In a few days we will be leaving for Flanders. Mark tells me he has been reading Trevor Wilson’s huge history, The Myriad Faces of War, as preparation. I am impressed and a little shamed by his diligence. My own reading of general histories of the war is characterized by a headlong impatience. Basil Liddell Hart, A. J. P. Taylor, John Terraine, Keith Robbins — I read them all in the same inadequate way. With a cloudless conscience I skim the same parts of each: the war at sea, air raids on London, anything happening on the Eastern Front, Gallipoli. . Then there are the parts of these histories I try hard to concentrate on but whose details I can never absorb: the network of treaties, the flurry of telegrams and diplomatic manoeuvres that lead up to the actual outbreak of war. Consequently everything between the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the lamps going out over Europe is a blur.
Although I always dwell on the period of enthusiastic enlistment, I move attentively but fairly quickly through the period 1914–15. It is not until the great battles of attrition that I am content to move at the pace of the slowest narrative. From the German offensive of 1918 onwards I am once again impatient and it is not until November, the armistice and its aftermath, that the speed of history and my reading of it are again in equilibrium.
For me, in other words, the Great War means the Western Front: France and Flanders, from the Somme to Passchendaele. Essentially, then, mine is still a schoolboy’s fascination. Uncertain of dates and eager for battles, I pause again over a passage I had marked years before, when I was a schoolboy, in Leon Wolff’s In Flanders Fields:
. . a khaki-clad leg, three heads in a row, the rest of the bodies submerged, giving one the idea that they had used their last ounce of strength to keep their heads above the rising water. In another miniature pond, a hand still gripping a rifle is all that is visible, while its next door neighbour is occupied by a steel helmet and half a head, the staring eyes glaring icily at the green slime which floats on the surface at almost their level.
All of which is of no interest except in so far as my own interests coincide with the remembered essence of the conflict. Is it not appropriate and inevitable that I should move quickly through the period of the war’s relative mobility before getting stuck into every detail of the stalemate of 1916–17? Rather than being a quirk of temperament, perhaps this is how the war insists on being remembered, on remembering itself. .
After meeting him in Craiglockhart in August 1917, Owen began immediately and consciously to absorb the influence of Sassoon. Enclosing a draft of the poem ‘The Dead-Beat’, Owen explained in a letter how, ‘after leaving him, I wrote something in Sassoon’s style’. Sassoon also lent Owen a copy of Under Fire, which he read in December. Sassoon took a quotation from Barbusse’s novel as an epigraph for Counter-Attack and Owen used passages as the basis of images in his poems. ‘The Show’ and ‘Exposure’.
If Owen found it helpful to see his own experience of the war through first Sassoon’s and then Barbusse’s words, it has since become impossible to see the war except through the words of Owen and Sassoon. Literally, since so many books take their titles from one — Remembering We Forget, They Called it Passchendaele, Up the Line to Death — or the other — Out of Battle, The Old Lie, Some Desperate Glory — of them. Owen’s lines in particular offer a virtual index of the themes and tropes featured in these books: mud (‘I too saw God through. .’); gas (‘GAS! Quick, boys!’); ‘Mental Cases’; self-inflicted wounds (‘S.I.W.’); the ‘Disabled’; homoeroticism (‘Red lips are not so red. .’); ‘Futility’. .
So pervasive is his influence that a poem about the Second World War, Vernon Scannell’s ‘Walking Wounded’, seems less an evocation of an actual scene than a verse essay on Owen. Owen’s ‘stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle’ becomes the ‘spandau’s manic jabber’ (the rhythmic similarity enhanced still further by the Owenesque near rhyme of ‘jabber’ and ‘rattle’). The wounded, when they enter, look like they have tramped straight out of ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’:
Straggling the road like convicts loosely chained. .
. . Some limped on sticks;
Others wore rough dressings, splints and slings. .
Scannell was aware of this; as Fussell points out, he even wrote a poem about how ‘whenever war is spoken of’, it is not the one he fought in but the one ‘called Great’ that ‘invades the mind’.
The difficulty for recent novelists is that the same thing also happens when they are dealing with the Great War itself.
Recent novels about the war have the benefit of being more precisely written, more carefully structured than the actual memoirs, which tend, with the magnificent exception of All Quiet on the Western Front, to be carelessly written and structured. Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, Guy Chapman’s A Passionate Prodigality, Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune (also known as Her Privates We) and Sassoon’s The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston all contain impressive passages, but none has the imaginative cohesion of purpose and design or the linguistic intensity and subtlety to rival the English translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s masterpiece.16
The problem with many recent novels about the war is that they almost inevitably bear the imprint of the material from which they are derived, can never conceal the research on which they depend for their historical and imaginative accuracy. Their authenticity is mediated; they feel like secondary texts. In 1959 Charles Carrington complained that certain passages in Leon Wolff’s In Flanders Fields read like ‘a pastiche of the popular war books which everyone was reading twenty-five years ago’. Thirty-five years on, Wolff’s evocative historical study of the Flanders campaign is likely to be a major source book for anyone wishing to fictionalize the war. We have, in other words, entered the stage of second-order pastiche: pastiche of pastiche.
In the Afterword to the 1989 edition of Strange Meeting (the title is, of course, from Owen), her novel about the friendship that develops between two English officers at the front, Susan Hill notes that as well as immersing herself in memoirs and letters, she had, in writing her book, to make ‘an imaginative leap’ and ‘live in the trenches’. Though successful in its own terms, this leap is over-determined by the material amassed in the run-up to it. Especially in the sections of the novel which try to pass themselves off as unmediated primary sources — the letters supposedly written by David Barton, the younger of the two central characters.
Well there [he writes to his mother], I have told you what it’s like and made it sound bad because that is the truth and I would have you believe it all, and tell it to anyone who asks you with a gleam in their eye how the war is going. A mess. That’s all. . Tell all this to anyone who starts talking about honour and glory.
We have noticed a tendency, during the war, to look forward to a time in the future when the participants’ actions could be looked back on; here is the opposite process of historic back-projection. Barton’s letters fail to ring true — not because he would not have expressed sentiments like this, but because, ironically, they correspond so exactly with those established as the historical legacy of the war. Their authenticity derives from exactly the process of temporal mediation they have, as letters, to disclaim. In this instance it is difficult not to recall the famous passage from A Farewell to Arms in which Hemingway established the template for Barton-Hill’s sentiments: