Stretchers

This memoir, published in 1929, provides a first-hand account of the work of an American evacuation hospital on the Western Front in 1918. Whereas the account is centred on the author’s recollections, it also draws on the diaries and correspondence of several of his colleagues. There are also some detailed descriptions of the surgery and antiseptic treatment of wounds.

The author, Frederick A. Pottle (born 3 August 1897), graduated from Colby College in 1917 and joined Evacuation Hospital No. 8 later that year. After the war he studied for a doctorate at Yale University and remained there to pursue a lengthy academic career, serving as Sterling Professor of English from 1944 to 1966. He became the foremost expert on the literary career of James Boswell.

The account starts in Fort Slocum on an island off New York. There Pottle’s unit was assembled. It was a miserable situation:
“As we draw away from that terrible isalnd, each of us knows in his heart that, though the months ahead may hold many bitter and painful experiences, they will contain nothing to match the accumulated and unalleviated horror of Fort Slocum.”
From there the unit transferred to Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia where conditions were not much better; two of the company's men dying there in January 1918. Eventually the unit sailed from Hoboken, New Jersey on 10 May on a small Italian liner described as “dirty and insanitary”. The company arrived in Brittany on 24 May and by 6 June were stationed in the Collège de Juilly about 30 km northeast of Paris. There they receive wounded American soldiers from the battle at Belleau Woods:
“Some of them are babbling in delirium, some shouting and cursing as they fight their way out of the ether dream in which they are re-enacting the horror of the trenches, some in their right minds, gaily talking and joking, but the most lie in a half-waking stupor, the inevitable reaction to days of hunger, fatigue, the nervous strain of incessant deadly peril and, finally, the shock of severe wounds, ether and surgical operations.”

After the Armistice, the unit is sent to serve in occupied Germany and the men are billeted in homes in the town of Mayen near Koblenz. This brings conflicting sentiments to mind:
“Shocking! Less than 50 days before the American Army had been engaged in a most earnest and uncompromising effort to kill all the Germans it could; now we sat in their kitchens breaking bread with them, every shade of bitterness past, watching together for the dawn of a New Year. It was inevitable. If you want to make people hate properly, you must keep them out of sight of each other.”

Boomerang

This epic novel, written in 1931 and published in 1932, reads like a combination of the historical narrative of a Who Do You Think You Are? feature and the eccentricity of Georges Perec’s Life: A User's Manual. It was the winning novel in 1932 in the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize awards, also won by Liam O'Flaherty, Kate O'Brien and Winifred Holtby, each of whom feature in this project. In this impressive novel the author builds on her own actual ancestry, in particular on the family of her aristocratic French maternal grandfather, Auguste Pierre Clement de Guerry de Lauret, who was born in the French colonial outpost of Pondicherry in 1810. Through this device, she explores English, French and Australian history in the 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating in Australia’s participation in the Great War. The boomerang of the title is a way of explaining how she had come full circle back to the ancestral home in Artois on the Western Front. It also conveys warfare and the narrative includes sections concerned with the Peninsular War and the Franco-Prussian War as well as the First World War.

The author, Helen de Guerry Simpson (born 1 December 1897), was the daughter of a Sydney solicitor and the novel includes some legal cases where the narrator, Clotilde de Boissy, describes family members pursuing careers in law. Indeed the author has used many aspects of her own family history as a framework for the plot of the novel. Whereas she maintains in the foreword that “the characters throughout are either imaginary or dead”, in a sense many of them were somewhat based on actual characters in her own family history. For example, her appreciation of Irish characters in Australian society was no doubt influenced by a knowledge of the relatives on the side of her maternal grandmother, Anna Maria Lett, from Co. Wexford. In addition, she gleaned a few actual events for use in the plot and explained that “of the various incidents related in the book, some of the more improbable are true”. A key autobiographical element of the novel is the presence of the narrator in Europe during the First World War: the author went to England in 1914 to study. Having been reading French at Oxford, in April 1918 she joined the Women's Royal Naval Service as an officer responsible for deciphering and decoding messages in foreign languages.

The narrator’s grandfather had in the outback of Australia requested that her father, the eldest son, would go to France to fight in the Franco-Prussian War. When he refused, he was ostracised and the patriarch himself went to Europe with the intention of protecting the honour of his fatherland. By the time he reached Bordeaux, though, “the war was over, humiliating terms of peace were being added up into a treaty... and France, like a woman in hysteria, was drumming her heels on the ground and shrieking that it was everyone else's fault”. He ended up dying in a duel with an officer of the German army of occupation that he had earlier assaulted, insisting that “the uniform he wears is a challenge and an insult to every Frenchman.” Just as her grandfather was useless to the war effort, so also in the First World War was Clotilde’s aristocratic English husband, who she had met on board a ship, he having been invalided home from India suffering from asthma. When determinedly he came up before an army board, doctors “could hear him whistling rooms away... they were not going to hand out combatant jobs to a fellow who... ought to be wearing a tube in his throat”. Ultimately, therefore, it fell to Clotilde to return to her ancestral homeland to contribute to the war effort as part of a Women's Interpreter Corps. There she encounters an Australian doctor, who she had met in England, and visits him on the battle line, witnessing his death in a futile minor campaign to secure a useless trench. He explains to her,
“There's an attack down for tomorrow morning. The blasted fools are going to make a set at Grease Trench.”

“What's that? Is it important?"
“Important, of course it isn't. It's a bit of a salient that spoils the look of their maps.”

A Trip to Czardis

This novel, published in 1966, started out in 1932 as an award-winning short story of the same title. The scenario of the short story, set in Florida, was a woman and her two sons making the journey into town to see her condemned husband for the last time. The apparent purpose of the novel is to explain why he had been sentenced to death for murder. It was at that time unusual for an author to write such a prequel and although it has stylistic merits, as a plot it seems contrived and predictable, though obviously tragic. The central character is shown to be guilty of many things connected to the death of his employer but not actually of his murder.

The author, Edwin Granberry (born 18 April 1897), moved from his native Mississippi to Florida as a child. His studies at the University of Florida were interrupted in 1918 by his service with the Marine Corps. On his return he completed his degree at Columbia University in New York and pursued an academic career. Following the success of the short story, he was appointed a lecturer in English at Rollins College in central Florida and went on to become Professor of Creative Writing there.

At the beginning of novel, the central character, Jim Cameron, a ranch hand, while in conversation with his employer, Ponce Logan, owner of the ranch, explains that he had only one been in New York  and that was “on [his] way home from the war”. There are suggestions of post-traumatic stress disorder in Cameron’s behaviour but whether it is war-related depends on exactly when the novel is set and that is unclear. Jim and Martha Cameron have two young sons and it is possible they had met and married after the war. Martha observes her husband’s episodic withdrawal into silence:
“ ‘What's the matter, Jim?’ ...
‘Nothing, Marty,’... ‘It's just one of my dumb spells. It'll pass.’...
And she was eased — for he had had his ‘dumb’ spells since the time she first knew him. And she, nor anyone, could do nothing but wait until he came back from the lonely place where he wrestled with matters known only to him and his soul.”

The White Oxen

This novella, published in 1924, tells the story of Matthew Carr, an adolescent orphan in the care of an uncle and aunt. Matthew has little experience of meaningful relationships of any kind. The first profound interaction for him is with a herd of white oxen that he decides to feed with grass through a fence. The author describes subsequent friends in Matthew’s life as the equivalents of these white oxen: a connection of strangers which will never be close but which will have value. One case is described in terms of the loyalty of a pet:
“The fact was that Gabriel had begun to be irritated by Matthew. He sensed the dog-like fidelity behind his friend and it irritated him.”
When in his mid twenties, Matthew is said to have no meaningful social connections:
“People had no more meaning to him than the pavements he walked on.”

The author, Kenneth Burke (born 5 May 1897), was a student at Columbia University from 1916 to January 1918. He withdrew from his degree course in January 1918 as he was fearful that his studies were stifling his intellectual growth. Unlike his schoolmate and literary friend, Malcolm Cowley, who served with the American Field Service on the Western Front, Burke had no involvement in the war (his draft registration was done in June 1918).

Burke tells of a series of bereavements that shape the life of Matthew Carr:
his mother “getting up from her Grieg one evening, turning a white, frightened face towards her dozing husband and sinking dead to the floor”;
his father “slipping from a rock and breaking his neck, probably the only vigorous action of his career”;
his sister dying within two years of her father’s death.
There were undoubtedly many Americans who experienced the loss of all members of their family during this period and this novella imagines the social impact that this forced detachment of emotional ties could have on an individual life.

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.