War Centenary Wars

The Great War centenary may be over a year away, but the preliminary skirmishes are already providing entertainment.
A few weeks ago a letter appeared in the Guardian, signed by a number of actors and celebrities, sternly arguing that the message of any celebrations should be firmly anti-war:

We are disturbed [...] that David Cameron plans to spend £55m on a “truly national commemoration” to mark this anniversary. Mr Cameron quite inappropriately compared these events to the “diamond jubilee celebrations” and stated that their aim will be to stress our “national spirit”. That they will be run at least in part by former generals and ex-defence secretaries reveals just how misconceived these plans are.
Instead we believe it is important to remember that this was a war that was driven by big powers’ competition for influence around the globe, and caused a degree of suffering all too clear in the statistical record of 16 million people dead and 20 million wounded.
In 2014, we and others across the world will be organising cultural, political and educational activities to mark the courage of many involved in the war but also to remember the almost unimaginable devastation caused. In a time of international tension, we call on all those who agree with us to join us – by adding their names to ours at ww1.stopwar.org.uk – to ensure that this anniversary is used to promote peace and international co-operation.

Today historian Gary Sheffield replies with guns blazing, strongly criticising ‘the popular view of the war as a futile one, a belief that is sharply at odds with most modern scholarship, and with how it was perceived at the time.’ He points out:

The Spectator and the Wipers Times

I’m delighted to pass on news of a new resource. The Spectator has scanned all its back numbers, from 1828 to the present, and they can be found to read here. I warn you, though, that the scanning can be a bit erratic. You’ll need your detective boots on to puzzle out some of the sentences.
Someone asked me some interesting questions about the Wipers Times yesterday, so I’ve had a quick look to see if the Spectator had anything to say about the paper. There is a long 1916 article called ‘The Accidental Literature of the War’, which includes these paragraphs about trench journals:

Novelists Ngram

Here’s another of those nice Ngrams.
I was thinking about the decline in the reputation of John Galsworthy – from Nobel prize-winner to also-ran. (This was sparked by reading a book about him written by a friend, Hermon Ould, written shortly after Galsworthy’s death. It’s a hero-worshipping tome that makes its hero sound very dull indeed.)
So maybe an Ngram could chart what happened to his reputation. An Ngram, for those who missed my previous post, is an ingenious Google device. You enter some search terms and the software zips through all the Google-scanned books that were published in the various years of the century, and it gives you a chart showing numbers of mentions:
So I entered John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, to see what happened to the reputations of two Edwardian realists and two modernists.
Here’s the chart. Click on it to see it properly.

Allan M. Laing and Bertrand Russell

I’ve blogged before about Allan M. Laing, the author of Carols of a Convict who in the 1930s and 1940s would become the monarch of the New Statesman literary competitions.
Cyril Pearce (author of the excellent Comrades in Conscience) has very kindly helped me by sharing the information about Laing in his database of conscientious objectors, and the results are interesting.
in May 1916 Laing, who had been secretary of the Liverpool No-Conscription Fellowship, was tried at Liverpool police court (together with someone called A. White) for distributing leaflets. He was sentenced to one month’s imprisonment. Refusing to be drafted into the non-combatant corps, he would in 1917 be sentenced to one year’s hard labour, which he served first at at Winson Green, Birmingham, and then at Wormwood Scrubs. (It was in the later days of his time at the Scrubs that he wrote Carols of a Convict). He was then returned to the Army, re-arrested, presumably for non-compliance, and sentenced to two years hard labour. He went to Winson Green again, until he was discharged and released in April 1919.
What intrigues me at the moment is this letter in the Times of May 17, 1917, a few days after Laing’s conviction. The Latin title (presumably supplied by a learned Times sub-editor) has Bertrand Russell declaring ‘I am here who did it’:

The Time of the Armistice

I’ve been asked a question.

We all know that the ceasefire came into operation at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Which would be 11 a.m. French time.

What time was this in Germany?  There’s a suggestion that in Germany the War would not have stopped until 12 noon local time.

Does anyone know if this is correct?

Philip Gibbs and ‘Heirs Apparent’

In many ways Philip Gibbs is the archetypal male middlebrow writer of the inter-war period. Immensely prolific, he appealed strongly to the thoughtful decent middle class, worried about the way the world was going and wary of extremes. The title of his 1923 novel The Middle of the Road conveys how he portrayed himself – a man of common sense, making his own path between reaction and revolution. The typical Gibbs hero is a walking Guardian editorial. I am never entirely convinced by Rosa Maria Bracco’s contention in Merchants of Hope that all middlebrow fiction is about finding the middle way, resolving conflicts peacefully and establishing continuities – but there were plenty of novels like that in the twenties, and Gibbs’s are good examples. The label ‘Galsworthy-and-water’ could have been made expressly for him.
Heirs Apparent (another of my finds at the Chaucer Head bookshop in Stratford-upon-Avon) is also from 1923, and takes as its subject the problem of Youth – the post-war generation that prefers jazzing to seriousness. Like all his books it is very readable. Like all of them it tells you interesting things about the period. Like all of them, it has its weaknesses when considered as a novel.
Gibbs is an odd writer. Beginning as a journalist, he became a novelist in the early years of the twentieth century, producing a run of novels about social issues, like A Master of Life (industrial relations) and Intellectual Mansions S. W. (about ‘advanced’ lifestyles). His Street of Adventure (which I’ve not read yet) is about journalism. In wartime, he became perhaps the most distinguished of the official war correspondents embedded with the troops, the one who conveyed best the fortitude and suffering of the soldiers. After the Armistice, his non-fiction Realities of War was a bracing corrective to complacencies about the conflict (He was very tough on Haig).

‘The Road to En-Dor’

Lieutenant H. E. Jones was part of the army that surrendered to the Turks at Kut, and was sent as prisoner to Yozgad , a bleak spot way out in the Anatolian desert. What he did there is the basis of his astonishing memoir, The Road to En-Dor (1919), which I came across last week in the excellent Chaucer Head bookshop at Stratford-upon Avon.
Prisons are very tedious places, and a postcard from home inspired Jones to make things more lively by having a go at spiritualism, with a home-made ouija board. The dead refused to communicate, so he thought he’d experiment by pushing the glass. His efforts were not rumbled, and the messages he spelt out were received with awe by most of his fellow-prisoners, but doubters suggested increasingly complex tests to discover whether the results were genuine. Jones relished the challenge, and found, not only that he could pass the tests, but that he had created so firm a faith in his miracles that nothing would undeceive the credulous.
He than moved on to experiments in thought-reading (an appendix to the book clearly explains how the trick can be done). His partner in this was an Lieutenant Hills, an Australian with a knowledge of conjuring. Together they cooked up a wild and absurd escape plan.

Ngrams

Thanks to Erica at Reading 1900-1950 for spreading the word about Ngrams.

The Google Ngram Viewer is ‘a phrase-usage graphing tool.’ Based on scans of over 5.2 million books, it charts the yearly appearance of  any n-grams (letter combinations) that you care to enter.

I’ve plotted incidences of the phrase ‘Great War’ against appearances of the phrase ‘First World War’ over the twentieth century. The result is much what I expected – though it’s interesting to see the dramatic rise of ‘First World War’ after 1935, as fears of a second increased. (click on the graph to see it enlarged).

Since this website possibly has a family audience, I shall not post the graphs I made to track the usage of very rude words over the century. But try it for yourself. It’s fun.

‘One of England’s Broken Dolls’

Joanna Bourke, in Dismembering the Male mentions ‘a popular song’ about a maimed soldier:

“A man and maiden met a month ago;
She said there’s one thing I should like to know;
Why aren’t you in khaki or navy blue;
And fighting for your country like other men do?
The man looked up and slowly shook his head
Dear madam, do you know what you have said?;
For I gladly took my chance
Now my right arm’s in France;
I’m one of England’s Broken Dolls.”

Trying to find the source for this, I did some googling, and found on the National Archive website a reference to a collection of family photos, property of a Mrs Aspin, in the Manchester Record Office. Some of these relate to her father, W. M. Harris, who was killed in the War. A note is appended:

Ian Beckett’s ‘The Making of the First World War’

When I posted details of that 1918 list of Great War books, someone asked me for my own list of 100 best.
Well, I’m thinking about it, but one definite candidate will be a book I’ve been reading recently, The Making of the Great War by Ian F.W. Beckett.
This doesn’t aim to be a comprehensive history of the War, but instead chooses twelve key moments that defined the War, and were crucial either to its progress or to the way it shaped the twentieth century, and presents an illuminating essay on each of them.
These key moments are not always what you would expect. At the start of the War he chooses, not the Battle of the Marne, but the flooding of the Yser in October 1914 as the key moment that made the trench stalemate on the Western Front inevitable. This essay puts into focus King Albert of the Belgians and the decisions he made. He was, as Beckett says. ‘a prickly ally of the British and French’ and ‘technically, he was not an ally at all, for, throughout the war, Albert maintained the fiction that Belgium remained a neutral country defending its territory as an “associated” rather than an allied power.’ The description of the difficult choices that Albert had to make contained much that I did not know.
The next two essays head eastward, looking at Turkey’s entry into the War and the Australian contribution at Gallipoli, which Beckett presents as a crucial stage in Australian nation-building, and a key ingredient in the Australian myth. (He has some sharp words about how this myth was presented in the Mel Gibson movie.)