Sapper

One of the things that I’m interested in is the way that post-war thrillers show ex-soldiers defeating various forms of evil by using skills and attitudes learnt in the war. So I read Bulldog Drummond and the like. This weekend (taking a break from  scholarly texts about the activities of suffragettes during the war) I’ve read The Final Count of 1926, the fourth book in the series.

One thing that interests me is that by 1926 even Sapper is expressing disillusionment with the war. In the first Bulldog Drummond book it’s Carl Peterson, the arch-villain, who says "The world has recently been engaged in a performance of unrivalled stupidity.” His sneering view of the war’s futility is a strong indication of his villainy.

But in The Final Count, Sapper allows his narrator to make some disillusioned comments about the war, calling it “that foolish performance” and making sardonic fun of the idea that it was “the war to end war… To make the world safe for heroes to live in, with further slush ad nauseam.”

The dangerously pacifist scientist whose lethal invention is the main motive of the plot is even more explicit: “The Armistice was signed: the war was over: an era of peace and plenty was to take place. So we thought – poor deluded fools. Six years later found Europe an armed camp with every nation snarling at every other nation.”

I’d reckoned that the idea of the war’s futility didn’t become a majority view till about 1928, but if even Sapper was saying this kind of thing in 1926, I’ll have to revise my estimate.