Story and history: exploring the Great War. Glassco, David Kidder The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author For additional information about this publication click this link. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/jspui/handle/123456789/1416 Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionally make corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. For more information contact [email protected] 1 story and History: Exploring the Great War David Kidder Glassco submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD. Queen Mary College 2 ABSTRACT This essay suggests that the creative imagination proved to be the most effective guide to the experiences of the Great War. The argument is that the rational consciousness and its received, discursive language proved unable to explore many of the dimensions of an experience that was characterized by the irrational. That most precious of heritages--the language-­ actually prevented people from seeing and saying what was going on. Most of the memoirs demonstrate a tension between that which is recognized by the rational consciousness and that which is rendered as there by the creative imagination. The various tactics employed by the memoirists to deal with that tension (most interestingly by the creation of a persona who stands in for the memoirist) are revealing in themselves. In exploring these issues we will discover that memoirs are actually a subset of fiction, and must be seen and read as such. We learn to trust the tale rather than the teller of it. The novels, too, will demonstrate a dichotomy between novelist and novel. There too, as in the memoirs, we discover that the imagination can lead us into places not readily available to the discursive mind. Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End gives us an extraordinary picture of a civilization bound and impotent, helpless to free itself from the dead hand of its past except by some apocalyptic smash-up. It suggests in a number of ways precisely how and why European civilization seemed in the end to be so eager for the war that would destroy it. H.G.Wells's Mr. Britling Sees it Through is one of the very few contemporary renditions of the war that sees it clearly as nightmare and horror. Worse, Britling must realize that even though this nightmare may consume his son he can do nothing about it. It is a lesson of impotence that is enforced. Finally D.H.Lawrence's Kangaroo starts to explore some of the implications of the war. In the end, as a result of his own experiences in England during the war, Somers has lost his faith in the England he once so cared for, in civilization, in democracy, in any kind of political action, in connecting. It is a staggering loss. - '" 3 CONTENTS Introduction 5 THE MEMOIRS 49 Preface 50 A.G.West 59 C.E.Montague 74 G.Chapman 84 C.Carrington 98 J.Glubb 115 F.P.Crozier 123 E.Blunden 134 R.Graves 149 S.Sassoon 166 Conclusion 190 THE NOVELS 198 Preface 199 Parade's End 201 Mr. Britling Sees it Through 251 Kangaroo 275 Conclusion 303 4 Art speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day ... Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. D.H.Lawrence "The Spirit of Place" 5 Introduction Elizabeth walked up the stone steps ... A man in a blue jacket was sweeping in the large space enclosed by the pillars. As she came up to the arch Elizabeth saw with a start that it was written on. She went closer. She peered at the stone. There were names on it. Every grain of the surface had been carved with British names; their chiselled capitals rose from the level of her ankles to the height of the great arch itself; on every surface of every column as far as her eyes could see there were names teeming, reeling, over surfaces of yards, of hundreds of yards, over furlongs of stone. She moved through the space beneath the arch where the man was sweeping. She found the other pillars identically marked, their faces obliterated on all sides by the names that were carved on them. "Who are these, these ... ?" She gestured with her hand. "These?" The man with the brush sounded surprised. "The lost." "Men who died in this battle?" "No. the lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in the cemeteries." "These are just the ... the unfound?" She looked at the vault above her head and then around in panic at the endless writing, as though the surface of the sky had been papered in footnotes. When she could speak again, she said, "From the whole war?" The man shook his head. "Just these fields." He gestured with his arm. Elizabeth went through and sat on the steps on the other side of the monument. Beneath her was a formal garden with some rows of white headstones, each with a tended plant or flower at its base, each cleaned and beautiful in the weak winter sunlight. "Nobody told me." She ran her fingers with their red­ painted nails through her thick dark hair. "My God, nobody told me."l The experience of beginning to read the memoirs and novels Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong (1993; rpt. London: Vintage, 1994), pp. 210-211. 6 of the Great War is an extraordinary one. "My God," one says, "did we really do this? Did people like me go out to a front that was like that? And suffer those horrors? And kill each other in that way? And if we did that, why did nobody tell me? Why was I not told when I went to school some forty years later? Did my grandfather do that? How? Why?" My interest in the writings of the war stems from this sort of an experience. From the beginning there was a sense of a split, a gap, between whatever I had conventionally learned about the First World War, and what this literature seeemed to be telling me. The literature makes one feel something like the panic Elizabeth feels: "She looked at the vault above her head and then around in panic at the endless writing, as though the surface of the sky had been papered in footnotes." That tells, somehow, a very different story from the statistics of the casualties in the battles around Baupaume. J. M. winter (who makes demographics speak in human tongues) in discussing the human cost of the war says " ... the story of World War 1 ... was a story of suffering, multiplied by many millions, which taken as a whole is comprehensible not in statistics but perhaps only in art.,,2 Why would such a story be comprehensible in art but not in statistics? Does that difference have anything to do with the difference between the received story I had grown up with, (this was a war to defend democracy; this was a war in which Canadian 2 J .M. Winter, The Experience of World War 1 (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 197. 7 troops had fought bravely, in which we had demonstrated our fidelity and loyalty to Britain), and the story I received from Graves or Aldington which certainly seemed to be a very different story? Was there any way to work out which of these stories was "true"? If the experiences I shared from Goodbye to All That had actually occurred--if that was what was actually happening to human beings--then, surely, the more conventional versions needed some drastic amendment. This essay is an attempt to explore some of the issues that come up both as we attempt to tell the story of the Great War and as we attempt to hear that story. My first concern is to try to examine some of the reasons why certain aspects of the Great War may be "comprehensible ... only in art." Traditional wisdom would have it that if we want to find out what the war was really like then we should go to the historians. History, after all, deals with fact. Literature, on the other hand, deals with fiction. This essay is an attempt to deconstruct that opposition. First of all, I want to suggest that historical text and literary text share the same epistemological status. 3 Secondly, I want to explore the many 3 Historians may not like to think of their works as translations of fact into fictions; but this is one of the effects of their works ... The older distinction between fiction and history, in which fiction is conceived as the representation of the imaginable and history as the representation of the actual, must give place to the recognition that we can only know the actual by contrasting it with or likening it to the imaginable ... In my view, we experience the "fictionalization" of history as an "explanation" for the same reason that we experience great fiction as an illumination of a world that we inhabit along with the author. In both we recognize the forms by which consciousness both constitutes and colonizes the 8 reasons why literature may give us a fuller version of what went on in the Great War than conventional history. I want to suggest the way in which literature is open to a wider variety of evidence--likely to admit more into the court--than is history.