‘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 […]

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 […]

Life Imitates Art

Authors of fictions about the Great War often claim that their work is rooted in some actuality or memento of the conflict. A grandfather’s memories, an interview with a veteran, a bundle of letters… In the ‘Author’s Note’ to War Horse, Michael Morpurgo wrote that he was inspired to write the book by a painting […]

‘Bartimeus’ in war-time

Before the War, Bartimeus’s stories had mostly been pictures of everyday naval life, tinted with a nostalgia for the service from which his disability had excluded him. They were collected in his first book, Naval Occasions, which was published in August 1914; after this, his writing would change. He immediately set his talent to the […]

130 Books about the War

I like lists of books, and I’ve found an interesting one. It was compiled in 1918, and is called  called Thirteen Ways of Looking at the War. (Why thirteen? Homage to Wallace Stevens? His ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ had been published in 1917.) It’s purely a list, with no commentary, except that […]

‘The Village’ concludes – for the time being

‘It is this obsession of futility, not any depth of sympathy or humanitarianism, which accounts for the piling up of the individual agony to so many poignant climaxes remote from the necessities or even from the incidental happenings of war [....] As for their infinite pity, nothing is easier, unfortunately, than to be bravely sympathetic […]

Leavis at War

F. R. Leavis as a member of the Friends Ambulance Unit Jessica Meyer’s talk at Leeds last week was about the Friends Ambulance Unit. She mentioned that, especially later in the War, the main work of the Unit was on the ambulance trains that took the wounded from the war zone to the channel ports. […]

Extracts

A reader sent me a request the other day. He will be taking the AQA WW1 AS exam next month, and would like some suggestions for practice extracts. (the trickiest question on the paper is a compulsory one where candidates are given an unseen extract about the War, and asked to analyse it, and to […]

Jeeves

In a comment on my ‘Faulks’ post, Roger speculates on the interesting question of Jeeves’s war service The only evidence we have for this is an enigmatic exchange in Ring For Jeeves (1953): “Were you in the First World War, Jeeves?” “I dabbled in it to a certain extent, m’lord.” What could the dabbling have […]

‘Bartimeus’ before the War

Bartimeus Pre-War The ‘Bartimeus’ Omnibus (1933) is divided into three sections – Pre-War 1909-1913, War 1914-1918 and Post-War 1919-1925. The sections refer to when the stories are set rather than when they were written, though, as one or two of the Pre-War section explicitly look forward to more testing times. It’s not hard, though to […]