced). The same is true of other departments, I’m sure – I knew a postgraduate researching Music, and got the impression that the department was very lively indeed.

Similar things are happening in universities all over the country, and especially in the newer ones – the ones that used to be polytechnics. Students these days are piling up huge debts, and so there is pressure (not least from parents) to do courses that will have a practical earning potential after graduation.

I was fortunate enough to first go to University (Manchester, since you ask) back in 1963. I studied Politics and Modern History, because I thought it would be an interesting course. It was. I never thought about what it would qualify me for, and just enjoyed a stimulating three years. I was on a full grant, which covered my living costs, and left with an Upper Second degree (when an Upper Second was worth having). And I had no debt burden of any kind.

Today a lower-middle class student like myself would have to be so much warier. Study for intellectual excitement or for self improvement? But what about the job at the end of it?

These pressures have caused what is being called ‘the bonfire of the humanities.’ Cagey students are opting for practical and profitable courses, rather than education for its own sake. Humanities student numbers are down. Departments are shrinking or disappearing.

If humanities departments everywhere are under pressure, it’s no surprise that the biggest casualties are in the less posh institutions. And it’s no surprise that the students who make it on to Humanities courses at the high-status institutions will increasingly tend to be those from moneyed families.

Time was when universities were democratising institutions, taking the less well-off into realms previously reserved for the gentry. Is this process going into reverse? Will the humanities become the preserve of the posh?

Another thing. Eighteen years ago, when I signed up for postgraduate study at Oxford Brookes, the fees were affordable from savings and pension after a teaching career. (They were noticeably less than at those more ancient proper Oxford colleges down the road). They have now increased severalfold. Someone in my position retiring today, might be rather less sure that he or she could afford it. All in all, I’ve been a lucky bastard.