A word about the sources I’ve used before I start the analysis: my subject is war

memoirs, but contemporary audiences made little distinction, if any, between war
memoirs and war novels where the novel author was known to have been a serving
soldier and been at the front. So I’m referring to texts published both as memoirs and
as novels, where the novels were treated as memoirs by the original readership. My
other source is contemporary journalism, esp reviews, since I’m interested in the
memoirs as part of the process of circulation of opinions about the war.

I’d like to start with a couple of pieces of author’s correspondence about some best-
selling war literature, taken from the mid-point of the war, the winter of 1916/17.
The authors are René Benjamin and Henri Barbusse. A bit of background first, to
show what is at stake in the correspondence (PPT2).

Benjamin was the author of Gaspard, a war novel published in 1915. It won the
Goncourt that year and was the fastest-selling book in the history of French literature,
at least according to contemporary journalism. Barbusse was the author of Under
Fire, published in 1916, the winner of that year’s Goncourt; it overtook Gaspard as
the fastest-selling book. Most importantly, the two books were utterly different.
Gaspard is a good-humoured, willing soldier, always ready with a joke and a helping
hand, a brave man who tries to rescue a wounded comrade by carrying him on his
back through machine-gun fire; then goes to visit his widow and tells her a comforting
and invented story of a quick and easy death. It is an optimistic, comforting account
of the morale of the French Army despite appalling losses – the French Army had lost
around 25% of its men in the first few weeks of the war. Under Fire is an
apocalyptic account of a slow descent into hell, in which heroic rescues are simply
impossible, and death is randomly distributed by artillery and machine-gun fire; at the
end, most of the squad who are the collective ‘hero’ of the narrative are dead. In
particular, none of them shows any understanding of or enthusiasm for the war – none
of them have any sense of its purpose, and their only hope is that it will end with a
lasting peace, preferably soon.

On publication, both books were enthusiastically received by the reviewers, and the
sales figures tell their own story. Here is the correspondence. It is a paragraph from
a letter from Barbusse to his wife, quoting a letter he has received from Benjamin.
The date is early 1917, a few weeks after Barbusse had won the Goncourt, and after
the first wave of reviews. PPT3. What is referenced here is two alternative ways of
understanding the war; Benjamin’s perception of the critics’ re-evaluation of him
derives from the massive contrast between the two, as does Barbusse’s barbed
compliment. But beyond that is the implication of Benjamin’s decision to write this
letter and Barbusse’s description: “moral catastrophe”: it is not just two alternative
opinions about the war, it’s some profound emotion as well.

In particular what is surfacing here is the shock that was created by Barbusse’s vision:
PPT4 – MdeF, L’Oeuvre. However, the reception was far from universally
positive: the nationalist and religious right detested the book, declaring it was a
travesty of the army and the war effort.

In Britain too a frank account had appeared in 1916: Patrick Macgill’s The Great
Push, about the battle of Loos (autumn, 1915). MacGill was a stretcher bearer with
the London Irish Rifles, who had already made a name for himself before the war as a
poet. As far as I know, MacGill published the first British account by a private, and
it was a success – 40,000 copies sold in two editions in 1916. On the back of it he
did a reading tour of the country, which left traces in regional reporting. His account
is extremely frank – a litany of rotting bodies on the barbed wire, dressing appalling
wounds, a woman and child blown to pieces by a shell, crawling over dozens of
recently dead men to avoid a sniper. He is also frank about his doubts about the war
– “few of us knew of the importance of the events in which we took part, and cared as
little” (134), and a few pages later he looks at the battlefield the day after the assault
and ponders on the purpose of so much death; he can find no answer to his questions.
On the other hand, he reflects on his own emotions during the assault and says:
“There was so much simplicity in doing what I’d done, in doing what 800 comrades
had done, that I felt I could carry through the work before me with as much credit as
my code of self-respect required” (72-3).

The book was widely reviewed, and the ambiguities noted, in various ways. (PPT5)
The TLS says that it portrays the war as having no purpose, where soldiers obey
orders and “throw themselves under the Juggernaut without exaltation”, but with a
“defiant fortitude that comes from something within: duty, patriotism, vanity, and
dreams” (29.6.16). In this analysis, the horror of the events portrayed underlines the
bravery and commitment of the soldiers. But according to the Scotsman, it is
excessively morbid, even if true, and according to Country Life, totally out of order as
it ignores the heroism and sense of purpose that give war dignity.

One of the episodes in MacGill is about kicking a football across No Man’s Land
during the assault. He sees a very young soldier carrying it and asks what on earth
it’s for – they’ve had the idea of kicking it ahead of them, for fun, apparently. Then
during the assault he notices that the ball has ended up punctured and deflated on the
German barbed wire; and later he has a conversation with another soldier who saw the
ball being kicked and said he thought it was the daftest thing he’d ever seen; MacGill
makes no comment, and was probably unimpressed. The episode is commented in
Country Life, which says that it is unforgettable and should have been narrated with
more respect.

Ironically, the Country Life report appeared on July 1st, 1916, the first day of the battle
of the Somme, in which the Royal Surrey regiment kicked a ball (or maybe two)
ahead of them. According to the regimental museum archives, this was suggested by
a Captain Neville, who thought it would take the men’s minds off the danger;
apparently, he – in common with many others – had worked out that the artillery
barrage was unlikely to have actually made the attack into the walk-over that senior
commanders had predicted.

The footballs at the Somme made it into history in a way that the one at Loos didn’t.
Here’s the original report, complete with a celebratory poem (PPT6, 7). As we
know, the first day of the Somme was the worst day in the history of the British
Army, with 58,000 casualties, of whom 18,000 were dead.

I’ve gone into detail about these comments and reports because I think that between
them they tell us a lot about what was at stake in thinking about the war at that point,
i.e. mid-1916 to early 1917.
At this time, it was still perfectly possible to believe in the optimistic and heroic
version of the war: this is still fully present in the footballs story at the Somme, as
well as in Gaspard and the public response to. But at the same time, the first frank
accounts of what combat on the western front was actually like had started to appear,
and the discrepancy between the false optimism of war reporting (and some memoirs)
was visible to those who made the effort to make the comparison: this is visible in the
discrepancy between different reactions to MacGill; there’s a parallel example in
France. Genevoix/Lavisse [PPT8]

What we see in these contrasts is the first public indications of a divergence in

attitudes towards the war. At this point we could characterise this divergence as
optimism (or enthusiasm) versus realism. It is in this context that we should
understand public reaction to the first memoirs: regardless of whether the author is
pro- or anti-war, what is valued is the sense of authenticity. For example, prominent
in the reviews of MacGill is the importance attached to an eyewitness account of the
events. At around the same time, French reviews start to stress the same importance.
In particular, it was very difficult to attack Barbusse’s account because of his own
exemplary war record: he volunteered in 1914 but was refused on the grounds of age
and ill-health, he insisted and got the refusal reversed; all this despite his previous
record as a pacifist.

I think it’s impossible to over-emphasise the importance of this point: that whatever a
memoir writer said about the war, provided he had really been there, it was his truth
about it, a truth that derived from subjective experience. To quote the Saturday
Review: “There were as many wars as there were men in the armies”.

To summarise what I’ve been saying: it’s at this point that three things emerge:
doubts about optimistic war reporting, the importance of eye-witness accounts
(because war reporting wasn’t done from the front line), the centrality of sincere
realism. I know that this point is well-known - Eric Leed made it central to the
analysis of WW1 literature many years ago; so I’ll flag up now that at the end I will
pull a rabbit out of the hat on this subject – but only after some different analysis.
Now, to return to the question of the divergence: the attitude of ‘realism’ did not
necessarily lead to disillusion, far from it: Grenfell ‘Into Battle’ (written late April or
early May, 1915, published posthumously on 28 May, 1915; and letter to his father
(PPT9) (dated 5 May, 1915). The same is true of Sous Verdun: Genevoix’
description is frank to the point of being unsparing, and we’ve seen Lavisse’s defence
of the shocking revelations of just what the war was like. Yet Genevoix is visibly a
committed and conscientious soldier. Nonetheless, it is at the mid-point of the war
that we start to see a sense of disillusion creeping in beside the realism. From this
point onwards, there is a gamut of ‘normal’ responses to the war as recorded in
memoirs and writings about them: enthusiasm, realism, disillusion.

It is this disillusion that we have come to associate with the overall public memory of
the war, most clearly manifest – in this country – in poems like Wilfred Owen’s
‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. However, 2 things:

(1) this is only one degree of disillusion: the rejection of the any heroic conception
of the war. Contrast the degree of disillusion in Craonne; videos, explain. PPT10,
11

(2) although some of the most commercially successful and best-received texts were
disillusioned, they are balanced by texts which are either enthusiastic or at least accept
that what was done was what had to be done. Blunden’s Undertones is instructive in
this respect. Nowadays he is seen as part of the group of disillusioned texts
published ten years after the war, along with Graves and Sassoon. But at the time, he
was not seen in this light: what struck reviewers was that although he was critical of
the conduct of the war (“We deserved a battle, not a massacre”), he was never
spiritually despondent, never beaten down, never devoid of spiritual resources in his
way of dealing with his experiences - and remember he was a frontline infantry
officer at both the Somme and Passchendaele.

In fact, these three responses are distributed across the whole corpus of memoir
literature in varying doses. At the risk of a vague generalisation, I would say that in
France, after 1916, positive accounts of the war were marginalised and increasingly
associated with the far right; and in Britain, there was a balance between positive and
negative ones; my personal summary of British ambivalence is two remarks about the
same book – Douie, me p.15 PPT12. = balance in the sense that the optimism is
either untrue to average infantryman’s experience, or a refreshing change when
compared with negative accounts. In Germany, war-positive accounts far outnumber
and outsell war-critical accounts, despite the massive success of All Quiet.

You’ll probably have noticed I’ve said nothing about Germany up till now. Modern
German scholars seem to agree that it was more or less impossible to publish anything
negative about the war before its end, due to a censorship that was politically stricter
than in Britain and France. Certainly the memoirs published during wartime, that I
have seen, are positive to the point of enthusiasm, notably the two best-sellers, Flex
and von Richthofen. Fritz von Unruh’s Opfergang is often cited as a disillusioned
text written during wartime, even though it couldn’t be published until 1919; this is
how the author described the process; however, once his papers became public it was
clear that the original 1916 version was in fact a lot more patriotic than he later
admitted.

Post-war, the history and the role of German memoirs are significantly different from
Britain and France. The difference is primarily visible in two things: firstly, the
preponderance of German memoirs that are positive about the war experience; the
most famous of these is certainly Jünger (bloodlust PPT13). There were around 100
other D best-sellers that were equally enthusiastic; secondly, in the degree of
politicisation of the memoirs and of the response to them.

Here’s a well-known example [PPT14 of cover of Am Westen .., Molo quote].

Of course, there are interminable variations on how this politicisation of memory

played out in the varied circumstances of Weimar; but underlying the variety were
two fundamentally different senses of what the memory of the war ought to be, which
were roughly aligned with the left/right political divide. For nationalists, arguments
about how the war should be remembered were inseparable from arguments about
what type of nation Germany should be. For the radical authoritarian right, it was the
starting point for the demand for a fundamentally different Germany, often
encapsulated in the aphorism from Schauwecker’s Emergence of the Nation “We had
to lose the war in order to win the nation”; or Jünger’s “Nobody died in vain”
(PPT15).

For Republicans, on the other hand, the meaning of the war was nothing more than
the ordinary soldier’s experience of the war. Despite some ambiguities deriving from
an acknowledgement of comradeship and the sense of duty, the Republican version of
the frontline experience is fundamentally negative: the war was meaningless, the only
thing to be learnt from it is to avoid it happening again – “Nie wieder Krieg”. For
many, this meant denouncing the incompetence and corruption of the military caste –
e.g. Wandt. Whereas for the Nationalists the war experience could and should be
made the source of national renewal.

Despite this fundamental divide, there was one thing widely shared across it: the
centrality of the front line experience; but it was interpreted in divergent ways: was it
essentially traumatisation (Republican line), or was it essentially commitment to duty
and self-sacrifice (nationalist line)? Either way, its horrific nature was central.
Hence the often-noted similarity between the nationalist and the pacifist literature
where the portrayal of the frontline experience was concerned.

For the Nationalists, the horror shows the admirable courage and solidarity of the
ordinary German soldier: again and again what is implied, or directly stated, is: how
could the army have fought for so long but for the courage and commitment of the
soldiers?

For Republicans, the horror was just that; Paul Bäumer and stabbing the French
soldier, the Süddeutsche Monatshefte response: this was the wrong sort of horror for
them.

The nationalist take on the horror is seen at its clearest in the Schlachten des
Weltkrieges series (PPT16): what allowed D soldiers to maintain the front for so long
against superior forces was “virtuous and moral capabilities such as comradeship,
leadership, decisiveness, steady nerves” (Bruckner’s summary of Soldan) : “Aus
dieser Bewährung (proving ground), mag das Krieg gewonnen oder verloren sein,
leitet (ableiten = derive) das Volk seine Kraft, seine Hoffnungen und seine Ansprüche
(claims) auf Ansehen (good reputation) ab” i.e. “The people derives its strength, its
hopes and its claims to a reputation from this proving ground, whether the war was
lost or won”. (Soldan in Bruckner 90).

To summarise, what divided the nationalist version of remembering from the

republican version was a basic principle: for the republican version, the essential
point was the experience of the war, what the war felt like to the ordinary soldier; for
the nationalists the essential point was the meaning of the war, what Beumelburg
called its “spiritual coherence”. This distinction is also to be found in Britain and
France, where it certainly underlay the divisions in the reception of the memoir texts,
as can be see in these remarks (PPT18): an attack on Barbusse and similar writers in
the Nouvelle Revue Nationale which denounces “so called authentic details, which
always turn out to be defeatist” (no.3, 25.7.17); cf Jerrold. But outside Germany it
did not have the same political freight attached to it, for reasons that far exceed the
role of the memoirs.

This is the rabbit out of the hat that I referred to earlier: authenticity was not always
enough: it had to be the correct authenticity, and if it wasn’t it fell foul of political
correctness.