The Cavalry Went Through

This novel, published in 1930, is an intensely personal account of military life on the Western Front and at Gallipoli. In the introduction, the author explains that it is “neither an autobiography nor a biography” but ”a series of personal reminiscences centred on the greatest military figure of the ages”. That individual is the fictional Henry Berrington Duncan. The story proper begins in October 1915 when Duncan's force was transferred from East Africa to the Western Front.

The author, Bernard Newman (born 8 May 1897), was a great-nephew of the celebrated novelist George Eliot. He lied about his age in order to enlist when aged 17. Arriving in France in September 1915, he served on the Western Front with the Army Service Corps and was entrusted with the role of liaison officer for his regiment on account of having reasonably fluent French. He could be said to have died of wounds received during the war: a shrapnel injury to the roof of his mouth developed into a tumour and he died in 1968 of heart failure during an operation to remove it.

In this novel of virtual history, Newman imagines what a difference it would have made to the progress of the war if there had been a wiser military commander with a more effective strategy than that of the actual generals who directed the war. The hero Duncan asks insightful questions about army appointments policy:
“Do we pick the right commanders for the jobs? Have you noticed that, of the six British generals holding Army or equivalent independent commands, four are old Etonians? I don't run down Eton but isn't there a certain significance in this fact? Is the bogey of seniority really laid? Another point. You mentioned the other day that most of the brains of the nation were now in the Army! Quite right. But what have you done with them? Made them second- lieutenants to be shot down by the hundred. Do you realise that of all these 'brains' only two have so far attained the very moderate rank of brigadier-general?  I am the only one who has passed it.” This is an important point as one of the pillars of Duncan's successful military campaigns is intelligent strategy.

Key to the effectiveness of Duncan's battle plans was the use of highly-trained, well-informed troops. He cites the example of Gideon:
“How he reduced his army from 32,000 to a mere 300 men and how he won by tactics skilfully executed, where mere numbers of second-class troops would not have prevailed... I worked somewhat along the same lines. I weeded out men here and there. No man with a blemish of any kind remained. In the end there remained but a little more than a complete battalion. But what men! Every one in a magnificent state of physical vigour; every one mentally alert; above all, every one determined to see the job through, no matter what it meant for him.”

As Duncan is allowed to introduce new shock tactics to change the direction of the war, he observes:
“But the war is now more than ever a question of the quality of men. A year ago —two years ago— our men were definitely inferior to the Germans as soldiers, in spite of patriotic journalistic ravings. It is not only a matter of courage but of training. But now the positions are utterly reversed.”
So convincing is the author’s account of Duncan’s successes on the Western Front and in Turkey that it is easy for the reader to believe that the war would have taken a different course if a wise leader such as Duncan had taken charge of the stalemate.

The Man in the Queue

This detective story, published in 1929, introduces Inspector Alan Grant of the Criminal Investigation Department. He is leading the investigation into the murder of a man in a queue outside a theatre in London's West End. At the start of his involvement not only can the murderer not be identified but nor can the victim and there is no obvious motive.

The author, Josephine Tey, according to some sources was born in Inverness in 1897 and I included her, therefore, in this year's section of the project. Records now appear to show that she was born Elizabeth Mackintosh on 25 July 1896. I have transferred her to the list for that year. Her pseudonym included her mother’s forename and her English grandmother's surname. This novel was, however, first published under a male pseudonym (Gordon Daviot).

Sir John Gielgud, a close friend, suggested that she might have suffered a bereavement during the First World War. Throughout this novel, the author includes war service as a component of many of the male characters. In Chapter 4, she ascribes Inspector Grant’s alertness to his war service:
“he became conscious, with that sixth sense which four years on the Western Front and many more in the C.I.D. had developed to an abnormal acuteness, that he was being watched.”
Later in that chapter Grant reassures his landlady that he is not in grave danger:
“No one has ever spilt my blood except a Jerry at Contalmaison and that was more by luck than good management.”
Here the author points to him having served in a Scottish regiment, Contalmaison being most associated with the 16th Battalion of the Royal Scots.
In Chapter 6, when Grant is in pursuit of a suspect on the streets of London, he thinks to himself:
“Won't it be awful to die under a bus in the Strand after dodging the Bosche for four years!”

In Chapter 7 she uses the language of war to describe the investigation:
“Patiently Grant sifted the reports through the long, bright morning, sitting at his desk and sending his lieutenants out here and there as a general arranges his forces on a battlefield.”
Another example in the same chapter:
“A silence followed, dark and absolute. It was as if an advance guard, a scout, had spied out the land and gone away to report. There was the long, far-away sigh of the wind that had been asleep for days. Then the first blast of the fighting battalions of the rain struck the window in a wild rattle.”
Only someone who still had the war firmly in her consciousness would write such lines.

In Chapter 9 the plain-clothes policemen sent to do undercover investigations are pretending to be impoverished door-to-door salesmen who had served their country in the war:
“I was in the Army during the War. That's the only time bin in the Army counts. France? I was four years in France, miss.”

In subsequent chapters, the author mentions the war service of the murder victim and of the prime suspect, Gerald Lamont. When pursuing Lamont across a moor in the Scottish Highlands, Grant understands his elusiveness:
“He was heading somewhere. And for a townsman he was making a wonderful job of cover. But then, of course, there had been the War — Grant had forgotten that Lamont was old enough to have seen active service. He probably knew all that was to be known about the art of taking cover.”

Cynics

This satirical novella, published in 1928, chronicles life in the early years of the Soviet Union. Set in Moscow, it focuses on the relationship between the two central characters, Vladimir and Olga. It is divided into four sections, covering the years 1918, 1919, 1922 and 1924, and within each section by short numbered factual paragraphs and longer narrative passages. The factual paragraphs document the civil war, famine and developments in Soviet policy. It was first published in Berlin and was not available in Russia. This, however, did not prevent it from being severely opposed by the Soviet authorities and media.

The author, Anatoli Marienhof (born 6 July 1897), left school in 1914 and was later conscripted into the army, serving on the Eastern Front. In 1918 he co-founded a Moscow-based literary movement called Imaginism. His early publications were books of poetry. He progressed to novels and screenplays. As Michael Stein outlines in his 2012 article about Cynics, Marienhof wrote the novel with many of the devices of a screenplay.

Early in the novella, Olga sees her brother, Goga, leave home to join General Alexiev's anti-Bolshevik volunteer army in the Don region. She view him as “a charming, handsome lad of 19. His lips were always petulant and pink. His hair was golden, like melted butter from the cows of the steppes. His eyes were large, green, tragic.” The expectation is that this gentle young man will not return alive: “Poor angel! He will be shot like a partridge.”

One of the characters is sarcastically said to be suffering from shell-shock that, “according to precise information from the Soviet Revolutionary Army” is “not very severe”:
“Perhaps in three years... he will be able to hear with his left ear, and his head may stop shaking even sooner.”
Later there is a further reflection on this war-related debility:
“I was shell-shocked at the front, my ear drums burst, my noodle jerks and twists — what luck! Just think, that same nice little shell might have blown me into a 124 pieces!”

Another character, Ilia Dokoutchaev, in 1914 went from being an errand boy in a wholesalers to wartime service emptying bedpans in a hospital in Pskov near the Eastern Front:
“From boredom, [he] began to tabulate curious statistics of the relation between deaths and bed-pans. From these it appeared that for every ten pans, one dead body was carried out. In three years of war, Dokoutchaev emptied 26,000 urinal bottles.”

The Twelve Chairs

This satirical epic, published in 1928, exposes the selfishness and greed of Soviet society shaped by the New Economic Policy. It was a hugely successful book and achieved something of a cult status among its readers. Set in 1927, it was written collaboratively by journalist colleagues Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. The central character, Ippolit Matveevich Vorobyaninov, sets out on an exhaustive search for the jewels which his mother-in-law had secreted in one of twelve chairs. The chairs have been redistributed by the authorities. Together with Ostap Bender, a conman accomplice who forces himself on Vorobyaninov for a share of the treasure, he finds a way to obtain each chair and tear open the lining to see if the diamonds are hidden within. The idea for the plot was suggested by Petrov's brother, Valentin Kataev, whose novel, Embezzlers, parodies many of the same aspects of Soviet society of the 1920s.

The co-author, Ilya Ilf (born 15 October 1897), came from Odessa in present-day Ukraine. Ilf was a pseudonym; he was of a Jewish family called Fainzilberg. Ilf and Kataev were the same age and were close friends. Kataev recalled coming up with the scenario:
“As I saw it, the search for diamonds hidden in one of 12 chairs scattered all over the country by the Revolution offered the chance to portray a satirical picture gallery of character types from the N.E.P. era. I laid it all out for my friend and brother... I suggest the idea, the springboard, and they work it up, clothe it in the flesh and blood of a satirical novel. Then I go over their writing with the master's expert hand and we end up with an amusing picaresque novel.”

In a clever Russian-doll feature of the novel, some writers in a Moscow theatre discuss ideas for a play:
“It's a swell plot. See, here's what happens. A Soviet inventor comes up with a death ray and hides the design in a chair. Then he dies. His wife doesn't know about it and sells the chairs to different people. But the fascists find out and start hunting down the chairs. But then a Young Communist finds out about the chairs and so a struggle begins. Now you could do something really big here...”

Vorobyaninov and Bender have a rival in the pursuit of the diamonds, except he is sent after an entirely different set of chairs when swindled by a corrupt local archivist. He is Father Fyodor Vostrikov and is one of the few characters in the novel for which we are told anything about their experience of the Great War:
“Father Fyodor's impetuous soul knew no peace. It never had... Vostrikov switched from seminary to university and finished the first three years of the law faculty but in 1915 he got scared of being mobilised and returned to the spiritual line of work. First he was ordained a deacon, then he was consecrated to the sacred office of priest... And throughout all these stages of his spiritual and lay career, Father Fyodor had always been, and now remained, a money-grubber.”

The Walls of Jericho

This comic novel, published in 1928, is set in the African-American community of Harlem, New York. This edition was published in London in 1995 by The X Press as part of its Black Classics series. Its central character, Fred Merrit, is an upwardly-mobile black lawyer, who has purchased a house on Court Avenue, an exclusive white street on the edge of Harlem.

The author, Rudolph Fisher (born 9 May 1897), grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. The son of a clergyman, he graduated from Brown University in 1919. He was one of the principal writers of what was known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Among the comic characters he encounters in Agatha Cramp, a wealthy spinster resident of Court Avenue, who mistakes him for a white man due to his relatively pale skin. She is an eager philanthropist and eagerly adopts the charitable cause of the ethnic group from which her maid comes, as well as taking other concerns that she reads about in the newspaper:
“Over the slaughter of Armenians by Turks [in 1915] she had once sobbed bitterly and even over the devastation of the Japanese by earthquake [in 1923] she had mourned a little... but Negroes... they had never actually entered her head.”
That is until she hires an attractive black maid called Linda. She adopts her people’s charitable cause (the Improvement Association founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914). At a fundraising dance, Fred Merrit, playfully pretending to be white, explains black resistance to a credulous Miss Cramp:
“Suppose you were fighting somebody and, at every blow you delivered, your antagonist simply grinned and came on. Wouldn't you soon get scared? Wouldn't you begin to lose your nerve? Wouldn't you begin wondering if maybe the other fellow wasn't grinning at the futility of your blows — if maybe he wasn't just biding his time in the certainty of his power?”

Later Miss Cramp discovers she has been fooled and is greatly alarmed:
“I got interested in the welfare of Negroes and joined a mixed organisation for the improvement of conditions among them, you know. Well, naturally, I had to go about among them... I went... to see how they acted in their own surroundings and there were both white and coloured people in the box with me... And one of them was the man that bought a house almost next door to me here... and... he intends to live in it...
Anyway, suppose neighbours of mine see my name on the literature of the organisation. As soon as this man moves in, I'll be accused.”

When Miss Cramp loses the service of Linda to Fred Merrit, she hires an Irish maid called Mary and interrogates her about the Irish cause:
“I wonder if your people don't need help. Look at the way that Mc Reeny starved to death. Something ought to be done. Isn't there some organisation that takes care of such matters?...
What I mean is this. Here is a young an inexperienced newborn nation, planted on a little isle of the sea, and left quite alone, helpless. It does seem to me that those of us who are in a position to do so should contribute all we can toward their welfare.”

The Story of the Eye

This novella, published in 1928, tells of the deviant sexuality of two teenagers. The story is narrated by the young man. He was 15 when he first met the girl, Simone, a girl of the same age. Soon they involve their friend, Marcelle, in their sexual games. When an orgy is discovered, he flees home:
“I judged it prudent to decamp and elude the wrath of an awful father, the epitome of a senile Catholic general... I slept in a wood during the day and at nightfall I went to Simone's place.”

Georges Bataille (born 10 September 1897) was born in the Auvergne but grew up in Reims in northern France. He and his mother left home in August 1914 as part of the evacuation of the town ahead of German occupation. His father, a blind, syphilitic invalid, remained in Reims and died “in abandonment” in November 1915. Georges was conscripted to served in the army in 1916 but before he went to the front he was discharged in early 1917 having contracted tuberculosis. He remembered being “a sick soldier, imagining each day, amid the wounded and sick..., the hell to which I remained destined. My life, like that of the soliders among whom I lived, seemed enclosed in a sort of apocalypse.”

In a postscript Bataille refers to the novella as a “partly imaginary tale”. He maintains that he thought “at first... that the character speaking in the first person had no relation to [him]” but he reveals that he later was able to identify many subconscious influences of actual incidents in his own childhood and adolescence on his deviant imaginings.

Death is always close to the several incidents described by the narrator. He describes, for example, Simone and him attending a bull fight in Madrid in May 1922. The matador kills a bull:
“Simone... witnessed the killing with an exhiliration at least equal to mine and she refused to sit down again when the interminable acclamation for the young man was over. She took my hand wordlessly and led me to an outer courtyard of the filthy arena, where the stench of equine and human urine was suffocating because of the great heat... We stepped into a stinking shithouse, where sordid flies whirled about in a sunbeam... A bull's orgasm is not more powerful than the one that wrenched through our loins to tear us to shreds...” On returning to their seats, Simone is aroused by the return of the matador to fight another bull, mixing in her erotic imagination the testicle of the dead bull and the detached eye of the gored matador.