During the Great War, a work of fiction had to be pretty extreme to attract the attention of the authorities, who had their work cut out regulating the Press (and were sometimes criticised for only dealing with the London papers, and letting the provincial press go more or less unchecked). A pacifist novel like Theodora Wilson-Wilson’s The Last Weapon of 1916 could be published by C.W.Daniel, the Tolstoyan publisher, without being prosecuted. (This is a work of religious pacifism, and gets very allegorical, but contains a very strong chapter depicting a soldier who has returned from the front, where he has done terrible things. He angrily confronts the minister who had persuaded him to enlist because it would be doing Christ’s work.)
Even Despised and Rejected by ‘A.T.Fitzroy’ (Rose Allatini) was on sale for several months before a press campaign forced the authorities into prosecuting it. (This was a novel that compounded its offence by being about young men who were not only pacifist but homosexual, a provoking combination in the year of Pemberton-Billing’s campaign against treason and depravity in high places.)
The government prided itself on allowing more freedom of expression in Britain than there was in Germany, and on the whole seem to have been happiest when difficult cases were not thrust upon their attention.
That was what happened, however, with Harold Begbie’s Mr Stirling Sticks It Out. Begbie was a popular novelist who had written rousing recruiting poems at the start of the War:

Where will you look, sonny, where will you look,
When your children yet to be
Clamour to learn of the part you took
In the War that kept men free?
Will you say it was naught to you if France
Stood up to her foe or bunked?
But where will you look when they give the glance
That tells you they know you funked?

He had become concerned, however, by the treatment meted out to conscientious objectors, and so wrote this book about a pair of brothers. Both are idealist, but one is a soldier, the other a Christian pacifist. (The book’s title echoes Wells’s Mr Britling Sees it Through. Is there an implication that endurance was easier for a non-combatant whose opinions were as fluid as Mr Britling’s than for a pacifist who stuck firmly to his principles?)
The book contains a disturbing account of the treatment of conscientious objectors in prison, and the printer entrusted with the manuscript by the publisher referred it to the Press Bureau who ‘disclaiming their power to censor, nevertheless felt it their duty to read the book, and having read it they informed the printer that its publication was against the national interest.’ They refused to indemnify the book against prosecution, whereupon the printer refused to hand back the manuscript. The Press Bureau continued to refuse an authorisation even after the War was over, since sections of the book, they claimed, contained untruths about the prison service.
I think the Press Bureau found itself caught in the censor’s dilemma. If the book had been published and they could claim official ignorance of it, they would have let it go; once it had been brought to their attention, however, to allow it would seem to be to endorse it.
In 1919 the book finally got into print, with a preface by Begbie that gives a full account of the affair, including correspondence with the Prime Minister’s office and elsewhere.
He asks why his book is banned while pamphlets on the same subjects have circulated freely, and is told that ‘there was a considerable difference between an obscure pamphlet and a novel written by one who might be sure of a considerable number of readers’. Which seems a reversal of the usual policy of being harder on pacifist pamphlets than on fiction, and is maybe a testimony to the effectiveness of the book’s later chapters, detailing the pacifist’s treatment in jail.
Here is a Punch comment of 1919, which I’ve cut’n’pasted in. It’s mildly interesting, I think, for its having-it-both-ways tone. It’s critical of the government’s handling of the matter, but makes the claim that not all C.O.s were as saintly as Begbie’s hero. Some, the implication is, were Socialists, or Bolsheviks. The Punch writer seems to think that such men would have deserved the worst.

I quite agree with Mr. HAROLD BEGBIE, whose Mr. Sterling Sticks it Out (HEADLEY) is a generous attempt to put into the form of a story the case of the conscientious objector of the finest type, that, when we are able to think about this matter calmly, we shall have considerable misgivings at least about details in our treatment of this difficult problem. I also agree that the officials of the Press Bureau don’t come at all well out of the correspondence which he prints in his preface, and, further, that the Government ought to have had the courage to alter the law allowing absolute exemption rather than stretch it beyond the breaking point. But I emphatically dispute his assumption that the matter was a simple one. It was not the saintly, single-minded and sweet-natured C.O.’s of Christopher Sterling’s type that made the chief difficulty. There were few of this literal interpretation and heroic texture. The real difficulty was created by men of a very different character and in much greater numbers, sincere in varying degrees, but deliberately, passionately and unscrupulously obstructive, bent on baulking the national will and making anything like reasonable treatment of them impossible. It would require saints, not men, to deal without occasional lapses from strict equity with such infuriating folk. Mr. BEGBIE’S book is unfair in its emphasis, but it is not fanatical or subversive, and I can see no decent reason why it should have been banned. I certainly commend it to the majority-minded as a wholesome corrective.

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 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.

(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 after a stay in England:

During a recent visit to the Dominion I met many fathers and mothers whose boys had been sent back to Canada debilitated and ruined for life because they had been enmeshed by some of the harpies who are still allowed to go very near the camps, and especially in this great Metropolis, and again and again these parents have said to me, ‘We do not mind our boys dying on the field of battle for old England, but to think that we sent our sons to England to come back to us ruined in health, and a disgrace to us, to them, and to the country, is something that the Home Country should never ask us to bear.

Brian Busby has kindly sent me in the direction of a 1929 novel by Peregrine Acland All Else is Folly, which presents the relations between a Canadian soldier and the ladies he meets in London in a more nuanced light. The novel’s hero (whose name, Falcon, hints at his similarities with Peregrine Acland himself) is home on leave after a difficult time in France. The woman he loves keeps her distance from him because her husband, though a drunken bully, is a prisoner in Germany, and she feels the obligation to be faithful until he returns. Falcon goes to a musical comedy, but feels it inane: ‘To go through all those months in the trenches – for this!’
He walks out, and heads for the Prince Rupert Lounge, where ‘most of the women wore too much make-up… But not much more than their non-professional sisters’. Myra has just snubbed a young English subaltern with an obviously high opinion of himself, but her eyes twinkle at Falcon. (Most of the women in the novel are instantly attracted by the hero, which makes one suspect that autobiography here is tinged with a big dose of fantasy.)
They go to her flat, and Myra turns out to be a Russian ex-art student whose lover has been killed. She surprises Alec by ‘the bitterness of her passion against war.’ She says, ‘ I am young, I am full of vitality. I don’t know that I could use it better than by giving a few hours of pleasure to some officer home, tired, from the trenches.’
She certainly gives Falcon pleasure, and Acland lapses into poeticism when he describes the pleasure that Falcon gives her:

Mutely, she told of the rhythm that sways the vast slow-moving seas.
Fiercely she showed him the fire that whirls the stars in their courses.
Limply she lay when the last wave of passion had burst like a breaker assaulting a cliff, ascending to heaven… falling.

Wow!
Rather better written is a short scene when she refuses money from Falcon but he insists and starts peeling notes from a roll.

Myra laughed at him.
‘The more you hurry, the slower you are,’ she said – ‘and you trying to catch a train. Here, give them to me. My fingers are quick.’
Too quick, thought Alec, as he watched her dextrously strip off not five notes, but eight…

That, I reckon, is a little anecdote based on personal experience.
The episode with Myra redeems an otherwise unsatisfactory leave, before Falcon goes back to France, and the Battle of the Somme, his part in which is described in some of the very best chapters of war writing that I have come across – clear, credible and truly gripping.
Another Canadian novel that features a relationship with a London prostitute is Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed (1930) a book that is mostly devoted to making clear the brutality of combat.
As in Acland’s novel, there is a brief period of respite in London. The hero is taking a solitary meal in a restaurant on Shaftesbury Avenue, when a pretty girl asks him for a match. (In some future age there will be thesis written on the effect of our recent smoking ban on mating rituals.) They leave together, and go to the Hippodrome, where he is disgusted by the revue (and the ‘fifty girls in gauzy khaki stage uniforms’ singing ‘Oh it’s a lovely war’). ‘These people have no right to laugh,’ he says. There are soldiers there enjoying the show, but according to Davidson, they are all non-combatants – Ordnance Corps, Pay Corps and so on.
Gladys takes the (unnamed) soldier home, and he likes her so much that he arranges to stay with her for all of his ten days leave. It turns out that that is what most of her ‘boys’ do. As well as providing sex she comforts him, for example when the backfiring of a  motorcycle panics him:

She puts her hands on my face and looks anxiously at me.
I try to laugh.

The intimacy between the two is well-described. He asks if she is happy, and:

Her body made a friendly, conscious movement. It is one of the many ways that lovers speak without words.

‘In a dozen different ways she makes me happy,’ says the narrator. ‘She is that delightful combination of wife, mother and courtesan – and I, a common soldier on leave, have her!
Both Acland and Harrison were writing a decade after the event, and these episodes in their novels may be tinged by nostalgia for cuddles past. What each of them does, though, is to present both the soldier and the prostitute as complicated human beings, linked by more than the sordid sex-and-money connection which is all that the parliamentary moralists were able to imagine.

The new Fringes of the Fleet CD has arrived from Amazon, and very satisfactory it is, too. It has Elgar’s settings of Kipling’s poem-cycle, of course (with a version of the sinister  Tin Fish that should get anyone’s neck-hairs tingling), but there are also instrumental pieces by John Ansell and Haydn Wood and a setting by John Ireland of Brooke’s The Soldier that I didn’t think much of  at first, but which is growing on me with repeated hearings.

Maybe most interesting to me are two settings of Kipling’s poem Big Steamers, one by Elgar and one by Edward German, who I gather was Kipling’s composer of choice. (During the War, I’ve heard that George V was listening to a band playing selections from Merrie England, and asked ‘Who’s the composer?’ A  courtier told him, ‘Actually, he’s German, sir.’ To which the King replied, ‘Yes, most of them are.’)

The two settings are both good. Maybe Elgar’s has the fancier tune, but German’s has a feel for the rocking of a ship on the waves. Anyway, the two settings directed my attention to the words:

“OH, where are you going to, all you Big Steamers,
With England’s own coal, up and down the salt seas? “
“We are going to fetch you your bread and your butter,
Your beef, pork, and mutton, eggs, apples, and cheese.”

“And where will you fetch it from, all you Big Steamers,
And where shall I write you when you are away? “
“We fetch it from Melbourne, Quebec, and Vancouver.
Address us at Hobart, Hong-kong, and Bombay.”

“But if anything happened to all you Big Steamers,
And suppose you were wrecked up and down the salt sea?”
“Why, you’d have no coffee or bacon for breakfast,
And you’d have no muffins or toast for your tea.”

“Then I’ll pray for fine weather for all you Big Steamers
For little blue billows and breezes so soft.”
“Oh, billows and breezes don’t bother Big Steamers:
We’re iron below and steel-rigging aloft.”

“Then I’ll build a new lighthouse for all you Big Steamers,
With plenty wise pilots to pilot you through.”
“Oh, the Channel’s as bright as a ball-room already,
And pilots are thicker than pilchards at Looe.”

“Then what can I do for you, all you Big Steamers,
Oh, what can I do for your comfort and good?”
“Send out your big warships to watch your big waters,
That no one may stop us from bringing you food.”

For the bread that you eat and the biscuits you nibble,
The sweets that you suck and the joints that you carve,
They are brought to you daily by All Us Big Steamers
And if any one hinders our coming you’ll starve!”

Kipling wrote this for C.R.L.Fletcher A School History of England (1911) as an illustration of the importance of Free Trade to England. The last two stanzas, though, are a strong argument for maintaining the strength of the armed forces, and keeping up with Germany in the naval race.

Can you imagine a schoolbook today being as frank about the real political facts of life? I can’t.

In 1919 this poem was given the sub-heading ‘1914-18′, which indicated, I suppose that the protection of food supplies was an exceptionally important issue during those years, but blurred the fact that Kipling had seen the problem coming.

On the Kipling Society’s website there are excellent notes on the poem, written by Peter Keating, one of my tutors at Leicester many years ago, and a very nice man.

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 me shouting at the telly, like the nerd I am.
It was all over the place.
Bits were actual documentary, though often they didn’t fit in with what they were supposed to show. The programme made the classic mistake, for example, of using film of soldiers in tin hats to illustrate events in 1914. I think it was a bit of the 1916 Somme film that was used at the end to add a picture to Marr’s account of the last Hundred days.
Bits were from much fiction later films, but not labelled as such. I think I spotted sequences from Tell England and Westfront 1918, and maybe J’Accuse. You can generally tell a fictional reconstruction by the camera angle. In a real battle, the high angle of some of these shots could only have been achieved by a cameraman who was positively suicidal.
Then other bits were modern reconstructions, like the blindfolded general choosing the ‘unknown soldier’ coffin.
Well, maybe it’s nerdish to complain about the mixing of fact and fiction, but I think I’ve got a real complaint about the section describing official British propaganda. The illustration used for it was this

Now that is an American poster. British official ones were never so sensational; most of them were  rather dignified letterpress-only efforts.

Some years ago Nicholas Hiley wrote a rather good article about the most famous British poster of the War, Leete’s design of Kitchener’s pointing finger. This is often assumed to be typical government propaganda, but it began unofficially as an illustration in the small-circulation topical magazine London Opinion, and when it became a poster, this was not under the auspices of the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, but as a private venture. Hiley concludes that: ‘There is… no evidence that this design played any part in the official campaign, or was even regarded by contemporaries as an official poster.’

So Marr’s programme contributed to the myth that British soldiers were hustled into the War by falsifying propaganda, which is a half-truth at best.

A pity, because, as I say, I rather like Marr’s style. But I shall watch future programmes in the series with increased scepticism.

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.

Thanks to Brian Busby, who pointed me in the direction of All Else is Folly, by Peregrine Acland. Abebooks found me a reasonably-priced copy, which arrived this morning.
I probably won’t read the novel for a while, but I have already taken a look at the introduction, by Ford Madox Ford. In this he does the usual thing of saying that the novel he is introducing is a very good book (‘the convincing, mournful and unrelieved account of a simple soul’s suffering in the late war’). He also has some good words for the Canadians, claiming ‘I saw a good deal of the Canadians in France, and liked them really more than any other troops, my own battalion naturally excepted.’
But he also praises the novel for containing a hero ‘as normal in temperament and circumstances as it is possible to be’, on the grounds that a ‘normal’ hero who is ‘neither hypersensitized nor callous; neither Adonis nor Caliban; neither illiterate nor of the intelligentsia’ will be identified with by ‘normal’ readers.

For the defect of all novel-writing is that, as a rule, the novelist – Heaven help him – must needs select unusual, hypersensitized souls to endure the vicissitudes that he is pleased to make them endure, and that makes him lose half the game with the normal reader. I remember very well – for I am not pleading Not guilty! thinking to myself when about half way through a novel about the late war, “Well, my central character is such a queer, unusual fellow that I do not see how anyone is going much to sympathise with him in his misfortunes.”

Well, I think most of us do manage to sympathise with Tietjens, even when he is being absurdly gentlemanly even to the vile Sylvia, but undoubtedly he is odd, and it’s good to know that Ford realised the fact.
Mind you, I wonder if this is Ford musing that he has missed the literary boat. Some Do Not was begun in the early twenties, and has much in common with best-sellers of the time like Hutchinson’s If Winter Comes (a hero who represents the best of England going off to fight, while those who represent the worst profit from the War. Then the noble hero is blamed unfairly for a scandal, but he holds his tongue.) By 1931 a new model of war book was fashionable, based on All Quiet and Journey’s End. It was now the literary fashion to write about the sufferings not of ‘hypersensitized souls’, but of ordinary soldiers. What Ford is praising Acland for writing has become the orthodox way of writing about the War – and Ford must feel that his own tetralogy now seems a little old-fashioned.

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 farmyard, one soldier heard the sound repeated twice within a couple of minutes, close at hand, and on the second occasion found that a hen was responsible for it. Immediately afterwards a cock replicated the exact imitation of a falling shell. Comrades corroborated the observation, and the French farmer assured them that the fowls had learnt to make the noise since the war began, and sometimes kept it up for a long time.

The author of the article (who was clearly more of a Lamarckian than a Darwinist) reflects:

It would indeed be strange if the accomplishment were transmitted to these fowls’ progeny, and in future peaceful days hens perpetuated the memory of the Great War by roaring like a falling shell every time they laid an egg.

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, 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.

The Pretty Lady (Churnet Valley Books, £14.95. ISBN 1904546689)
John Shapcott’s excellent new edition of The Pretty Lady raises the question why this extraordinary book has not been generally recognised as one of the most original and penetrating twentieth-century novels. Even Bennett enthusiasts like John Carey and John Lucas have been a bit sniffy about it. Recently, though, Margaret Drabble has written in the TLS about the novel as ‘a “feverish” engagement with the violence and sexuality of modernity’, and Shapcott’s introduction to the new edition  (whose text is a facsimile of Cassell’s nicely printed 1918 first edition) provides an excellent analysis of the book’s visual symbolism, in a way that shows how closely worked and considered the book is beneath its easy readable surface.
It’s the readability that has told against the book among twentieth-century academics, of course.  Bennett the best-seller (The Pretty Lady sold 30,000 copies within six months) offers little to those who make their living by explication, unlike his arch-critic Woolf; untangling her gossamer complexities has made many a career.
The subject-matter of The Pretty Lady was what caused problems for the book at first. It is the story of a French prostitute, Christine, who has escaped from wartime Ostend, and set herself up in business in London. Though a refugee, she demands no pity; she is self-sufficient, practical and realistic.
Bennett began writing the novel in May 1917, when the nation was in the throes of a moral panic on the subject, helped on its way by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote this letter to The Times:

Sir – Is it not possible in any way to hold in check the vile women who at present prey upon and poison our soldiers in London? A friend of mine who is a Special Constable in a harlot-haunted district has described to me how these harpies carry off the lonely soldiers to their rooms, make them drunk with the vile liquor which they keep there, and finally inoculate them, as likely as not, with one or other of those diseases which, thanks to the agitation of well-meaning fools, have had free trade granted to them amongst us? (The Times, Feb 6, 1917)

A few days later, a news article in The Times reported:

Dealing with young women of known disorderly character for importuning soldiers in the streets, Mr. Paul Taylor, at Westminster yesterday, said he was very glad to see Sir Conan Doyle’s letter in the Press characterising persons like the prisoners as enemies to their country, putting temptation in the way of young men, with horrible consequences. No fines would meet this class of case, and he sentenced the prisoners to a month’s hard servitude. (The Times, Feb 11, 1917)

The Criminal Law Amendment Act and the Venereal Diseases Act of 1917 were responses to the problem, and the parliamentary debates about these contained language very like Doyle’s crude misogynist stereotyping, as when Col Sir Hamar Greenwood reflected on the scandal of seven thousand ‘clean Canadian boys’ needing venereal treatment after a stay in England:

During a recent visit to the Dominion I met many fathers and mothers whose boys had been sent back to Canada debilitated and ruined for life because they had been enmeshed by some of the harpies who are still allowed to go very near the camps, and especially in this great Metropolis, and again and again these parents have said to me, ‘We do not mind our boys dying on the field of battle for old England, but to think that we sent our sons to England to come back to us ruined in health, and a disgrace to us, to them, and to the country, is something that the Home Country should never ask us to bear.’ (House of Commons Debates, 23 April 1917)

Bennett’s Christine is not a harpy preying on innocent soldiers, but a canny businesswoman, doing the best she can with the opportunities life has given her. Her main relationship is with G.J.Hoape, a wealthy man above the military age;  when they meet on the Empire promenade their communication is a matter of subtle hints between sophisticates. Is she exploiting him? Is he exploiting her? Bennett leaves it to the reader to decide.
Throughout the novel, Bennett questions the simple moral dualisms found in Doyle’s letter. The prostitute may be ‘the professed enemy of society’, but society’s official protectors, the police, demand a bribe to let her continue her business. As for those who set up as society’s moral guardians, Bennett shows them as using the war to advertise the nobility of their own characters. There is Lady Queenie Paulle, for example, who ‘had few rivals as a war-worker’, because she attended so many societies and sat on so many committees, and had, Bennett sardonically notes, ‘done practically everything  that a patriotic girl could do for the war, except, perhaps, join a Voluntary Aid Detachment and wash dishes and scrub floors for fifteen hours a day and thirteen and a half days a fortnight.’ One of her committees, in charge of a French hospital, assumes the right to moralistically discuss the private lives of doctors and nurses, with an interest clearly shown as lubricious.
John Shapcott’s introduction shows how Bennett in this novel presented a disturbing image of wartime society, fragmented, uneasy and divided. There are references to industrial unrest and to social injustices, and hints that the British press is less than frank about the war. (Hints that are the more remarkable when one considers that at the time of the book’s publication, Bennett held an important post in the Ministry of Information). Those in authority are mostly  either self-deceiving or corrupt, while there is immense sympathy for those doing the essential work of war, the female munition-makers and the soldiers.
The soldiers in this book, however, are neither the innocents of Doyle’s fantasy, nor the calm and responsible action-men of wartime cliché. The first soldiers that we hear of, at a funeral service, and as the subject of an official telegram, are dead; living ones are enigmatic. When Hoape meets some old friends on leave, they avoid speaking about the War, and channel the conversation into trivialities, making both him and the reader aware of the urgency of their need for distraction before they leave again for the front.
The most important military character is the anonymous officer first seen fighting with another soldier on the Empire promenade, and later found lying in a drunken stupor, snoring on Christine’s bed. Above all, he is needy, and Christine supplies what he wants – not sexually, but as someone to talk to, so that he can unburden himself in confession. Significantly, he is irrational and superstitious. Christine asks him about his experiences:

‘Have you been in the retreat?’
‘I was.’
‘And the angels? Have you seen them?’
He paused, and then said with solemnity:
‘Was it an angel I saw?… I was lying doggo by myself in a hole, and bullets whizzing over me all the time. It was nearly dark, and a figure in white came and stood by the hole; he stood quite still and the German bullets went on just the same. Suddenly I saw he was wounded in the hand; it was bleeding. I said to him: “You’re hit in the hand.”  “No,” he said — he had a most beautiful voice — “ that is an old wound. It has reopened lately. I have another wound in the other hand.” And he showed me the other hand, and that was bleeding too. Then the firing ceased, and he pointed, and although I’d eaten nothing at all that day and was dead-beat, I got up and ran the way he pointed, and in five minutes I ran into what remained of my unit.’
The officer’s sonorous tones ceased; he shut his lips tightly, as though clinching the testimony, and the life of the bedroom was suspended in absolute silence.

The text’s realistic narrative is disturbed by this irruption of the supernatural; the silence that follows it is also an authorial silence. Bennett does not tell us whether he gives any credence to the story of the figure with the stigmata, or whether readers should.
This association of this soldier with the supernatural (which could signify his contact with experience beyond the reach of prosaic civilians, or could merely reflect the extremity of his need) recurs months later at a tedious night club, when the recitation of a poem by Poe precedes Christine’s hallucination of a voice calling her name. Running randomly through the streets, she finds her officer, now reduced to the ranks because of his drunkenness, and puts herself at his service again. Bennett implies that people like her, nearer to the harsh realities of life, can do more for a soldier than any of the  proliferating committees and charities can. The soldier and the prostitute are both outsiders, and Bennett links them by this narrative of the uncanny that is outside the conceptual range of an otherwise naturalistic story. To research this part of the book, Bennett consulted George Whale, a folklorist. He wrote in his journal: ‘Dined with George Whale at the N.L.C. And in his great ugly sitting room took what I wanted from his large collection of notes on war superstitions for my novel. His notes were extremely interesting.’)
At the end of the novel, there is a crucial scene where Hoape, who thinks he has exclusive rights to Christine, sees her in the streets, talking to one soldier after another. He does not realise that she is searching for news of the soldier who needs her, and whom she is helping back to the War. He assumes she is soliciting, and decides to have nothing more to do with her, thus condemning her once again to the difficult life of a common prostitute. Like Doyle and the parliamentary moralists, Hoape, himself far from innocent, presumes to make a judgment about the relationship of the soldier and the prostitute on the basis of appearances, assuming the worst and without knowing all the facts.
As A. S. Wallace wrote in his review for the Manchester Guardian, Christine has, ‘despite an analysis of the stratagems and devices of her professional career that is Maupassant-like in its ruthlessness… a humanity that shines in contrast with this world of humbug and hysteria.’  The prostitute and the soldier together become a judgment on the wartime society that passes judgment on them.  The committees of the rich and powerful who populate the book pride themselves on doing good for the victims of war, while benefiting themselves from the power and status that do-gooding confers on them.  She, meanwhile, is a refugee who does not claim charity or victim status, but copes efficiently for herself. This was not a message that commended itself to some of the book’s first readers. The Star reasserted Doyle’s moralistic contrast between soldiers and courtesans:

Our boys are being martyred by the millions. Hearts are being lacerated by incalculable sorrows. This is no time to regale our hurt minds with glimpses of the nether world. We are not in the mood for idylls of the promenade and pastorals of the pavement.

Bennett’s point is that the ‘nether world’ with its acknowledgment of human frailty, may be more use to a damaged soldier than the sermonizing of those above him.
The book aroused protests which belatedly caused it to be banned by the libraries. Among the strongest complaints  were those from Catholics offended by the portrayal of Christine as a sincere member of their religion.  The Catholic Federation wrote threatening prosecution; nothing seems to have come of this, but as Kinley Roby writes: ‘It was the kind of letter that made publishers very nervous, and Bennett was sufficiently disturbed by the letter to send a copy of The Pretty Lady to Attorney General F.E.Smith to forestall any police action against the book.’   Bennett’s establishment connections helped him to outface criticism in ways that a less well-situated writer would have found difficult. As he wrote to Geoffrey Madan: ‘Various attempts have been made to suppress it. Smiths, after doing exceedingly well out of it, have decided to ban it. Boots of course won’t touch it. […] However, I have influences in high places which ought to be able to counteract such moves. The book sells like hot cakes.’
After the War, the book doubtless suffered from the general reaction against wartime fiction; the early twenties mostly wanted to look forward. When they read novels about the War, they were less interested in books analyzing wartime society than in books like Hutchinson’s phenomenal best-seller If Winter Comes, which explained the War in a way that explored its meaning for the post-war world. Even apart from the assault on Bennett’s reputation by modernists such as Woolf, the subject of The Pretty Lady was not one to endear it to the moralistically Leavisite generation of critics of English fiction. As Margaret Drabble wrote in her Bennett biography, ‘the extreme calm with which Christine, G.J. and the author accept her profession is unusual in English fiction, to say the least.’ On the other hand, Bennett’s treatment of the question is too sane to have attracted the Foucauldians.
With luck, John Shapcott’s new edition, with its clear and attractive reproduction of the original typography, and its keenly analytical introduction, will do something to alert new readers to this remarkable novel.