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.”