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.”