And the winner is...

After the first six months of this reading project, here are my awards —

Best novel:           The Eye of Purgatory by Jacques Spitz
Best memoir:        Second Wind by Carl Zuckmayer

Best lead character in a novel: Frances Nolan (above) in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Best supporting character in a novel: Roddy Cornett in Wide Open Town

Best lead character in a memoir: Edmund Blunden in Undertones of War
Best supporting character in a memoir: Major Sir Francis Fletcher-Vane in Inglorious Soldier

Picnic at Hanging Rock

This mysterious novel, published in 1967, was well-known in Australia before being made famous internationally by Peter Weir’s film of 1975. The plot centres on a school for young ladies in rural Victoria, based on the author’s own alma mater, Clyde Girls’ Grammar School. The mysterious events that happen when the schoolchildren are taken on an outing to Hanging Rock, a nearby geological attraction, occur in February 1900.

The author, Joan Lindsay (née Weigall, born 16 November 1896), spent much of the First World War as a student at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne. As part of her introduction to the novel, she attempts to add to the mystery of the story:
“Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year 1900, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important.”
The disappearance of several of the girls and one of the members of staff is left unexplained at the end of the novel. The publisher decided that this would make the novel more effective as a mystery (the final chapter of the author’s original text, with partial explanation of what had happened on Hanging Rock, was excluded and suppressed until it was published in 1987).

Set during the Boer War, in which 600 Australians were killed, the author’s concern with disappearance and loss is reflective of the experience of her generation in losing so many (60,000) young men (brothers, cousins, husbands) in the First World War and a further 40,000 (sons, nephews) in the Second World War. The author makes occasional references to the conflict in South Africa:
“The Fitzhuberts and their friends were a smug little community, well served... pleasant comfortable people for whom the current Boer War was the most catastrophic event since the Flood”
“An uneasy silence accompanied the mousse of tongue despite the host’s monologues on rose growing and the outrageous ingratitude of the Boers towards Our Gracious Queen.”

The typical preservation of the room of a son killed in the war is represented in the perceived sanctity of lost Miranda’s belongings in the room she shared with her friend Sara:
“Nothing had been changed since the day of the picnic... Miranda’s soft pretty dresses still hung in orderly rows in the cedar cupboard from which the child invariably averted her eyes. Miranda’s tennis racquet still leaned against the wall exactly as it did when its owner, flushed and radiant, came running upstairs after a game with Marion on a summer evening. The treasured photograph of Miranda in an oval silver frame on the mantelpiece, the bureau still stuffed with Miranda’s Valentines, the dressing table where she had always put a flower in Miranda’s little crystal vase.”   

We Think the World of You

This tragicomic novel, published in 1960, is largely concerned with Evie, a German Shepherd dog, whose master, Johnny, has been sent to prison for theft. It deals with both the incarceration of Johnny and the captivity of his dog at his parents’ London home. This is reflective of the author’s experience as a prisoner of war in Switzerland during the First World War.

The author, Joe Ackerley (born 4 November 1896), received a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the 8th Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment. He went to France in June 1915. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme (1 July 1916) he was wounded both by a gunshot to the arm and by shrapnel to one side of his body. He was rescued from a shell-hole having been lying there injured for six hours. He was invalided home but soon recovered and returned to duty on the Western Front. In May 1917 he was wounded in the leg while leading an attack near Arras and was captured by German forces. He spent the remainder of the conflict as a prisoner of war, being moved from camp to camp before ending up as an internee in a resort hotel in Switzerland. During his detention he began to write the play Prisoners of War.

Ackerley was open about his homosexuality for much of his life and this novel explores the homosexual central character Frank’s love for both Johnny and Evie. The frustration that Frank experiences in his love for both Johnny and Evie is representative of the author’s own difficulty in forming loving relationships (the author had been tormented by unrequited love when a prisoner of war). Frank frequently feels estranged from Johnny and from his wife and his parents. Johnny’s father is a villian of the piece and is the one character connected by the narrative to the war in which the author fought:
“Generally a silent, ruminative sort of man, he was liable, if addressed, to respond, and would launch, in his slow, monotonous, complacent way, into reminiscenes, usually concerned with the First World War, which seemed to have neither direction, end, nor point, excepting always to exhibit himself, in a climax one had learnt to foresee... as having come off best.”

Frank thinks of Evie in affectionate terms that are normally reserved for lovers:
“She stood before me now in the failing light of this early March evening, gazing at me intently. How pretty she was! How elegantly tailored her neat sable-gray, two-piece costume! Her sharp watchful face was framed in a delicate Elizabethan ruff, which frilled out from the lobes of her ears and covered all her throat and breast with a snowy shirt-front. She stood like a statue — no, she was too lightly poised for that; more like a dancer...”
Whereas Frank succeeds in rescuing Evie from confinement in the scullery at Johnny’s parents’ home, he ends up taking full responsibility for Evie’s care and through it is both restricted and lonely:
“Advancing age has only intensified her jealousy. I have lost all my old friends, they fear her and look at me with pity or contempt. We live entirely alone. Unless with her I can never go away.”

Cattleman

The narrative of this engaging novel, set in rural Queensland, fluctuates between the present situation of the central character, Ben, as a dying old man in his hospital bed in the 1950s and the past situations of his adult life dating back to the early 1890s. As he lies there, his conversations and his dreams bring him back to the many incidents that have shaped his life, including both World Wars.

The author, Sydney Porteous (born 18 August 1896), interweaves much of his own life experience into this novel. Like the hero of this novel, he too was a cattleman; just as Ben was known as Boss, he was known as Skip. Skip was working as a cattle station trainee in New South Wales in 1914 when the war broke out. By then Ben, from the previous generation, was married with children and had established himself on a cattle farm in Queensland. Ben and his son, Dan, go to Victoria (the author's home state) to enlist before embarking for the Middle East. The author enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in November 1914 and served in the 8th Battalion of the Light Horse Regiment. At Gallipoli that battalion began the disastrous attack on the Nek on 7 August. Much reduced in numbers, the unit had a defensive role until it withdrew on 20 December 1915. Likewise, Ben and Dan were in the 8th Australian Light Horse. The main action that Ben recollects is in Egypt and Palestine; “Gallipoli was only a memory; a senseless interlude that had cost them so many mates.”

On 1 December 1917, the author was wounded in action at El Burj in Palestine. It was at the same place that he depicted Ben and Dan and their unit relieving a Scottish unit on a prominent defensive ridge but they were among a number of soldiers sent by night to an exposed outpost. When the Turks launched an attack that night, there was no safe route of escape and the Australian soldiers had to flee with enemy soldiers on either side. Ben was wounded and many, including, Dan, were killed. Ben recalled the disaster:
“What a turn-up! What a howling mess! And what had they achieved for it all? Nothing. Not one damned thing. In fact they had only caused confusion to the men in the line by racing up the hill all mixed up with a  mob of Jackos. Probably half the outpost had been killed by their own machine-guns. What a lovely bloody thought! Well, at least Danny hadn't been killed that way. But he was dead, wasn't he? Murdered by some brainless Headquarters mug who kept them stuck out there until it was too late. If they expected Sergeant Ben Mc Ready to go back into the line and fight after that, they had another think coming. Let them come back here and put him on a crime sheet for refusing to obey an order. Let them take his bloody stripes away. He didn't want the rotten things. When he got his wind back he;d find Headquarters and tell 'em so. Tell 'em what he thought of the whole show.”

While away at war, Ben's wife had given birth to a second son, Ken. When, as an experienced pilot, he joined the Air Force at the beginning of the Second World War, Ben gave him firm advice:
“Don't knock back any promotion that comes your way. It's not a matter of higher pay. It's a matter of getting to where you're giving the orders instead of taking them. The higher up you get the fewer numskulls you've got pushing you around and the more chances you have of getting home alive. Dan was killed through the mistake of a dud officer. I wouldn't want the same thing to happen to you.”

Ben lost his second son when Ken’s plane was shot down over the English Channel. Whereas it was rare for a father to lose a son in each war, it was common for a man to lose a brother in one war and a son in the next. The author’s description of loss in this novel is reflective of his own life, not only the loss of so many fellow soldiers in the First World War but also the death of his first wife in childbirth in 1930. Ben also experienced the sudden death of his wife. Though Ben recounts great loss and hardship in his life, there is also gratitude for what has been and hope for what is to come. It has much in common with Albert Facey’s classic Australian memoir, A Fortunate Life, which I read immediately prior to this project.

The Leopard

Published posthumously in 1958, this novel, set in Sicily in the second half of the 19th century with a concluding chapter in 1910, was nominated by The Observer as one of the ten greatest historical novels. It has much in common with the fiction of the interwar period as it deals with political upheaval and social change. The central character is a prince, heraldically referred to as the Leopard.

The author, Giuseppe Tomasi (born 23 December 1896), son of the Prince of Lampedusa, based this novel on his family's experience of the erosion of its traditional influence on Sicilian society as Garibaldi's movement brought about a restructuring of politics that led to the unification of Italy. The description of loss and decay is reflective of the huge impact that the First World War (and indeed the Second World War) had on Italian society. Tomasi had served in the Italian army in the First World War, having been conscripted in 1915. In late 1917 he was captured during the Battle of Caparetto and was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp at Szombathely in Hungary. Nearing his death in 1957, he wrote in a letter of instruction to his family that his fellow prisoner, Guido Lajolo, who had emigrated to Brazil, should be notified of his death.

The destruction of human life is a motif throughout the novel. In an early scene the body of a young solider had been found in the garden:
“They had found him lying face downwards in the thick clover, his face covered in blood and vomit, crawling with ants, his nails dug into the soil; a pile of purplish intestines had formed a puddle under his bandoleer.”
A month later, the Prince recalled the soldier when viewing “six baby lambs, the last of the year’s litter, with their heads lolling pathetically above the big gash through which their life-blood had flowed a few yards before. Their bellies had been slashed open too and iridescent intestines hung out.”

Another interesting feature of the novel is the author’s flourishing use of military language. It is scattered throughout the text, almost echoing the actual military engagements going on outside the Prince’s estate:
“But the defence forces of his inner calm always on the alert in the Prince were already hurrying to his aid, with the musketry of law, the artillery of history.”

Secret of the Andes

This children's novel won the Newbery Medal in 1953 "for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children". The author, Ann Nolan Clark (born 5 December 1896), spent many years teaching literacy in the indigenous Tesuque Pueblo communities of her home state of New Mexico. She wrote 15 books about her experiences with these Native Americans. In 1945 the Institute for Inter-American Affairs sent her to Latin America and she lived and worked there for five years. She wrote several books about this period of life, including this coming-of-age novel set in highland Peru.

The significance of the choice of a boy, Cusi, as the central character in the story is reflective of the author's nurturing and loss of her only child, Thomas Patrick Clark Jr., who, as an Army Air Corps pilot, was shot down over the West Pacific in January 1944. Her husband, too, had died at a young age, leaving her to bring up her son alone. Cusi has been brought up by an old man, Chuto, in a hidden valley in the Andes and has no knowledge of his father or mother. Cusi had taken the place of another boy who had chosen not to return from his first visit to a town.

The novel sensitively deals with the destruction of a traditional society and the preservation of its culture by those left behind determined to pass on the historical values and way of life to future generations. This made me think of the nations that experienced genocide during the First World War, such as the Armenians, the Assyrians and the Greeks, and the way in which the survivors have been determined to preserve generation after generation of cultural memory and tradition. At the end of the novel, Chuto tells Cusi about the destruction of the Inca culture. We're told that “the words were precise... were deadly and cold” and that Cusi, listening, shivered:

“They, the Conquerors, came.
They came swarming into the land
with hate and with weapons.
They came.
They captured the mighty Inca,
holding him with chains.
They captured him.
Down the trails of the Andes
the Indians sent ten thousand llamas,
carrying bags of gold dust
to ransom their King
but they, the Conquerors, killed him.”

Inglorious Soldier

The author, William Monk Gibbon (born 15 December 1896), claimed that he did not wish to write this memoir of his experience as a soldier in the First World War. He referred to it as “a book which I did not want to write because it would disinter so much that was painful.” While a student at Oxford, he volunteered for the army and was given a commission in January 1916 as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Army Service Corps.

Published in 1968, Inglorious Soldier is perhaps more famous for its account of the author’s role in opposing the Easter Rising and his encounter with Francis Sheehy Skeffington, executed by an army officer without any trial, than it is for its description of military life on the Western Front. His description of winter hardship in northern France is both colourful and miserable:
“We were approaching one of the wettest spells in this harshest and coldest of war winters. As long as the frost lasted, wagon wheels, crashing across ruts and over ancient shell-holes, might crack in half; wagons might need an extra pair of horses traced up to get them up a hill; but at least the air was fresh and the surface of the ground clean: but as soon as the thaw came the roads, patched with Somme chalk, quickly dissolved into a thick glucous cream.”

In the summer of 1917 Monk Gibbon submitted a pacifist letter to his commanding officer in France. His argument was conscientious and rational:
“I have ceased to believe in either the justice or the efficacy of a death peanlty. War is the most monstrous of all death penalties — being indiscriminate. Individual hatred may to a certain extent be logical: collective hatred is well-nigh impossible. So far from being able to condemn a whole nation I would not feel justified in saying of any single individual even that he had forfeited his right to live... To say that I hate a man seven miles away I have never seen and about whom I knew nothing save that he happened to be born in one part of Europe and I in another — is a psychological impossibility. To say that... I should want to kill him is preposterous.”
This letter could have placed him in danger of being court-martialed for cowardice or disobedience; he understood that he might face a firing squad. Instead, however, his concerned parents in Dublin wrote to the War Office asking that he could come home on leave. While there he was admitted to hospital and diagnosed as suffering from neurasthenia (a.k.a. shell shock). His family had been appalled by his stance but drew comfort from an article in The Spectator which maintained that one of the ways in which shell shock manifested itself was as “morbid conscientiousness and exaggerated scrupulosity”. The remainder of his service during the First World War was in England and Ireland rather than on the Western Front where his conscience would have interfered with his duties.

Spaceward Bound

As a special treat to coincide with Science Week I have been reading the 1955 novel of astronautics, Spaceward Bound. The author, Slater Brown (born 13 November 1896), was imagining a pioneering space flight programme some years in the future while drawing upon the trends in current science that were leading up to the beginning of the space race in 1957. Brown had served in France for several months during the First World War, having volunteered in early 1917 for the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps. He was, however, arrested in September 1917 on suspicion of espionage along with his friend, the poet E.E. Cummings, because of Brown's pacifist letters home. They were held in a detention camp for several months. Cummings wrote about their incarceration in his memoir, The Enormous Room.

Brown's pacifism informs many aspects of this novel. The vision of the Young Astropolitans, the organisation behind the space flight programme, was of a future civilisation far removed from the destructive forces of the world. Rusty Brick, one of the visionaries, read from the organisation's constitution:
“We, the Young Astropolitans of America, alarmed by the sad state of the world today with its constant wars and its overcrowded cities, convinced that it is beyond repair or redemption, hereby take oath that we will not rest until we have established upon a distant star or planet, under the flag of the United States, a new land where we can raise our children in peace.”
Brick goes on to explain to the central character, a lecture in astrophysics at his university, that the overpopulation of the Earth is the root of global conflict:
“War. Constant war. And what brings it about? Overpopulation. The world has become an overcrowded slum. In 1950 the population of the world was two billion and a half. It's increasing at the rate of 25 million a year — 70,000 births every 24 hours. By the year 2000 there will be at least four billion people on the earth to feed. And the earth won't be able to feed them. Even at the present time half the children of the world are undernourished.”
(In fact the world's population was well in excess of six billion by 2000.)

Brown does not prove to the reader that the novel offers a solution to the world's problems. The academic who narrates the novel outlines the vast difficulties facing any space settlement, describing the scientific challenges of space flight and the harshness of living on the Moon or any known planet:
“Temperature on Mars? Good to middling. In the Martian tropics it rises to well above freezing point at noon and may reach 50 degrees or more. Quite enough to sustain life. Water? Water vapour at least is certainly present in the atmosphere.”
Brown was wise in understanding that any space programme based on ethics and conscientious vision might well be hijacked by others for the purposes of world domination. Homberg, the villian of the story, imagines a space station orbiting the Earth:
“A satellite dictatorship! There lies the solution. A satellite station circling the Earth at bombing range and manned by a staff of scientists who will rule the world... all problems will be solved on this satellite island of brains. Peace, war, overpopulation, economic problems, will all be settled by this staff of scientists circling the globe every two hours.”

The author depicts the Young Astropolitans (and the central character who joins their programme) as holding fast to their vision in spite of the danger and rivalry that threatens their success. He concludes with the hope that “everything will turn out all right”.

The Eye of Purgatory

This novel about death and decay was published in 1945 in the context of mass destruction of life. Its author, Jacques Spitz (born 1 October 1896), is regarded as the most important French writer of science fiction of his generation. He was born in Algeria where his father, a military officer, was stationed. Having completed his engineering studies at the École Polytechnique in Paris, he joined the army. He also served in the army in the Second World War and was awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur for this service to his country.

The two key characters in The Eye of Purgatory are a self-proclaimed German genius, Christian Dagerlöff, and an artist that he befriends, Jean Poldonski. Dagerlöff, having observed that Poldonski has lost interest in life, decides that he would be a suitable guinea pig for his experimental use of Siberian hare bacillus. He infects Poldonski with this. Poldonski’s initial response is ecstatic, considering himself to have recovered from his worldweariness:
“Something extraordinary has happened to me. I woke up cured!
My resumptions of consciousness on emerging from sleep are always immediate. When I woke up, this morning, I initially experienced a diffuse sensation, a sort of internal inflation of unknown nature, which surprised me until — at the moment when my misty gaze, encountering a pool of pale sunlight displayed on the wall facing my divan, recovered therein the magic of colour — I recognised  the sensation that is inflating my bosom as happiness: the happiness of which I had lost even the memory, the very idea; the joy of existence, quite simple, quite bald, given gratuitously, without cause or reason, accompanied by an appetite for life that multiplied my strength tenfold and made everything appear to me with a stupefying facility.”

Soon, however, he realises that the cure is more like a poison. From his experience of daily life, he concludes:
“I see things in the location where they are but in the state they will be in subsequently.”
His observation of the world is dominated by visions of decay and death, dust and ashes. A letter from Dagerlöff explains the process:
“In this bacillus, the advancement of time — the same one that confers upon the Siberian hare the presentiment of the boyar shotgun or the muzjik snare and ensures its salvation by flight or a clever detour — is a few seconds. In the improved conditions of culture that sufficed to secure the glory of the all-too-mortal Pasteur, the gene corresponding to the specific character of advancement is transmitted to the next generation in such a way that the advancement in time of the microbial colony increases with every generation.”
Poldonski has been infected with presentiment in his optic nerve and the condition is progressive, forcing him to see further and further into the future. He sees more and more decay, more and more death.
With this concept, Spitz enables the reader to look at the society shaped by war and genocide and observe no beauty and instead continuous degradation, disintegration and annihilation.

The Red Right Hand

This thriller, published in 1945, is regarded as a classic of crime fiction. Not only does it keep the reader in suspense as to who the murderer is, it also plays a trick on the reader by allowing them to make presumptions based on class prejudices.

The author, Joel Townsley Rogers (born 22 November 1896), was a prolific writer. Apparently at his peak he could write 40 pages a day. He launched his writing career while a student at Harvard. He left Harvard a year early in order to join the navy air corps. He undertook training as a pilot in Virginia and was keen to go to Europe to serve in the war but the armistice came before he could be sent overseas.

The plot centres on wealthy Inis and his young fiancé, Elinor, who drive from New York to find a state where they quickly can get married. On their journey, they stop to give a lift to a tramp. When they stop for a picnic in a secluded location, a murder takes place. The author enjoys being playful with language, such as the subtly macabre:
“They weren't going fast, just idling along well below the wartime speed limit, enjoying the wind and sunlight and the sight of the blue hills stretching roll on roll ahead. There was time enough to kill before they reached Vermont.”
Another example of this linguistic playfulness is that the murder is being investigated by a physician by the name of Dr Riddle. He happens to be on the lonely road when the murder takes place and finds himself embroiled in the aftermath. He desperately tries to piece the mystery together by drawing on one of the popular textbooks from college, Homicidal Psychopathology. Autobiographically, the author has Riddle, as narrator, explaining he was “scheduled for flight surgeon in the Navy air arm, two stripes and a half, next month, after battling for three years to get my release from St John's and S. and P.”

 

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

This novel is regarded as one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century and was very widely read when it was published in 1943 (it sold 300,000 copies in just six weeks).

The author, Betty Smith (born 15 December 1896), grew up in poverty in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and based the novel on her own adolescent experience. Her central character, Francie, spends much of her childhood accompanied more by books than by friends. In response to her mother Katie's question, “What must I do, Mother, what must I do to make a different world for her?", the grandmother advised Francie's mother, Katie, that she should read to her family every evening from the Bible and from the complete works of Shakespeare:
“The secret lies in the reading and the writing. You are able to read. Every day you should read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day.”

The concluding chapters show Francie gaining independence through the education that she has received. The young men on the streets of New York are preparing to go to Europe to fight in the war. A soldier admirer on a date with Francie speaks of his fear:
“I may not come back from over there and I'm afraid... afraid. I might die... die.”
Months later, she thinks of him:
“He was with the Rainbow Division — the Division even now pushing into the Argonne Woods. Was he even now lying dead in France under a plain white cross?”

Second Wind

This is an excellent insight into the German experience of the First World War and its aftermath, including the author’s difficult escape from Austria after the Anschluss. Carl Zuckmayer (born 27 December 1896) served in the field artillery on the Western Front. In the 1920s after several years of disappointment he became a successful dramatist.

Written in 1940, this autobiography was published in English in 1941. It was an important book of the period, giving readers a personal view into the background to the Second World War.

Zuckmayer went straight from school into the army on the outbreak of the First World War. In that respect he was typical of his class of boys aged 17 or 18:
“Only five of the 21 in our class did not volunteer on the first day of the war; three of them belonged to a Catholic seminary for priests and... had to join the Red Cross... two were physically unfit. These five envied us and wept for chagrin and despair. Of the 16 who went into the war nine fell in battle. Two died from the effects of the war. One, while still at the front, committed suicide. Four lived on. I am one of the four.”

Zuckmayer recalled the youthful enthusiasm for war which he shared with so many of his compatriots as well as his counterparts:
“Like young lovers who do not know the reality of love, its lust for power, its cruelty and magnificence... so were we who rushed into war under the impression that it was an intoxicating and noble adventure. We were wild, exalted, uninhibited, full of appetite and awkwardness. And again, like lovers, we were full of ourselves, hypnotised by conceit.”
He wrote candidly about dealing with fear on the Western Front when recounting a particularly tense battle:
“During that night I may have killed some of the Senegalese. I did not mean to do anything bad. I was afraid. Yet I had been at the front for two years by then. I knew that courage was nothing more than controlled, repressed fear. If you did not know fear, you are not brave but just stupid. And we, at the front, knew that you cannot rid yourself of fear; it always comes back like sweat or digestion and you simply evolve a technique of dealing with it, which means that in spite of terror you continue to function with precision and keep your head. In return for that, your superior technique in handling your fear, you receive medals and laudatory mention in dispatches.”

In the midst of the terror of war, Zuckmayer’s dignity and kindness shone through:
“Once, during the spring offensive in March 1918, I came across a dead Englishman whose lettercase had fallen out of his pocket. I opened it and found a little coloured card with a printed message to which were added two lines in a child's handwriting:
                          CHRISTMAS GREETINGS
         Kindest thoughts and best wishes for a Happy Christmas
                                          To: Bob
                          From: His Sister Dolly, with Love
I looked long into the face of this young 'enemy' and I can still remember it today. I could imagine, from his features, what his little sister Dolly looked like. I mourned for this Bob. I thought to myself, ‘Why is he lying there and not I?’ Those are dangerous thoughts. When you begin that you cannot stand war much longer.”

The Secret of the Empire

Heimito von Doderer (born 5 September 1896) served in the Austro-Hungarian army from April 1915 and shaped this novel around his experiences as a prisoner-of-war in Siberia during the Russian Civil War Though published in German in 1930, the novel only appeared in English translation in 1998.  In his afterword, the translator, John S. Barrett, refers to an earlier book in this project:
“Like the Englishman, Edmund Blunden, who wrote in his introduction to Undertones of War (see my blog), ‘I must go over the ground again,’ Doderer returned — in his mind at least — to go over the ground on which he had stood some 50 years before, to Siberia. At the very end, in a losing race against death in 1966, he was reworking the themes of The Secret of the Empire, reshaping the events and people encountered into a novel in his mature style, titled Der Grenzwald (The Border Forest).”

In another part of the afterword, Barrett brings to mind the biography of Eric Lomax (The Railway Man). Lomax was a railway enthusiast who as a prisoner-of-war in Burma in the Second World War was tortured in the construction of a railway. Barrett ponders:
“Some of the author’s earliest memories were of the rail lines, the viaducts and the puffing trains near the home rented by his father while he was designing and overseeing the construction of the commuter lines into Vienna. What must it have meant later, to the young Austrian soldier, to be carried off to the most memorable time and place of his life, into Siberia, by the same creatures of steel?”

Doderer detailed the plight of the thousands of prisoners:
“In the gigantic camps... where the captured enlisted men live stacked on top of one another in bunks without bedding or covers... the Russian state is squeezing every bit of work out of those man that can possibly be squeezed out. The rapidly expanding camp cemetery receives the worn-out material.”

For the survivors at the end of the ordeal there was, however, compassion:
“To those wandering homeward, the peasants along the way still offered, a thousand times over, a hospitable roof, a friendly word, and shared their bread and their milk pails with them, and asked whether their mothers were still alive back home, whether perhaps there were wives or sweethearts or maybe even children... who were awaiting their return...
And then there were those last, memorable conversations about the sin of taking part in wars and the salvation from it through our Lord, Jesus Christ. In that way the peasants imparted to those wanderers... that most necessary advice, offered in such a touching way even to many a godless one.”

Verdict of Twelve

This novel, published in 1940, is a multifaceted crime mystery that focuses on the trial of a woman for the murder of the orphaned great-nephew who had been entrusted to her care. The author, Raymond Postgate (born 6 November 1896), was an Oxford-educated academic. On graduation in 1917, he sought exemption from military service on the grounds of pacifism and socialism. His case was dismissed. He was offered a non-combatant role in the army but he refused it. He was then forcibly conscripted before being discharged as medically unfit.

Postgate’s pacifism and socialism are visible in several elements of this novel. In particular, he includes in his accounts of the background of the members of the jury either tragic outcomes of the war or a well-defined class consciousness. These background accounts in their variety and eccentricity resemble the approach of Georges Perec’s Life: a user's manual. Victoria Atkins, for example, had moved to London to work in a munitions factory and by the end of the war had saved some £200. Her little niece was orphaned by the war:
"Irene Olga Hutchins, sole reminder of the two younger male Atkinses... 'two' because there was a regrettable doubt which of them was the father, and both were beyond reach of questioners in a Flanders cemetery."
Another juror reflects:
"Adrian, Frederick, Lionel, Alistair... where were they... They were all golden or dark boys, whom he had loved passionately, and who had elegantly supported his uncouth and obvious affection... Where were they now? Adrian, Maurice, Alistair, Lionel... some of them were dead. Handsome and young an dead..."
"There has been, after all, one who had not been indifferent to his shambling tutor. He had been allowed to call him Dion... His Dion had enlisted in 1915 in the R.F.C. and had come back within a week broken. He lived three days in hospital, unconscious: he was buried in the cemetery of the Wiltshire village where he was born."

As for the young boy, Philip, and his great-aunt at the centre of the trial, the author tells of that family's loss in the war:
"Philip's grandfather, Sir Henry Arkwright,... had had three sons to inherit his considerable fortune. All three had served in the army during the 1914 war. Michael, the eldest, had been killed with thousands of others at Passchendaele. Arnold, the professional soldier, had been the only one to come through unscathed. He had served in the East and after the war had gone with his young wife to take up a responsible post in East Africa. Robert, the youngest, was called up in February 1918. Before he went out, he married Rosalie Brentt [the woman later charged with murder]... It was a war marriage... Robert never had time either to repent or to feel his [father's] wrath. He was posted as missing in July 1918: he was never heard of again."

The Promised Hand

This Gujarati novel was a surprising delight. I kept thinking of Shakespeare (there are definitely shades of Othello and Romeo and Juliet). The author, Jhaverchand Meghani (born 28 August 1896), originally wrote this novel in weekly instalments in a newspaper (à la Dickens). It was then published as a book in 1938. Interestingly, the author explains in a foreword that the gradual serialisation allowed readers to influence the development of the plot:
“The letters started arriving soon after the first instalment appeared and continued to come as  the story progressed. From near and far, from villages and cities, the college-educated and commoners, men and women alike, wrote to me and suggested the direction the story should follow.”

As the title suggests, the story focuses on a traditional betrothal. The families of Sukhlal and Sushila had agreed when they were still young children that they would get married. In the intervening period, however, Sushila’s father brings his family from rural Gujarat to bustling Mumbai. As her father becomes more and more successful in commerce, he develops a prejudice against the ordinary village families that used to be his neighbours back in Gujarat. He shows more and more determination to bring an end to the betrothal and find a more prosperous husband for his daughter. Sushila, however, has other ideas. As with Charles Plisnier’s Nothing to Chance, the author describes female characters as being confident and free from male domination or constraint (though the traditions and customs remain strong). No matter how ruthless or menacing her father is, Sushila, aided by other women, is resolute. Unlike Juliet, she succeeds in overcoming all the obstacles placed in the way of her marrying Sukhlal.

An interesting historical anecdote is that one of Sukhlal’s cousins intimidates Sushila’s father into retreat but sarcastically proffers an apology:
“Please forgive me, Sheth! I have also joined Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent group, sort of. It’s only my hands that have remained outside.”


Alongside the central plot, there is a constant theme of loss. From the start, Sukhlal’s mother is confined to bed with a serious illness and the shock of hearing of a threat to her son’s betrothal is fatal blow. Sushila quickly takes over motherly care of Sukhlal’s young siblings even though the wedding is still in doubt. Another character, Leena, had nursed Sukhlal in hospital with a strong sense of remembrance of a loved one who had died young. The novel’s conclusion has Leena making a poignant gesture towards the young couple as she prepares herself for the possibility of her own death as part of a relief team responding to a severe epidemic.

The Yearling

This lengthy novel, published in 1938, earned the author the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1939. Though set in the 1870s in the aftermath of the Civil War, it describes experiences of loss similar to that which shaped the generation of the First World War and the Wall Street Crash. Moreover, its description of loss helped to prepare its young readers for the death of brothers and friends during the Second World War.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (born 8 August 1896) had moved to northern Florida with her husband in 1928. Although an outsider, she quickly made a deep connection with the local environment and it inspired her to write short stories and novels immersed in the locality and seasoned with the Southern dialect. Her first novel, South Moon Under, published in 1933, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

The Yearling concentrates on the humble existence of small farmer, Ezra Baxter, son of a preacher, and his wife, Ora. Ezra was nicknamed Penny because of his size. They had many children:
“The family had come. Ora Baxter was plainly built for child-bearing. But it had seemed as though his seed were as puny as himself. The babies were frail and almost as fast as they came they sickened and died. Penny had buried them one by one in a cleared place among the black-jack oaks, where the poor loose soil made the digging easier... He had carved little wooden tombstones for all.”
“There had been a hiatus in the births. Then, when the loneliness of the place had begun to frighten him a little, and his wife was almost past the age of bearing, Jody Baxter was born and thrived.”

The Baxter parents bring up a single child as a treasure: he is the survivor. The author tells the parallel story of another survivor: a fawn, whose mother has been killed by Penny in an emergency, is adopted by Jody. Jody goes hunting with his father not as a pastime but as a necessity both for obtaining meat and hides to trade and as a means of subduing the threat that predators pose to the livestock on the Baxter farm. Jody tells his father “I hate things dyin.” His father explains the reality he must come to understand:
“Nothin's spared, son, if that be ary comfort to you... Well, hit's a stone wall nobody's yit clumb over. You kin kick it and crack your head agin it and holler but nobody'll listen and nobody'll answer.”

Jody is stunned by the death of his young friend and neighbour, Fodder-wing. He observed the boy’s body on the death bed:
“Fodder-wing's silence was intolerable. Now he understood. This was death.  Death was a silence that gave back no answer. Fodder-wing would never speak to him again.”

When the two, boy and deer, come of age, these two yearlings are forced to confront the harsh reality of survival on the Florida scrub. If Jody insists that his friendly deer remains his pet, he will continue to destroy the crops that his parents depend on for their very existence. If he loses the deer, he loses the only companion he has other than his parents. In the end, his parents force Jody to lose the deer. His father tries to console him:
“I've wanted life to be easy for you. Easier'n 'twas for me. A man's heart aches, seein' his young uns face the world. Knowin' they got to git their guts tore out, the way his was tore. I wanted to spare you, long as I could. I wanted you to frolic with your yearlin'. I knowed the lonesomeness he eased for you. But ever' man's lonesome. What's he do then? What's he to do when he gits knocked down? Why, take it for his share and go on.”

Boss of the River

Published in 1937 as Menaud, maître-draveur, this Quebecois novel is regarded as one of the most significant nationalist novels of Quebec and in 2005 was selected as one of Canada’s 100 Most Important Books by the Literary Review of Canada. It is first and foremost a demonstration against the Anglophone takeover of Francophone lands for the exploitation of its natural resources.

The author, Félix-Antoine Savard (born 31 August 1896), was a Roman Catholic priest ordained in 1922. It was his ministry in the rural Charlevoix region that inspired him to write Boss of the River. Throughout the novel the central character, Menaud, is concerned with loss — some of what he fears losing is perhaps metaphorical for the greater loss of land and livelihood. He loses his son, Joson, to the river when they are part of a team trying to move huge numbers of logs downstream:
“Already the evening, like a grave digger, began to cast over the scene its cumulating dusk and here the man entered the very valley of torture, now on his knees, gazing up at the skies, imploring that at least there be granted to him the body of his son, to bury it at home beside his mother under the big birch, whose bark in a strong wind rustled like a prayer.”
Savard’s flowery prose is not to everyone’s taste. Interestingly, though, the author had described the scene prior to the young man’s death in the language of war, saying how the men in trying to subdue the raging log jam were “hurling insults at the enemy, shouting the satisfaction that surged in their hot blood”.

Having lost his wife and his son, he struggles to keep hold of his daughter. She has secretly agreed to marry Délié, the traitor in the community, who has arranged to sell the local land rights to the Anglophone outsiders. Another of the young men, Alexis, who had tried to rescue Joson from the river, is a more honourable suitor. He refuses to return to the work on the river:
“It would make me think too much about Joson. It is terrible — terrible how that haunts me.”

The concluding scenes of the novel depict Menaud suffering mental torment:
“The strangers have come! The strangers have come! Joson! Alexis! The mountain is full of them — the whole country is full of them”
He, however, clings to a nationalist trust:
“We are a people that knows not how to perish.”

And then the Harvest

Fedor Panferov (born 20 September 1896) came from the Volga region of south-central Russia. Much of his journalism and fiction focused on rural development under Stalin. His epic novel Brusski, published in four parts between 1928 and 1937, was the first literary account of Soviet collectivisation. This single-volume translation into English was published in 1939 with a clearer agricultural title.

The central characters of this propagandist novel are heroes of the proletariat. They are involved in increasing agricultural output, constructing a dam, developing an iron-and-steel industry, manufacturing tractors and many other ventures. Foremost among them is Kirill Zhdarkin, organiser of the metallurgical and tractor works and secretary of the town's party committee. Though viewed heroically at the beginning and end of the novel, the novel also describe Kirill’s adultery and the breakdown of his relationship with Steshka, the mother of his child. As he rages at the prospect of losing Steshka, he rapes her and she abandons the home. The author decides that even with such severe flaws in his character Kirill’s reputation can be redeemed. At the conclusion of the novel, Steshka returns to her love for Kirill as he shows the strength of the character on the eve of the 20th anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution. In a different context, this redemption and forgiveness is a common motif of literature. In the context of Stalin’s Russia, however, this is not a moral restoration of Kirill but rather a political device. A hero of the proletariat has to be shown to overcome all his weaknesses. There was no place for ultimate failure in the Soviet Union of the 1930s.


Kirill is not only depicted as a hero of Stalin’s Russia, he had previously been awarded the Order of the Red Banner for military valour during the Civil War. On a visit to the Kremlin, he recalled that Stalin never wore the badge:
“... he also had been a military man and an outstanding one at that. He had held the supreme command of more than one front, he had worked out the brilliant plan for shattering the enemy. But he never wore any decorations.”

The key heroic event of the novel, however, was the death of Natasha, a young pregnant woman who died trying to rescue a team of female peat workers from a devastating bog fire. The peat workers escaped a burning train by jumping into the grey ash left behind by the fire but “at once sank and fell to a squatting position, clutching their bare legs with their hands, writhing, struggling, bursting into flame. Natasha displayed the impulsive courage that many soldiers showed during the First World War:
“Not realising what was happening to the girls, carried away by the elemental desire to save them, she flung herself towards them and also sank into the grey ash. In a moment she was transformed into a little flaming bonfire. She struggled to her feet... but the flames caught her away and flung her back into the inferno.”
Kirill, who had been with Natasha when she did this, asked himself:
“I've left Natasha Poronina and the girl peat-workers in the fire. How that wound of mine is to be healed I don't know.”
Similarly, many who fought in the First World War added survivor guilt to their grief.

Nothing to Chance

Though written by a man, this novel largely takes the viewpoint of the young women who are central to the plot. Published in 1936, the novel is set in the north of France near to where much of the trench warfare of the Great War took place. The author, Charles Plisnier (born 13 December 1896) came from the Mons district of Belgium, an area similarly devastated by the war. In early 1917 he had gone to the Netherlands in an unsuccessful attempt to join the Belgian army of resistance. Instead he took to the cause of Communism following the success of the Bolshevik revolution. It's hardly surprising, therefore, that the context for this epic novel is an industrial bourgeois family that owns a small-town shoe factory.

At the outset of the novel, Fabienne, the daughter of the factory chief, sets the scene for the battlegrounds of the story:
“To start with there’s been this ridiculous war. It’s not only left us short of men — it’s made the ones that are still alive think far too much of themselves.”
The simple French title translates as Marriages. Fabienne abandons an unhappy engagement and carefully contrives to lure Maxime, one of her father’s salesmen, into a desperate marriage of convenience. In parallel plots we read of the similarly unconventional marriages of Fabienne’s cousins, Marcelle and Christa. All three marriages are portrayed as having been instigated by the women (a revolutionary feminist concept for the time perhaps — but the author ascribes to them a prejudice learnt in romantic novels).

Whereas Maxime might have been shown as a hero of the proletariat in his ascent from serving the firm and its clients to managing the whole business with rationalisation and economy of labour, he is instead shown as a villian both in matters of money and of the heart. Plisnier concludes the novel with a victory for Fabienne over Maxime, the man she had chosen to be her husband but who had undermined the marriage with infidelity and disloyalty:
“She was beautiful again with a kind of beauty which only adorns the very strong and unimpeded. In her whole bearing was that resplendent dignity which maturity bestows on women who have won.”
That generation of young French women are shown here to have become assertive through the responsibilities that arose due to the absence of men during the war. In contrast the narrative implies that many of the men in post-war French society were second-rate, weak individuals that could not fill the shoes of the fine young men who were killed or maimed during the war. This also is in contrast to the men of the previous generation. Marcelle’s mother had seen her marriage and her man far more positively than her daughter viewed hers:
“Married, she had loved him for his loyalty, his earnest method of dealing with life, his quiet attentions.”
Perhaps then this is a novel of nostalgia, of mourning for a society alienated from the standards that had existed before the war.

Tempest in Paradise

This thriller is set in the Far Eastern city of Harbin in 1932 around the time of Japan’s imposition of a new state (Manchukuo) in Manchuria. The Australian author, Janet Mitchell (born 3 November 1896), knew the city well (see her reportage from there http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/4462104). As an explanatory preface she wrote that “many of the incidents in this story actually happened” but “except for allusions to public personages... no references to any living person is made or intended”.

The plot reveals many interesting extensions of the geopolitics of the First World War: the increasing regional dominance of Japan, the brutal control of Soviet society, the White Russian diaspora, the efforts of the League of Nations and the fragile existence of British and American expatriates in Far Eastern outposts. One of the expatriates, W.E. Maunder, editor of The Harbin Morning Star, describes the setting:
“No, it's not a bad place, Harbin, really. Apart from the fact that politically it is one of the most interesting places in the world, especially now, with the Japanese sweeping up from the south and doing just what they dam’ well like, while the Powers blether at Geneva, with the Soviet crouching in the north, with one eye winking from Vladivostok over the Sea of Japan and the other skimming across Outer Mongolia to China — apart from all this, from which anything might emerge, from a second Korea to a world war, there’s its human interest, to use a somewhat trite expression.”

The central character is Boris Moitev, a young poet and aspiring leader of the counter-revolutionary movement among the Harbin Russians. The other main characters are Russian members of his household and some British expatriates, including Madeline Vincent, who falls in love with him. Madeline learns to see the severity of her existence: “Life! What was it all about? Only one thing had become clear to her lately, that life was something that hurt you...” She also reflects on the difference between her generation and that of her cousin Agnes who she is staying with in Harbin: “...we are so often at cross purposes. It's the battle of the generations — of the pre-wars who accept life and the post-wars who challenge it.”

The final scene of the novel happens in the context of the chaos that was caused by the devastating Sungari River Flood and a consequent cholera epidemic. The author does not attempt to bring the romance of Boris and Madeline to a cheerful conclusion. Perhaps the First World War had turned young writers away from ‘happily ever after’; instead a romantic tale could end in tragedy; the hero that the reader had come to identify with would not survive. At the denouement, Boris has these words of his friend Tanya at the front of his mind: “..life and death don't matter. Only two things count — pity for others; for ourselves, courage!”

Night on the Galactic Railroad

Japan played a minor but regionally important role in the First World War as an ally of Britain. Its navy was active both in restricting German and Austrian naval activity in the Pacific and in seizing German and Austrian territories in China and in Micronesia. In early 1917 Japanese ships arrived in the Mediterranean to assist the Royal Navy. 

This imaginative novel, written around 1927, explores death and the afterlife from a child’s perspective. The author, Kenji Miyazawa (born 27 August 1896), experienced serious health problems throughout his life and wrote with a special awareness of mortality. The story was published posthumously in 1934, the author having died of pneumonia in the previous year.

The two central characters in this novella are Giovanni and Campanella, who are close friends and the sons of close friends (their fathers). One night Giovanni is on a grassy hill above his home town. There he gets on a mysterious train and finds that Campanella is already on board. The train brings them through space with passengers boarding and disembarking at the various stations along the way. When the conductor approaches Giovanni, he shows him a ticket that he did not know he had in his pocket. One of the passengers explains to him:
“Now this is something! That ticket will take you anywhere, even all the way to the true Heaven... No, perhaps even farther! It will take you anywhere this four-dimensional Galactic Railroad is capable of going. To have something like this on your person... you must be very important!”

Miyazawa tells about three of the passengers that board the train and have come from a ship that has sunk having hit an iceberg (as the Titanic had). These two children (a brother and sister) and their tutor did not get places on the lifeboats:
“I held onto these two for as long as I could... and now we're here.”
They are heading for Heaven. The girl tells them a tale about a scorpion that is cornered by a weasel. Fearing for his life, he runs away but falls into a well and starts to drown. He then started to pray:
“Oh, God. How many lives have I stolen to survive? Yet when it came my turn to be eaten by the weasel, I selfishly ran away... If only I'd let the weasel eat me, I could have helped him live another day. God, please hear my prayer. Even if my life has been meaningless, let my death be of help to others.”

Campanella looks out the window and observes his mother in Heaven. He leaves the train to join her. The scene that immediately follows is Giovanni waking on the same grassy hill. He walks to the bridge over the river and finds a commotion there. One of his classmates tells him what has happened:
“Zanelli leaned too far over on the boat we were in... It ended up tipping over and Zanelli fell in but Campanella dived in right after him and pushed him back up to the surface. Zanelli got pulled back into the boat... but Campanella... never resurfaced.”
As was often said about acts of self-sacrifice during the war,
“Greater love has no man than this than to lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)

Meredith and Co.

This entertaining novel (published in 1933) about life in a preparatory school in the south of England draws heavily on the experiences of the author, George Mills (born 1 October 1896), as a young master from 1925 to 1926 at Windlesham House School in Sussex.

It would, however, be possible to construe that he was imagining the school in an immediate pre-war context with some of the boys destined for active service towards the end of the war.
“The mind of the small boy attaches tremendous importance to trivial matters. When the whole of Europe is swaying on the brink of a precipice, anxious citizens are snatching extra editions of the papers, and harassed parents are wondering how they can afford to educate and clothe their children, the small boy is knitting his brows and puzzling over a paper aeroplane!”


Whereas Mills might have been looking back at the financial disaster of the late 1920s, he might also have had in mind his own prep school days at Parkfield School (also in Sussex) and the impact the war had on his schoolmates. He hints at this remembrance at the end of the book in relating what happened to the schoolboy Meredith after he left prep school. Though describing an interwar context for his career, surely the loss of life points to Mills’s memories of lost lives during the war:
“Meredith was not thinking of the future. He did not know it but he was standing on the threshold of true greatness and was destined, after a fine Public School career, to pass some years of self-sacrifice and devotion to duty in the African swamps where, as a young doctor, he was to lay down his life fighting a cholera plague.”
The choice of the words ‘self-sacrifice’, ‘lay down his life’ and ‘fighting’ strongly suggests that he was reflecting on the war dead. Mills had served from June 1916 as a Private in the Rifle Brigade and later transferred to the Royal Army Service Corps in 1917. (His military service record is available at Ancestry.com but does not reveal much about his service.)

To-morrow's Yesterday

This satirical novel (published in 1932) captures much of the growing tension of Europe in the early 1930s and accurately predicted that the Great War had not been ‘the war to end all wars’.  John Gloag (born 10 August 1896) opted not to present his sensational science fiction scenario as the main plot but instead to feature it is a film being promoted by the ruthless writers of the advertising agency who are the central characters of the novel. The attempts by the advertising agency to manipulate the opinion of the masses brings to mind the propaganda machinery of the totalitarian regimes on the rise in Europe at that time.

Early in the novel Bryce muses about the First World War:
“I'm sorry in a way that if there's going to be another war that it won't come in my time...I was just old enough to take part in the last and I'd love to put a spoke in the next lot of nonsense by proclaiming to everybody that I was going to be a conscientious objector and as I'd fought in the Great War they couldn't say it was because of my skin and I'd make it clear it was because of my sense.”
This might well be considered autobiographical comment. John Gloag had himself fought on the Western Front. As an old man he recalled the impact that his experience of conflict had had on him:
“I served in the Welsh Guards during the latter part of the 1914-18 War, and was in France (as a subaltern)... with the first battalion... and took part in the big push that smashed into the Hindenburg Line in August 1918, when I collected some lungfuls of poison gas (our own, chiefly, for we were far ahead of our barrage in the attack when I was knocked out) and invalided home... What I experienced in the army and on active service had a profound effect upon my imagination and to some extent coloured my fiction when I wrote short stories and novels after the Great War. (Engraved on one of the routine medals... suspended from... the Victory ribbon... are the words: ‘The Great War for Civilisation’. That’s a laugh, in view of the sort of civilisation we’ve had ever since!)”

The advertising agency has been entrusted with a campaign to promote a new theatre in London for which the opening attraction is the science-fiction film To-morrow's Yesterday.  The film depicts a world war and its drastic consequences for civilisation. The levels of destruction resemble that expected in any World War III in popular imagination during the Cold War:
“An official declaration of war against the United States of America has not yet been made by the United Soviet States of Russia and China but... a fleet of long-distance planes... raided California, completely destroying San Francisco, Los Angeles and Hollywood... thus dealing a crushing blow at America's ability to organise war propaganda. A note radiogrammed from Washington to Moscow demanding and explanation has not been answered. It is 79 years since the U.S.A. waged a successful European war and the victories of 1918 have not been forgotten in the Great Republic.”
Within a short time, rival alliances went to war in Europe —
France invaded England; “All London south of the Thames has been on fire for thirty hours”; Paris and Bordeaux were “gassed out”; Italian planes “reduced Vienna, Salzburg and Munich to ashes”. (As an aside, Gloag correctly foresaw Irish neutrality in the Second World War: “The Irish Free State declared itself an independent republic at 15.30 yesterday afternoon. President Mullins immediately proclaimed the strict neutrality of the republic and followed the proclamation by a message to the President of France, wishing all success to the French arms.”)
Later the U.S. war secretary seeks to notify Moscow of America's desire for negotiations but “Moscow does not reply, having been razed to the ground with high-powered bombs by combined French and Polish air squadrons”.

What survives is a world that returns to a primitive pre-industrial way of life. The tribal ritual of sacrificing a man to satisfy the animal masters of the jungle is prefaced by ceremonial words remembering what once was:
“We could shoot our arrows with the sound of thunder and none could withstand them; we were the masters and the lords of all that flew in the air, or ran on the earth, or swam in the waters under the earth. We remember the glory and the power. We were the lords of creation.”
The film then skips to a scene in the distant future: “it is now the year three million, one hundred and ten thousand, three hundred and eighty-eight... There have been no men in the world for over two million years.”
The ‘society’ of that era was said to have “evolved from the savage mammals that preyed on the last men.”

After the première of the film has been described in detail, the novel moves on to describe the public response to the sensational storyline and the continuing promotion of the film by the advertising agency. The film had received much negative criticism in the media but the agency sought to use all this publicity to increase the commercial success of the film.


A newspaper was “indignant that out-of-date war scaremongering should be thrust upon the British public under the guise of entertainment”. Gloag’s prescience, however, is revealed on the final page. Bryce read the stop-press column on the front page of the newspaper:
“A Royal Proclamation, declaring a State of Emergency, was signed at 10.40 p.m.”
The final sentence of the novel foresees events only a few years from the time when it was written:
“As he walked home to Knightsbridge at midnight the sky was barred with searchlights.”

Wide Open Town

The copper mining town of Butte, Montana (renamed Silver Bow in the novel) is the setting for this novel centred on the lives of two Irishmen, the young John Donnelly, a miner, and his uncle, Roddy Cornett, the spieler (town crier). Though born in Minnesota (22 December 1896), the author, Myron Brinig, grew up in Butte and much of his early fiction includes semi-fictional accounts of the town’s affairs and characters. Wide Open Town takes in the labour politics of the imposition of martial law in 1914 in response to dangerous tensions among the miners and the 1917 lynching of militant socialist Frank Little (renamed Phil Whipple in the novel). Though Brinig was drafted and saw active service in the latter months of the First World War, the only mentions of soldiers in this novel are to those imposing martial law.

Brinig sees his central characters as otherwise simple men transformed by words and captured by dreams. He affirms aesthetics and artistic imagination as strong features in the character of working men. Though depicted as tough, Roddy Cornett delighted in reading poetry:
“The only books he had read in his life were the Bible and Walt Whitman and though reading was something of a strain for him, he could read Whitman for hours at a time...and sometimes he read Walt Whitman to the Red Light girls. Within their cramped, sinful cribs, the girls did not understand Walt Whitman but they were entranced with the color and virility of Roddy's voice.”
A friend of his, Christian Weber, is a talented German pianist but without any cultured appearance:
“Passing Christian in the street, you would never have taken him for a skilled pianist. He looked more like a garbage collector, or worse, an out-and-out bum. His breath always stank of alcohol and the fumes of cheap tobacco; his fingers were stained with nicotine so that no fastidious woman would have him about. Those who shrank from him did not understand that he was truly in the tradition of great musicians.”

Whereas the context of the novel is about socialist revolution in the mining community, the liberty that Brinig envisions as the aspiration of his central characters is of a different nature. Roddy Cornett waxes lyrical:
“Free was a deep word and covered immense spaces over land and sea. To run free along a road, along a street, to climb a mountain, free! To swim a river, to stand under the sun, to lie in deep clover. Man is too much imprisoned. To travel over far countries, to talk with a Chinaman, an Indian, a Japanese. To sit and look long at a sunset, to eat by a campfire in the woods, to drive a dog sledge through the snow. To read free. To breathe free. To sit by a sick man or a woman or a child and comfort the sick and cool their foreheads. To stand under the stars...Life is so short, let us be free.” His nephew John sees freedom in similar ways: climbing Big Butte Mountain with his sweetheart Zola and looking to save enough money to move to California to live together by the sea. At the top of the mountain, John turns to Zola and asks

“Do you see that beauty down there? Look well! That's the world down there and here we are above it all... Look, Zola, how wild and beautiful it is up here! And look down there at the mines, men going down thousands of feet and never breathing the fresh air. There are men who never stood up here like we are now, men who have lived the better part of their lives away from the sun an' the air!” His is the oratory of the freedom fighter, Phil Whipple, but for a gentler kind of liberation.

 

Undertones of War

In 1930 War Books, a critical guide to published writings on the Great War, was published. In it the Dublin-born author, Cyril Falls, both a veteran and an official historian of the war, rated each publication, awarding one star for good, two for very good and three for “of superlative merit”. One of those to achieve the accolade of three stars was Undertones of War by the poet Edmund Blunden (born 1 November 1896). Falls considered it a masterpiece.

Blunden's coming of age as an acclaimed poet coincided with his war service with the Royal Sussex Regiment on the Western Front. At Givenchy he was summoned to battalion headquarters:
“A review of my poems has been printed in the Times Literary Supplement (a kind review it was, if ever there was one!) and my Colonel has seen it and is overjoyed at having an actual author in his battalion.”
He relates also that a General “had done me the honour to read” a manuscript of his poems about Ypres and “had perused them with interest”. Whereas many of his war poems were written while he was at the Front, his prose reminiscences in Undertones of War were written in 1924 in a hotel room in Tokyo where he had gone to be professor of English literature in the Imperial University.

While on the Western Front, Blunden was not only writing poems but also drawing comfort and inspiration from the poetry of others. He was guided through a time of heightened danger and risk of death by the words of Edward Young, an English poet of the 18th century:
“... bullets began to strike round the entrance of my pillbox, as if the Germans had advanced their machine-guns. We were supposed to have been making advances on this front, too. During this period my indebtedness to an 18th-century poet became enormous. At every spare moment I read in Young's Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality and I felt the benefit of this grave and intellectual voice, speaking out of a profound 18th-century calm, often in metaphor which came home to one even in a pillbox. The mere amusement of discovering lines applicable to our crisis kept me from despair.”


As an old man, Blunden admitted that his mind had never properly left the battlefield behind:
“My experiences in the First World War have haunted me all my life and for many days I have, it seemed, lived in that world rather than this.”

Diary of an Unknown Aviator

Elliott White Springs (born 31 July 1896) was an American pilot in the Royal Air Force during the First World War. Unlike many men who were too traumatised to want to remember the details of the war, he wrote extensively about his experiences. In 1926 he brought to publication a book based on the diary entries of his pilot colleague and friend, John Mc Gavock Grider (born 18 May 1892), who had been killed in June 1918. Another pilot colleague, Clayton Knight, provided illustrations for the book. In the first edition there was no mention of Grider's diary and readers might have construed that this was a device of Spring's autobiographical musings. In the second edition, however, Springs referred to the existence of the diary but did not name Grider. His other books included Nocturne Militaire (1927), Above the Bright Blue Sky (1928), Leave Me with a Smile (1928), In the Cool of the Evening (1929), Romance of the Air (1930), War Birds and Lady Birds (1931), The Rise and Fall of Carol Banks (1931), Pent up on a Penthouse (1931) and Clothes Make the Man (1948), several of which concerned aviation.

Grider and Springs enjoyed sparring as aspiring writers. In one entry, Grider wrote admiringly about his colleague's command of language: “If Springs isn't hung first, he'll be a great writer some day.” He also records in its entirety a mock epic poem written by Springs about an affair that one of the boys was having with a young lady. Another anecdote is of Springs getting into a heated literary argument with the novelist Arnold Bennett, who was said to be “out here getting some local colour for a book”. Of Knight he wrote: “He showed me some sketches he had made of planes and flights. They were very good. That boy will be an artist some days if he lives thru it.”

Grider, from Arkansas, writes with typical Southern frankness about his own experience and that of the men around him: “About ten of the boys have given it up and just quit flying. No nerve. They never should have enlisted if they didn't intend to see it thru after they found it was dangerous. Jeff Dwyer gets them jobs at Headquarters or puts them in charge of mechanics. But yellow is yellow whether you call it nerves or not. I'm just as scared sometimes as any of them.”

Another colleague landed “after he'd been out alone and his plane had about fifty holes in it...He was as limp as a rag and had to be assisted to his quarters.” Grider added: “The wing doctor came over to see him and sent him to hospital thos there's nothing wrong with him except he's badly frightened. That's the last of his illustrious career. He'll go home and write a book on the war now.”

The final entry begins:
“War is a horrible thing, a grotesque comedy. And it is so useless. This war won't prove anything. All we'll do when we win is to substitute one sort of dictator for another. In the meantime we have destroyed our best resources. Human life, the most precious thing in the world, has become the cheapest.”

Early Autumn

Louis Bromfield (born on 27 December 1896) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1927 for Early Autumn.

The novel documents a period in American society where tradition and change collide. The setting is the seaside Massachusetts home of the Pentlands, a family with a proud early New England ancestry and an extensive display of portraits to prove it. The middle-aged Anson Pentland is obsessed with the family tradition and spends much of his time researching a book on the family’s genealogy. Everything that is not of the New England tradition is viewed with suspicion or contempt: the Polish immigrant workers, the Portuguese woman who married into the family, the Irish (several of whom are employed by the family) and those family members that have been living in France. These people are the agents of change. They transform their own situations, particularly Michael O'Hara who has risen from a working-class background to being a major landowner and an aspiring politician. They encourage others to behave differently, such as when Higgins eggs on Anson’s unhappy wife, Olivia, in considering an affair with O'Hara: “Well, you can't do better, Ma'am. I hope it brings you happiness. You ought to have a man like that.” The family members who have lived in France, including débutante Sybil who has returned home from her schooling in France, have little sympathy for the conservative attitude of Anson and the older generation at Pentlands and show little desire to remain there.

Bromfield served in the First World War with the American Field Service and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. He was enamoured with France during his service there and returned there in 1925 (the intention was a family vacation but they remained there for years). The writing of Early Autumn was begun in America and completed in France. The relationship between Sybil and a young Franco-American, Jean, had begun “when all Paris was celebrating the anniversary of the Armistice, and in the morning Sybil had gone with Thérése and Sabine [her cousin and her aunt] to lay a wreath beside the flame at the Arc de Triomphe (for the war was one of the unaccountable things about which Sabine chose to make a display of sentiment).”
Sybil is enraptured: “something in the sight of the uniform, or perhaps in the feel of the air, the sound of the military music, the echoes of the Marseillaise and the Sambre et Meuse, the sight of the soldiers in the street and the great Arc with the flame burning there... something in the feel of Paris, something which she loved passionately, had taken possession of her. It was something, which, gathering in that moment, had settled upon the strange young man who regarded her with such admiring eyes.” Jean, French by upbringing, though of New England ancestry, views America as a pioneer might. He contemplates “the plans he had for adjusting himself in this vigorous country. To discover it now, at the age of 25, was an exciting experience. He was beginning to understand those young Americans he had encountered occasionally in Europe (like his cousin Fergus Tolliver, who died in the war), who seemed so alive, so filled with a reckless sense of adventure... young men irresistible in such an old, tired world, because Nature itself was on their side.”

The Informer

Liam O'Flaherty served with the Irish Guards on the Western Front and was seriously wounded at Langemarck in 1917. Following the war, he travelled widely and became involved in the Communist movement while in the United States. When he returned to Ireland in 1921, he participated in Marxist revolutionary activity and his 1925 novel The Informer focuses more on Marxist militancy than on separatism.

The two central characters, Gypo Nolan and Frankie Mc Phillip, former members of the Revolutionary Organisation. The leadership of the organisation investigate the death of Mc Phillip in a police raid and seek to prove that Nolan was the informer. Nolan fluctuates between drunken stupor and paranoia.

There is little reference to the First World War in the novel. In one scene, an old woman speaks of her admiration for Gypo: "I wish I had a son like ye. Me own Jimmy, Lord have Mercy on him, was killed in the big war. He was the boy that could bate the polis!" She clung to a memory of her son’s courage, not so much in warfare but in resisting authority: "I seen him wan night an' it took six o' them to pull him off a coal-cart an' he holdin' on to the horse's reins all the time with wan hand while he was fightin' them with th' other."

Whereas the prevailing attitude among the working-class people of Dublin was that violence was necessary, Mary, Frankie’s sister, has come to a different perspective: "Before, when I used to read in the papers about a man being shot [in a punishment killing], I used to think it was right but it's a different thing when a man you know does a thing like that. Frankie killed a man too, Lord Have Mercy on him. Oh God, have pity on us all. Why can't we have peace? Why must we be killing one another? Why?"