November 22, 2009 – 12:09 pm
When Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed was published in 1930 it aroused much criticism in Canada, partly because of the hero’s relationship with a prostitute, which I mentioned yesterday. One critic deplored the representation of the Canadian soldier as
a coarse-minded, profane creature, seeking only the solace of loose women or [...]
November 21, 2009 – 1:03 pm
(Book covers courtesy of Alan Hewer’s excellent Great War Dust Jackets site)
In a recent post on Arnold Bennett’s The Pretty Lady, I quoted the 1917 parliamentary debate on prostitution and its effect of the soldiers. During this, Col Sir Hamar Greenwood reflected on the scandal of seven thousand ‘clean Canadian boys’ needing venereal treatment [...]
November 16, 2009 – 12:17 pm
I rather like Andrew Marr’s Making of Modern Britain series on BBC2. It’s punchy tabloid history, simplified here and there (especially about social class, I think) but conveying sound basic historical information in a clear and engaging way.
Or at least, Marr’s script does that. The use of archive film, though, in this week’s episode, had [...]
November 11, 2009 – 6:32 pm
In 2002, Ben Shephard wrote A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914 -1994. This is a work of serious history, examining a wide range of sources and attempting to get beyond conventional ideas about war neuroses. He looks at these in their historical context, in a way that illuminates the behaviour both of soldiers [...]
November 9, 2009 – 6:10 pm
An interesting story from War Illustrated of June 24, 1916 , attested as true by a soldier stationed on a farm in France:
The men there often heard a sound as of a falling shell, not followed by the burst, and they concluded that the shell must be a ‘dud’. But one day, sitting in the [...]
November 4, 2009 – 9:30 am
There’s an article in today’s Guardian about the excellent news that the National Heritage Memorial Fund has allocated £550,000 to ensure that Siegfried Sassoon’s archive stays in this country.
The only downside to this is that the Guardian has appealed to the usual suspects for quotations, and some of these are a bit off-target. Andrew Motion, [...]
October 25, 2009 – 11:33 am
I’ve been looking at the 1925 House of Commons debate about military executions, which gives some good insights into how the war was seen at the time. The Labour M.P. Ernest Thurtle moved the amendment, making some very strong arguments, and citing some persuasive cases in evidence:
Case No. 1 is that of a private soldier [...]
September 30, 2009 – 9:04 am
When I picked up Neville Lytton’s The Press and the General Staff (1920) at Lichfield Book Fair the other day, I expected it to be a dryish analysis of the relations between journalists and soldiers during the War. It’s actually much better than that, a pacey memoir of Lytton’s time, first as a soldier, and [...]
September 20, 2009 – 4:30 pm
It’s a general rule that Great War fact is stranger than Great War fiction. Here is an extract from a letter sent home to his brother Syd by Frank Cambridge of the London Irish on January 12th, 1916. In December 1915 the Staff had been very keen to discourage any repeat of the Christmas Truces [...]
September 15, 2009 – 5:44 pm
I’ve written about Kate Hume before, the seventeen-year old girl from Dumfries, who went on trial for forgery in December 1914; in September she had written a letter apparently from her sister Grace, a nurse in Belgium. It read:
Dear Kate, — This is to say “Goodbye.” Have not long to live. Hospital has been set [...]
