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.”