Many people still seem to believe in the ten-year myth – the idea that books ruthlessly analysing war experience could not be written until ten years after the event. Herbert Read expressed it in a 1930 review of All Quiet:
All who had been engaged in the war, all who had lived through the war years, [...]
John Brophy was only fourteen when he enlisted in 1914, but maybe he thought readers of his novel The Bitter End (1928) might find that a bit hard to believe, so he makes his hero, Donald, sixteen.
The book plots his hero’s increasing disillusion with war, from the extreme naivety of his enlistment to the complete [...]
I don’t think I had an especially sheltered upbringing, but I don’t quite understand a reference in John Brophy’s The Bitter End (1930). Donald, the hero, is strongly attracted to Celia, an upper-class WAAC, until one day she makes a gesture:
There was current at the time a slang phrase used to express intense pleasure and [...]
Precise recall of factual details has long been considered an important criterion of the worth of war writing. In her biography of Sassoon, Jean Moorcroft Wilson describes how:
All Quiet on the Western Front irritated him not just because of its sensationalism, but also because it gave ‘no place names’, left ‘everything vague’ [...] He had [...]
I have been reading John Brophy’s A Bitter End (1928), a rather good fictionalisation of his war experiences as an underage volunteer in 1914. So far I’ve only read the account of his training, and have been struck by the following passage, describing his Army medical examination:
Before Donald could answer, they were all called to [...]
This week’s Daily Telegraph has done a great deal to educate us about our rulers. Reading about the activities of Phil Hope, from the Ministry of Health, I was reminded of Chesterton’s 1922 poem about education, Citizenship:
For he will learn, if he will try,
The deep interior truths whereby
We rule the Commonwealth ;
What is the Food-Controller’s [...]
Stephen Graham’s A Private in the Guards (1919) is one of the very best memoirs by a man who served in the ranks. It also puts forward a tough philosophy of warfare.His book’s first sentence is: ‘The sterner the discipline the better the soldier, the better the army.’
Although he was, as a private, on [...]
I went for an afternoon’s walking in the Chilterns yesterday, with some friends and their brilliant new dog. On the way, I noticed a pub sign with a familar face on it.
This is the Pink and Lily, at Parslows Hillock, near Lacey Green, on the edge of Princes Risborough, in Buckinghamshire.
The Brooke connection is that [...]
