The Great War and Modern Memory Other Books by Paul Fussell
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The Great War and Modern Memory Other Books by Paul Fussell Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England Poetic Meter and Poetic Form The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations Class: A Guide through the American Status System Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War BAD: or, The Dumbing of America The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters Editor English Augustan Poetry The Ordeal of Alfred M. Hale Siegfried Sassoon’s Long Journey The Norton Book of Travel The Norton Book of Modern War Co- Editor Eighteenth-Century English Literature P AUL F USSELL The Great War and Modern Memory 1 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 1975, 2000, 2013 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1977 ISBN for 2013 edition: 978-0-19-997195-4 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. The Library of Congress has cataloged the fi rst edition as follows: Fussell, Paul, 1924– The Great War and modern memory / Paul Fussell. p. cm. Originally published: New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Contains a new afterword. Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 0-19-513332-3 (pbk.) 0-19-513331-5 1. English literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. World War, 1914-1918—Great Britain—Literature and the War. 3. Memory in literature. 4. War and literature. PR478.E8F8. 2000 8209’358–dc21 99-43295 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To the Memory of Technical Sergeant Edward Keith Hudson, ASN 36548772 Co. F, 410th Infantry Killed beside me in France March 15, 1945 This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Illustrations viii Introduction by Jay Winter ix Preface to the Original Edition xv Credits xviii Chapter 1 A Satire of Circumstance 3 Chapter 2 The Troglodyte World 39 Chapter 3 Adversary Proceedings 82 Chapter 4 Myth, Ritual, and Romance 123 Chapter 5 Oh What a Literary War 168 Chapter 6 Theater of War 207 Chapter 7 Arcadian Recourses 251 Chapter 8 Soldier Boys 293 Chapter 9 Persistence and Memory 336 Afterword 363 Notes 371 Index 390 Illustrations Plumer, the King, Haig 16 British home front recruits 21 Map : the line at the end of 1914 42 The King inspecting model trenches 48 A trench on the Somme 49 Duckboards going forward, Ypres Salient 52 Siegfried Sassoon 101 The Golden Virgin 144 Near Zonnebeke, the third battle of Ypres, 1917 151 David Jones 158 Robert Graves 227 Edmund Blunden 279 Hill 60 from the air 289 Wilfred Owen with Arthur Newboult 315 Battle of Passchendaele, November 1917 359 Introduction first met Paul Fussell en route to an academic conference in I Germany in the late 1970s. We were heading by car to a meeting on “War Enthusiasm in 1914,” a reaction to war we both detested, and I no- ticed that whenever we reached a crossroads, or passed a hill, Paul would scan the horizon in a quick and methodical manner. After an hour or so, I asked him what he was looking for. He said it was a refl ex from his army duty he still could not change. Whenever he passed a point of interest, he scanned the landscape for the best place to put an anti-tank gun. His daily journey home on Route 1 in New Jersey, he said, provided many such opportunities to scan the landscape for good defensive positions. This was, he added, one of the ways in which he was still stuck in the Battle of the Bulge, which had left him with a piece of shrapnel in his thigh and a cosmic skepticism about the arbitrariness of survival in war. His wartime service did more than that. It helped make him one of the fi nest scholars of his generation. Fussell was a great historian, one who found a way to turn his deep, visceral knowledge of the horrors and stupidities of war into a vision of how to write about war. I use the term “historian” deliberately, though he professed literature throughout his academic career. What he accom- plished, not singlehandedly, although centrally, was to break down the barrier between the literary study of war writing and the cultural history of war. When he published The Great War and Modern Memory in 1975, x • Introduction he set in motion what is now an avalanche of books and articles of all kinds on the First World War. He did much to create the fi eld in which I have worked for the last four decades. How did he do it? By using his emotion and his anger to frame his understanding of memory, and his insight into the way language frames memory, especially memories of war. War, he knew, is simply too frightful, too chaotic, too arbitrary, too bizarre, too uncanny a set of events and images to grasp directly. We need blinkers, spectacles, shades to glimpse war even indirectly. Without fi lters, we are blinded by its searing light. Language is such a fi lter. So is painting; photography; fi lm. The indelible imprint Paul Fussell left on our understanding of war was on how lan- guage frames what he termed “modern memory.” The term is seductively simple but essentially subtle and nuanced. Fussell meant that through writing about war, First World War veterans left us a narrative framework we frequently overlook. Drawing on the literary scholarship of the Canadian critic Northrop Fry, he made these distinc- tions. Instead of viewing war as epic, the way Homer did, where the free- dom of action of the hero, Achilles, was greater than our own, and instead of viewing war as realistic, as Stendhal did in The Charterhouse of Parma or Tolstoy did in War and Peace, with Fabrizio or Pierre exercising the same confusion and freedom of action we, the readers have, Great War writers did something else. They told us of the ironic nature of war, how it is always worse than we think it will be, and how it traps the soldier—no longer the hero—in a fi eld of force of overwhelming violence, a place where his freedom of action is less than ours, where death is arbitrary and everywhere. What had happened in 1914–18, Fussell argued, happened again in later wars, whose narrators built on the painful achievement of the soldier writers of the Great War. Men like Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, Gurney were thus sentinels, standing in a long line of men in uniform who were victims of war just as surely as the men they killed and the men who died by their side. Paul Fussell had his ironic moment during the Battle of the Bulge, which no one had anticipated in its ferocity and daring. When the German thrust began and the shells hit, he was with a sergeant who had taught him how to be an offi cer and how to take seriously his responsibility for the young soldiers under his command. He owed everything to that sergeant. “Until the day I die,” he said when we met in Germany, “I will tell anyone who wants to hear how much I owed him.” The two men hit the ground Introduction • xi during the bombardment, and in a moment or two, only one of them stood up. Fussell dedicated The Great War and Modern Memory to this sol- dier, whose death so easily could have been his own. Fussell remained a survivor, with a sense of the fragility of life. Returning home with two Purple Hearts will do that to a man. It also made him intolerant of civilians gung-ho about war, and in particular about the Vietnam War. He told me once that he wrote The Great War and Modern Memory because he was disgusted with the conversations of neighbors at cocktail parties in Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived at the time, about body counts during the Vietnam confl ict. They had no idea how blind and obscene were their smugness and their arithmetic. I recall a similar incident of civilian hauteur about casualties. The Harvard historian Oscar Handlin told an audience in Jerusalem in the 1970s that only 50,000 men had died in Vietnam.