The Literature of the First World War

This year, and indeed this very week, marks the centenary of the end of the First World War. The poignant commemorations which will take place across the globe are the culmination of a long programme of anniversary events stretching back to 2014 reflecting on the many facets of the conflict which became known as the ‘war to end all wars’. On 11 November 1918 the Armistice was signed and the guns were silenced and we will watch on this coming weekend as the world remembers the millions of people who lost their lives in the First World War and those who have been killed in the many conflicts since.

As a means to reference this significant milestone we have chosen to select a slightly unusual but suitably important and thought-provoking piece on the literature which emerged from the conflict. Edward Quinn’s piece is one of many deeply researched and carefully framed articles on the conflict that can also be found on Infobase’s Modern World History database, alongside many thousands of others tailored to the K:12 schools and university library readership . 

The first World War is most notable for its wanton destruction of lives—almost 10 million killed, 20 million wounded. The staggering loss of life resulted primarily from the technological advances of modern warfare—including barbed wire, poison gas, the machine gun, and massive artillery—but no small part of the slaughter grew out of the blindness of military tacticians on both sides who continued to rely on huge infantry attacks, in which waves of soldiers burdened with heavy backpacks went over the top of their trenches to be mowed down on an open plain—no-man’s-land—time after time.

But the Great War, as it was known, is even more notable for the catastrophic consequences that followed in its wake. World War II, despite its wider impact, remains not just a result of World War I, but an extension of it. At the roots of the Great War were developments that might easily have been avoided. Instead, with what appears to be in hindsight a kind of whimsical carelessness, the great powers plunged Europe into an abyss of suffering and misery, which was then compounded by the cynicism and self-interest that created the terms of the five separate peace treaties in 1919 that concluded the war.

The years preceding the outbreak were marked by relative peace and prosperity, giving the superficial impression of a civilization too advanced for war. However, as with the case of the Titanic, a ship thought too technologically sound to be sunk, there was shaping beneath the surface an iceberg in the form of military buildups fueled by national jealousies and fears. The Germans were envious of the English and French colonial empires in Asia and Africa. The English, in turn, feared Germany’s naval development, designed to challenge British supremacy at sea, while the French, still smarting from their loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, armed themselves in anticipation of a reenactment of that war. Meanwhile three imperial powers—Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire—all teetered on the brink of revolution within their borders, sparked by unrest within the ethnic minority populations they had mistreated for years. As a result, the major nations set up a series of alliances designed to ensure mutual protection. In 1907, Britain, Russia, and France formed the Triple Entente, which led Germany to feel both isolated and “surrounded.” In turn, the Germans concluded comparable pacts with Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.

Thus the fuse was in place; it was lit in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist. Soon after, Austria declared war on Serbia, and Germany, Austria’s ally, declared war on Russia and France, leading Great Britain to declare war on Germany. Joining the German and Austrian empires were the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. In 1915, Italy, following a failed attempt to cut a deal with the Austrians on postwar spoils, came into the war on the side of the Allies. In 1917, after considerable soul-searching on the part of President Woodrow Wilson, the United States entered the war, a move that had a decisive effect on the outcome. The war drew to a close amid political chaos and social upheaval. The Russian Empire was transformed into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), while the three empires on the losing side—the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman—were dissolved, transforming the map of Europe and the Middle East in a way that had, and continues to have, profound consequences for the stability of the continent.

THE LITERATURE

In the beginning, the literature of World War I on both sides was predictably supportive—depicting the conflict as a quasi-religious crusade, calling the nation to its sacred duty, demonizing the enemy, and extolling the nobility of dying for one’s country. In England this type of drum-beating patriotism was reflected in the poems of Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), and Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), the latter a young soldier poet whose early death before seeing action transformed him into a symbol of the glory of English manhood. The religious theme emerged in the journalist Arthur Machen’s (1863–1947) The Angels of Mons (1915), which reported the appearance of ghostly spirits in the form of old English bowmen, fighting alongside British troops during the battle of Mons. Ironically, this flight of fancy occupied a major role in popular English mythology, sustaining the home front’s belief in the war. Some German writers, notably Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) (Storm of Steel) embraced the tradition of war in itself as a mystical and spiritual enhancement of human life, a belief that lingered in the mind of at least one German soldier, an obscure corporal named Adolf Hitler. Similarly, in France, the poet and essayist Charles Péguy (1873–1914), who maintained simultaneous commitments to Catholicism, militarism, nationalism, and socialism—all these symbolized in the figure of Joan of Arc—glorified the war as the setting for France’s return to greatness. In America, this type of propaganda literature is reflected in Edith Wharton’s (1862–1937) The Marne(1918), a novel describing America’s entry into the war as an irresistible force “powered from the reservoir of the new world to replace the wasted veins of the old.”

But when the people who were actually experiencing this new form of mechanized warfare and its attendant slaughter began writing, the war took on a different look and its literature a different language. Heroic ideals and romantic imagery gave way to anger and ironic images rooted in the concrete reality of death and dying. Among the first to experience the war not as a crusade but, in Ernest Hemingway’s words, as “the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth” were the English poets Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918), and Wilfred Owen (1893–1918). Two of these poets, Owen and Rosenberg, were killed in combat. Typical of their poems are Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches,” an ironic ode to the rat, the trench soldier’s constant companion, and Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” a furious rejection of Ovid’s “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“It is sweet and just to die for one’s country”). The great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), whose work spanned the two world wars and the momentous upheavals within Russia in the 20th century, wrote powerful poems on the war, including the prophetic “July, 1914,” in which she foresees “famine, tremors, death all around” as the consequence of the impending war.

Along with these poets were novelists such as the French writer Henri Barbusse (1873–1935), whose Under Fire(1916; trans., 1917) offered an authentic voice describing the inglorious reality that gave the lie to official propaganda. Barbusse’s dirty, weary, cynical infantrymen, their speech liberally sprinkled with obscenities, want no part of military glory, nor do they hate their German counterparts, whom they see as fellow victims. In this representation of the common soldiers transcending the limitations of nationalism, Barbusse is heavily influenced by his internationalist, communist convictions. In sharp contrast to this social view is the perspective offered in some of the most outstanding English novels emerging from the war, Ford Madox Ford’s (1873–1939) tetralogy Parade’s End, consisting of Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and The Last Post (1928). According to Ford, in these works he assumed “the really proud position” of “historian of his own times.” To that end, the tetralogy covers the period from 1912 to the postwar years, depicting the social, moral, and political war-induced changes in England on both the home front and the battlegrounds.

Ford’s protagonist is Christopher Tietjens, an old-school Tory landowner, wedded to traditional values, appalled by what he sees as the dissolution of those values. Tietjens is woefully ill-equipped to deal with the emerging modern world, hampered as he is by a stubborn integrity and fidelity to his own sense of honor. His military career is constantly undermined by the machinations of his wife in collaboration with his treacherous commanding officer. Largely regarded as a failure, he is in fact a brave and intelligent officer, qualities that go unrecognized by his crass, careerist superiors. In the end he succumbs to the inevitable: “The war had made a man of him. It had coarsened him and hardened him.” Eventually he finds a place in the postwar world for himself and the long-suffering woman he loves. He comes to accept the diminished modern world. The Great War was a catalyst of change to a mechanical, debased world, but still one where “a man could stand up.”

Important American novels to emerge from World War I include Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), E. E. Cummings’s The Enormous Room (1922), and John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers (1921). Of these, The Enormous Room is the most unusual both in subject and tone. It is the fictionalized account of Cummings’s experience while serving as an ambulance driver for the French forces. In 1917, he and his friend were arrested for treason by French authorities and sent to the Ferté prison, where he was confined for three months. The Enormous Room is a protest against the war itself, most pointedly against the intransigence and arbitrariness of the military mind and its ruthless disregard of the individual.

A similar theme underlies Three Soldiers. The three soldiers represent three character types from three different social spheres: Fuselli is an Italian American from the West Coast intent on making a success of his military career; Chrisfield is a midwestern farm boy who seeks in war an outlet for his violent nature; and the main character, John Andrews, is a university graduate and aspiring composer who joins the army in an effort to find fulfillment in some vaguely perceived act of self-sacrifice. All three soon fall victim to the bureaucratic constraints and soul-deadening routines of army life. Implicit in the novel is the suggestion that the army is a metaphor for all of modern life, in which the twin forces of mechanization and bureaucratization combine to imprison the individual spirit.

Recent years have seen a revival of interest in the First World War as a literary subject. Among the best of these newer works are two by English women novelists, Susan Hill (1942– ) and Pat Barker (1943– ), as well as Sebastian Faulks’s (1953– ) Birdsong. Susan Hill’s Strange Meeting (1971) is the story of the close friendship between two young British officers in the trenches. John Hilliard, a disillusioned, wounded veteran of the war rejoins his battalion shortly before they are due to return to the front lines. His new roommate, David Barton, is a newcomer to the battlefield, a man of unflagging good humor and open-heartedness. Barton’s fundamental goodness helps Hilliard overcome his alienation and sense of despair. Barton, the product of a large and loving family, to whom he writes long and cheerful letters, invites his family to correspond with Hilliard, whose own family is cold and emotionally ungiving. Once exposed to the horrors of the trenches, however, it is Barton whose spirit and nerves need to be strengthened. Hilliard is able to mitigate Barton’s suicidal depression, and the two become even closer. In a particularly futile patrol operation, Hilliard is seriously wounded, and Barton is killed. Hilliard is again plunged into despair, but the novel concludes on an optimistic note as Hilliard goes to visit Barton’s family with the sense of someone who is at last coming home. Strange Meeting is well written, particularly in its depiction of trench life and military combat. Its success in this area puts to rest the canard that women cannot write realistically of war. Harris shows little interest in the social issues associated with the war. Her focus is almost exclusively psychological, and within that sphere she succeeds in capturing the full force of the war’s assault on the individual psyche.

On the other hand, Pat Barker’s highly acclaimed Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration [1991], The Eye in the Door[1993], and The Ghost Road [1995]) is deeply tied to social questions. The three novels focus on three figures, two historical, one fictional. In Regeneration, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, after earning the Military Cross for gallantry in action, refuses to return to the front and publishes a statement disowning the war: “I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.” Rather than risk the embarrassment of court-martialing a decorated hero, a military tribunal declares him mentally unsound and sends him to Craiglockhart, a hospital for victims of “shell shock.” There he is treated by the celebrated psychologist (and anthropologist) Dr. William Rivers, whose task it is to restore his patients sufficiently so that they can be returned to battle.

In the sessions with Sassoon, Rivers finds himself facing a crisis: He is being won over to Sassoon’s position. Regeneration ends with Sassoon’s decision to return to battle to share the fate of the men under his command. In the second novel (The Eye in the Door), Sassoon is wounded and returns to England. Meanwhile the focus shifts to the third major character in the trilogy, the fictional Billy Prior, an officer who is also a patient of Dr. Rivers, having become temporarily mute after a traumatic experience in the trenches. Prior is a man caught between two worlds: He is a working-class officer, a rarity in the British army of the time; a bisexual, in a society in which homosexuality is a crime; and a patriot with a moral commitment to pacifism. The Eye in the Door explores all of these conflicts against the background of a society torn apart by a mounting body count in a seemingly endless war.

In the last volume of the trilogy, The Ghost Road, Prior, Sassoon, and the poet Wilfred Owen, who historically had also been a patient at Craiglockhart, are back in the front lines for the final offensive of the war. One week before the armistice, Owen and Prior are killed. Meanwhile Dr. Rivers, suffering from a mild case of influenza, deliriously recalls his days as an anthropologist living with a tribe of headhunters. The relation of this experience to that of the war insistently imposes itself on his mind, as he treats a dying soldier whose last garbled words are, “It wasn’t worth it.”

The Regeneration trilogy is a work whose implications extend beyond the events of World War I. Barker skillfully weaves into the story the themes of gender and class, both profoundly influenced by the war. Billy Prior, the bisexual officer from a working-class background, becomes involved with Sarah, a working-class woman laboring in a munitions factory, and experiencing, as many women of the time did, their first taste of independence. But Prior is also having sex with a fellow officer from the aristocratic class. Barker sees the war as the opening breach in the clearly drawn lines indicating the status of women, the distinctions of class, and the definition of “manly” behavior. English society was, at great cost, changing. In Parade’s End, these changes are seen as entirely pernicious, shattering the framework of English society. Writing almost 70 eventful years later, Barker, deploring the destructive madness of the war even more vehemently than Ford, takes the longer historical view that the old order, in its death throes, suicidally induced the war, and (if the word regeneration is not being used ironically) that in the boundless suffering of the war, some cleansing took place. Other war novels of note include Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We, Blasco Ibanez’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914, A. P. Herbert’s The Secret Battle, Ian Hay’s The First Hundred Thousand, Jules Romain’s Verdun, and William March’s Company K. For the best-known novel of the period, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front; for the comic masterpiece of the war, Stefan Zweig’s The Good Soldier Schweik.