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.”