And the award goes to...

After completing another year of the reading project, here are my awards —

Best novel: Boomerang by Helen de Guerry Simpson
Best memoir:  Schoolboy into War by H.E.L. Mellersh

Best lead character in a novel: Len Roberts in Cwmardy
Best supporting character in a novel: Frith (pictured) in The Snow Goose

Best lead character in a memoir: Frederick A. Pottle in Stretchers
Best supporting character in a memoir: Bill Smith in Stretchers

Schoolboy into War

This memoir, published in 1978, details the author’s experience of the First World War, starting with his membership of the officer training corps at Berkhamsted School and continuing through his service on the Western Front, during which he was wounded on three occasions. Like Stuart Cloete and his character Jimmie Hilton in How Young They Died, the end of the war brings the marriage of the author to one of his nurses. With his wife, he attended the sixtieth anniversary commemorations of the battle of Passchendaele.

The author, Harold Mellersh (born 28 May 1897), grew up in north London and Hertfordshire. He served in the First World War as a second lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion, East Lancashire Regiment. After the war he joined the Civil Service. He began writing and had three novels published between 1926 and 1931, including Ill Wind, a largely autobiographical account of the First World War. He also wrote some 20 works of non-fiction. In the first chapter of his memoir he writes:
“In 1930 I, like quite a few others, got around to writing about World War I. The prevalent fashion was to write in novel form. My novel was largely fictitious so far as the 'home front' was concerned; but naturally it was based on my own personal experiences so far as war training and fighting went. This has helped me remember.”

The author was not immune from a perceived prescience of death:
“It was customary to mark a grave in the trenches, if possible, with a wooden cross. Someone in the Headquarters Company made them. He made one...  for the poor chap whose life had been so suddenly ended; it would be put just outside the part of the trench where he had been blown up. On our next tour of duty it was taken up by one of the men. This man happened to be just in front of me as we made our way up the communications trenches... He was also carrying a bag of coke and having difficulties; I therefore relieved him of the cross. I was immediately fileld with a deep suspicion that this was an omen: I was carrying my own cross obviously, and on this tour of duty I should be killed.”

Towards the end of the memoir, Mellersh explains how deeply his mind remained connected to the war even as an old man:
“I still dream on occasion that I am in World War I — as I dream too that my friend Harold Smith is still alive, though strangely, unhappily unapproachable. Sometimes the war dream is also unhappy, full of foreboding of death such as I felt carrying that cross up the front line or hoping ignobly for reprieve as I marched towards the German attack. But sometimes I am happy and proud and in uniform, and about to be someone important — a wish-fulfilment dream if ever there was one.”

How Young They Died

This evocative novel, published in 1969, is set in England and on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918. Much of what is described in the novel is informed by the author’s own experience of the war. Although much of the war narrative is serious and sombre, there are also several scenes of black humour. The central character, James Hilton, turns 19 in the summer of 1915. He arrives in Flanders with the Wiltshire Light Infantry in April 1916. As in the author's war experience, he is twice invalided home, being wounded first at the Somme and again in the summer of 1918. The novel ends with his marriage on 11 November 1918 to one of the nurses who treated him in hospital (so also did the author marry one of his nurses).

The author, Stuart Cloete (born 23 July 1897), was born in France to a South African family. He was educated in Lancing College, Sussex and served in the school’s officer training corps. He went to Sandhurst and in September 1914 received a commission as a second lieutenant in the 9th Battalion, King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. On being wounded in August 1916 he was invalided to London. He later returned to the Western Front with the Coldstream Guards and was severely wounded in the attack on Saint-Leger in August 1918. After the war he settled in Transvaal but in the mid 1930s abandoned his farm and his failing marriage to return to England to launch a career as a writer. His first novel, Turning Wheels, was published in 1937 and was very successful. He went on to write a further 13 novels, numerous volumes of short stories, a two-volume autobiography and several other works on non-fiction.

For much of the war Jimmie Hilton pursues a relationship with a London prostitute called Mona. She befriends numerous soldiers in the war and sends them food packages when they are at the front. At one point at the Somme he merges his thinking about Mona with the senses and shapes of warfare:
“He thought of Mona... But what was the good of thinking about them? Of aching for it? Still, you had to think of something and it was better than thinking about the war. Food, books, pens, paper, rifles, bombs, women. He thought of all the things a man touched and held in his hands! The soft nose of a horse, the soft thighs of a girl. He thought of Mona's thighs. Hands and fingers had a kind of life of their own. The hard, cold feel of a Mills bomb; its weight. The weight of Mona's breasts when he came up behind her and held them. The hard, smooth feel of a rifle-butt and the cold of its barrel. The softness of a woman's belly, the wiry harshness of her pubic hair. The messages the hands flashed back to the brain; the return messages from the brain to the body, every man his own bloody signal corps.”

The Eighth Day

This epic novel, published in 1967, won the National Book Award for fiction. Its central setting is a small mining town in southern Illinois but there are also sections of the novel set in Chicago, New Jersey, Ohio and in Chile. The central character, John Ashley, works in the local coal mine and the novel gives an account of the life of his family from 1885 to 1905, the plot being shaped around the 1902 murder of Ashley’s neighbour Breckenridge Lansing for which he is found guilty and sentenced to death. The author weaves the narrative in five non-sequential sections rather than in a simple chronology. By doing so, he reveals elements of the case of the killing of Breckenridge Lansing throughout the novel as he gives an elaborate account of the lives led by this small-town family before and after the crime.

The author, Thornton Wilder (born 17 April 1897), was the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes, one for fiction and two for drama. He was educated in China, where his father served as a diplomat, and California. He served in the Coast Artillery Corps from September to December 1918 before completing a degree in Yale. His first play was published in 1920 and his first novel in 1926 while he was working as a French teacher in a preparatory boarding school in New Jersey. His second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1928. One reviewer was effusive in his appreciation of Wilder’s talent:
“Mr Wilder knows precisely what he is doing and why; and, better still, how to do it. This is lavish, yet restrained, praise for a tale which I am grievously tempted to call a masterpiece.” It was this precision that characterised Wilder’s finest writing.

The most striking aspect of this novel is how the author, with a mindset shaped by World War, depicts two key attempts to save a life as futile. The murder of Breckenridge Lansing we learn is an attempt to save John Ashley. Instead he is sentenced to death. Likewise when John Ashley is identified as a fugitive while in exile in Chile, an English woman conspires to rescue him. He had previously been rescued from the train that was bringing him to be executed. Understanding him to be innocent and honourable, the reader has been taught by the author to identify with Ashley and is looking forward to the prospect of him being safely reunited with his wife and children. All the efforts to save Ashley are, however, ultimately in vain. Similarly many soldiers were dramatically saved in battle only to be killed a short time later. The author, however, goes on to show the success of his children after the loss of their father.

To a great extent Wilder uses this novel to reflect on the concept of history: personal history, family history, local history and national history. Towards the end of the narrative he reflects on the history of Coaltown, the small town at the centre of the novel:
“Here the young John Ashleys had descended from the train and looked about them, all happy expectation. The platforms of railway stations! ...Here young men departed for the First World War and returned from it. Before the second war a new highway had been built and new tracks laid eleven miles to the west of Coaltown. The station fell into disrepair. It decayed and finally went up in flames one frosty November night. It burned up, like everything else in history.”

On Gallipoli: an epic of Anzac

This epic narrative poem, written in 1931 and published in 1958, is a fictionalised account of the experience of a group of young Australians at Gallipoli. Though there is presumably much autobiographical content (“I was 18… yet I felt tired and old”), many of the scenes take place before the author arrived at Gallipoli. The narrator and central character is Bill, a past pupil of Sydney High School. He describes landing on the beach with his unit and then the various battle scenes that led to the death of several of his friends. The text is accompanied by poignant sketch illiustrations. The narrative concludes with the humiliating evacuation of the beleaguered forces mainly due to the severity of the winter weather.

The author, Richard Graves (born 17 July 1897), was born in Waterford. Following the death of his mother in 1909, his father emigrated to Australia. The author was left in the care of his paternal grandmother and sent to boarding school in Dublin. He left Ireland to join his father in Queensland in 1911. He attended agricultural college before serving with the Kennedy Regiment in northern Queensland. A few weeks after his 18th birthday he volunteered for active service and embarked with reinforcements on 16 August 1915.  He served as a Private in the 25th Battalion of the Australian Infantry and was wounded at Gallipoli on 23 November. He was evacuated to a military hospital in Malta. He joined the 7th Australian Trench Mortar Battery in August 1916 and served with that unit in France for the remainder of the war. On returning to Australia he suffered from shell shock and related claustrophobia. This led him to a love for wilderness and he became an expert in bushcraft, training soldiers in survival techniques for jungle warfare in the Second World War. He wrote several books on bushcraft as well as adventure books for children.

Perhaps the most interesting aspects of the poem are the conversations with enemy soldiers. Bill’s friend Pearce encounters a wounded Turk during a short truce to retrieve dead and wounded from the battlefield:

“Why see… you talk with me and we are friends…

Between us is no feud or enmity…

The intervening war alone offends

The sense of fellowship ‘tween you and me…

What cause is this, which makes us disagree,

Fostering the fears from which we should be free?

It is not you or we who caused this war

But those who rule… not always for our good…

They never see us… wounded, mangled… sore…

They never know the horrors we’ve withstood…

Or how our wives, in dread of widowhood,

Had begged us stay… Praise Allah!... if we could.”

His cigarette had dwindled to an end.

I took it from him his almost nerveless hand…

“Comrade, that was the action of a friend…

But tell me why you come in No-Man’s-Land.

Turk and Australian… side by side you stand…

Has the war done?... I do not understand.”

Purely Academic

This satirical novel, published in 1958, is, as its title suggests, set in an American university. The central character, Henry Schneider, is a modern historian in a Midwestern university and there are interesting accounts of curriculum committee meetings and anodyne undergraduate lectures. Schneider’s a schemer and he sets about advancing his own career by pretending to be undertaking a top-secret state security role, thus rising in the esteem of colleagues and administrators alike. His specialism of diplomatic history is also put to good use in negotiating for a better salary, playing one university off against another.

The author, Stringfellow Barr (born 15 January 1897), was the son of an Anglican clergyman and grew up in Virginia and Louisiana. He studied English at the University of Virginia and after obtaining his M.A., enlisted in the army. He served with the army medical corps in France for two years. After the war he studied modern history at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He taught modern European history (as did the central character of this novel) at the University of Virginia from 1924 to 1936. He was president of St John’s College, Annapolis from 1937 to 1946 and was a radical innovator there, introducing the Great Books curriculum with the intention of shaping learning around the Western literary canon. He was the author of a wide variety of books, including textbooks, a cookbook and a children’s book. Purely Academic was his only novel.

Given that Henry Schneider was teaching the same subject as the author, it seems safe to presume a high degree of autobiographical content. It's likely, therefore, that the author imagined that Schneider had served in the First World War. In Chapter 14 Schneider delivers an undergraduate lecture on the First World War with considerable passion and perhaps some trauma:
“He paused and looked about him as if in sudden pain. Some of his students stared curiously. Breathing harder, he began again.
‘From this bourgeois, Baconian Eden modern man was ejected with a sudden violence unique in his experience. In a few days, millions of men were mobilised to kill and be killed. It was as if some terrible madness had seized on the citizens of the city that Matter and Force has so benignly ruled. Across the tranquil, smiling, midsummer countryside of Europe swept vast armies, bearing more deadly weapons than man had ever known. The earth rocked and the sky reeled. The great gray ships of the British Royal Navy hurried silently to their appointed posts. It was the summer of 1914.’
Suddenly such violent emotions arose in Schneider that he knew he could not go on. He glanced at his watch. There was lots of time left — but it was time he could not use. His throat became dry; his voice came to his own ears as if from a great distance. He felt slightly dizzy.
‘I cannot discuss the First World War today. I am sorry.’
He bowed slightly, rose clumsily to his feet and left his classroom.”

The Journey

This novel, published in 1952, is set in and near Tokyo and describes a society changed by the American occupation after the Second World War. The central character, Okamoto Taeko, is a young woman. At the start of the novel she has arrived in the seaside resort town of Kamakura to see her uncle Soroku and to visit the grave of his son Akira, who was killed in action in the war. At the cemetery Taeko meets a young man called Tsugawa Ryosuké, one of Akira’s school friends, and they fall in love. Ryosuké becomes increasingly greedy and ambitious and struggles with gambling debts and the dangers of corrupt business deals. This puts an unbearable strain on their relationship. At the end of the novel, Taeko’s journey is uncertain:
“Painful as things might be at the moment, the first consideration was life itself and the process of living. She must not stand still on the road but must keep on walking. This idea had somehow become embedded in her mind and she felt the power of it. She would not let her life become like standing water, which is bound to stagnate; no, she would make it start flowing, like a fresh river. At present her destination might be blank but she would move ahead depending on the very strength that motion gave her.”

The author, Osaragi Jirō (born 4 October 1897 as Nojiri Haruhiko), was born in Yokohama. His first book was published while he was still in school. After studying at the University of Tokyo, he took a teaching position at a girls’ high school in Kamakura, the town where most of this novel is set and where he remained for the rest of his life. Osaragi committed himself to a full-time career as a writer in 1923 and his first historical novel was published in the following year. His 1948 novel Kikyō (Homecoming) was the first to deal with post-war society and won the Japan Art Academy Prize.

What connects the key characters of the novel is the death of Akira, the only son of Okamoto Soroku. He was killed in the war in southern China. His old school friend, Ryosuké, comments to Taeko at his graveside:
“Terrible thing about his dying, isn't it? Well, that's what happens in war. I dare say it couldn't be helped. But, you know, [he] always took the most dangerous things on to his own shoulders. He was like that at school too... A terrible shame his dying like that!”
He often felt “regret that on the particular front where so few people had been killed, his friend had been one of the casualties.”
Later in the novel Akira’s father speaks of his grief:
“He’s dead and there’s no use my complaining about it. Until today I haven't ever mentioned him to anyone. But my loneliness, you know, is something indescribable. Nothing can alleviate it. It gets worse and worse as the days go by. It does no good talking to people about it. Something must be wrong with me.”

Buše and Her Sisters

This novel, published in 1953, is set in a rural community of the Klaipėda district of western Lithuania where the author grew up. The central character is Buše, one of four daughters of Mikšas Karnelis, a peasant farmer. From an early age she shows boorish determination to get her own way and has little respect for her sisters. When she marries Jokūbas Pikčiurna, she sets about transforming his small farm holding into a landed estate. At the end of novel, the author presents the anti-capitalist viewpoint on the legacy of Buše years after her death:
“Today there are no more masters in Benagiai. All trace of them is gone and their memory has faded. Today there are no more Pikčiurnas in Benagiai, even their name is gone, nobody remembers them or wishes to do so.”

The author, Ieva Simonaitytė (born 23 January 1897), grew up in a small village in the German-governed Klaipėda district of Lithuania. She was taught to read and write by her mother. In 1921 she moved to the city of Klaipėda and became involved in the fledgeling Lithuanian cultural movement. Her literary breakthrough came in 1935 with her award-winning historical novel on the Šimoniai family (Aukštujų Šimonių likimas). In old age, she returned to the district of her childhood every summer (her summer home is now a museum).

The central character, Buše Pikčiurnienė, has economic ambitions when the First World War breaks out but is furious when her elder son, patriotic for Germany due to his education, is the first to volunteer to serve in the German army:
“When war broke out in 1914 Pikčiurnienė rejoiced. She had debts and she felt war would be her salvation. And even more than that. People would be glad to work for a crust of bread now. Everyone knew that there was always hunger in war-time, and after it too!
There was only one fly in the ointment; her son Jurgis announced that he was going to volunteer for the army at once. Volunteer! He was barely 19, he would not be called up for some time yet.”
She tries to reason with Jurgis:
“D'you want to be killed like a dog out there? D'you want to have the crows pick out your eyes?”
Her predictions prove correct; Jurgis never returns.

The hero of the novel is Jurgis Būblys, husband of Trudė, one of Buše’s sisters. He comes home from the war discontent and speaking of revolution. His friend, Adomas, recalls his removal from the Western Front:
“I threw my gun away, Jurgis, in the Argonne Forest. There was a gas attack. When I came to, I knew I was in a dark forest but where I was or what had happened I could not remember...
But all the same, I felt sort of guilty. Maybe I ought to have done differently. But I didn't know how. We did know, all of us, what was happening in the East, over there in Russia. But we had nobody to start things. Only those that could talk and dream... And then when I came out of hospital, it was all over.”
Jurgis becomes the local Communist hero, people telling their grandchildren about him:
“how eagerly they listen to tales about Jurgis Būblys, who not only fought for all that the people of Benagiai now possess but gave his life for it!”

The Second Seal

This First World War thriller, published in 1950, is one of 11 novels featuring the Duc de Richleau character. Jean Armand Duplessis, the tenth Duc de Richleau, is a French aristocrat but has been politically disgraced and is in exile. On the other side of his family, he is the Count Königstein, giving him strong connections to Austria-Hungary and to the wider German-speaking aristocracy. He’s also related on the maternal side to the Russian royal family. As a career soldier, he served in the Ottoman army during the Balkan wars and in one incident saved the life of a senior Serbian officer. He has taken British citizenship in admiration of the strong principles of the Empire. With a foot in almost every camp as the outbreak of the First World War looms, he’s sent by the British authorities to Belgrade to investigate the activities of the ultranationalist secret society, the Black Hand. He ends up trying to prevent the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. On the outbreak of war, he retained his officer’s rank in the Ottoman army, and had been offered senior military positions in Serbia, Austria and Britain. Through his Austrian role, he visits the German military headquarters in Aachen in an attempt to persuade von Moltke to move German forces from the Western Front to the Eastern Front, allowing the French and British forces to recover from the initial onslaught. Added to all of this confusion is his clandestine affair with Archduchess Ilona Theresa, granddaughter of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria.

The author, Dennis Wheatley (born 8 January 1897), grew up in London. He fought in the First World War as a lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery. He dedicated this novel to “the memory of that fine soldier and friend, the late Colonel H.N. Clarke” and for “those good companions of my youth, J. Albert Davis and Douglas Gregson” and for “those other officers, N.C.O.s and men with whom I had the honour to serve in the 2nd/1st City of London Brigade R.F.A. from September 1914”. He served in Flanders from August 1917 to May 1918 before being invalided out of the war. He began writing short stories in the 1920s and his first novel, featuring the Duc de Richleau, was published in 1933.

In an early scene in the novel, the central character is in London in April 1914 and explains to a senior British official his desire to serve in the British army:
“since I am debarred from fighting for the country of my birth, I wish to fight for the country of my adoption. I arrived in England yesterday with the hope that I should be in ample time to make arrangements which would ensure my being in a post suited to my abilities when war breaks out.”
When war does break out, he’s in Vienna observing the mobilisation of troops:
“Meanwhile bodies of smiling troops swung through the streets, lustily singing gay marching songs. The great majority of them were reservists, or young conscripts, on their way to training camps, where they would spend several weeks, if not months, being knocked into shape before they were called on to face the enemy... De Richleau watched it all with unsmiling eyes. He was no pessimist by nature but ever since he had reached manhood war had been his game. He had seen too many youngsters, grinning, vigorous, determined at one moment, and screaming like maniacs from shell-rent flesh or smashed bone the next; too many still, twisted corpses and pulped, messy heads. But his own effort to prevent the colossal madness had failed.”

Black Bethlehem

This tripartite novel, published in 1947, is set in London, where the author lived, during the Second World War. The narrative opens and concludes with a blitz scene in February 1944 in which John Everyman, an air-raid warden, is injured:
“He was crossing the road when the ground heaved under him. The last thing he saw was the red light in the northern sky. Then all light and sound ran together and vanished, and he fell down, down into darkness.” He and other characters in the novel express a sympathy not only for those being bombed in London but also those being bombed in Berlin: “The whole thing: this war — the bombing here — the awful bombing of Berlin — the lives wasted — the goodness wasted.”

The author, Lettice Cooper (born 3 September 1897), was born near Manchester and grew up in Leeds. She began writing fiction aged 7. Her brother, Leonard, was invalided out of the army and also took to writing fiction. Her first novel, The Lighted Room, was published in 1925. She went on to write as many as 20 novels. During the Second World War, she met Eileen Blair, wife of George Orwell. She and Orwell feature in Black Bethlehem as Ann and Christopher Drake.

In Part I of the novel, set in April 1945, the main character is Lieutenant Alan Marriot, recently invalided after a battle siege in the Dutch countryside. In a visit to his Aunt Hilda they discuss the war and she recalls the First World War:
“ ‘My friends have mostly been killed.’...
‘Some of them I know, and I'm very sorry. But not all. You mustn't exaggerate. Thank heaven the casualties in France haven't been nearly as bad as we all expected.’
‘Those are just numbers!’
She blinked at what must seem to her nonsense.
‘If you remember, as I do, the terrible slaughter in the last war.’
He said wildly, ‘It's a pity everybody didn't remember it.’ ”
He tells her about his friend Justin, who had recently been killed in action, and she reveals that her fiancé had been killed in the First World War:
“I don't know whether anyone has ever told you, I was engaged to be married just at the beginning of the last war. His name was David, David Nicholls. He was at school with your father. He was killed at Paschendale. After that I felt I must do everything I could to see that he hadn't died in vain, that it wasn't all wasted.”

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

This novel, published in 1947, is set in Australia in the 24th century. The central character, Knarf, has written a historical novel about Harry Munster, a veteran of the First World War, and is discussing it with a colleague. His novel, Little World Left Behind, begins in 1924 and brings Munster’s story through unemployment during the years of the Depression and then on to the Second World War. Although Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was published in 1947, it was written in 1941 and 1942 and it, therefore, describes the latter years of the Second World War predictively rather than historically (though, of course, Knarf himself is describing it historically).

The authors, Marjorie Barnard (born 16 August 1897) and Flora Eldershaw (born 16 March 1897), collaborated under the amalgam nom-de-plume, M. Barnard Eldershaw. They met as students at the University of Sydney. One of Eldershaw’s brothers, John St Elmo Eldershaw, served as a gunner on the Western Front and died soon after the war. Their first collaborative novel, A House is Built, was published in 1929. During the 1930s they hosted an influential literary salon in their flat in suburban Sydney. Their collaboration became more difficult and less productive after Eldershaw moved to Canberra in 1941. This was to be their last collaborative novel. It was severely censored and only published in its completed, uncensored form for the first time in 1983.

Harry Munster had served with the Australian forces during the First World War. At an early stage of Knarf’s novel, Munster considers his family’s struggle to sustain themselves and remembers his experience as a soldier:
“His mind strayed back to the war. The times his belly had been sticking to his backbone, times when he'd been perishing and the food had come up stone cold, or there hadn't been any, because Fritz had got the ration party. Times when to lie down and sleep in the mud, even to the thunder of a barrage, would have been the sweetest thing in the world, times when he would have welcomed death itself for the sleep there was in it. He'd sworn then if he ever came back he'd not be ungrateful again for food and sleep, quiet, and a body free from lice.”

When he is caught up in the turmoil of the blitz in Sydney during the Second World War, his traumatised mind returns him to a battle scene at Gallipoli in 1915 and another scene from the Western Front in 1916:
“Another crash came and the blast threw him down, spreadeagled on the road. It was a minute before he stirred, got to his knees and then to his feet. His chin was wet with blood but he felt nothing — only the sky was red with whirling black stars and the ground rose steeply under his feet. He was running up the slope at Gaba Tepe, carrying his equipment, his lungs bursting, the surf of the Turkish fire just ahead of him; he was caught by their own barrage in the crumbling French village out of Bouchevenes, stumbling blind and suffocated towards a shelter that had gone.”

Strange Fruit

This novel, published in 1944, is set in a small town in Georgia in the 1920s and portrays the interaction between the two communities, black and white. The central character, Tracy Deen, has been leading a wayward life, including a relationship with a young black woman called Nonnie Anderson. Towards the end of the novel, he seeks to become a reformed character by attending church, getting engaged to respectable Dorothy and distancing himself from Nonnie. His decisive actions, however, have violent consequences.

The author, Lillian Smith (born 12 December 1897), grew up in northern Florida. After her studies, she spent several years teaching in eastern China before returning home in 1925. In 1936 she launched a quarterly literary magazine that encouraged liberal expression by authors from both communities of the South. She closed the magazine in 1945 to concentrate on her own writing. This was the first of several novels. She was renowned as one of the first prominent Southern white authors to write about and speak out openly against racism and segregation. She was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2000.

In the early chapters of this novel, we learn about the army service of the central character, Tracy Deen, and what the soldiers thought about when far from home:
“Months in the Ruhr Valley left you time to think. Cut off from everything that makes it hard to think at home, it was easier... Most of the men didn't talk much about ideas. It was women... When they talked about women Tracy would find something else to do. There was no woman he wanted to talk about or think about.”
When he is sent with his unit to Marseille, however, the change of atmosphere starts him thinking:
“He liked the place and used to walk for hours at night on the streets, feeling something about it...
One night — it's hard to know how a thing gets in your mind — he began to remember Nonnie. He was walking along a street whose name he never knew. There was music somewhere and voices somewhere, and in the shadows a girl softly accosted him. He did not answer her but a tone in her voice sounded in his mind after he passed her. There was a feeling in his mind too that he had been here before... the music, the easy soft laughter... He thought: I'd like to dance with Nonnie... She had never been something to think about until then... Now she was here.”
Such was the power of nostalgia in the soldier serving overseas.

The Last of Summer

This evocative novel, published in 1943, is set in West Clare during the last few days of countdown to the outbreak of the Second World War. The central character, Angèle, the French daughter of a Clare man, decides to visit his family home for the first time. There she meets for the first time her Uncle Ned’s widow, Hannah, and children, Tom, Martin and Josephine. Though they are first cousins, she and Tom quickly fall in love and become engaged before the outbreak of war in her native country intervenes.

The author, Kate O'Brien (born 3 December 1897), grew up in Limerick, spending much of her childhood in boarding school after the death of her mother. She studied English and French at University College Dublin and began work as a teacher. While working as a governess in the Basque city of Bilbao from 1922 to1923, she began to write fiction. Her novel, Mary Lavelle, published in 1936, was largely based on her own experiences there. Her debut novel, Without My Cloak, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1931. She spent most of her life in England away from the conservative strictures of de Valera’s Ireland.

Tom Kernahan, father of the central character, had left home in 1909 and never returned. When his brother, Cornelius, is asked about the First World War, he recalls his own limited experience and what he knew of Tom’s involvement:
“Were you in that other war, Corney?"
"No. I volunteered for the South Irish Horse, but they rejected me. Said I was C3, if you'll believe me! And Ned didn't go either — he had a wife and two children already, and the whole of this place depending on him. He made a good deal of money out of it, I can't deny. But Hannah was anti-British even then, and wouldn't have let him join up, if he'd wanted...
Tom was in it though... I remember Ned hearing some way that he was attached to a French regiment, and doing liaison work with the British. I remember we were delighted it was for the French he was fighting. And then in 1917 Ned had a postcard from him to say he was invalided out. That was the last news I ever had of him until nine years later, when Ned told me he was dead.”

Towards the end of the novel, Martin resolves to follow in his uncle’s footsteps, intending to join the French army. His sister has immediate plans to go to Brussels to become a nun. We are left to wonder what would have happened to Angèle and her cousins, Irish and French, during the war that had just been declared.

The Land of Far-Beyond

This novel, published in 1942, is “a kind of new Pilgrim's Progress” for children. Its central characters are three siblings living in the City of Turmoil. There they meet a missionary stranger called Wanderer and he shows them the burdens “of all the ugly things you have said and done and thought in your life”. The burdens appear on the back of each child and Wanderer explains “they can only lose them by going to the Land of Far-Beyond, through difficult ways and hard paths.” The three children, Peter, Anna and Patience, leave on their pilgrimage with two other children, John and Lily, and five adults. During the journey, their companions one by one surrender to the hardships along the way but the three children persevere.

The author, Enid Blyton (born 11 August 1897), grew up in London. She finished school in 1915 and began training as a primary school teacher in 1916. One of her brothers, Hanly, fought in the First World War with the Machine Gun Corps and survived. She qualified in 1918 and began writing in 1920. Her first book, a collection of poems, was published in 1922. She married in 1924 and soon became prolific in writing plays and story books. By the 1940s she could see the value of writing a whole series of books featuring the same characters, the Famous Five, for example, first appearing in the same year as this book. The success of the vast majority of her books was enhanced by the use of gifted illustrators, such as Eileen Roper and Horace Knowles, whose drawings appear in this book.


Beyond its moral emphasis, this book is significant for its teaching about fear and courage to children living through the violence of the Second World War. At an early stage in the journey, one of the adults, called Mr Fearful, refuses to cross the River Trouble at the Ford of Determination:
“He wept bitterly as he saw the others going off towards the hill in the distance. But he was much too afraid to go across the river by himself.”
Later another adult, Dick Cowardly, flees at the sight of a group of soldiers guarding the road ahead of them:
“I daren't stay here to face those soldiers. We shall be cut to pieces! We shall be taken prisoner!... I want to go back home. I daren't face any more dangers. Better to be safe in the City of Turmoil with this load on my shoulders than cut to pieces by fierce soldiers!”
The soldiers are in fact guarding the House of Peace and Peter realises Dick Cowardly’s mistake:
“Poor Dick Cowardly. He could easily have stayed and gone with us. If only he had had a little more courage and had kept with us.”

On the other hand, the children meet a character called Courage, “a stout, smiling youth”, who was “big and strong” and “his mouth was determined.” He helps them to rescue their travelling companions who have been imprisoned in the dungeons of the Castle of Desolation. The young readers are shown that virtues, such as courage, honesty, mercy, patience and truth, led the children from turmoil through many dangers to a place of contentment. This was, no doubt, important for building character in children growing up during the war.

Voyage to Kazohinia

This impressive satirical novel, written in 1935 and published in 1941, has Lemuel Gulliver shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean during the 1930s and details his experiences in the isolated country of Kazohinia. The narrator has much the same tone as the original character in Gulliver’s Travels. He describes the two kinds of people living in that country: the Hins, an advanced society without culture, finance, love, politics, patriotism or war, and the Behins, a ghettoised chaotic population that live according to the subversion of reason.

The author, Sándor Szathmári (born 19 June 1897), was the son of a Hapsburg state official and his upbringing involved frequent relocation to different parts of the empire. His delicate health prevented him from serving in the war and instead he was living in poverty in Budapest while studying engineering in the city’s Technical University. As a student he began writing, being influenced by the writer Frigyes Karinthy, who himself wrote a sequel to Gulliver's Travels, in his case called Voyage to Faremido (1916). He began writing novels in 1930 and this, his magnum opus, was published with a dedication to Karinthy. Much of his subsequent literary output was written in Esperanto and he’s regarded as one of the few Esperantist literary figures worthy of wider attention.

The outset of Gulliver’s adventures in 1935 has Britain facing the probability of having to wage a war with Italy over Abyssinia. Gulliver, an officer in the Royal Navy, is aboard H.M.S. Invincible bound for Shanghai (to protect Britain’s interests in the Far East) when it is sunk by a torpedo and he survives with the aid of a lifebelt. He is well received in Kazohinia, an island country where everything is expected to be kazo (rational), the name of the country meaning “the land of those who know the pure reality of human existence”. He is taught about kazo by Zatamon, a Hin, and he in turn tries to explain European society and its values. There is a huge gap in understanding between the two. Zatamon is critical of every aspect of European society. For example:
“Though your kings travel by coaches of gold and wear robes of state heavy with all kinds of jewels (which are of course unnecessary), they still don't permit the people to use their remaining energy for the benefit of their own physical well-being but force them to build a pyramid for themselves or wage war to reduce other peoples to destitution as well.”
When Gulliver despairs at the sterility of the Hin way of life, he decides to enter the settlement of the Behins (those who do not live with reference to reason but subvert what is rational). The Behins are divided into two warring factions that regularly slaughter each other even though their disagreement is entirely nonsensical and concerned with emblems. Whereas much of Hin society are utopian and the Behin settlement dystopian, the picture is not black and white — Gulliver draws some comfort from aspects of Behin life and is tormented by aspects of Hin life.

The pinnacle of the satire comes at the end of the novel when Gulliver has fled Kazohinia and is rescued by a Royal Navy battleship. The admiral of the ship makes a patriotic speech, echoing the Behin obsession with symbols and confirming the Hin suspicion of the senselessness of European politics and culture:
“Respect for military values and the national ideal is the source of life of the people, without which our fate would be death and ruin... For the time being we don't know whether the war to come will be fought against the Germans, the French or the Japanese but wherever we shall be called by His Majesty’s order we shall hasten without thought or hesitation to defend the flag, that much is certain.
I firmly believe that when the bugle call is heard, every citizen, regardless of sex and age, will be happy to sacrifice his or her life for these ideals and the flag, for even if all of us should die, Great Britain and her ideals will live forever!”

Call it Courage

This novel, published in 1940, was awarded the American Literary Association’s Newbery Medal as “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children” in that year. Set in the South Pacific "many years... before the traders and missionaries first came”, its central character is Mafatu, an adolescent boy, who is terrified of the sea having been at sea with his mother in a storm in which she died. He lives on the atoll of Hikueru in the Tuamotu Archipelago and is the son of Tavana Nui, the great chief of the island community. Mocked by his peers for his timidity, he resolves to change his reputation; “he must prove his courage to himself, and to the others, or he could no longer live in their midst” and so with his pet dog he sets out in a canoe to conquer his fear of the ocean.

The author, Armstrong Sperry (born 7 November 1897), grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. He was a student at the Yale School of Art when he was drafted to serve in the Navy in September 1918. After the war, he spent several years travelling around Polynesia, assisting with ethnological research and practising art. His first children's book, complete with his own illustrations, was published in 1933. Almost all of his stories were written with an ethnographic focus. He also was a prolific illustrator of children’s books by other authors, including William Standish Stone’s Teri Taro from Bora Bora, set in the same region of Polynesia as Call it Courage.

Soon after Mafatu sets off on his adventure, he faces a severe storm in which he loses the mast and sail. An ocean current carries his canoe to a small island before his boat is destroyed on the reef. He makes it to shore and sets about the tasks of survival (finding food, making fire, building a shelter, constructing a dugout canoe). During his time on the island, he kills a shark and a wild boar. When the otherwise uninhabited island island is visited by fierce cannibals, he flees in his new canoe with the warriors in hot pursuit. As a strong swimmer nears the boat, Mafatu shows fighting courage to resist his attack:
“The boy lifted the paddle and cracked it down... With a groan the man dropped back into the water.”
When after a long journey he returns to his home island, his father does not recognise him. Like a returning soldier, he “staggered up the beach... wasted and thin” and greeted Tava Nui as “father”. The chief is astonished that “this brave figure, so thin and straight, with the fine necklace [of boar’s teeth] and the flashing spear and courage blazing from his eyes” is his son come home from the sea.

Mars in Aries

This novel, written between December 1939 and February 1940 and published as The Blue Hour in 1941, was suppressed by the Nazis and reissued in 1947. The early chapters of the novel are set in Vienna in the weeks before the invasion of Poland in September 1939. The central character, Wallmoden, is an officer awaiting the order to invade and keeps himself occupied by pursuing a romance with a mysterious woman. The novel is significant for its hinting at the existence of an organised Austrian resistance movement at the time of the invasion.

The author, Alexander Lernet-Holenia (born 21 October 1897), had a place in the University of Vienna to study law but volunteered for the army in September 1915. During the war he began writing poetry and became a protégé of Rainer Maria Rilke. His first book of poetry was published in 1921, his first play in 1926 and his first novel in 1931. His 1934 novel, The Standard, was set during Austria-Hungary’s collapse in the First World War. He took part in the invasion of Poland in September 1939 but became a dissident later in the war. He went on to write several widely-acclaimed novels and was awarded the State Prize for Literature in 1961 for his body of work.

The central character, Count Wallmoden, is, like the author, a veteran of the First World War. During the invasion he comes to a place where he had previously been as a soldier and recalls:
“From here... from here I went to the field for the first time. We had spent several months garrisoned in the city. It was here, where we got into the train, here at this point. I was 18 years old then, or a little more. There were four of us and we had a wagon with our horses with us. I still know the names of the people that bid us farewell. I remember their faces. I still know almost all of the words that they said. It seems to me as though it were yesterday. It wasn't that long ago. It must have been about 23 years.”

Delilah

This novel, published in 1941, is set on the seas around the Philippines during the First World War. The author presumably intended the central character to be U.S.S. Delilah rather than the numerous lively characters serving aboard the ship. The scenes in the novel are informed by the author's own experience as an officer on a similar ship in the same time and place. Even before the declaration of war by the United States, the crew face many dangers in their work and experience casualties due to events such as explosions and shark attacks.

The author, Marcus Goodrich (born 28 November 1897), grew up in Texas. He left school to served in the Texas National Guard on the Mexican border. He then joined the Navy. He served on the U.S.S. Chauncey, part of the Asiatic fleet operating in the seas around China and the Philippines. When the United States entered the war in 1917, the Chauncey was sent to Europe for convoy escort duty. The author was one of 70 survivors of the accidental sinking of the ship in November 1917 near Gibraltar. He received a publishing contract for this novel in 1932 and worked successfully as a screenwriter before the novel finally appeared in 1941. He subsequently was again on active duty in the Navy during the Second World War.

One of the officers on the U.S.S. Delilah, Warrington, prepares for the declaration of war by reading of the events in Europe:
“In these lax, latter days he had gotten so absorbed, so indignantly absorbed, in magazine and newspaper accounts of the havoc being wrought by the Germans in Europe that he had been swept out of his reading routine into a feverish wallowing in the atrocity columns of all the publications that he could buy ashore or that came in the mail to the men on the ship. He seemed to have forgotten his books... in order to torture himself with nothing but the reading of every reported rape, every destroyed cathedral, every executed civilian as if each were a personal affront of his own human dignity.”
When war was finally declared, the crew’s response was somewhat impassive:
“They understood the declaration, most of them, simply in the sense that now, one way or another, there had become part of their daily work a fabulous chaos blazing somewhere half-a-world away, amidst still other scenes and peoples their eyes had not looked upon before.”

The Snow Goose

This outstanding novella, published in 1941, is set on the Essex coast. The central character, Philip Rhayader, is a maimed and crippled veteran of war and lives quietly on his own by the wilderness of the Great Marsh. He is a talented artist and a caring foster parent of migratory birds. One winter day a girl called Frith brings an injured snow goose to his door aware “that this ogre who lived in the lighthouse had magic that could heal injured things”.

The goose is brought back to health and leaves in the spring. When she returns each year, he sends a message to Frith to announce her return and she resumes her friendship with Philip. In 1940 when he hears in the village about the need for small boats to evacuate soldiers from the beaches in Dunkirk, he decides to go there in his small sailing boat. The goose flies with him and is a harbinger of rescue.

The author, Paul Gallico (born 26 July 1897), grew up in New York City. Both of his parents were from Central Europe. He served as a gunner's mate in the United States Navy in 1918. From 1922 to 1936 he worked as a journalist on the New York Daily News before moving to England. He bought a house in south Devon and, like the central character of this novella, lived by the sea. His first works of fiction were published in literary magazines in the late 1930s. This novella first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post and won the O. Henry Prize for short fiction in 1941.

The central character came to live by the Great Marsh in early 1930 at the age of 27. If then he was born in 1902, he was only 15 or 16 when he went to war in which he had “fought valiantly” (or else he served in one of the conflicts that followed the war). He was generally left alone by the local people “for he was a hunchback and his left arm was crippled”. Having helped the birds of the marshland for many years, he uses this concern as a simile and metaphor for his response to the Dunkirk crisis. He explains to the young girl who has befriended him:
“Men are huddled on the beaches like hunted birds, Frith, like the wounded and hunted birds we used to find and bring to sanctuary. Over them fly the steel peregrines, hawks and gyrfalcons and they have no shelter from these iron birds of prey. They are lost and storm-driven and harried, like the [snow goose] you found and brought to me out of the marshes many years ago... They need help, my dear, as our wild creatures have needed help and that is why I must go. It is something I can do. Yes, I can. For once — for once I can be a man and play my part.”

Each to the Other

This verse novel, published in 1939, documents several tragic events in the life of the central character, Thomas Cottrell. The author, however, begins his prologue by refuting the tragedy:
“Here is no tragedy. These are my days
Life-weighted, turned and measured in the scale
Of my own inches: only that, no atom more,
No plus or minus subscript to its sum.”
He again refutes it in the epilogue:
“Tragedy?
No, I have loved and married and been loved,
And these are mine forever, past all death...”
There are several autobiographical elements in the author's depiction of Thomas Cottrell, including his upbringing in an artistic household.

Christopher La Farge (born 10 December 1897) was one of the most prolific verse novelists of his generation. He interrupted his studies at Harvard to volunteer for the army and served as second lieutenant in the infantry. He later qualified as an architect but abandoned that profession due to the severe downturn of the Great Depression. His first novel was published in 1934. For his second novel (this one) he was awarded the A.C. Benson Silver Medal by the Royal Society of Literature. It was also shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. During the Second World War, he worked as a war correspondent for Harper’s magazine, writing informative short stories on the war in the Pacific. These stories were published in an anthology in 1944 under the title East by Southwest.

In this novel Thomas Cottrell experiences the breakdown of his parents’ marriage and the deaths of four loved ones. The first of those deaths comes in the context of his war service. Tom and his college friend, Sam Allen, opt for aviation in preference to the infantry:
            “Let's fly," I said. “That's a clean, sudden death.”
           “Oh, death!" said Sam. “The hell with it, my boy.
            Somebody else, perhaps, uh-uh, not me.
            We'll fly and live.”
                                     “O.K., we'll live,” I said.
           “We'll join together, what?”
                                                  “You bet," he said.
           “Let's stick together.”
 They left Harvard together and signed up at Long Island for the aviation section but were lated separated into different training units. Instead he befriends Martin Fenton as they learn to fly. During training in Texas, Martin crashed and died of his injuries in hospital. Tom responded by turning to his girlfriend for solace:
                                                  I wrote to Judith again,
                      I felt as if Martin made me begin that letter,
                     Though I wanted to write it. The hand didn't guide the pen,
                     The pen ran away with the hand. A silly letter,
                     Proposing marriage, or more truly, demanding,
                     To save my life from the loneliness that his death.
                     Left inside me.
Her response was firm:
                    Write to me as a woman you love and not
                    As a hot-water-bottle to warm your present illness;
                    Write when the war is over and you've forgotten
                    The war's dramatics.
He crashed his plane soon after receiving her letter ("I'd had a letter, it ran in my head... It took my mind off the job of flying.”). Like many who trained for aviation, he was discharged as an invalid before he saw active service.

Azarel

This controversial novel, published in 1937, is a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy’s struggle of conscience with the Judaism of his family. Set in provincial Hungary, Gyuri Azarel, the central character is the grandson of Jeremiah, a fundamentalist Orthodox Jew, and the son of a severe rabbi of a modern Jewish sect. Damaged by a period of strict religious observance when an infant in the care of his grandfather, Gyuri becomes unruly and ruthlessly disrespectful of parental authority and of the religion at the centre of family and community life. Although much of the cleverness of the novel is probably lost in this mediocre translation into English, its powerful stream-of-consciousness narrative of the nine-year-old Gyuri’s conscientious rebellion is vivid and captivating.

The author, Károly Pap (né Pollák, born 24 September 1897), grew up in Sopron in western Hungary. His father was the most important rabbi in the city. On finishing school, Pap (pronounced like 'pop') volunteered for the army. He served as an officer on the Italian front and was decorated for bravery. Involved in the shortlived socialist regime of 1919, he was imprisoned and then lived in exile in Vienna from 1923 to 1925. On his return to Hungary, he was soon having poems and short stories published. His first play, Leviát György, written in 1926, details the experience of assimilating Jews serving in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War in the context of general hostility towards Jews by the Hungarian majority. His first novel was published in 1932. Having been sent to a labour camp in May 1944, Pap was interned at Buchenwald in November. He's believed to have been taken to Bergen-Belsen in 1945 but the exact circumstances of his death are unknown.

Gyuri’s distressing narrative leads from his imagining “climbing up to the window and falling out”  (and the immediate response of his parents, brother and sister) to imagining his father strangling him to death:
“Now I knew it was all over, that he would strangle me in no time. But I couldn't even bring myself to move, no, I only felt as if my father's hand was twisting, slowly, around my neck from inside the pillow. I gasped for air, then suddenly all was completely silent; and once again I heard that third voice, but more softly than ever: ‘Well, that's it: you're dead, finished, you can't get up anymore and never again will you open your eyes.’ ”

Song on Your Bugles

This novel, published in 1936, is largely set in Skirthorpe Green, an industrial village in Yorkshire. The central character, Herrie Champion, is a talented young artist with the opportunity to escape the poverty and economic dependence on the uncertain future of the village's worsted mill. He is, however, emotionally tied to the village through love for three women — his unmarried mother, who has a secret reliable source of income; his childhood sweetheart, Elsa Crawby; and the mysterious other, Daphne Calwenter, daughter of the mill owner.

The author, Eric Knight (born 10 April 1897), was the son of a diamond merchant, estranged from his family, who was killed during the Boer War. His mother went overseas to earn a living and left her sons in the care of relatives in Yorkshire. Like the central character of this novel, Eric began work aged 12, as a bobbin doffer in a mill, and over the next three years was employed in mills, an engine works, a saw mill and a glass factory. His mother married a German man in Philadelphia in 1907 and Eric moved there as an adolescent. In June 1917 he interrupted his study of art in New York to volunteer for active service with the Canadian Army. Having trained as a signaller, he joined Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry in May 1918. His two surviving brothers, serving with the 110th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army, were killed in action in the Battle of Argonne Forest in July 1918. Having worked his way up as a newspaper journalist, his first novel was published in 1934. His most famous novel, Lassie Come-Home, was published in 1940. He was, however, killed in an air crash over Suriname in January 1943 (while serving with the Special Services Division of the United States Army) before the film was completed.

The fact that the novel has many autobiographical elements indicates that it is set in the same period as the author's childhood in Yorkshire. There are, therefore, no references to the First World War. The central character's friend, Joe Crawby, leaves behind the poverty of the village to join the army and returns home an invalid having lost an arm due to an accident. He had always had that ambition:
“Me? Eigh, Ah know what Ah'm off to dew. Fust thing Ah gates big enough Ah'm off to lie to t'recruiting sergeant for t'King's shilling. Then they'll tak' me off to Aldershot and put me in a bloody fine uniform and Ah'll drill and fill me belly full of army duff. Ivery day Ah'll go me out on all t'athletic exercise things and swing t'dumb-bells till Ah'm heavy and strong.”
As in the previous novel in this reading project, the major battles that are fought by the local people are industrial and the great casualty at the end of the novel comes when the workers at the mill, like soldiers possessed by the kill-or-be-killed traumatic mindset, “welded together into the one-thing that is a mob, that thinks and moves as one creature, like a flock of birds that has no differing thoughts but wheels and turns in answer to the mass will.”

Cwmardy

This novel, published in 1937 and republished in 2006 as part of the Library of Wales project, is a key novel of industrial fiction as it depicts the emergence of a trade union movement among the miners of a valley in South Wales. Whereas the main conflict in the novel is a lengthy miners’ strike, the First World War features towards the end of the novel. The central character, Len Roberts, an aspiring leader of the local mine workers, is involved in arranging an anti-war lecture by a socialist activist. His father, a Boer War veteran, volunteered for active service but Len, having also volunteered, did not pass the medical and remained at home to work in the mine and support his mother.

Lewis Jones (born 1897) began work in a colliery at the age of 12 and was part of the workforce involved in the famous 1910-1911 strike that led to the Tonypandy riots in which large numbers of policemen and soliders were used to control the striking workers. Given that there is a strong autobiographical current in this novel, it would seem likely that the author did not serve in the war on account of some physical infirmity (as is described in the case of Len Roberts in the novel). He died of a heart attack in 1939 while campaigning in support of the Spanish Republic.

In this novel, the author describes how the striking miners’ protest is violently suppressed by the army. The troops opened fire on the protesters. In the aftermath, Ezra Jones, the senior leader of the miners, speaks to his men in a low voice:
“My poor friends, we have arrived at the saddest moment of our lives. The strike, which we began with so much confidence and faith, has brought us nothing but misery, injury and, now, death. The forces against us are so many and so great that they can smash our determination by bludgeon and bullet in the name of law and order. I don't know what we can do.”
Len’s response is emphatic:
“We can't expect to fight a battle without suffering hurt... We can grieve for our poor butties who have been battered and shot but to give in now will be to betray all the principles for which they have suffered and died.”

When the actual war comes, Len’s father joins up. His wife, Siân, tells her son:
“Your dad be gone... Perhaps he will never come back to us. The good Lord alone knows what he have gone for. I don't. They do say the Shermans are cruel. Perhaps they be; I don't know. But wasn't our own sodegers cruel that night they did shoot down our men for nothing? Them was supposed to be our own flesh and blood but that did make no difference. When their guns went 'bang', our men did drop just as sure as it was Sherman guns.”

Len’s own opinion of the war also reflected the military attack on the strikers:
“Although I don't know what it is and can't explain it, something inside me tells me that we must let the people know the two sides of the war. Wherever we turn now we only hear one side. Everybody is wrong and terrible and cruel except our own people. I can't believe this. There are bound to be some decent people among the Germans. We are told that they do this, that and the other but I can't forget what our own soldiers did to us during the strike.”

Confessions of Love

This pacy novel, published in 1935, is set in central Japan and describes the modernising society of the 1920s in which young progressive women sought to break with tradition. The narrator and central character, Yuasa Joji, is a young artist in a broken marriage and he tells about his several affairs with young women. The novel draws heavily on the actual experience of Togo Seiji. The author had contacted Togo (his surname) as part of her research for another novel, seeking to give an accurate representation of a gas-inhalation suicide, and they ended up spending the following five years together. It took him a year to tell her all his reminiscences of his several romances.

The author, Uno Chiyo (born 28 November 1897), had a traditional, restrictive upbringing in provincial society in southwestern Japan. Her father died in 1913 and she moved to Tokyo in 1917 and worked for a short time in a restaurant frequented by writers. She married soon after moving to the city and went to live in Sapporo. Having won a newspaper competition for short stories, Uno (her surname) moved back to Tokyo, abandoning her marriage, to pursue a literary career. Her most highly regarded work, the novella, Ohan, was published in 1957 and won the Noma Literary Prize for the most outstanding work published that year in Japan.

The artist, Joji (his forename), goes to great lengths to pursue his romantic interests. In one scene, he travels to a remote mountain estate during a severe storm in an attempt to rescue his beloved Tsuyuko from captivity in her grandparents’ home. In order to get there, he pays a driver to take him there from the railway station. The driver is fatally injured in an avalanche when making his return journey. Joji  considers his responsibility for the accident:
“Was this man going to die? Was he going to die like a poor dog, helpless in this strange house where they couldn't even get a doctor? Because he had driven me? The men stopped trying to help him further and an eerie silence ensued while we waited the few moments until he died.”

We Have Been Warned

In this novel, published in 1935, the author imagines a violent right-wing counter-revolution in England in opposition to the perceived threat of a Soviet-leaning Labour movement. In the foreword, she explains that “the final chapters of the book were written before the events of summer 1933 in Germany and before the counter-revolutions of 1934 in Austria and Spain”. The central characters are a married couple, Dione and Tom Galton. He lectures in Oxford and campaigns as a parliamentary candidate in the industrial north. She is from the Scottish highlands and has political sympathies somewhat further left than her husband's kind of socialism. Their socialist views harden following a visit to the Soviet Union.

The author, Naomi Mitchison (born 1 November 1897), was born in Edinburgh and grew up in an academic family, receiving her education in Oxford. On leaving school, she began to study for a science degree but abandoned the course on the outbreak of the First World War to train as a nurse. She served in a Voluntary Aid Detachment at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. She married in 1916; her husband, Richard Mitchison, was on leave from service on the Western Front. He was a friend of her brother, John Haldane, who fought with the Black Watch regiment in France and Mesopotamia. Her literary career began in 1923 and lasted some 75 years; of her 90 books, she is perhaps most highly regarded for her historical fiction.

Whereas the novel deals with the general political situation that arose in the aftermath of the First World War, it also documents the impact that the war had on the lives of individual characters. Dione Galton’s sister, Phoebe,  is married to Robin, a man with a war injury: “his leg had been bothering him again, there was probably still a tiny piece of shell in it, evading the X-rays — just enough to set up a kind of mild general poisoning from time to time.” Robin’s brother had been killed at the Somme in 1916. Donald, a friend of Dione from her childhood home in Scotland, is a Communist activist and obtains from a former serviceman “a souvenir of the Great War... an old Mills bomb, Mark 5, still undetonated”. This he uses to assassinate a political opponent, leading to his enforced exile in Ukraine. Her husband, Tom, is asked by a student about his service in the war:
“ ‘But you remember the European War?’
‘Quite definitely. Especially in wet weather.’
‘Why?’
‘My wound begins to play tricks then....’
‘But I didn't know you'd been wounded! It must have been a marvellous time.’
‘Marvellous? Haven't you read any war books?’
‘Oh yes. I adore them. You know that superb scene in All Quiet on the Western Front, the men sitting on boxes in the mud and...’
‘...Well, never mind, if the National Government goes on as it's doing at present there'll probably be another war in your time.’ ”