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.”