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 rebel. In 1919 he was at school in Amritsar, at the time of the uprising. I’m not sure of the extent of his involvement in the riots, but he was sentenced to seven strokes of the cane, a punishment whose indignity rankled with him for long afterwards.
Some time after taking his degree at the University of Punjab in 1924, he came to England, and continued to study philosophy at Cambridge and London. By this time, he was determined to become a writer, and made contacts in the literary world, beginning with E.M. Forster, but later meeting most of the literary elite of the late 1920s.
Some of these are described in a most engaging book, first published in 1981, Conversations in Bloomsbury. Each of its twenty chapters describes an encounter between Mulk and one or more of the people he met in London. Most of these are writers or artists, though one of the pleasantest chapters recounts his conversation with an ex-Tommy bus driver and his friend, a well-read bus-driver.
It’s a great bit of social and literary history, whose scope is indicated by the second chapter, in which a friend takes Anand to a sherry party at Harold Munro’s poetry bookshop. T. S. Eliot is there, ‘ a handsome figure, with a pale cast of thought on his face, relieved by a demure smile,’ (but he turns out to have a limp handshake). Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence are there (and Edith Sitwell’s sincere warmth breaks down Lawrence’s defensiveness.) Laurence Binyon hardly speaks to anyone at the party, but looks intently at the books.  Bonamy Dobrée introduces Anand to Eliot, who immediately begins enthusing about Kipling, to the young nationalist’s discomfort.
All the conversations are represented in direct speech, so that one wonders slightly about their reliability, since they were published fifty years after the event. Still, Anand kept a diary at the time, and these sketches are probably worked up from diary entries; but as his friend Alastair Niven wrote in an obituary: ‘the distance of years between the conversation recalled and the commitment of it to paper is sometimes so long that one suspects it should be read as an annexe to his prolific short stories.’ The ‘I’ of these sketches does seem to win rather a lot of the arguments.
Eliot gave him work at The Criterion, writing short notices of books, but he was far less relaxed in Eliot’s presence than he was with most of the other figures he chats with. Perhaps part of the trouble was that he always wanted to leap into talk about deep philosophical issues, while Eliot kept his defences up. (By the way, if this book is reliable, gossip that Eliot was ‘driving his wife nuts’ was commonplace in Bohemian circles at the time.)
Several of those he meets belong to what we now think of as the Bloomsbury set. Clive Bell is rude, and doesn’t want to talk to the young Indian. When Lytton Strachey takes the young man’s hand, ‘He pressed it warmly, too warmly, I felt.’
Anand likes Leonard Woolf, whose experience in Ceylon gives them a sense of common ground, and he worked occasionally correcting proofs at the Hogarth Press. When he meets Virginia Woolf (who exudes ‘the fragrance of grace’) she has been reading a draft of Anand’s novel, and is charming about it. He apologises for the style, claiming that he was too influenced when young by the long sentences of G. M. W.Reynolds.  Woolf has never heard of Reynolds, and Leonard has to explain about his sensational pop serials. She asks:

Why have I never heard about  The Mysteries of London and  The Mysteries of the Courts of London? I thought the only popular writers were Bennett, Galsworthy and Wells, with their old wives’ tales, about tables and chairs and haberdashery stores.’

There is a great thesis to be written about the connection between modernism and snobbery.
Anyone who wants an outsider’s view of the insiders of the literary scene in the twenties should take a look at this book. It’s fun.

a coarse-minded, profane creature, seeking only the solace of loose women or the courage of strong liquor [....] On the whole, such literature, offered to our avid youth, is an irrevocable insult to those gallant men who lie in French and Belgian graves.

Even more sensitive was the issue of Canadian soldiers commiting a war crime by shooting prisoners.
In Harrison’s novel, the men get a pep-talk before battle:

Our Colonel speaks to us. We like him. He has risen from the ranks.
‘I’m not saying for you not to take prisoners. That’s against international rules. All that I’m saying is that if you take any, we’ll have to feed ‘em out of our rations…’
Some of us laugh at this. Most of us are silent, however.

Shooting of prisoners had been an issue in Wilfrid Ewart’s novel Way of Salvation (1921) and Stephen Graham’s memoir A Private in the Guards (1919). Graham’s book especially is all about the paradox that a noble war can only be won by brutality. A crack unit like the Scots Guards needs to brutalise its men through tough training until ‘taking no prisoners’ becomes the sort of thing in which a man might take pride. The Canadians had a similar reputation for tough soldiering, and Robert Graves caused offence by claiming in Goodbye to All That that they sometimes shot prisoners.
Harrison’s novel is an intentionally dysphemistic account of war. Dedicated ‘To the bewildered youths, British, Australian, Canadian and German who were killed in that wood a few miles outside of Amiens on August 8th, 1918.’, it is one of those books that insists on the war’s nastiness. The trouble was that in the intervening decade the public memory of the dead soldiers had gone in the opposite direction, and many wanted to remember fallen husbands, relatives and friends as not just heroes but as saints. Between Harrison’s bitter memories and the sanctified ones of the bereaved there was no common ground.
Which is the ‘truth about the War’? You choose. Some Canadian soldiers shot their prisoners. Many did not. A story-teller must be selective, and memories are selective, too. What a particular writer remembers will usually tell us as much about him as about the events that impel him into print.
There’s an interesting online paper by Jonathan F. Vance on the formulation of historical consciousness of the War in Canada. From this I get the impression that the reaction in the Dominions against the disillusioned war books of the late twenties and early thirties went further than that in Britain. Is this because the War was so integral to the national myth of the young countries? In New Zealand, film versions of All Quiet on the Western Front and Journey’s End were banned, apparently.

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 and of doctors. He writes in his introduction:

The clinical literature of the war neuroses is so rich that it is easy for the historian to pull together a collage of horror and pathos. But to understand why, in the past, ordinary people were able to come through the horrors of war, we have to look at the overall record, not just at the gripping psychopathology. To get at the truth, case histories must be reconciled with another, less enticing body of writing: official histories, war diaries, regimental histories, Pentagon memoranda – dull, managerial, impersonal in tone and full of military euphemism, the ‘tough school’. (xxi)

It is therefore unsurprising that he was annoyed when Sir Andrew Motion filleted his book for quotations to make up exactly the kind of ‘collage of horror and pathos’ that he thought inadequate to the subject. It appeared in Saturday’s Guardian, and although it was advertised as an original work, it was actually a poem of eight sections, five of which were almost exact transcriptions of quotations from Shephard’s book, while the others were taken from Siegfried Sassoon.
Ben Shephard has raised the question of copyright. This is not the most important issue in this case, I’d say, but certainly pertinent when a poem of Sir Andrew’s posted on a website comes with the stern injunction:

To reproduce part or whole of the poem, permissions must be cleared through Carol Macarthur at United Agents, 020 3214 0880; cmacarthur@unitedagents.co.uk

Double standards  seem to be at work here.
More important are the literary ethics of the case. Sir Andrew has come out fighting. “He has got the wrong end of the stick.” he says haughtily. “To blow off about it like he has done completely misunderstands what found poetry is.” He cites as a precedent Shakespeare adapting North’s translation of Plutarch in Antony and Cleopatra. Quite apart from the fact that Shakespeare was writing a long while before our current standards of literary property were developed, the cases seem to me to be very different indeed, and it is maybe instructive to compare two very different types of adaptation. Here’s what Shakespeare did with Plutarch:

When I was a schoolteacher, I once gave these two passages to a sixth-form class to look at, to discover what Shakespeare did with his source material, and they didn’t find it hard to realise that he added richer sense impressions (the perfume), the personification of the water as ‘amorous’, the magical paradox of ‘what they undid did’, and so on. Then there’s the skilful use of a free iambic pentameter, with phrasing constantly made various by enjambment. Also, because he was a dramatist, he added to the effect by putting the words in the mouth of not-easily-impressed Enobarbus, and at a time when Antony had just promised to marry chaste Octavia, so that the speech is charged with dramatic irony. And so on. In other words, Shakespeare took a very good piece of writing by Plutarch, and changed it into a string of words that will be read with wonder and delight for as long as the English language exists.
Now let us look at what Sir Andrew did with a paragraph quoted from A War of Nerves, attributed by Shephard to Tom Salmon, an American army psychiatrist in the Great War who had, in Shephard’s words, ‘an eye alive to incongruity’:

It seems to me that Sir Andrew here has done the opposite of what Shakespeare achieved. The words are taken away from from a specific speaker, and put into a generalised collection of bits of war writing , where one speaker seems much the same as the next. Salmon even loses his nationality when his Ford becomes just a car and gasoline becomes petrol. He even loses his ability to look up in wonder, and his sense of the sheer variousness of things – those clouds, large and small, that are such a contrast with the bloody clothes below. Instead of the pretty clouds there are dangerous clay-pits; the tone is evened out to uniform grimness. Salmon sees war as various: “Everything which is dull and stupid and everything which yanks at your heartstrings”, but Sir Andrew won’t have this. It all has to fit one grim tone. The alert ‘eye alive to incongruity’ gets switched off, so that the paragraph will fit into a prosy sermon for Remembrancetide.
Prosy – that’s the real problem. Sir Andrew has chopped up the paragraph into lines that each have four main beats, but those lines just lumber along. Somewhere I read as justification of Sir Andrew’s use of this material that he had put in line breaks, and that these were original. The trouble is, they’re not very good. What on earth is the point of the break after ‘over’?
I know I shouldn’t blame poor old Sir Andrew for not being Shakespeare (though it was he who suggested the comparison). But there is a basic aesthetic principle, I’d say, that if you use ready-made material in a literary work (and many writers do, one way or another) then the transformation into a poem, play or story should in some way or other enhance the material. Shakespeare obviously passes the test. Sir Andrew actually manages to make the original material less interesting. He wants to reduce all war experience to passive suffering. One of the great merits of Shephard’s book is that he refuses to do this:

Finally we must see the shell-shocked soldier not simply as a victim, silently suffering, powerless to help himself, but as an agent, using his medical symptoms as a weapon of resistance to military authority.(xxi)

Shephard, therefore, is alert to the individuality of the shell-shocked soldier; Sir Andrew is not. No wonder Shephard was annoyed to see his work used in this way.

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, for example, says: “It is not only good news as a symbolic statement, but a lot of the material in the archive forms the backbone of our understanding of what it was like on the frontline during world war one.”

Really? But in the words of his biographer, Jean Moorcroft Wilson:

Remarkable though it may seem, Sassoon, who was in the army from the day War broke out to the day it ended and had the reputation of being a fire-eater, spent barely a month out of a possible fifty-one in the front line.

Most of that front-line experience was during the highly untypical first weeks of the Somme battle, and Sassoon was a most untypical soldier. For an understanding of what typical front-line experience meant, I’d suggest Max Plowman, maybe, or A.M.Burrage.

Then in the G2 section there is a piece by Michael Morpurgo, who has sentimentalised the War in Private Peaceful and other works. He begins his piece on Sassoon with an attention-grabbing paragraph about men shot at dawn for cowardice, and then adds:

As far as I know, Siegfried Sassoon didn’t write about these soldiers.

He goes on to suggest that Sassoon would have written indignantly about them if he’d thought of it, which seems dubious to me.  He didn’t after all,  show much sympathy for the ‘cold-footed useless swine’ in ‘The Hero’, though he offered compassion to the man’s mother, and shows plenty of fellow-feeling for the rather conventional officer who has tried to offer consolation:

‘Jack fell as he’d have wished,’ the Mother said,
And folded up the letter that she’d read.
‘The Colonel writes so nicely.’ Something broke
In the tired voice that quavered to a choke.
She half looked up. ‘We mothers are so proud
Of our dead soldiers.’ Then her face was bowed.

Quietly the Brother Officer went out.
He’d told the poor old dear some gallant lies
That she would nourish all her days, no doubt.
For while he coughed and mumbled, her weak eyes
Had shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy,
Because he’d been so brave, her glorious boy.

He thought how ‘Jack’, cold-footed, useless swine,
Had panicked down the trench that night the mine
Went up at Wicked Corner; how he’d tried
To get sent home, and how, at last, he died,
Blown to small bits. And no one seemed to care
Except that lonely woman with white hair.

There’s another ‘cold-footed’ character in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer’. An officer who ‘had now lost control of himself’, he was stumbling back to Headquarters when he should have been going in the other direction. Sassoon ‘pulled out my automatic pistol, and told him that if he didn’t go straight back [...] I’d shoot him.’ It was for the man’s own good, Sassoon argues, since he saved him from being court-martialled for cowardice. But all the same, the attitude seems pretty different from the one implied by Morpurgo.

Morpurgo puts the icing on his rhetorical cake by claiming:

Sassoon had the courage to say what, at the time, you absolutely couldn’t say, and to some extent, still can’t: that there was no point in just going on fighting and fighting.

But this Remembrancetide, that is exactly what almost everyone will be saying about the Great War. Sassoon’s attitude, once brave and extraordinary, has become the conventional wisdom about the conflict. It’s rather ridiculous for Morpugo to be trying to present his utterly conventional views as in some way brave or subversive. By the 1940s, Sassoon himself was casting doubt on the political sense of his campaign for a negotiated peace.

Still, it’s very good news that the archive has been saved – it will be kept at Cambridge, apparently.  But dont expect to find in it some ultimate simple truth about the War. Sassoon was a complicated man, and study of the archive is more likely to reveal new complexities, of character and attitude, than the grand simplicities beloved of Morpurgo.

Having done my own stint on Mr Gormley’s plinth a month ago,  (nothing to with the  Great War, though I did mention the nineteenth-century Afghan Wars, and quoted Kipling) I always check the site first thing in the morning, to see what has been happening.

As I write this, a young man is standing in a WW1 private’s uniform, commemorating his three great-uncles from Accrington, who died in the War:

Private Harry Broadley who served with the 13th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers and who died on 9th April 1917 age 33;

Private Owen Broadley who served with the 2nd Battalion of the East Lancashire Regiment and who died of his wounds on 11th June 1918 age 21;

Lance Corporal Thomas (Tom) Broadley who served with the 11th and 7th Battalions of the East Lancashire Regiment and who was killed in action on 2nd August 1917 age 22.

He’s just standing still, like a statue. Representing the private soldier, he is making a deliberate contrast with the Generals (Napier and Havelock) commemorated on other corners of the Square. Rather effective, and considerably more dignified than the naked man who leapt off the plinth yesterday afternoon

Why was Lord Lansdowne, when he called for peace in early 1917, so reviled? Why, at around the same time, when Siegfried Sassoon demanded an end to the war, and chucked the ribbon of his Military Cross into the Mersey, did others regard him as mad? Wasn’t he one of the few sane ones?
When I saw Mr Patch, Mr Allingham and Bill Stone – the last three surviving Great War veterans in Britain – at the Cenotaph last November, on the 90th anniversary of the Armistice, I wondered again why their generation had allowed itself to be slaughtered because of the opportunism of the German Kaiser in exploiting a quarrel between Serbia and Austria.

The answer to the questions in the first of these paragraphs is surely contained in the second. Yes, the Kaiser had started the War in a spirit of opportunism, and up until June 1918 he was winning. To have negotiated peace in 1917, when the Russians had just caved in, would have been negotiating from a position of weakness, and the Germans, effectively would have won the War. What sort of Peace settlement would there have been? Certainly no reparations to France and Belgium for the destruction of huge parts of those countries. Probably Belgium would have become a German puppet state, with control of the Channel Ports effectively in German hands. The Germans realised the War had become a stalemate, and a Western Peace would have been less draconian than Brest-Litovsk, but it would definitely have been a Peace that rendered the previous three years futile. Sassoon, by the way, in Siegfried’s Journey (1945) acknowledged that a negotiated peace in 1917 would not have been a final solution to the problem of German expansionism.
Meanwhile, a leading article in the Guardian takes a more sophisticated view, seeing the memorialisation of the War as the creation of a mythology and both the product and generator of ideology. Parts of the analysis simply do not ring true, though, because they depend on huge generalisations. For example:

Few of the 6 million who answered the call to arms saw themselves as heroes [....] For the veterans, it was something to leave behind, an experience most closely reflected in the bitter anger of poets like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Ivor Gurney and Edmund Blunden.

True of some, certainly – but a lot of soldiers in the twenties did not want to forget. In fact, it was the great age of Remembrance, of battlefield tourism, the creation of the British Legion, and the invention of proud rituals such as the Great Silence.
In literary terms, during the twenties the war was remembered less by the work of the poets mentioned than by the great flood of regimental histories, which soldiers bought to see their achievements proudly chronicled, in a way that stressed collective endeavour rather than individual suffering.
The Guardian editorial goes on to claim:

Three generations later, schoolchildren standing in the vast cemetery at Thiepval are still taken aback by the sheer scale of the loss, and the bathos of Rudyard Kipling’s inscription of the unidentifiable dead, “known unto God”.

That certainly wasn’t my impressionof the reaction  when I took students on school trips to Tyne Cot and the Menin Gate. Yes, they were flabbergasted by the scale of the losses – but there was no sense of bathos. On French unidentified graves, there is the blank word ‘Inconnu’. Kipling’s formulation may not please the taste of everyone, but it insists on the soldier as a presence, not an absence, affirming that the remnants under the stone were once a man, who had a soul. You don’t have to believe in God to see the value and meaning of that.

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 been reading Remarque’s book while writing Infantry Officer in 1929 and it undoubtedly strengthened his determination to be factually precise.

Most memoirists work hard at giving the impression of total recall, so it’s rather refreshing to read Hugh Kingsmill’s Behind Both Lines (1930), which contains quite a few sentences like:

Tunnelling, I believe, though where or why I forget, was the task finally discovered for our company…

Writing, like many other memoirists,  a decade after the war, Kingsmill makes use of the letters sent home by another officer, and frankly acknowledges that he does not remember several of the incidents described.  The selective nature of memory is also the theme of this anecdote from his first days in France:

Another portent was a meeting with another officer, Oliver by name, whom I had known at Harrow. He was in the cricket eleven, and two or three years my senior, and when I say I knew him at Harrow, I mean that he used to kick me whenever he saw me. The warmth with which he now greeted me was flattering; he remembered me,it appeared, as a sporting kid, whom it was rather a pleasure than a duty to kick. Over a dinner in the Terminus buffet, he recalled, with a touch of sentiment, how he had once thrown me to earth and how philosophically I had received a hundred lines from my form-master for my filthy appearance.

Kingsmill is an excellent writer (If you want to give yourself a treat, read his biography of Frank Harris.) but most of his books have slipped into oblivion. I had never heard of his war memoir until I came across a small reference in an essay by Michael Holroyd. Behind Both Lines is well worth reading. The first few chapters describe the experience of a young subaltern in France. Like A.P. Herbert and Douglas Jerrold, he was in the Naval Division, arriving just after the execution of Dyett, ‘accused of nothing more serious than wandering about under shell fire in a bad state of nerves, instead of taking some working-party to a point indicated by another subaltern’.  The response of Kingsmill and a friend was ‘If they’re going to treat us like this, I don’t know that it wouldn’t be better to end it all, here and now.’
Very soon, however, in the course of a chaotic action, Kingsmill is taken prisoner, and the bulk of his book is taken up with memories of his time in German prisons. The description of this experience is fresh, unexpected, and generally positive. He was incarcerated with two other notable authors: Alec Waugh (Evelyn’s brother, and notorious for The Loom of Youth) and J. Milton Hayes, author of my candidate for best poem of 1911:

The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God

THERE’S a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There’s a little marble cross below the town;
There’s a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.

He was known as “Mad Carew” by the subs at Khatmandu,
He was hotter than they felt inclined to tell;
But for all his foolish pranks, he was worshipped in the ranks,
And the Colonel’s daughter smiled on him as well.

He had loved her all along, with a passion of the strong,
The fact that she loved him was plain to all.
She was nearly twenty-one and arrangements had begun
To celebrate her birthday with a ball.

He wrote to ask what present she would like from Mad Carew;
They met next day as he dismissed a squad;
And jestingly she told him then that nothing else would do
But the green eye of the little Yellow God.

On the night before the dance, Mad Carew seemed in a trance,
And they chaffed him as they puffed at their cigars:
But for once he failed to smile, and he sat alone awhile,
Then went out into the night beneath the stars.

He returned before the dawn, with his shirt and tunic torn,
And a gash across his temple dripping red;
He was patched up right away, and he slept through all the day,
And the Colonel’s daughter watched beside his bed.

He woke at last and asked if they could send his tunic through;
She brought it, and he thanked her with a nod;
He bade her search the pocket saying “That’s from Mad Carew,”
And she found the little green eye of the god.

She upbraided poor Carew in the way that women do,
Though both her eyes were strangely hot and wet;
But she wouldn’t take the stone and Mad Carew was left alone
With the jewel that he’d chanced his life to get.

When the ball was at its height, on that still and tropic night,
She thought of him and hurried to his room;
As she crossed the barrack square she could hear the dreamy air
Of a waltz tune softly stealing thro’ the gloom.

His door was open wide, with silver moonlight shining through;
The place was wet and slipp’ry where she trod;
An ugly knife lay buried in the heart of Mad Carew,
‘Twas the “Vengeance of the Little Yellow God.”

There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There’s a little marble cross below the town;
There’s a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.

This is a good time for books about the social history of the War. I mentioned Jessica Meyer’s Men of War last week, and there is another book that I have been meaning to write about for a while. It was published last year, but I don’t think I’ve seen any reviews of it. Maybe I haven’t looked in the right places.
Adrian Gregory’s The Last Great War has a title that may seem off-putting. He wanted to call it The Last War, because that’s what many at the time hoped desperately that it would be – “The War to End Wars” in Wells’s rather glib formulation – and contender for the least successful prophecy of all time. His publishers told him that people would take that to mean 1939-45 (Why not Iraq?) so he made it The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War.
The Last Popular War might have been a better title, because the main theme of the book is the popular support for the War, despite anxieties, disappointments and tragedies. Adrian Gregory has used an impressive range of resources, and he’s used them well. I can say this because I have covered some of the same ground, and  whenever he mentions a resource that I  have looked at, he seems to get it right.
He’s good on propaganda and atrocity stories, showing how the British people were less gullible than some later historians have made them out to be. By carefully checking original texts, he is able to show how careless that influential writer Arthur Ponsonby was about checking his sources in Falsehood in Wartime. (That book was so influential on left-thinking opinion that the saintly George Monbiot was still repeating its line exactly in the Guardian last Remembrance Day.) Gregory also shows that even Northcliffe’s Daily Mail tried to report the war accurately.
A chapter I found particularly interesting was the one on the Church in wartime. Gregory quotes warlike prelates such as the ghastly Bishop of London who urged a great crusade:

…to kill Germans: to kill them not for the sake of killing but to save the world; to kill the young men as well as the old, to kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded as well as those fiends who crucified the Canadian sergeant…

He also shows however that as well as clergymen using their religion to promote war, there were far more trying to use the War’s popularity to bring people to religion. The National Crusade of 1916 was an attempt at channelling the wartime spirit of self-sacrifice into specifically religious channels. It doesn’t seem to have worked.
Gregory is good on class. He analyses the changes in attitudes of the working classes, and makes it clear why strikes occurred, despite powerful public condemnations. He considers the relative sacrifices of the various classes, and points out that while numerically a majority of the dead were from the working class, the middle classes proportionally suffered more. This was because a large proportion of the industrial workforce was in skilled occupations deemed necessary to the war effort; such workers avoided the “combing out” process, and were in many cases exempted from conscription.
On remembrance, of course, Gregory has written before, and more fully, but the chapter in this book adds to the picture, showing the tensions between the bereaved, the ex-soldiers and local elites about how the dead should be remembered.

The book is packed with statistics,anecdotes and examples. I’ll be coming back to it.

This was a one-day conference organised in conjunction with the excellent War and Medicine exhibition at the Wellcome Collection. A number of speakers explored different aspects of the themes of memory and war, in ways that connected fascinatingly.
To start with, Martin Conway from Leeds gave a laid-back presentation about memory in general. He talked about our earliest memories (If you’re average, you probably remember an incident from when you were about 3. If you can see yourself in the memory, this is probably a sign that the memory has been processed – worked on over the years.“No memories are true representations of what occurred,” he told us – they are always selective and interpreted.
He has been collecting memories for a database. Some people have offered impossible memories – things from earliest infancy, the preverbal period. Yet these people believe in the images as memories. We remember most about our life between the ages of 15 and 25 (the “reminiscence bump” on the graph of memories). This are the years when we are defining our personalities, and the memories are part of that definition. (Schizophrenics, apparently, don’t show  a reminiscence bump.) Memory declines, he says, after the age of 27. Yes, I’ve noticed.
War memories, he says, have a disproportionate influence on children and young adults, because they come at this crucial time when the self is being formed.
Next, and very different, was Mary Fulbrook, talking about different generations’ memories of the past in Germany, and the different stories that Germans have constructed to deal with having been the “perpetrator nation” of the twentieth century. Usually these involved denial of aspects of the past, or distancing oneself from it.
She described how the unreality of the 1918 defeat produced myths that led to right-wing radicalisation. After 1945, a defeat so complete that it could not be denied, West and East Germany evolved different official myths to shape their memories, with different heroes and villains. Blame was put on elites, and the people exculpated in different ways in the two halves of Germany. These public myths must often have been at odds with private memories.

Prof. Fulbrook talked about the Holocaust memorials in Berlin – that deliberately ugly maze of great grey blocks, and the stolpersteine, the stumbling blocks in the pavements memorialising individual victims.

It struck me how different these are from British War memorials. Here, the memorial, in town centre or churchyard, was almost always built because the community wanted it, and often by community subscription. It is a focus of voluntary remembrance, especially for descendants, and usually of civic pride. New names, from the Falklands, Bosnia, Iraq or Afghanistan, have been added, so that the monument evolves as a public record. The Holocaust memorials are imposed on a culture that would rather forget, and are a reminder of shame, not pride. I sometimes wonder how long they will last.
In contrast with these public reminders of shame, private mourning for the war dead is conducted quietly. Candles and flowers in the cemeteries show the continuation of private mourning, but there are no ceremonies to give this a public dimension.
Very different, but equally impressive, was the next speaker, Simon  Wessely, on “shell-shock” and PTSD. He gave us a quick tour of the twentieth-century history of the problem, showing how there was no simple narrative of progression in the treatment. What Simon Wessely communicated most brilliantly was his own fascination by the complexities of the subject – such as the Americans who define themselves as war-damaged Vietnam vets, but in some cases were never in Vietnam, and in a few cases were never in the military.
He was illuminating about how small-group bonding contributes to the capacity to cope with war. Also  about why the military are suspicious of nervous disorder – it’s because being a soldier is about controlling fear, not expressing it. You have to earn your breakdown, he said. (If you break down on the way to war you get no sympathy. If you break down on the way back, you get plenty.)  Why do soldiers have more psychiatric trouble than sailors or airmen?  Because the Army recruits more men with a history of trouble than the other two, especially the air force. And on a ship there is nothing to be gained by breaking down. You’re heading into action whether you like it or not.

He is sceptical of the blanket term PTSD, sometimes used to suggest that even chronic psychiatric disorder can be caused by war. Pre-war problems can be exacerbated by war, though, and combat stress can make itself felt years after the event – maybe when the man’s children have grown up, and his wife has left him, and his late-life troubles revive memories (which can then be blamed for what went wrong…).

Simon Wessely was illuminating on “flashback memories”. There is no record of this in WW1 shell-shock literature, except in Goodbye to All That (and Robert Graves later confessed to having made it up. But since the flashback has been a staple feature of war films…

There was plenty more in his talk, but that should give you the flavour.

Then there was lunch. Very good sandwiches provided by the Wellcome – and while I’m on the subject, let me recommend the ground-floor café. I shall definitely use it when I’m in that part of town – and the bookshop, too.

After lunch, Catherine Moriarty gave a good talk about British war memorials – standing, as she said, as enduring reminders in an age of fleeting communications. She talked about them as reminders of responsibilities, and as visible signs of invisible private memories. Talking about the IWGC, she mentioned a Kipling pamphlet that I really must get to read, explaining the principles according to which war cemeteries were organised.

She spoke briefly about the Silence, which turned everyone at the memorial into a participant, not just a spectator; and also about different forms of memorial.

Lastly, she enthused  about Steve McQueen and his project for putting photos of soldiers killed in Iraq on postage stamps.

When I saw the stamps in their neat sliding display cases at the IWM last year I was underwhelmed; they were in the same room as Sargeant’s great painting Gassed, and in comparison seemed a little glib. But she is right. If McQueen’s original plan had been taken up by the Post Office, and these faces of the dead had been on millions of letters, this would indeed have been an interruption of public space that would have made people take note of what soldiers were doing in our name. I wonder which civil servant put a stop to the scheme? One of those who encouraged the sentimental granting of pardons to every soldier executed in WW1?
The last speaker was Walter Busuttil, a psychiatrist from the charity Combat Stress, which helps ex-servicemen with mental problems. There are a lot of them.
Many soldiers, he pointed out, join in the first place because they have problems at home. The military culture does not necessarily help them – hard drinking and institutionalisation (a lot of your decisions taken for you.) The hard military life can produce physical disorders, and civilian life can be very difficult to adjust to. Since seeking help can also go against their self-image, no wonder they have problems.
Here are a couple of facts I noted:
Of all recent warfare environments, Northern Ireland was the most traumatising.
More Falklands soldiers have died from suicide than were killed in combat.

So – in all, a most thought-provoking day. I’ll keep an eye on the Wellcome Collection’s website to see what else is coming up on their calendar.

When I was in London a while back, I walked through Hyde Park, and looked at Artillery Memorial by Charles Sargeant Jagger , surely the most remarkable in London.

In Galsworthy’s Swan Song, Soames Forsyte, grim during the General Strike, is walking through the Park when he comes across it:

Automatically he had begun to encompass the Artillery Memorial. A great white thing which he had never yet taken in properly, and didn’t know that he wanted to. Yet somehow it was very real, and suited to his mood—faced things; nothing high-flown about that gun—short, barking brute of a thing; or those dark men—drawn and devoted under their steel hats! Nothing pretty-pretty about that memorial—no angels’ wings there! No Georges and no dragons, nor horses on the prance; no panoply, and no panache! There it ‘sot’—as they used to say—squatted like a great white toad on the nation’s life. Concreted thunder. Not an illusion about it! Good thing to look at once a day, and see what you’d got to avoid. ‘I’d like to rub the noses of those Crown Princes and military cocks-o’-the-walk on it,’ thought Soames, ‘with their—what was it?—“fresh and merry wars!”’ And, crossing the road in the sunshine, he passed into the Park, moving towards Knightsbridge.

When he has walked on further, and after he has found himself in Montpellier Square, with its painful memories of his first marriage, though, he goes back again through the Park, and sees the Memorial differently:

He had come again to the Artillery Memorial; and for the second time he moved around it. No! A bit of a blot—it seemed to him, now—so literal and heavy! Would that great white thing help Consols to rise? Some thing with wings might, after all, have been preferable. Some encouragement to people to take shares or go into domestic service; help, in fact, to make life liveable, instead of reminding them all the time that they had already once been blown to perdition and might again be. Those Artillery fellows—he had read somewhere—loved their guns, and wanted to be reminded of them. But did anybody else love their guns, or want reminder? Not those Artillery fellows would look at this every day outside St. George’s Hospital, but Tom, Dick, Harry, Peter, Gladys, Joan and Marjorie. ‘Mistake!’ thought Soames; ‘and a pretty heavy one. Something sedative, statue of Vulcan, or somebody on a horse; that’s what’s wanted!’ And remembering George III on a horse, he smiled grimly. Anyway, there the thing was, and would have to stay! But it was high time artists went back to nymphs and dolphins, and other evidences of a settled life.