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.”