Centenaries

There has been a deal of news recently about the forthcoming centenary celebrations of the War – including slightly silly plans for a football match to commemorate the Christmas truce (After the match, will the fans try to murder each other?) Having been reading about the Battle of Waterloo recently, I wondered how the end […]

A Tree from Verdun

War memorials took many forms. Today,in Beaumont Park, Huddersfield, I spotted this plaque at the base of a tall chestnut tree: An offshoot of battlefield tourism, presumably, but also an attempt to weave the memory of the War into the fabric of everyday life. This was a reminder that families might spot when out walking […]

Paul Fussell, 1924-2012

2nd Lieut. Paul Fussell. I was saddened to hear of the death last week of Paul Fussell. He is a critic whom I have often argued against, in these blog posts and elesewhere, but he was an important writer and an invigorating one. I would argue that he got many things wrong in The Great […]

Vera Brittain, fact and fiction

Reading Vera Brittain’s Testament of Experience (1957) makes me think once again about the complicated relationship between truth and fiction when it comes to writing of the Great War. Many novels contain strongly autobiographical elements, while many memoirs are structured like fiction. Readers and critics add to the confusion. Several novels, such as Sassoon’s Sherston […]

Robert Graves on Crozier and on War Fiction

In a letter responding to the Times Literary Supplement’s rather grudging account of Crozier’s A Brass Hat in No Man’s Land, Robert Graves wrote (26 June, 1930): That a senior officer of his distinction had turned King’s Evidence against modern war was an event that should have been more attentively greeted. He defends Crozier against […]

Lest we forget

In today’s Observer, Robert McCrum is filling space with a piece about poets’ memorials. Ted Hughes is rightly being remembered in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, but McCrum is sniffy about some of the company he will find there: a fraternity that includes forgotten figures such as Thomas Shadwell, Granville Sharp and Charles Sorley. Sorley […]

Woman to Woman (1929)

Grapevine Video is an excellent and resourceful organisation which regularly produces new DVDs of silent films and early talkies that are otherwise quite unobtainable. (Hint to anyone at all interested in old movies, especially silents: subscribe to the organisation’s email newsletter.) One of their June offerings is Woman to Woman (1929). This is a talkie, […]

A ‘decade of literary silence’?

The most persistent myth about Great War writing popped up in the Guardian again last week, in an article by Geoff Dyer: A decade of literary silence followed the armistice of 1918. It wasn’t until 1929 that a novel appeared that made imaginative sense of the first world war. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on […]

Maude Onions

I’m busy marking the WW1 Literature AS-Level papers again. The set passage this year is from a text I had not come across before, A Woman at War by Maude Onions. She worked as a signaller in France, and the extract describes her sombre mood on 11th November, 1918 after passing on the message that […]

Mulk Raj Anand in Bloomsbury

Mulk Raj Anand, as  a young man. Mulk Raj Anand, author of the epic novel about sepoys on the Salient,  Across the Black Waters, was not only an interesting man, but surprisingly well-connected. He was born in 1905 in Peshawar, the son of Lal Chand,  coppersmith and soldier, and early in his life became a […]