Boy

This novel, published in 1931, details the experience of Arthur Fearon, a 14-year-old boy forced into a tough adult world after having his schooling cut short due to his parents' poverty in an Irish district of Liverpool. He is terrified of his violent father and when he cannot cope with the demands of work in the docklands, he decides to stow away on a ship rather than face the wrath of his father. On the ship's journey to Alexandria, he is abused and taunted by most of the crew but receives some kindness from a few individuals. When they arrive in port, the boy is taken by one of the crew to the city's red-light district and introduced to a lust that he had not previously been aware of having. Before the ship leaves, he is determined to have another visit to the young prostitute.

The author, James Hanley (born 3 September 1897) was the Liverpudlian son of Irish parents. He left school in 1910 and went to sea in early 1915. In April 1917 he jumped ship in Saint John, New Brunswick and soon had joined the army at Fredericton, enlisting in the 236th Battalion. He served in France with the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force in 1918. He was gassed near Bapaume, was invalided and subsequently discharged.

Although the author’s own experience informed this novel, he rejected the suggestion that some of the events had happened to him. Writing in 1953, the author outlines how he as young seaman “overhears a conversation on the bridge of a ship, from which emerges the terrible fate of a young boy, who is undoubtedly the central figure of Boy.” (reminiscences described in his son Liam Hanley's preface to a 1990 edition of the novel). The telling of a story of another boy who went through similar experiences to himself falls into the same pattern as many novels written by survivors of the First World War. Such writers, often shaped by survivors’ guilt, imagined the tragic death of someone like themselves.

There is little reference to the First World War in this novel. The central character, Arthur Fearon, when asked by his teacher to explain his distractedness in class, reveals that he's the only surviving child of his parents:
“I had one brother and sister. Both died during the war, sir.”
Note that he uses the word ‘during’ — it would be wrong to presume that they were killed in the war. If we presume that the strike which Arthur’s father has recently participated in was the general strike of 1926, then the novel is set about 1927. Arthur was, therefore, born about 1913. It would seem unlikely that his brother and sister were that much older than him that they would have served in the war. Perhaps they succombed to disease, such as the influenza pandemic (the death rate from this outbreak of 1918 was as high as 215 per 1,000 in Liverpool). 

Reinhold at the Front

This novella, published in 1931, is a fictional account of the experience of a young German soldier serving in Artois on the Western Front. It was published in English as part of a collection of his war stories with the title Changed Men.

The author, Paul Alverdes (born 6 May 1897), was the son of an army sergeant who himself had written about his experience of war (Hermann Alverdes, Mein Tagebuch aus Südwest: Erinnerungen aus dem Feldzuge gegen die Hottentotten. Oldenburg, 1906). He was educated at a school in Düsseldorf and enlisted, aged 17, at the beginning of the war. He served at the Somme and was severely wounded by a gunshot to the throat. In the short story, The Next Man, he writes about a similar injury for one of his characters:
“a crossing bullet caught the boy in the throat and he fell headlong over the dead man with his face on his. But he sprang up again at once and, pressing the handkerchief to the wound, staggered back and fell at the sergeant-major's feet. By a miracle the arteries of the neck were not severed or at any rate they did not bleed for the moment; and so, scarcely able to breathe and quite unable to speak, he was got back that night to the nearest field hospital on that sector of the front. The surgeon at once performed an operation to help him breathe more easily and it met with some success.”

One of the features of the novella is how the author describes the beauty of nature alongside the horrors of war:
“They were a draft for a Rhineland artillery regiment which had stayed where it was ever since the armies had dug in. It was the end of April 1915 and the chestnuts were just in blossom.”
The colour on the trees and the music of birdsong contrast with the painful sights and sounds of the battlefield:
“The blackbirds were singing already in the chestnut trees and the starlings chattering among the ruins. Now and again, however, a report like the snapping of a tightly-stretched wire broke ominously on the ear, or a sharp whisper passed over, as though for the fraction of a second a jet of steam was forced through a narrow vent. A hollow explosion was heard aloft that turned into a shrill singing sound and the shrapnel bullets pattered among the branches, or whipped through the grass, or went crashing and smacking against the walls. Then everything was still. Cautiously and tentatively the blacbird began to sing again...”

Sometimes the sounds of beauty and horror get muddled in the mind of the soldier. In the story The Next Man a soldier wakes at dawn:
“There'll be another fine day again soon, he thought. Above him too and all around there were numbers of birds singing. But then he became aware that it was the whistling and twittering of rifle bullets.”

Dance Night

This impressive novel, published in 1930, is set in a working-class community in smalltown Ohio in the years immediately before the First World War. The central characters are Jennia St Clair, toughened by an upbringing in an orphanage, and Morris Abbott, whose irascible father is normally absent from home. Neither of them having strong parental models to guide them, they construct their own ambitions to pursue and at the same time look to gain each other’s approval in the absence of a father or mother who will bless them.

The author, Dawn Powell, often gave her birth year as 1897. In fact she was born in Ohio on 28 November 1896 and so I have moved her to that year's section of my reading list. Her own childhood was unsettled and often unhappy and her portrayal of Jennia and her younger sister, Lil, as girls abandoned by their mother, reflects much of her own experience, even though she was never herself in an orphanage. Her mother had died when Dawn was seven years old and she was persecuted by her stepmother. It was only after she fled her father and his second wife to live with an aunt that she began to have confidence in herself as she received encouragement from her guardian to express herself creatively. She graduated from Lake Erie College and began a career as a freelance writer. Dance Night was her third novel and she considered it the best of the 15 that she wrote. Her biographer, Tim Page, has recently tried to give her the acclaim that she did not quite receive during her lifetime: “I don’t like using gender labels but I really do think Powell is our finest woman writer.”

Jen is haunted by loss and dreams of rescuing her younger sister, Lil, from the orphanage and of being able to support her:
“People last such a little while with me. There's no way to keep them, I guess. Everybody goes away — that's why I've got to go back for Lil because I know how terrible it is to be left always — never see people again.”

Beyond that she aspires to being successful as a dancer in one of the big cities. Morry wants to make it in business and be respected in the community but struggles to have enough self-confidence:
“Nobody would ever listen to Morry Abbott — and worse yet he could never in this world get up the nerve to approach them. The snappy young Abbott of his fantasies might calmly tap Hunt on the shoulder and tell him just what was what; but nothing, to the real Morry, was worth the anguish of going to a man and quite out of a blue sky telling him your own private little dream of a lovely place to live.”
At the end of the novel, neither Jen nor Morry have found genuine fulfilment even though they manage to achieve some aspects of their dreams.

The Cavalry Went Through

This novel, published in 1930, is an intensely personal account of military life on the Western Front and at Gallipoli. In the introduction, the author explains that it is “neither an autobiography nor a biography” but ”a series of personal reminiscences centred on the greatest military figure of the ages”. That individual is the fictional Henry Berrington Duncan. The story proper begins in October 1915 when Duncan's force was transferred from East Africa to the Western Front.

The author, Bernard Newman (born 8 May 1897), was a great-nephew of the celebrated novelist George Eliot. He lied about his age in order to enlist when aged 17. Arriving in France in September 1915, he served on the Western Front with the Army Service Corps and was entrusted with the role of liaison officer for his regiment on account of having reasonably fluent French. He could be said to have died of wounds received during the war: a shrapnel injury to the roof of his mouth developed into a tumour and he died in 1968 of heart failure during an operation to remove it.

In this novel of virtual history, Newman imagines what a difference it would have made to the progress of the war if there had been a wiser military commander with a more effective strategy than that of the actual generals who directed the war. The hero Duncan asks insightful questions about army appointments policy:
“Do we pick the right commanders for the jobs? Have you noticed that, of the six British generals holding Army or equivalent independent commands, four are old Etonians? I don't run down Eton but isn't there a certain significance in this fact? Is the bogey of seniority really laid? Another point. You mentioned the other day that most of the brains of the nation were now in the Army! Quite right. But what have you done with them? Made them second- lieutenants to be shot down by the hundred. Do you realise that of all these 'brains' only two have so far attained the very moderate rank of brigadier-general?  I am the only one who has passed it.” This is an important point as one of the pillars of Duncan's successful military campaigns is intelligent strategy.

Key to the effectiveness of Duncan's battle plans was the use of highly-trained, well-informed troops. He cites the example of Gideon:
“How he reduced his army from 32,000 to a mere 300 men and how he won by tactics skilfully executed, where mere numbers of second-class troops would not have prevailed... I worked somewhat along the same lines. I weeded out men here and there. No man with a blemish of any kind remained. In the end there remained but a little more than a complete battalion. But what men! Every one in a magnificent state of physical vigour; every one mentally alert; above all, every one determined to see the job through, no matter what it meant for him.”

As Duncan is allowed to introduce new shock tactics to change the direction of the war, he observes:
“But the war is now more than ever a question of the quality of men. A year ago —two years ago— our men were definitely inferior to the Germans as soldiers, in spite of patriotic journalistic ravings. It is not only a matter of courage but of training. But now the positions are utterly reversed.”
So convincing is the author’s account of Duncan’s successes on the Western Front and in Turkey that it is easy for the reader to believe that the war would have taken a different course if a wise leader such as Duncan had taken charge of the stalemate.

The Man in the Queue

This detective story, published in 1929, introduces Inspector Alan Grant of the Criminal Investigation Department. He is leading the investigation into the murder of a man in a queue outside a theatre in London's West End. At the start of his involvement not only can the murderer not be identified but nor can the victim and there is no obvious motive.

The author, Josephine Tey, according to some sources was born in Inverness in 1897 and I included her, therefore, in this year's section of the project. Records now appear to show that she was born Elizabeth Mackintosh on 25 July 1896. I have transferred her to the list for that year. Her pseudonym included her mother’s forename and her English grandmother's surname. This novel was, however, first published under a male pseudonym (Gordon Daviot).

Sir John Gielgud, a close friend, suggested that she might have suffered a bereavement during the First World War. Throughout this novel, the author includes war service as a component of many of the male characters. In Chapter 4, she ascribes Inspector Grant’s alertness to his war service:
“he became conscious, with that sixth sense which four years on the Western Front and many more in the C.I.D. had developed to an abnormal acuteness, that he was being watched.”
Later in that chapter Grant reassures his landlady that he is not in grave danger:
“No one has ever spilt my blood except a Jerry at Contalmaison and that was more by luck than good management.”
Here the author points to him having served in a Scottish regiment, Contalmaison being most associated with the 16th Battalion of the Royal Scots.
In Chapter 6, when Grant is in pursuit of a suspect on the streets of London, he thinks to himself:
“Won't it be awful to die under a bus in the Strand after dodging the Bosche for four years!”

In Chapter 7 she uses the language of war to describe the investigation:
“Patiently Grant sifted the reports through the long, bright morning, sitting at his desk and sending his lieutenants out here and there as a general arranges his forces on a battlefield.”
Another example in the same chapter:
“A silence followed, dark and absolute. It was as if an advance guard, a scout, had spied out the land and gone away to report. There was the long, far-away sigh of the wind that had been asleep for days. Then the first blast of the fighting battalions of the rain struck the window in a wild rattle.”
Only someone who still had the war firmly in her consciousness would write such lines.

In Chapter 9 the plain-clothes policemen sent to do undercover investigations are pretending to be impoverished door-to-door salesmen who had served their country in the war:
“I was in the Army during the War. That's the only time bin in the Army counts. France? I was four years in France, miss.”

In subsequent chapters, the author mentions the war service of the murder victim and of the prime suspect, Gerald Lamont. When pursuing Lamont across a moor in the Scottish Highlands, Grant understands his elusiveness:
“He was heading somewhere. And for a townsman he was making a wonderful job of cover. But then, of course, there had been the War — Grant had forgotten that Lamont was old enough to have seen active service. He probably knew all that was to be known about the art of taking cover.”

Cynics

This satirical novella, published in 1928, chronicles life in the early years of the Soviet Union. Set in Moscow, it focuses on the relationship between the two central characters, Vladimir and Olga. It is divided into four sections, covering the years 1918, 1919, 1922 and 1924, and within each section by short numbered factual paragraphs and longer narrative passages. The factual paragraphs document the civil war, famine and developments in Soviet policy. It was first published in Berlin and was not available in Russia. This, however, did not prevent it from being severely opposed by the Soviet authorities and media.

The author, Anatoli Marienhof (born 6 July 1897), left school in 1914 and was later conscripted into the army, serving on the Eastern Front. In 1918 he co-founded a Moscow-based literary movement called Imaginism. His early publications were books of poetry. He progressed to novels and screenplays. As Michael Stein outlines in his 2012 article about Cynics, Marienhof wrote the novel with many of the devices of a screenplay.

Early in the novella, Olga sees her brother, Goga, leave home to join General Alexiev's anti-Bolshevik volunteer army in the Don region. She view him as “a charming, handsome lad of 19. His lips were always petulant and pink. His hair was golden, like melted butter from the cows of the steppes. His eyes were large, green, tragic.” The expectation is that this gentle young man will not return alive: “Poor angel! He will be shot like a partridge.”

One of the characters is sarcastically said to be suffering from shell-shock that, “according to precise information from the Soviet Revolutionary Army” is “not very severe”:
“Perhaps in three years... he will be able to hear with his left ear, and his head may stop shaking even sooner.”
Later there is a further reflection on this war-related debility:
“I was shell-shocked at the front, my ear drums burst, my noodle jerks and twists — what luck! Just think, that same nice little shell might have blown me into a 124 pieces!”

Another character, Ilia Dokoutchaev, in 1914 went from being an errand boy in a wholesalers to wartime service emptying bedpans in a hospital in Pskov near the Eastern Front:
“From boredom, [he] began to tabulate curious statistics of the relation between deaths and bed-pans. From these it appeared that for every ten pans, one dead body was carried out. In three years of war, Dokoutchaev emptied 26,000 urinal bottles.”

The Twelve Chairs

This satirical epic, published in 1928, exposes the selfishness and greed of Soviet society shaped by the New Economic Policy. It was a hugely successful book and achieved something of a cult status among its readers. Set in 1927, it was written collaboratively by journalist colleagues Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. The central character, Ippolit Matveevich Vorobyaninov, sets out on an exhaustive search for the jewels which his mother-in-law had secreted in one of twelve chairs. The chairs have been redistributed by the authorities. Together with Ostap Bender, a conman accomplice who forces himself on Vorobyaninov for a share of the treasure, he finds a way to obtain each chair and tear open the lining to see if the diamonds are hidden within. The idea for the plot was suggested by Petrov's brother, Valentin Kataev, whose novel, Embezzlers, parodies many of the same aspects of Soviet society of the 1920s.

The co-author, Ilya Ilf (born 15 October 1897), came from Odessa in present-day Ukraine. Ilf was a pseudonym; he was of a Jewish family called Fainzilberg. Ilf and Kataev were the same age and were close friends. Kataev recalled coming up with the scenario:
“As I saw it, the search for diamonds hidden in one of 12 chairs scattered all over the country by the Revolution offered the chance to portray a satirical picture gallery of character types from the N.E.P. era. I laid it all out for my friend and brother... I suggest the idea, the springboard, and they work it up, clothe it in the flesh and blood of a satirical novel. Then I go over their writing with the master's expert hand and we end up with an amusing picaresque novel.”

In a clever Russian-doll feature of the novel, some writers in a Moscow theatre discuss ideas for a play:
“It's a swell plot. See, here's what happens. A Soviet inventor comes up with a death ray and hides the design in a chair. Then he dies. His wife doesn't know about it and sells the chairs to different people. But the fascists find out and start hunting down the chairs. But then a Young Communist finds out about the chairs and so a struggle begins. Now you could do something really big here...”

Vorobyaninov and Bender have a rival in the pursuit of the diamonds, except he is sent after an entirely different set of chairs when swindled by a corrupt local archivist. He is Father Fyodor Vostrikov and is one of the few characters in the novel for which we are told anything about their experience of the Great War:
“Father Fyodor's impetuous soul knew no peace. It never had... Vostrikov switched from seminary to university and finished the first three years of the law faculty but in 1915 he got scared of being mobilised and returned to the spiritual line of work. First he was ordained a deacon, then he was consecrated to the sacred office of priest... And throughout all these stages of his spiritual and lay career, Father Fyodor had always been, and now remained, a money-grubber.”