Katrin Becomes a Soldier

I was not aware of this book when last year I was reading books by authors born in 1897. This impressive semi-autobiographical novel, published in 1930, takes the form of a diary of an adolescent Jewish girl. It's largely set in Metz, a historic city of Lorraine, one of the frontier regions that had at different points been part to the Holy Roman Empire, France and Germany. The actual diary — “a lovely fat one made of red leather with gilt edges” — is a present to the central character, Cathérine Lentz, for her 14th birthday (27 May 1911). When war breaks out and her male contemporaries, including her beau Lucien, leave for the Western Front, she is determined to serve in solidarity with them and volunteers to serve with the Red Cross, chiefly at the city’s railway station but also in the military hospitals. There’s no happy ending — Cathérine (or Katrin as she is known to the German soldiers she attends to) outlives most of her young male friends, including Lucien, before herself dying in December 1916 of disease contracted in a military hospital due to poor nutrition and voluntary overwork.

The author, Hertha Strauch (born 24 June 1897), grew up in the town of Saint-Avoid and then the nearby city of Metz. She used the nom de plume Adrienne Thomas, Adrienne being her middle name. During the First World War, she served as a voluntary nurse with the Red Cross. Whereas the central character of this novel opts to stay and serve in Metz when her parents leave for Berlin to avoid the air raids, the author moved to Berlin and continued her Red Cross work there. She married there in 1921 and settled in Magdeburg. Her first novel (this one) was published in 1930 and soon appeared in many translations. She went into exile in 1933 with the beginning of the Third Reich and her book was banned and burned in Nazi demonstrations. She was living in Switzerland when her second novel was published in 1934. She wrote a further ten books for publication, most being semi-autobiographical, as well as several unfinished works. In 1947 she moved to Austria with her second husband, the prominent Austrian socialist, Julius Deutsch. Although highly regarded in the German-speaking countries for many years, she has only recently been honoured in her home town due to a reluctance to acknowledge any aspect of the German occupation of Lorraine. There is now an Adrienne Thomas prize for young historians in her native Saint-Avoid.

The central character’s narration of the war is consistently pacifist. At the start of the war, when her boyfriend asks “Wouldn't you join up if you were a boy?”, she doesn't answer but records in her diary:
“I knew that I should go. This frightful war is more bearable for a man, for he knows that others will be killed today and he himself will die tomorrow.”
By February 1916, she condemns the inhumanity of the fighting going on near Metz:
“I should like to sleep but I can't go to sleep. I wish they would stop that noise out there! I can't stand it. They are attacking each other like wild animals. There! — now I hear it again. But the men out there can't be civilised human beings!”

And the votes are in...

At the end of a third year of the reading project, here are my awards —

Best novel: All Quiet on the Western Front (below) by Erich Maria Remarque
Best memoir: The Prisoners of Mainz by Alec Waugh

Best lead character in a novel: Deborah Seerlie in Deborah by Marian Castle
Best supporting character in a novel: Jack Pugh in Through the Wheat by Thomas Boyd

Best lead character in a memoir: Ludwig Bemelmans in My War with the United States
Best supporting character in a memoir: Milton Hayes in The Prisoners of Mainz

Home and Home Again

This memoir, published in 1973, is set in Georgia in 1961. The author, having fled the fledgling Soviet Union for Turkey and later entered the United States in 1922, returns to his homeland four decades later with his American wife and resumes his relationships with his family and friends. He summarises his story to a curious member of the public:
“How could you leave home and go so far away?”
“I wanted to learn all about automobiles and how they were designed and made.”
“You were a student?”
"No. It was 1918. I was a soldier tired of war.”
The nostalgic visit to his native country only became possible due to the post-Stalin thaw introduced by Nikita Khruschev.

The author, George Papashvily (born 23 August 1898), was brought up in the village of Kobiaantkari about 50 km northeast of Georgia's capital, Tbilisi. There was considerable doubt about his year of birth. In the 1940 census he's declared to be 51 years old and in the 1942 draft registration for men born between 1897 and 1921, he claims that he “does not know“ his age. This memoir, however, records that he was drafted into the army soon after the conscription age was lowered — and from this it can be interpreted that he probably turned 18 in 1916. He served as a sniper in the Russian infantry, some of the time on the Turkish front, and subsequently fought with the Georgian army during the revolution of 1917. On arriving in America, he worked in a variety of trades. In 1935 he and his American wife Helen (née Waite, born 24 December 1906) moved to Pennsylvania and established a farm. She helped him to write his first memoir — Anything Can Happen, published in 1945, was a lively account of his experiences as an immigrant and was well received (later being adapted into a 1952 film). They went on to write several other books together. He also became highly regarded as a sculptor.

The remoteness of rural Georgia is epitomised in the author's recollection of the local response to the outbreak of the First World War:
“Why is everybody in such a hurry?"
“Some kind of an archduke was killed.”
“Where?”
“Who knows. Far away someplace.”
“Why was he killed?”
“Who knows.”
“There must have been a reason.”
“You don't need a reason to kill an archduke.”
“But what has that to do with all the extra work brought in the shop to be finished at once?”
“The officers hope to make a war out of the dead archduke.”
“Why a war?”
“Why? To earn promotions, naturally, and medals and estates and prizes.”
“It doesn't make any sense.”
“Of course not...”

Black Rain

This masterpiece, published in 1965, is a documentary novel of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Written to mark the 20th anniversary of the events of August 1945, the account is built around the central character, Shigematsu Shizuma, a real man who wrote a journal of the bombing and its aftermath. In the novel, set in 1949, he is transcribing the journal to send to the family of a young man interested in marrying his niece Yasuko (who has been living with her uncle). He wants to use it as evidence that Yasuko wasn't in Hiroshima on the day of the bombing and would, therefore, be free of radiation sickness and a suitably healthy wife. In the course of transcribing it, however, Yasuko’s health deteriorates. Paul Brians, in his authoritative work Nuclear Holocausts: atomic war in fiction, considers it to be “by far the most devastating account of the effects of nuclear war ever written” and it's also reasonable to regard it as one of the most important indictments of warfare in the 20th century.

The author, Masuji Ibuse (born 15 February 1898), grew up in a village in Hiroshima Prefecture. He studied literature at Waseda University in Tokyo. His first publication (a work of short fiction written in 1919) appeared in 1923. His first novel was published in 1931. During the Second World War, he was conscripted to serve for a year as a war correspondent in Southeast Asia. Many of his post-war writings are full of bitter condemnation of the war and its enduring aftermath. He received the Noma Literary Prize in 1966 for this novel and was in the same year awarded the Order of Culture, the highest honour for writers in Japan. He was also well-regarded for his writings on rural life and for works of historical fiction.

The anti-war sentiment of the central character is perhaps best exemplified by an entry in his journal on 10 August 1945:
“A phrase from a poem came back to me, a poem I had read in some magazine when I was a boy:
‘Oh worm, friend worm!’ it began. There was more in the same vein: ‘Rend the heavens, burn the earth and let men die! A brave and moving sight!’
Fool! Did the poet fancy himself as an insect, with his prating of his ‘friend’ the worm? How idiotic can you get? He should have been here at 8.15 on 6 August, when it had all come true: when the heavens had been rent asunder, the earth had burned and men had died. ‘Revolting man,’ I found myself announcing quite suddenly to no one in particular. ‘Brave and moving, indeed!’ For a moment, I felt like flinging my bundle in the river. I hated war. Who cared, after all, which side won? The only important thing was to end it all as soon as possible: rather an unjust peace, than a ‘just’ war.”

A for Artemis

This satirical novel, published in 1960, deals with the relationship between Australian politicians and the media. The central character, Oliver Goldfish, is, like the author, a newspaper journalist. Early in the novel, Goldfish is called before the editor and sacked. In response he calls the editor a bastard. When, however, an influential tycoon meets the editor and told how wonderful Goldfish's writing is, the editor has not only to re-employ Goldfish but to give him a promotion. Later Goldfish is at the centre of the media tussle over the Senate elections in which alphabetical order is hugely significant. His newspaper's favoured candidate, Artemis Aars, is an immigrant Dutchman. When the whole scheme has been completed, Goldfish is no longer needed and is sent on an obscure reporting trip to Tibet and Afghanistan.

The author, Leslie Haylen (born 23 September 1898), wrote this novel using the pseudonym Sutton Woodfield. His early childhood was spent in rural New South Wales before the family moved to Sydney in 1908. On leaving high school, he worked as a bank clerk before enlisting in the army in July 1918. His troop ship embarked for Europe in October but was recalled and he was subsequently discharged in January 1919. He re-enlisted in June and served as part of a military escort accompanying German prisoners of war being repatriated. Afterwards he worked as a journalist, first in Sydney and then in Wagga Wagga. His first play, Two Minutes' Silence, appeared in 1930. An anti-war drama, it was well received and ran for 26 weeks in Sydney. He moved back to Sydney in 1933 to be news editor of the Australian Women's Weekly and in the same year published the first of three novels about early colonial Australia. From 1943 to 1963 he served as a Labour M.P. for the suburban constituency of Parkes. On losing his seat, he continued writing and subsequently a novel, a play and a political memoir were published.

The narrator explains the difficulty with editorials:
“I told them that they shouldn't put me on leader writing while the man who did the regular job was on leave. It's too much of a temptation to a man used to straight news. Politicians and reporters are the world's greatest frustrates. The politician can't say what he thinks because of his electors; the reporter mustn't write what he thinks because of his editor. When they cut free, they're wildcats.”

Gates of Bronze

This epic novel (of 132 chapters), published in 1968, grew out of a short novel published in 1956 and had its earliest origins in a series of short fictional accounts of the Russian Revolution published in 1924. Set in a fictional Ukrainian village, it focuses on the experience of the village's Jewish community in the aftermath of the October Revolution. The central characters are Sorokeh, a young Anarchist, Polyishuk, the ambitious Bolshevik, and Leahtche, a young woman who symbolically divides her romantic affiliation between Sorokeh and Polyishuk:
“Leahtche’s thoughts raced from Sorokeh to Polyishuk and back again. She was torn, filled with doubts, unable to make up her mind how she really felt.”

The author, Haim Hazaz (born 16 September 1898) grew up in a small Ukrainian village with a mixed population of Slavs and Jews. At the age of 16, he left the village to pursue an education in  Kharkiv (the second city of Ukraine) and was working as a journalist in Moscow during the revolutions of 1917. His first literary work to be published appeared in 1918. He emigrated in 1921, moving from Istanbul to Paris, where he spent nine years. There he wrote the short stories on the Revolution that were the kernel of this novel. His first novel, published in 1930, was set during the Russo-Japanese War. In 1931 he moved to Jerusalem and settled there. He wrote several further novels and numerous works of short fiction as well as The End of Days, a major play of the modern Hebrew canon.

Having experienced pogroms, war, revolution and confiscation of assets, many in the Jewish community were considering a Zionist alternative to their suffering but it wasn't a clear-cut decision:
“When the Revolution came, at the same time that people heard about the Balfour Declaration, they began to think that maybe some good would come out of the war and its attendant suffering. After all, they said, the Land of Israel is desolate and the people of Israel is in ruins. They make a good pair. But when Sorokeh suggested that now was a good time to think about going to Palestine, they looked at him as though he had gone out of his mind. ‘Now,’ they said. ‘Now, just when the law of the Pale has been abolished and we’re allowed to live in Kiev, Moscow, Petrograd?’ "

Five Soldiers

This novel, published in 1954, describes, as the title suggests, five soldiers, one from each of the five nationalities represented in post-war Berlin. In five separate sections, the lives of each soldier is traced through the First World War to the end of the Second World War (October 1945). Each of the five soldiers is given the same surname in the relevant language: Krieger, Warrior, Guerrier, Voin and Fighter. In the devastated German capital the five soldiers are spending a night in the cellar of a ruined building along with a teenaged orphan called Otto.

The author, Paul Vialar (born 18 September 1898), grew up in Paris. He served as a soldier during the First World War and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. His first novel was published in 1931. He won the prestigious Prix Femina for his third novel, La Rose de la mer. In addition to more than 30 separate novels, he wrote three distinct series of novels consisting of a total of 28 volumes. He also wrote poetry, drama and works of non-fiction. Among his early plays was Les hommes ceux de 14-18, which was written as a tribute to his comrades a few years after the war. One critic described it as “the most lively, most versatile and most accurate synthesis of war that one could imagine”. A screen adaption of the play was broadcast on French television in 1964 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of war.

A young François Guerrier, the French soldier featured in the novel, is told by a soldier on leave from the Western Front of the realities of the First World War:
“You have 20 chances in a hundred of coming through and then perhaps with the loss of an arm or a leg. In any case, unless one is nothing but a brute, the immense disgust that I and many like me feel and which makes life utterly purposeless, condemning us to do to the end of our days like men who exist in a living death, only leaves room in us for a vast, irremediable, barren grief at the uselessness of our life. There is something great, indeed, in accepting the sacrifice. But there is something so ignoble and so base in war that the sacrifice becomes a caricature of itself. You've got to know what war is.”

The Earthquake

This semi-allegorical novel, published in 1950, tells how a series of earthquakes bring about the disintegration of society. The narrator and central character has killed his wife and his state of mind is being analysed by a psychiatrist. As part of this investigation, he records incidents from his life beginning with his childhood and concluding with the act of uxoricide. Presumably the following description is intended to refer to the Nazi regime:
“In those days we were ruled by a party whom the wits styled the ‘Government of the Industrious Ants’. The name was not ill-chosen considering that their national emblem was a wheel and their motto ‘To rest is to rust’... [The regime] went so far as to bind the citizen not only with laws but also with all kinds of unwritten rules and expressions of opinion which were never clearly defined and could thus be interpreted in a variety of ways. To discover the correct interpretation required in the subject a herd instinct, an instinct for uniformity. The threat of danger was greatest, therefore, to those who wanted to roam freely and indeed they were the chief victims of the hunters and their bloodhounds.”

The author, Heinz Risse (born 30 March 1898), grew up in Düsseldorf. On completing his schooling in 1915 he enlisted in the army and served on the Western Front. Here he recalls fighting around the village of Fleury. Although wounded by a grenade in 1918, he was the only one of his 22 classmates to survive the war. After the war he studied in Marburg, Frankfurt and Heidelberg universities and pursued a career in accountancy. He did not begin writing fiction until after the Second World War, his first literary work (a collection of novellas) being published in 1948. He went on to write five novels, mostly with sociological and philosophical themes, as well as short stories and numerous works of non-fiction. In 1956 he received the Immermann literary prize of the city of Düsseldorf and in 1974 he was awarded the cultural prize of the city of Solingen.

The narrator describes the life-changing event that occurred when he had just reached adulthood:
“As long as my father was alive it was taken for granted that I should go to the university when I had finished school... My plans disintegrated when my father was suddenly killed in the earthquake. I had to start earning a living and after passing my leaving examination at school, entered an insurance firm as a junior... My mother was compelled to go out to work.“
Such was the experience of many families when the main breadwinner was killed in the First World War.

The Skin

This black comedy, published in 1949, is set in Naples following the Allied liberation of the city. The central character, bearing the author’s name, is embedded with the American forces as a liaison officer. He is torn between the American viewpoint of being liberators and the perspective of the Neapolitans that they have been conquered rather than liberated. He observes the immediate aftermath of the American takeover of the city in the context of abject poverty and years of persecution, describing the situation in terms of an outbreak of an epidemic:
“I preferred the war to the plague. Within the space of a day, within a few hours, all — men, women and children — had been infected by the horrible, mysterious disease. What amazed and terrified the people was the sudden, violent, fatal character of that fearful epidemic. The plague had been able to achieve more in a few days than tyranny had done in 20 years of universal humiliation or war in three years of hunger, grief and atrocious suffering. These people who bartered themselves, their honor, their bodies and the flesh of their own children in the streets — could they possibly be the people who a few days before... had given such conspicuous and horrible proof of their courage... in the face of German opposition?”
Rather than being set free by the Allied forces, the people of the city were immediately enslaved to a system of corruption, exploitation and abuse. The macrocosm is that the vicious oppression of Fascism was being replaced by the ruthless free-for-all of American capitalism.

The author, Curzio Malaparte (né Kurt Erich Suckert, born 9 June 1898), grew up in Prato, Tuscany, the son of a German father and an Italian mother. On the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered for service in the Legion Garibaldi of the French Foreign Legion. When Italy entered the war in 1915, he enlisted in the Italian army and served in the Dolomites as a captain in the 5th Alpine Regiment. In the aftermath of the war he wrote Viva Caporetto! — a fictional account of the 1917 battle in the Austrian Littoral in which the Italian army was routed. It was scathingly critical of the Italian military leadership that oversaw the slaughter. During the 1920s he was active as both a journalist and a Fascist. In 1931, however, his book, Coup d'état, was published. In it, he was critical of both Hitler and Mussolini and this led him to being stripped of his Fascist party membership, then to him being exiled on the island of Lipari from 1933 to 1938 and was subsequently jailed repeatedly between 1938 and 1943. In 1941 he worked on the Eastern Front as a war correspondent for Corriere della Serra. This assignment informed the first of his two seminal novels: Kaputt, published in 1944. From November 1943 to March 1946 he worked as a liaison officer with the American High Command and his experience in that role was the basis for his greatest novel (this one).

In reference to the title of the novel, the narrator observes the situation for the people of Italy:
“Today they suffer and make others suffer, they kill and are killed, they do wonderful things and dreadful things, not to save their souls, but to save their skins. They think they are fighting and suffering to save their souls but in reality they are fighting and suffering to save their skins and their skins alone. Nothing else counts. Men are heroes for the sake of a very paltry thing today! An ugly thing! The human skin is ugly. Look! It’s loathsome. And to think that the world is full of heroes who are ready to sacrifice their lives for such a thing as this!”

Device and Desire

This comic novel, published in 1949, is set in affluent Philadelphia. The plot revolves around the death of Camilla Flint Purdon, a wealthy dowager and those who hope to inherit her millions. Her will contains a peculiar request with regard to her funeral:
“None of the legatees on pain of forfeiting his legacy shall follow to the grave. I will not have people pretending sorrow they do not feel.”
One of the family members ignores the request and is believed to have forfeited the legacy that is due to her — until a codicil to the will is found and the tables are turned. 

The author, Mary Fanning Wickham (née Porcher, born 8 June 1898), grew up in Philadelphia and received the benefits of a private education. She turned a place in the prestigious Bryn Mawr College to volunteer as an emergency aide during the First World War. She began writing fiction in the 1920s but only two of her seven novels of that period were published. Her first successful novel (this one) appeared in 1949. Another novel followed as well as poetry and works of non-fiction, including an autobiography in 1988. Her other claim to fame is that her second marriage was to the ornithologist James Bond — Ian Fleming came across him and felt his plain name would suit his new fictional character.

The novel describes the parallel responses to the death of a family member — the conventional emotional loss of a loved one and the unemotional loss of someone who performed an important role in family life but in a way that did not inspire respect and admiration. Her daughter Kate’s sense of loss is shown in the context of previous bereavement:
“When Kate’s father had died, a pillar of her world had collapsed. She had never loved him but she had depended on him. Now, when the undertakers came to take her mother's body away, and their dark sleek car had rolled unctuously down the drive and out through the gate, Kate became light-headed.”
This made me reflect on the fact that some of the men killed in the war were not greatly loved and admired by the members of the family (they weren't all charming young men) but their deaths were still felt hugely because of the roles they performed within the family.

The Years of the Locust

This novel, published in 1947, is set in the author's native Missouri. The central character, Dade Kenzie, the family patriarch has died and the novel covers just three days in the aftermath of his death. It documents the response of seven characters to Old Dade's death and traces the influence he had on each of their lives. The title of the novel refers to part of God's promise revealed to the prophet Joel:
“And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten.”


The author tells how a preacher
explained this:

“He said that it meant that the Lord would give people a chance to straighten things out, even after they had made the worst kind of a mess. He said that, since the Lord had to work through people, he had to give them lots of chances to make good, just like a mother had to give her child more than one chance to learn a thing.”






The author, Loula Grace Erdman (born 8 June 1898), grew up in rural Missouri. She submitted her first story for publication at the age of 14 and wasn't deterred by it being rejected. She went to college and then began a career as a teacher in Amarillo, Texas. The pinnacle of her teaching career was at West Texas State College where from 1945, as an assistant professor, she taught creative writing. Later she was promoted to the role of novelist in residence. Her first novel was published in 1944 and had plenty of autobiographical content, being about a teacher fresh out of college. Her third novel (this one) was awarded the biennial Dodd-Mead-Redbook Award and with it a prize of $10,000. She went on to write a total of 17 novels as well as short stories and works of non-fiction.

Taking into account that the novel is ultimately about bereavement, the novel contains some positive perspectives on death:
“There was no telling how many lives he had helped to shape, lives that maybe got his influence only indirectly, themselves scarcely knowing of his existence. So goodness and strength and force are spread as ripples spread when the stone is thrown into the water. His destiny, enlarged and multiplied, was passed on and on. Death did not finish such an influence as that.”

Deborah

This feminist novel, published in 1946, is set in the American Midwest. It chronicles the life of the central character, Deborah Seerlie, from her childhood on a Dakota farm to her life as a student in Chicago, then teacher, wife and mother, concluding with her return to her impoverished homestead with her granddaughter. Deborah assesses the different opportunities available to each generation of women: her rebellion against her parents’ plan for her to settle down with a local farmer; her desire for her daughters to get a degree; her hopes that her granddaughter will marry her childhood sweetheart and have a career.

The author, Marian Castle (née Johnson, born 5 November 1896; some sources have 1898 and I had listed her among the authors for that year), had a small-town Midwest upbringing, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. Like Deborah in this novel, she took a year out from her studies (aged 16) to teach in a junior school. She recalled this episode in rural Wisconsin: “I look back on that year teaching 32 pupils in seven grades as a nightmare of ‘character building’. I remember how I battled deep snow drifts and deeper ignorance (my own and the children's) and how the snow and the ignorance usually won.” Having graduated from the University of Chicago in 1920, she got married in 1924 and soon settled in Denver, Colorado. Her first published writing were Western short stories in magazines. She began writing her first novel (this one) in 1936. She went on to write three more novels.

Deborah, the central character of the novel, is twice widowed and outlives two of her three children. Her son, Richard, dies in an army camp in 1918 during the influenza epidemic. He had run away from home to join up and she had complained to her husband:
“But I had such plans for him — I won't let him. He had to lie about his age to enlist — I can get him out."
Many years later she did not distinguish between his death from illness and any other kind of war death:
“I lost my son Richard in the war and my daughter Gay... several years later.”

The Journey Home

This novel, published in 1945, is an account of a train journey from Florida to New York. The central character, Lieutenant Don Corbett, is on three weeks’ leave from service as an Air Force bombardier in Europe. During the train journey, he moves from carriage to carriage, engaging in conversation with a wide variety of characters. Through doing so, he gets an insight into the mood of America’s home front and some of them see beneath his steely veneer the frailty and fatigue of a war-weary fighter.

The author, Zelda Popkin (née Feinberg, born 5 July 1898), grew up in and around New York City. Her parents were both Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. On leaving school, she worked as a newspaper reporter. She wrote regularly for magazines, such as The New Yorker, before she wrote her first novel when convalescing from a long illness. Published in 1938, it was the first of five detective novels featuring Mary Carner, one of the earliest female detectives in fiction. After those novels, she wrote this novel, focused on American attitudes to the Second World War; then Small Victory (published in 1947), one of the first American novels on the Holocaust; later Quiet Street, the earliest novel in English about the creation of the state of Israel, for which she received a National Jewish Book Award in 1952. Small Victory  was largely informed by her own experiences of post-war camps for displaced people in Germany, which she visited on behalf of the American Red Cross in the winter of 1945-1946.

The central character, Don Corbett, befriends Nina, a young New York woman, on the train and she tries to connect to this experience of war. Towards the end of the novel, part of the train is derailed and in conversation with Don, she tries to use the disaster as a means of understanding the horrors of war:
“I feel as if I'd been through the war. Why, it's something like that, like that wreck, isn't it?”
“Something. Only more so. All the time.”
“Oh, no!... but then how do they stand it?"
“Some do. Some don't. Depends on what kind of person you are. If you're one kind, you pull up your guts and do something to help. If you’re another, you sit down and cry and say why did it happen to me?”

Death in the Mind

This novel, published in 1945, reads like a series of Homeland, except for the fact that it's set during the Second World War. The main premise is that the Nazis are using hypnotism to turn Americans into Nazi operatives. The novel begins with an American submarine commander firing torpedoes into an American ship in an English harbour. The American and British security agents are asked to investigate. The central characters are two agents, John Evans, who is leading the investigation, and his girlfriend, Madeleine Sawyers, who appears to have been turned by the Nazis.

The author, Richard Lockridge (born 26 September 1898), wrote this novel with the assistance of George Estabrooks (born 16 December 1895), a psychology professor with an expert knowledge of hypnotism. Lockridge grew up in Missouri and attended the University of Missouri. He briefly served in the navy in 1918 and returned to naval service during the Second World War, working in the Navy Public Relations Office. He was a drama critic for The New York Sun from 1928 to 1943. His first book, a biography, was published in 1932. His first detective novel was published in 1940 and he went on to write more than 60 similar novels, many in collaboration with is wife Frances. They won an Edgar in the Mystery Writers Association's first annual awards in 1945.

The novel begins by setting the scene for the event that sparks the investigation:
“Things were not going well for the Allies that day in late September of 1942 — they were not going well anywhere. In North Africa things went badly and Rommel’s tanks rumbled up to the line the British held only some fifty miles from Alexandria. They rumbled rapidly... Things went badly in North Africa and they went badly in Russia, where the Germans and those who followed them were snarling into Stalingrad. The Allied world awaited news which seemed inevitable. When Hitler screamed that Stalingrad would surely fall there were very few people in the world... who doubted him.”

The White Brigade

This novel, published in 1943, is described as “an absorbing and authentic account of the Belgian underground” during the Second World War. In effect it's a factual account of the White Brigade resistance movement (“all the characters in the book are real”), written in the form of fiction to protect the identities of those involved in the struggle against Nazi occupation. The central character, Jean Buchet, believes he is involved in the Resistance for the sake of his daughter but the terrible living conditions in Nazi-occupied Belgium lead to a tuberculosis epidemic and both his wife and daughter are infected. A wanted man for his resistance activities, his terminally-ill wife urges him to flee to England. There he joins many other Belgian exiles flying in the Royal Air Force.

The author, Robert Goffin (born 21 May 1898), grew up in the Walloon part of Brabant in central Belgium. He was educated at the Athenaeum Saint-Gilles in Brussels and then studied law at the city’s Free University. His first book of poetry was published in 1918. During the five years preceding the Second World War, he published 13 books: two novels, three collections of poetry, three long studies on eels, rats and spiders, two works of literary criticism, two books on the Habsburgs and also a Michelin-type gastronomy guide. He lived in exile during the Second World War, supporting himself by writing and delivering lectures. During this period, along with several well-researched books set in Nazi-occupied Belgium, he also published books on the history of jazz and delivered a related course at the New School for Social Research in New York City. After the war he returned to Belgium and resumed his work as a lawyer. In 1953 he was elected to the prestigious Royal Academy of French Language and Literature.

Whereas many outsiders would contrast the German occupation of Belgium in the First World War with the Nazi occupation in the Second World War, the author describes how the country was “occupied by the same enemy who had tortured it in 1914”. The central character, Jean Buchet, “remembered with anguish those years of desolation”. Reference is made to the Resistance movement during that first occupation, citing the response in the underground press to the execution of Philippe Baucq in October 1915:
“You may rob us, imprison us, even kill us; you can never silence us... Our voice is the voice of all the mothers, the widows, the children who weep for those whom they have lost. That voice will not be still until the last German, soldier or spy, has left the country, invaded as it was in contravention of every right.”

Siren in the Night

This detective novel, published in 1943, is set during the Second World War. The plot connects two major events in modern American history: the great fire of San Francisco in 1906, when more than 80 per cent of the city was destroyed, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 (the siren in the title refers to the blackout siren connected with air raids). Two murders take place in the respectable neighbourhood of San Joaquin Terrace. There are formal detectives investigating the crimes, Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck, but also Grace Latham, the narrator, who happens to observe aspects of both crimes and pieces together who might have been involved in the murder and why.
 

The author, Zenith Jones (née Brown, born 8 December 1898), wrote under the pseudonyms of Brenda Conrad, Leslie Ford and David Frome. Born in California, where her father was an Anglican missionary to Native Americans, she grew up in the state of Washington. She studied at the University of Washington in Seattle and following her marriage to an academic, she taught English there from 1921 to 1923. Between the publication of Murder of an Old Man in 1929 and Trial by Ambush in 1962, she wrote more than 60 detective novels. Whereas her novels as Leslie Ford were mostly set in large American cities, her novels as David Frome were set in London.

The family at the centre of the plot is that of Loring Kimball. His wife had disappeared during the 1906 fire and her husband had kept a light on in one of the rooms of his house since then, ostensibly to honour her memory. This approach to mourning resembles the respect shown for young men (sons or husbands) who went to war and never came home. The author touches on the impact of the First World War on American society. Of the two detectives investigating the murder case, Colonel Primrose “was wounded in the Argonne” (the American offensive of September-November 1918) and “his iron henchman Sergeant Buck... also 92nd Engineers”.

Curious George

This children's story, published in 1941, has become an international classic. Appearing during the Second World War, it explores relevant themes for children during wartime, namely curiosity and danger. The central character, George, is captured in his native jungle by a zoologist as a result of his characteristic curiosity and taken to America. There his curiosity again leads him into dangerous situations. There isn't a moralistic side to the story — he's not deliberately mischievous but his curiosity is still putting him and others at risk.

The co-author Hans Rey (né Reyersbach, born 16 September 1898) was brought up in Hamburg, where he lived close to the zoo and spent a lot of time there observing the animals. He joined the army as an 18 year old and served in France and Russia. After the war he studied at the universities of München and Hamburg. His first illustrations were published in 1923. In 1925, due to the economic depression he emigrated to Brazil. He later met there a family friend from Hamburg and he married Margret in 1935 and relocated to France later that year. While living in Paris, his animal drawings for several children's books came to the attention of a French publisher, who commissioned him to write a children's book and it was published in 1939. The couple, both Jews, had completed the manuscript for the next book (this one) when they were forced to flee into exile in June 1940 by the impending Nazi invasion. Settling in New York, the couple agreed a four-book deal with a Boston publisher in February 1941 and Curious George appeared later that year. It's generally accepted that the storyline was largely Margret's work with Hans adding the illustrations. They produced a further six books about the same character as well as several other story books for children. Hans also wrote an illustrated guide to astronomy.

George, the monkey featured in the story, ends up in prison. When the guard enters his cell, he manages to escape and goes up onto the roof.
“And then he was lucky to be a monkey:
out he walked onto the telephone wires.
Quickly and quietly over the guard's head,
George walked away.
He was free!”

This passage no doubt brought to mind for the authors how they had themselves escaped Paris by bicycle to Orleans from where they took a train to the Spanish border and freedom.

The Levantines

This historical novel, published in 1961, is set in the Italian community of northern Egypt in the interwar period and during the Second World War. I read it during Women in Translation Month. The central character, Daniela, has been raised as an orphan by her grandmother. As such, her character is a microcosm of the Levantine experience — not knowing whether they belong to Europe or to North Africa; not belonging to either the Arab community or the colonising British community; ostracised during the war; and disappearing without trace in its aftermath.

The author, Fausta Cialente (born 29 November 1898), the daughter of an Italian army officer, was a native of Sardinia but spent much of her childhood moving from place to place. When she married in 1921, she and her composer husband went to live in Alexandria, the main city of Egypt's Mediterranean coast. She completed her first novel, Natalia, in 1927 but it was not published until 1930 after she had made an impressive literary debut with the long story (it's a new term for me — apparently it falls somewhere between short story and novella), Marianna, in 1929. The novel Natalia explored the narrator’s memories of childhood and early adulthood; were it available in English I would have it read it as it includes the death of her father in the First World War and her correspondence with a young soldier on the front. Her second novel, wholly set in Egypt, was published in 1936. Involved in anti-fascist and resistance activities, her literary career was put on hold. She returned to Italy in 1947 but it was not until 1961 that this, her next novel, was published. She went on to write four more novels as well as a collection of short stories. Her final novel, Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger (The Four Wieselberger Girls) won the Premio Strega (Italy's most prestigious literary prize) in 1976.

Daniela, the orphan protagonist, seeks to understand her own background in conversation with her guardian grandmother:
“My grandmother was talking loudly, as she nearly always did. She was getting angry with Livia, which was not at all unusual, either, saying scornfully that Livia had made her miserable bit of money during the Great War, helping smugglers on the beach, which was then completely deserted, but no one had managed to find out how on earth she had landed up in Egypt, and with whom.”
There are other snippets about the First World War as the memories of different characters are explored.
Soàd, her grandmother's servant, tells Daniela what she wants to know about her early childhood:
“that immediately after the 'accident' my grandmother sent someone to fetch me in Italy. The Great War was on at the time and we made the journey in a convoy, guarded from attack, threatened by German submarines.”

The Great Crusade

This epic novel, published in 1940, is an intense account of the campaigns of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. The action described is based on the owner’s own service with the International Brigades. As Ernest Hemingway explains in his foreword to this novel, which “deals with the days when the Eleventh and Twelfth Brigades fought in defence of Madrid”, “no one has more right to write of these actions which saved Madrid than Gustav Regler. He fought in all of them.”

The author, Gustav Regler (born 25 May 1898), grew up in Saarland near the German border with France. On finishing school, he enlisted for war service in November 1916. He was sent to the Western Front and fought at Chemin des Dames near Soissons. He was invalided  with severe gas poisoning in autumn 1917 and was also treated in a mental hospital. After the war, he studied in the universities of Heidelberg and München. While working in journalism, his first novel was published in 1928. A member of the Communist Party from 1929, he fled his homeland in 1933 after the Reichstag fire. In 1936 he went to Spain to serve as a commissar of the Twelfth International Brigade, which consisted of battalions of Belgian, French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish volunteers. He was badly wounded in June 1937 near Huesca in northern Aragón . He was imprisoned in southern France on the outbreak of the Second World War but his Brigade colleague, Ernest Hemingway, successfully led a campaign for his release and he emigrated to Mexico. He wrote several more novels in exile as well as poetry and an autobiography. He was awarded the Art Prize of Saarland in 1960.

Many of the volunteers in the International Brigades had fought as young men in the First World War. One of the main characters in this novel is referred was a commissar called Albert. His war service on the Western Front takes place at the same location as the author’s:
“As a boy of 17 he had fought through the World War against France. On the heights of the Chemin des Dames he had kille the fathers of these volunteers with whom he now stood before Madrid. After the war he became a pacifist. In 1932, at that Soissons, which in 1917 he had helped to destroy, in Soissons the resurrected, he spoke on peace. A French war invalid with a wooden leg showed him about the city, which still smelled of paint and fresh plaster. They had walked arm in arm, a happy symbol of their two republics, which more and more must come to know each other. That was their hope”

Antimacassar City

This historical novel, published in 1940, is a somewhat Dickensian depiction of an Ayrshire family as they establish themselves in Glasgow society. Set in the 1870s, the central character is Phoebe Moorhouse, the only daughter of the second marriage of her father. When they are killed in a pony-and-trap accident, the ten-year-old orphan moves to Glasgow to become part of her half-brother Arthur's family. During the course of the novel, Arthur, a provisions merchant, works his way up from living near the toughest parts of the city and they join the exodus to the prosperous western suburbs. The novel formed part of the Wax Fruit trilogy. The trilogy in turn was followed by two sequels.

The author, Guy Mc Crone (born 13 September 1898), grew up in Glasgow. In January 1917, prior to taking up a place in university, he volunteered  to serve with the Young Men’s Christian Association on the Western Front. In an interview he explained this: "being ineligible for the army, I went to scrub floors and sell cigarettes in soldiers’ Y.M.C.A. [centres] in Normandy and Paris”. He went on to study economics at Cambridge. After university he worked as a printer in Glasgow and was a major proponent of opera there. He began writing in 1931 and his first novel appeared in 1937. A further seven novels were published. He defended the fact that he wrote mostly about Glasgow society:
“People have asked me why I continue to write almost exclusively about my own kind of people...Here is my reason. I had not gone far with the study of the novel before I saw that a novelist, especially if he has a recording talent and not a talent for fantasy, writes best about the place that has been his home; that is, the home of his childhood and adolescence”.

Phoebe Moorhouse, the central character, has a particularly traumatic experience early on in her life in Glasgow. This produces a peculiar change of mindset — she seems to lose all feeling for other people:
“She regarded him with her usual impersonal interest. He must be racked with anxiety. Did people express so little when they were faced with ruin? Did they merely sit quietly and look before them? Was she really hard, that she could not feel more for this stranger? Was there something left out of her make-up? Had she a limited supply of sympathy?”
This change of mindset is typically of what is now termed post-traumatic stress disorder, known in the First World War as shell shock or neurasthenia.

Between the Devil

This novel, published in 1939, is set in a small town in Virginia with an economy centred on a mill. The central character, Edward Burton, a young Methodist minister, whose wife is expecting their first child, becomes embroiled in the conflict between a fledgling trade union movement and the union-busting vigilantes. Having both powerful and powerless in his congregation, he tries, with the best of intentions, to serve each side with tragic results both for him and for the vulnerable people he seeks to help.

The author, Murrell Edmunds (born 23 March 1898), grew up in Virginia. While studying at the University of Virginia, he joined the army for service during the latter months of the war. On returning to university, he studied law. in 1926 he abandoned the legal profession to devote his time to writing. He sought to show in his writing the possibility of change through “the gradual relaxation of old patterns and tensions and a forthright new articulation of the brotherhood of man”. His first novel was published in 1927. During a long career he wrote eight more novels as well as short stories, plays and poetry. Aware that his social and political views were too progressive for Virginian society in general, he spent much of his career in New Orleans where his views were either tolerated or shared by those in his social circle.

Edward Burton, the young minister at the centre of this novel, is not unduly troubled when encountering death in his pastoral work:
“Edward laid his Bible on the side of the bed and sat down. Anne's pale face was barely recognisable on the white pillow, the outlines of her wasted body hardly discernible under the covers. He looked at her closely. He was accustomed to death; it neither shocked nor awed him. Death was sure. Death was certain. Life it was that bewildered and betrayed.”

The Fugitive

This psychological novel, published in 1938, details the experience of a killer on the run through rural Vermont.  The central character is an orphan farmhand. His employer, James Stark, makes an agreement with him to give him $600 at the end of three years but tries during those years to get the farmhand to leave and thus avoid having to pay. Nearing the end of the contract, at the age of 18, things come to a head and he kills Stark. He flees to the hills and is pursued by the local farmers.

The author, Richard Warren Hatch (born 18 April 1898), grew up in Massachusetts. His first novel was published in 1929 and, like this novel, featured a young farmhand. Writing under the pseudonym of Clare Meredith, most of his subsequent novels were set in rural Vermont and were psychological in their focus. He also wrote several works of fiction for children.

The author describes the psychological endurance that enables the fugitive to persevere in spite of physical weakness:
“Swinging along, fear-driven so that he had the preternatural strength of the sick, the lost and the demented, there gradually awoke in him the sense of his own prowess. He was aware that he went on beyond the limits of his own strength, that he did the impossible. He was aware that his endurance was too great for him. It was an overwhelming thought.”
In the same way soldiers were mentally driven on to overcome weakness of fatigue and injury.

Coming from the Fair

This novel, published in 1937, is a sequel to the 1935 novel Holy Ireland, which introduced the family of Patrick O’Neill, a Dublin cattle dealer. The semi-biographical focus is on her mother’s life. The second book starts with the death of Patrick and then follows the stories of his children and grandchildren, beginning in 1903 and finishing in 1933. Part 6 of the novel begins in 1916 with Patrick’s widow Julia remarking to a priest about the parallel conflicts of 1916:
“Now, Father, you can say what you like, and I don't want to say anything about my son killed in Flanders, and I'm not saying anything about the other Irish boys, killed and waiting to be killed, God help them, but there's one way only to look at this rebellion, and that is as a stab in the back.”

The author, Norah Hoult (born 10 September 1898), was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a free-thinking English father (terming himself a Theosophist in the 1901 census in which Norah is recorded as Eleanor). By the age of 10, both her parents had died and their children moved to England to be cared for by her English relatives. Working as a journalist, her first book, a collection of short stories, was published in 1928 and received critical acclaim. Her first novel appeared in 1930 and she went on to write more than 20 novels and three further collections of short stories. She returned to live in Ireland in 1957.

The central character, Charlie O'Neill, the wayward son of Patrick, gets caught up in the rush to enlist for war service during a cattle-dealing trip to Liverpool.
“Fellows going to enlist. The whole bloody train was packed seemingly with chaps going to enlist, to die for King and country... Mc Carroll was really going to London to enlist and he'd brought him along to do it as well... Charlie closed his eyes trying to recall last night's scene in the Liverpool pub. English chaps jeering them, asking what the Paddies were going to do about the war. Mc Carroll shouting he was off to London in the morning to join up with the London Irish.”
Far from keen, on reaching London, he manages to evade his enthusiastic friends and does not join up.

God's Sparrows

This epic novel, published in 1937, focuses on the wartime experience of an Ontario family, both at home and on the Western Front. Unsurprisingly it includes elements of romance and tragedy. The central character, Daniel Thatcher, is in competition with his ambitious brother, who enlists ahead of him, and his free-thinking father, who publicly opposes the war. The key event in Daniel’s active service comes toward the end of the war rather than at the iconic battles of Canadian history (Ypres, Passchendaele) — at the end of the novel, he leads his men in attack:
“They went up, over, and disappeared to eyes below the parapet level... Behind the flickering, rocking line of shell bursts 70 yards in front of them the line of men advanced, then knelt to wait for the barrage to jump forward, then broke up as men darted into trenches and shell holes to clear out the Germans at bayonet point, then sped on again to the line of the barrage.”

The author, Philip Child (born 19 January 1898), grew up in Hamilton, Ontario. He was studying at the University of Toronto when in April 1917 he enlisted for war service. He arrived at the Western Front in January 1918 and served as a private in the 262 Siege Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery. After the war he studied at Cambridge and Harvard. Following a time spent working as a journalist, he pursued an academic career and in 1942 was appointed professor of English in the University of Toronto. His first book, an historic novel, was published in 1933. He received prestigious national awards for two of his other novels. A collection of poetry, published in 1951, was also well received.

Having experienced much of the war, the central character Dan and his cousin Quentin discuss the Last Judgment. Philosopher Quentin views it in military terms:
“It'll be like the army, all smothered in red tape. Your theological credentials will have to be precisely in order; then they'll send you from one under-strapper to the next, as they do when you go to find out something in the War Office, all little men dealing with you by rule of thumb.”
He does not fear being killed:
“I'm not afraid of death... Only thing I'm afraid of — and hate — is this damned unreality we live in here and now: not knowing what we are or what we are here for; desiring, and not knowing why we have to; wanting life, more and more life, and getting death...”

By the Waters of Babylon

This story story, published in 1937, was written in response to the Fascist bombing of the Basque town of Gernika. As a work of science fiction it is considered remarkably prescient of the aftermath of atomic warfare as seen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The author’s reference to a “deadly mist” is probably influenced by the use of mustard gas in the trench warfare of the First World War. The story is set in New England several generations after a war had killed most people. The remnant live primitively as hill people. The central character, John, disobeys the tribal law and visits the Forbidden Zone (New York City) and observes the equivalent of Pompeii (an advanced civilisation brought suddenly to an end). The story inspired elements of Edgar Pangborn’s The Music Master of Babylon, which was set in a post-apocalyptic New York City.

The author, Stephen Vincent Benét (born 22 July 1898), was the son of an army colonel. Belonging to a two-generation military family, he was sent to military academy in California at the age of 10. He studied English literature at Yale and was a key contributor, mostly of poems, to the university’s literary magazine. His studies were interrupted by a year of military service as a code clerk in Washington D.C. He graduated in 1919 and his first novel was published in 1921. His most famous work, John Brown's Body, an epic poem on the American Civil War, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1929.

The central character, John, observes the fate of the advanced civilisation that had inhabited New York City. His tribe reveres those people as gods because they had been advanced but doesn't attribute their destruction to their own folly:
“Then I saw their fate come upon them and that was terrible past speech. It came upon them as they walked the streets of their city. I have been in the fight with the Forest People. I have seen men die. But this was not like that. When gods war with gods, they use weapons we do not know. It was fire falling out of the sky and a mist that poisoned. It was the time of the Great Burning and the Destruction. They ran about like ants in the streets of their city. Poor gods, poor gods! Then the towers began to fall. A few escaped. Yes, a few.”

My War with the United States

This eccentric account of the author's war service was published in 1937. He explains in the foreword that the chapters of the book were translated from the German entries he made in the diary he kept during his service in the United States Army. The author served with a New York State field hospital unit, beginning at a fort in Oswego on Lake Ontario and later at an army psychiatric hospital at Fort Porter, Buffalo. During his time at Buffalo, the author himself experiences mental illness and protects his sanity by transporting his thoughts to the rural idyll of his Austrian childhood:
“I have found a way to calm myself: I go myself to the long baths. There is a bathroom for the men that is not much used, as they prefer showers. I lie in it whenever I can and I have started to think in pictures and make myself several scenes to which I can escape instantly when the danger appears.”

The author, Lüdwig Bemelmans (born 27 April 1898), the son of a Belgian artist, was born in South Tyrol and grew up in the central Austrian town of Gmunden and in his mother’s home city of Regensburg, Bavaria. He emigrated to the United States in December 1914 and worked for several years in hotels and restaurants. He joined the army in 1917 but was restricted to home service due to being a citizen of an enemy state. In the 1920s he did some work as a newspaper cartoonist but he did not achieve success as a published author until the 1920s. His first children's book was published in 1934 and his Madeline series commenced in 1939. He won the Caldecott Medal (for the most distinguished American picture book for children) in 1954. He also wrote several autobiographical books and some travel literature.

At one point during his war service, a colonel from headquarters sent for him and revealed that someone in New York had told the police he was a German spy and that the claim had been investigated. He writes elsewhere that “it is fine of the Americans that now, here in the war, they let me speak German, tell me that Germany is beautiful and don't say a word that I have a stack of German books and many German ideas. I am truly thankful for all this and respect it.” He compares the American mindset with the German one:
“I am thankful that there is little or no patriotism among the soldiers. They will fight and even be killed but they do it, even the crude ones, with the same feeling as if they were repairing a truck and it rolled over them. This seems a bigger field of sentiment and thinking than the Germans are capable of and I think it makes men better soldiers. The Germans are tied up with three little holy grails; they constantly shout and march around with them...”

The Man Who Meant Well

This tragic novel, published in 1936, is set in rural northern Belgium and in Brussels. The central character, Thys Glorieus, is the son of a poor craftsman living in a district whose inhabitants are looked down on by the people of the local village. From a young age his mindset is governed by a desire to oppose injustice and this a recurring theme throughout his story. He works as a farmhand on a large farm nearby and Rosa, one of the daughters of the family there, becomes enfatuated with him in spite of the gap in class. After a dispute he leaves home and moves to Brussels in search of job. When old enough he joins the army and serves as a batman to a prosperous captain, who retains a personal interest in Thys after he leaves. The remainder of the novel resembles the tragic fiction of Thomas Hardy. An interesting device is the alternating narration between the conventional single narrator and the gossip merchants of the village — this reflects the importance of personal reputation within the community as a theme in the novel. An eight-part dramatisation of the novel appeared on British television in the summer of 1976.

The author, Gerard Walschap (born 9 July 1898), grew up in rural Brabant. Much influenced by the poet-priest Jan Hammenecker, he began training for the priesthood in Leuven but did not complete his studies. In 1923 he became editor of a Flemish weekly magazine. In the mid-twenties he wrote several plays and collections of poetry. His first novel was published in 1928 and he went on to write more than 30 novels in a long career. He received the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren (the most prestigious Dutch-language literary award) in 1968.

The central character, Thys (rhymes with 'ice'), as a schoolboy was vehemently opposed to injustice and got into trouble for his dogged protection of the girls who were picked on after school. He even took umbrage during history lessons:
“He hated the Romans who conquered Belgium which wasn't theirs to take. The schoolmaster described the savage battles in the forests; the Belgians were so brave that they fought till there were hardly 50 out of 1,000 left. Thys put his hand up and asked, ‘What about those 50? What did they do?’
‘What could they have done except take to their heels, the battle was lost, the Romans were master.’
Thys snorted contemptuously at those 50 out of a 1,000 and had to swallow the bitter truth that injustice had prevailed. No matter how hard he argued that, after all, there ahd still been 50 of them, the schoolmaster shook his head with a smile and said, just like mother: that’s life.”

South Riding

This novel, written in 1934 and published posthumously in 1936, is set in a fictional part of Yorkshire (the south in fact refers to the maritime East Riding). The central character, Sarah Burton, has come back to her native county from London to become headmistress of a small school for girls. She brings with her a socialist mindset and she attempts to improve the conditions of the poorest in the community. Much of the action of the novel involves the local councillors, some conservative, including Robert Carne of the big house, some socialist. Carne’s personal life is tragic and Sarah sees him as something of a Mr Rochester as she grows in affection for him in spite of their political differences.

The author, Winifred Holtby (born 23 June 1898), grew up near the Yorkshire port of Bridlington. On finishing school, she had the option of a place in Somerville College, Oxford but chose instead to volunteer in early 1918 for service with the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. She was, however, only posted to France at the very end of the war. She took up her place in Oxford in 1919 and became a close friend of Vera Brittain — on graduating, they shared a home in London where they hoped to establish themselves as writers. Her first novel was published in 1923. She went on to write a further five novels and two volumes of short stories as well as some poetry (including some about Edward Brittain, Vera’s brother, who was killed in the war). This novel received critical acclaim and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 1936.

The central character, Sarah Burton, was tormented by what she had known of the First World War. The playing of patriotic songs at a civic function brought her to tears —
“For though, apart from the death of young Roy Carbery, she had suffered less from the war than many women, seen less of it, remained less keenly conscious of its long-drawn catastrophe, the farther it receded into the past, the less bearable its memory became. With increasing awareness every year she realised what it had meant of horror, desperation, anxiety and loss of her generation. She knew that the dead are most needed, not when they are mourned, but in a world robbed of their stabilising presence. Ten million men, she told herself, who should now have been between 40 and 45 — our scientists, our rulers, our philosophers, the foremen in our workshops, the headmasters in our schools — were mud and dust and the world did ill without them.”

Last Cage Down

This novel, published in 1935, is set in a coal-mining village in Durham. The central character, Jim Cameron, is the local lodge secretary of the miners’ union. He carries the psychological burden of the death of his father in a pit accident and is determined to oppose the mine owner’s plan to introduce a high-risk industrial process to a dangerous seam. He predicts that the plan will inevitably lead to deaths and is jailed for threatening to kill the mine owner over his reckless scheme. The foreseen disaster would necessitate the closure of the mine and the destruction of the village economy. The novel was republished in 1984 during a period, as the foreword points out, of “massive pit closures and government ministers publicly discussing the privatisation of parts of the industry”.

The author, Harold Heslop (born 1 October 1898), grew up in a large mining family near the Durham town of Bishop Auckland. He left school at the age of 15 and began working as a miner. He was called up for army training at the end of 1917 and was based at Tidworth Camp in Wiltshire for the remainder of the war. He wrote, “The summer simply drooled on. Men died in Flanders while we played at being soldiers in and around Tidworth... We contributed nothing... The tale of disaster went on and on, killing ruthlessly the young men, while we stayed in Tidworth.” After the war he returned to the mines and became involved in the militant labour movement that looked to the Soviet Union for inspiration. In 1924 he wrote an essay that won him a two-year scholarship at the Central Labour College in London. While there he met other young activists, including Lewis Jones, whose novel, Cwmardy, featured in this project last year. Heslop’s first novel was written during his time in London — having come to the attention of a Soviet diplomat, it was translated into Russian and published in the Soviet Union in 1926. He went on to write five more novels as well as an autobiography.

The author describes the miners’ dispute with the mine owner in terms of warfare:
“The war was set. The old class enemies were erecting the barriers across the streets of industry with feverish anxiety; they were lining up ready for the encounter. Industrial strife is a remarkable phase of life, for it is in this strife that the meek and the lowly come forward with the mighty and the strong to form one solid phalanx of endeavour. Great companions. Strange weapons. Strange tools. Strange battle. The one holds all and is impatient; the other has nothing and is quietly determined, listening to every kind of counsel but that of despair, girding about them incalculable powers of resistance.”

The Pilgrim's Regress

This allegorical novel, published in 1933, is partly a reflection on the philosophical journey of the author. The narrator explains the journey as a dream (or series of dreams). The central character, John, leaves his home in Puritania in search of the beautiful island. It combines aspects of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim's Progress, as John encounters characters such as Reason, Halfways and Vertue, and of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels, as he comes across places such as Claptrap, Ignorantia and Zeitgeistheim. It was the author’s first novel and paved the way for the Space Trilogy and the Chronicles of Narnia, which, like this novel, combine allegory,  adventure and critical comment on current affairs.

The author, C. S. Lewis (born 29 November 1898), was the son of a Welshman. He was brought up in Belfast and educated there at Campbell College and in England at Malvern College. In 1916 he began studying on a scholarship at the University of Oxford but within a few months he was preparing for war service. From a cadet battalion in Oxford, he obtained a commission in September 1917 as second liuetenant in the Somerset Light Infantry and was sent with the 1st Battalion to the Western Front in November. He was wounded by shrapnel at Riez du Vinage on 15 April 1918: “Just after I was hit, I found (or thought I found) that I was not breathing and concluded that this was death. I felt no fear and certainly no courage. It did not seem to be an occasion for either.” He was invalided back to England and remained in hospital until October. He never made a complete recovery and suffered from headaches and respiratory trouble for the rest of his life. His trauma produced nightmares: “On the nerves there are... effects which will probably go with quiet and rest... nightmares — or rather the same nightmare over and over again.” After completing his undergraduate studies he spent almost 30 years working as an academic at Magdalen College, Oxford before becoming a literature professor in Cambridge. His most famous works of fiction, the Chronicles of Narnia, deal with tyranny, conflict and sacrifice and were written in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The novel contains one reference to a past war and this could well be read as a reflection on post-war Europe. A young boy explains:
“We lost our ideals when there was a war in this country... they were ground out of us in the mud and the flood and the blood. That is why we have to be so stark and brutal.”
John argues in response that the war happened “years ago”:
“It was your fathers who were in it: and they are all settled down and living ordinary lives.”
Certainly the reference to mud must have been shaped by the author’s own experience of the battlefields of the Western Front.

Threepenny Novel

This satirical novel, published in 1934, is set in London during the Boer War. The central character, George Fewkoombey, is an invalid soldier returned from South Africa with the lower half of one leg having been amputated. He quickly ends up in poverty and vulnerable to exploitation. His employer, Jonathan Peachum, operates an extensive professional begging business; Fewkommbey is responsible for the dogs that have to be kept severely lean in order to attract the appropriate sympathy. Peachum’s capitalist ambitions lead him to invest in a corrupt enterprise to provide ships to transport military recruits to South Africa. His daughter, Polly, is courted both by a murderous crook called MacHeath and by Coax, the broker who has instigated the enterprise.

The author, Bertolt Brecht (born 10 February 1898), grew up in Augsburg, Bavaria. With his father’s support, he avoided the immediate rush of recruitment for the army by opting to study for a medical degree. He was conscripted into the army in the autumn of 1918 but his short military service was in his home city as an orderly in a military clinic for venereal diseases. Brecht’s first full-length play was written in 1918 but was not performed till 1923. His second play, Drums in the Night, was first produced in 1922 and dealt with the aftermath of the First World War. That year he was awarded Kleist Prize, the country’s most prestigious literary award. With strong socialist conviction, Brecht went into exile in early 1933 soon after the election of the Nazis to government. He wrote forty plays, several screenplays, hundreds of poems and a few works of fiction.

The central character, Fewkoombey, is not only a victim of warfare but also a victim of the society that he returns to. Though innocent, he's brought under suspicion for the murder of one of MacHeath’s shopkeepers. The court hears that logic “will not let us believe that the prosperous banker MacHeath could have murdered Mary Sawyer” and that same logic “convinces us that it must have been the penniless, brutalised ex-soldier, Fewkoombey”. The solicitor maintains that “fighting in the war... arouses in the coarser type nothing but the most brutal impulses”.