The Penguin Book of First World War Stories Read online

  THE PENGUIN BOOK OF FIRST WORLD WAR STORIES

  BARBARA KORTE is Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Recent publications include work on the British short story, English travel writing, Black and Asian British culture and the cultural reception of the First World War in Britain.

  ANN-MARIE EINHAUS took her MA degree in English literature and History at the University of Freiburg and is currently working on a PhD project investigating the canonization of First World War short stories in Britain.

  The Penguin Book of First World War Stories

  Edited and Introduced by BARBARA KORTE

  Assistant editor ANN-MARIE EINHAUS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  This collection first published in Penguin Classics 2007

  1

  Introduction and editorial material copyright © Barbara Korte and Ann-Marie Einhaus, 2007

  The Acknowledgements on pp. 399–401 constitute an extension of this page.

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the authors and editors have been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  Contents

  Introduction

  Further Reading

  A Note on the Texts

  1 FRONT

  Arthur Machen, ‘The Bowmen’

  ‘Sapper’ (Herman Cyril McNeile), ‘Private Meyrick – Company Idiot’

  C. E. Montague, ‘A Trade Report Only’

  Richard Aldington, ‘Victory’

  Anne Perry, ‘Heroes’

  Mary Borden, ‘Blind’

  Katherine Mansfield, ‘An Indiscreet Journey’

  Joseph Conrad, ‘The Tale’

  A. W. Wells, ‘Chanson Triste’

  2 SPIES AND INTELLIGENCE

  Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘His Last Bow’

  W. Somerset Maugham, ‘Giulia Lazzari’

  John Buchan, ‘The Loathly Opposite’

  3 AT HOME

  Rudyard Kipling, ‘Mary Postgate’

  Stacy Aumonier, ‘Them Others’

  John Galsworthy, ‘Told by the Schoolmaster’

  D. H. Lawrence, ‘Tickets, Please’

  Radclyffe Hall, ‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself’

  Hugh Walpole, ‘Nobody’

  4 IN RETROSPECT

  Harold Brighouse, ‘Once a Hero’

  Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Fly’

  Winifred Holtby, ‘The Casualty List’

  Robert Graves, ‘Christmas Truce’

  Muriel Spark, ‘The First Year of My Life’

  Robert Grossmith, ‘Company’

  Julian Barnes, ‘Evermore’

  Maps

  Places of the Western Front

  Glossary

  Military Abbreviations

  Notes

  Biographies

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  The Literary Memory of the First World War in Britain

  As we approach the centenary of the First World War’s outbreak, its standing in the cultural memory of Britain is high. The war that, it was believed, would end all war1 set the tone for a catastrophic century and became a pervading historical myth. A ‘Great War’ of unprecedented scale, with more dead and injured combatants than any earlier conflict in which the British had been involved, it is popularly remembered as a ‘great casualty’,2 epitomized by the heavy losses on the first day of the battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916. It also intensely affected the population at home, who faced strict control of civilian life under the Defence of the Realm Act, lived under the threat of air raids and anticipated a German invasion. Women, as well as men, made considerable contributions to the war effort, on the so-called home front as well as in combat zones.

  The war’s impact on the outlook and transformation of British society in the early twentieth century was significant – for example, with regard to the changing relationships of gender and class. Above all, however, it traumatized a generation, and gave rise to a nationwide process of mourning and remembrance that coloured the collective memory of the war for the entire twentieth century.3

  The First World War had long-term consequences for all participant nations, but Britain seems exceptional in the extent to which its memory has retained, rather than lost, prominence in public perception, through public commemoration, museums, school curricula, popular history, films, television programmes and, last but not least, literature.

  Indeed, the First World War has been characterized as a ‘literary war’: since education had spread considerably during the preceding decades, there was, according to Paul Fussell, an ‘unparalleled literariness of all ranks who fought the Great War’4–soldiers who not only consumed but also produced literature, especially poetry. At home, established and amateur writers were equally prolific, providing propaganda and morale-boosting pieces as well as more balanced and openly anti-war views.

  In the war’s aftermath, fictional and autobiographical narratives played a substantial role in the nation’s coping with trauma, bereavement, and the reconstruction of private and public lives. The late 1920s and early 1930s even saw an outright war books ‘boom’,5 during which many of the now classic war memoirs and novels were first published: Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928), Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929), Siegfried Sassoon’s Sherston trilogy (1928–36), Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933) and Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929). These well-known books are marked by ‘disenchantment’6 with the war’s just cause and present it as the sacrifice of a whole generation. With the trench poetry, these works have perpetuated a view of the war as a futile endeavour, bungled by incompetent generals, condemning thousands of men to a cruel death. This perception was identified as one-sided even during the war-literature boom,7 and current research has confirmed that much of the middlebrow and popular fiction of the inter-war years offered a more patriotic, constructive and consolatory interpretation of the war than the handful of works that have become classics.8

  The widespread neglect of more affirmative views is in part a legacy of the 1960s, when there was a resurgence of interest in the First World War and its literature, which had been over-shadowed by the resona
nce of the Second World War. Faced with the nuclear threat, the decade engendered a strong peace movement, which preferred to see the First World War as pointless slaughter – an image disseminated in republished trench poetry and the war-critical memoirs and novels of the late 1920s.

  The sixties’ preferred interpretation had a crucial effect on the perception of all those who had no personal recollections of the war and its aftermath. The novelists who turned the war into a major subject during the final decades of the twentieth century, from Susan Hill in the 1970s to Pat Barker and Sebastian Faulks in the 1990s, all tend to retell the ‘great casualty’ narrative, with its now stereotypical settings and trappings, in particular the muddy, rat-infested trenches of the Western Front, which has become the site of the war in Britain’s cultural imagination.9 At the beginning of the twenty-first century even writers of popular crime fiction, like Anne Perry and the Children’s Laureate, Michael Morpurgo, have discovered the war as a central theme and keep its literary memory alive.10

  The War and the Short Story

  While high-street booksellers offer a wide selection of material for the general reader, and academic interest in the war and its literature is also high, the short story is curiously overlooked. A few stories by writers of renown, including Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield, are still familiar. Otherwise, British stories about the war have passed into oblivion – although thousands were produced during the war and the two subsequent decades, filling the pages of a broad range of magazines and newspapers. Not all of this vast production was of lasting merit and appeal. Most of the sea stories and sketches by ‘Bartimeus’ and ‘Taffrail’,11 for example, seem removed from contemporary interests and taste, as does the vast number of stories for a juvenile audience, for instance by the prolific Eden Phillpotts (1862–1960).12 Gilbert Frankau (1884–1952) was a bestselling author of the early twentieth century, but his stories have a xenophobic strain that tends to offend the contemporary reader. Such stories are of interest primarily to today’s cultural historian, but others have been undeservedly forgotten.

  The majority of stories about the war were written between 1914 and 1918, and then until the early 1930s, when the experience of the war and its consequences were still of immediate relevance to many readers. These decades were a heyday for the short story in Britain. A great number of periodicals offered a market for both more traditional storytellers (such as W. Somerset Maugham and John Galsworthy) and modernists (including Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield), who explored the short story’s potential in terms of a new aesthetic. Through the latter in particular, the short story acquired the reputation of a form congenial to the modern condition. Its emphasis on isolated moments and mere fragments of experience, its art of condensation and ambiguous expression seemed ideal for capturing modern life with its hastiness, inconclusiveness, uncertainties and distrust of traditional beliefs.13 For the same reasons, the short story was deemed to have an affinity to the first fully technological and industrialized war, which exploded extant norms of perception, interpretation and representation. Its aesthetic seemed highly suitable for articulating the experiences of the front with its moments of violence, shock, disorientation and strangeness. In 1930 Edmund Blunden (1896–1974), poet and memoirist of the war, emphasized, drawing on his own knowledge of the trenches: ‘The mind of the soldier on active service was continually beginning a new short story, which had almost always to be broken off without a conclusion.’14

  During the inter-war years, a time of ‘badly shaken values’, the short story became an alternative to the lyric poem for writers ‘hit in the face by a clash of material events it was impossible to ignore’. H. E. Bates (1905–74), a successful writer of stories, went on to say that ‘(n)o poetry of great consequence came out of that generation…, but many short stories did’.15

  Few stories written during the war and its aftermath were radically experimental or self-consciously modern, but many depart from conventional plot-oriented narration, resist closure and use forms like the impressionistic sketch, the dramatic monologue or the dialogue scene. In this anthology, such elements are most clearly discernible in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ and Mary Borden’s ‘Blind’. At the same time, a great number of war stories were told in traditional and sometimes even formulaic ways, aiming to provide accessible interpretations for a mass audience in modes that encompassed the heroic and tragic as well as the suspenseful and comic.

  But if such a vast and various body of war stories was produced, why did most of it slip out of literary memory? One possible explanation is that, as soon as it had ended, the First World War became an issue of mourning, intense retrospection and social analysis. In the context of mourning, some of the war’s poetry would become, in the words of Andrew Motion, a ‘sacred national text’.16 The memoir and the novel established themselves as major domains for depicting the long processes of trauma and healing, or for analysing the war’s impact on an entire society. The short story lacks the scope to investigate individual and social lives in all their dimensions, and although it can address the theme of memory quite effectively(as the final section of this book shows), its strength is the ‘momentary’ outlook – not only in terms of thematic preferences: stories require a relatively brief time to write and be published and can thus react more immediately to events and attitudes of the day than novels or memoirs. This topicality also means that some stories may date easily and lack interest for the general reader of later decades.

  For its survival, a story depends on the more permanent medium of an author’s collection or a multi-author anthology. But story compilations, and especially thematic ones, tend to have a restricted market appeal. Of the ‘classic’ representatives of the war’s literature, only Richard Aldington had a volume of stories still in print in the 1990s, and only because the Imperial War Museum decided to republish Roads to Glory (1930) in 1992.17 To date, there has never been a major anthology of British stories of the First World War, although they featured prominently in the multinational anthology that was part of the war-books boom and for which Edmund Blunden wrote an introduction, Great Short Stories of the War (1930).18 Its editor, H. Cotton Minchin, stated in his prefatory note that this was ‘the first substantial collection of short stories of the Great War to be published’ and expressed his hope that it might be found ‘of permanent value’.19 It was reprinted once in 1933, in a cheap edition, and again in 1994, in time for the eightieth anniversary of the war’s outbreak.

  Principles of the Present Selection

  This anthology aims to restore the short story to the map of the war’s literature. It sets out to illustrate the wide thematic and stylistic range of stories of lasting quality or fascination that writers in Britain have produced from the days of the war until the end of the twentieth century.20 The volume comprises work by authors famed for the art of their short story (such as Kipling, Conrad, Lawrence, Mansfield and, more recently, Muriel Spark), but also by writers well known during their lifetime but later forgotten, such as Stacy Aumonier and Winifred Holtby. It also includes a number of stories by writers specifically associated with the literature of the First World War, such as Aldington, Graves and Mary Borden. The selection acknowledges the many facets of the war’s cultural production and deliberately represents some successful stories in more popular modes: the spy thriller, the ‘whodunnit’ and the supernatural tale.21

  The variety of outlooks on the war in the stories assembled here is determined by genre and style, but also other variables: whether a writer is a man or a woman, experienced the war him- or herself or belongs to a later generation, whether and where he or she actively served in the war and, of course, whether a story was written during the war or from a temporal distance. Since there was at no time a unified perception of the war, the stories have been grouped into thematic sections rather than chronologically: ‘Front’, ‘Spies and Intelligence’, ‘At Home’ and ‘In Retrospect’. This arran
gement brings differences in experience and attitude to the foreground. It juxtaposes, for example, male and female impressions of the front and represents the latter not only with a nurse’s story, Mary Borden’s ‘Blind’ (1929), but also with Katherine Mansfield’s ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ (1915), which gives a more unusual and entirely selfish reason for a woman’s presence in the ‘forbidden’ militarized zone of France. The ‘Front’ section, as with all others, also mixes periods, including Anne Perry’s prize-winning mystery story ‘Heroes’ (2000). It investigates notions of heroism and cowardice from the perspective of the late twentieth century, but it also illustrates how strongly the memory of the First World War has now crystallized into an archetypical Western Front. Other stories in this section remind us of other theatres of war: Conrad’s ‘The Tale’ (1917) is about the war at sea, while Arthur Wells’s ‘Chanson Triste’ (1924), an apt illustration of the ‘literary’ war, is set in Bulgaria and hence on a front that has almost completely disappeared from the British cultural imagination.

  Even though various impressions and interpretations of the war have always existed side by side, we must distinguish the three major phases of origin for stories about the war: 1914–18; the inter-war years; and, finally, the resurgence of interest since the 1960s. The stories collected here date from all these phases, but with a strong emphasis on the early decades when production of stories was abundant and interpretation of the war highly contested.

  Positive views of the war as a necessary and patriotic event appear more frequently before rather than after 1918. This is reflected in this anthology, which starts with one of the first stories of the war to become famous, Arthur Machen’s ‘The Bowmen’, published as early as September 1914. A story of the supernatural, it associates the British soldiers who had bravely fought heavy German forces before their retreat from Mons on 23 August 1914 with the small victorious army of the battle of Agincourt in 1415, which has become famous as the patriotic centrepiece of Shakespeare’s Henry V. Not only does Machen’s story mask a British defeat, it also suggests that the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was guarded by celestial powers. Conan Doyle’s story about the war effort of Sherlock Holmes, ‘His Last Bow’, was written and published in 1917, after even more military disasters, and revived a view that had welcomed the war as a cleansing force: the bitter ‘east wind’ that Holmes evokes in his final remark will leave England a cleaner, better and stronger land. Like Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling worked for the War Office.22 His story, ‘Mary Postgate’ (1915), shows the enemy, a fatally wounded German airman whose plane has crashed in England, from the perspective of an elderly spinster who seeks revenge for the death of the young man she helped to bring up. But even stories written during the war sometimes presented a more friendly view of the enemy. In Stacy Aumonier’s ‘Them Others’ (1917), a woman is concerned about the fate of the German family she knew before the war. Wartime stories also vary significantly in their portrayal of the men who fought. ‘Private Meyrick – Company Idiot’ (1916), written by the once-popular ‘Sapper’, portrays an incompetent who, in his own tragicomic manner, dies a hero. Conrad’s ‘The Tale’ describes an officer’s dilemma after he has sent the crew of a ship to certain death.