Stretchers

This memoir, published in 1929, provides a first-hand account of the work of an American evacuation hospital on the Western Front in 1918. Whereas the account is centred on the author’s recollections, it also draws on the diaries and correspondence of several of his colleagues. There are also some detailed descriptions of the surgery and antiseptic treatment of wounds.

The author, Frederick A. Pottle (born 3 August 1897), graduated from Colby College in 1917 and joined Evacuation Hospital No. 8 later that year. After the war he studied for a doctorate at Yale University and remained there to pursue a lengthy academic career, serving as Sterling Professor of English from 1944 to 1966. He became the foremost expert on the literary career of James Boswell.

The account starts in Fort Slocum on an island off New York. There Pottle’s unit was assembled. It was a miserable situation:
“As we draw away from that terrible isalnd, each of us knows in his heart that, though the months ahead may hold many bitter and painful experiences, they will contain nothing to match the accumulated and unalleviated horror of Fort Slocum.”
From there the unit transferred to Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia where conditions were not much better; two of the company's men dying there in January 1918. Eventually the unit sailed from Hoboken, New Jersey on 10 May on a small Italian liner described as “dirty and insanitary”. The company arrived in Brittany on 24 May and by 6 June were stationed in the Collège de Juilly about 30 km northeast of Paris. There they receive wounded American soldiers from the battle at Belleau Woods:
“Some of them are babbling in delirium, some shouting and cursing as they fight their way out of the ether dream in which they are re-enacting the horror of the trenches, some in their right minds, gaily talking and joking, but the most lie in a half-waking stupor, the inevitable reaction to days of hunger, fatigue, the nervous strain of incessant deadly peril and, finally, the shock of severe wounds, ether and surgical operations.”

After the Armistice, the unit is sent to serve in occupied Germany and the men are billeted in homes in the town of Mayen near Koblenz. This brings conflicting sentiments to mind:
“Shocking! Less than 50 days before the American Army had been engaged in a most earnest and uncompromising effort to kill all the Germans it could; now we sat in their kitchens breaking bread with them, every shade of bitterness past, watching together for the dawn of a New Year. It was inevitable. If you want to make people hate properly, you must keep them out of sight of each other.”

Boomerang

This epic novel, written in 1931 and published in 1932, reads like a combination of the historical narrative of a Who Do You Think You Are? feature and the eccentricity of Georges Perec’s Life: A User's Manual. It was the winning novel in 1932 in the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize awards, also won by Liam O'Flaherty, Kate O'Brien and Winifred Holtby, each of whom feature in this project. In this impressive novel the author builds on her own actual ancestry, in particular on the family of her aristocratic French maternal grandfather, Auguste Pierre Clement de Guerry de Lauret, who was born in the French colonial outpost of Pondicherry in 1810. Through this device, she explores English, French and Australian history in the 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating in Australia’s participation in the Great War. The boomerang of the title is a way of explaining how she had come full circle back to the ancestral home in Artois on the Western Front. It also conveys warfare and the narrative includes sections concerned with the Peninsular War and the Franco-Prussian War as well as the First World War.

The author, Helen de Guerry Simpson (born 1 December 1897), was the daughter of a Sydney solicitor and the novel includes some legal cases where the narrator, Clotilde de Boissy, describes family members pursuing careers in law. Indeed the author has used many aspects of her own family history as a framework for the plot of the novel. Whereas she maintains in the foreword that “the characters throughout are either imaginary or dead”, in a sense many of them were somewhat based on actual characters in her own family history. For example, her appreciation of Irish characters in Australian society was no doubt influenced by a knowledge of the relatives on the side of her maternal grandmother, Anna Maria Lett, from Co. Wexford. In addition, she gleaned a few actual events for use in the plot and explained that “of the various incidents related in the book, some of the more improbable are true”. A key autobiographical element of the novel is the presence of the narrator in Europe during the First World War: the author went to England in 1914 to study. Having been reading French at Oxford, in April 1918 she joined the Women's Royal Naval Service as an officer responsible for deciphering and decoding messages in foreign languages.

The narrator’s grandfather had in the outback of Australia requested that her father, the eldest son, would go to France to fight in the Franco-Prussian War. When he refused, he was ostracised and the patriarch himself went to Europe with the intention of protecting the honour of his fatherland. By the time he reached Bordeaux, though, “the war was over, humiliating terms of peace were being added up into a treaty... and France, like a woman in hysteria, was drumming her heels on the ground and shrieking that it was everyone else's fault”. He ended up dying in a duel with an officer of the German army of occupation that he had earlier assaulted, insisting that “the uniform he wears is a challenge and an insult to every Frenchman.” Just as her grandfather was useless to the war effort, so also in the First World War was Clotilde’s aristocratic English husband, who she had met on board a ship, he having been invalided home from India suffering from asthma. When determinedly he came up before an army board, doctors “could hear him whistling rooms away... they were not going to hand out combatant jobs to a fellow who... ought to be wearing a tube in his throat”. Ultimately, therefore, it fell to Clotilde to return to her ancestral homeland to contribute to the war effort as part of a Women's Interpreter Corps. There she encounters an Australian doctor, who she had met in England, and visits him on the battle line, witnessing his death in a futile minor campaign to secure a useless trench. He explains to her,
“There's an attack down for tomorrow morning. The blasted fools are going to make a set at Grease Trench.”

“What's that? Is it important?"
“Important, of course it isn't. It's a bit of a salient that spoils the look of their maps.”

A Trip to Czardis

This novel, published in 1966, started out in 1932 as an award-winning short story of the same title. The scenario of the short story, set in Florida, was a woman and her two sons making the journey into town to see her condemned husband for the last time. The apparent purpose of the novel is to explain why he had been sentenced to death for murder. It was at that time unusual for an author to write such a prequel and although it has stylistic merits, as a plot it seems contrived and predictable, though obviously tragic. The central character is shown to be guilty of many things connected to the death of his employer but not actually of his murder.

The author, Edwin Granberry (born 18 April 1897), moved from his native Mississippi to Florida as a child. His studies at the University of Florida were interrupted in 1918 by his service with the Marine Corps. On his return he completed his degree at Columbia University in New York and pursued an academic career. Following the success of the short story, he was appointed a lecturer in English at Rollins College in central Florida and went on to become Professor of Creative Writing there.

At the beginning of novel, the central character, Jim Cameron, a ranch hand, while in conversation with his employer, Ponce Logan, owner of the ranch, explains that he had only one been in New York  and that was “on [his] way home from the war”. There are suggestions of post-traumatic stress disorder in Cameron’s behaviour but whether it is war-related depends on exactly when the novel is set and that is unclear. Jim and Martha Cameron have two young sons and it is possible they had met and married after the war. Martha observes her husband’s episodic withdrawal into silence:
“ ‘What's the matter, Jim?’ ...
‘Nothing, Marty,’... ‘It's just one of my dumb spells. It'll pass.’...
And she was eased — for he had had his ‘dumb’ spells since the time she first knew him. And she, nor anyone, could do nothing but wait until he came back from the lonely place where he wrestled with matters known only to him and his soul.”