Name: The Great War and Modern Memory
ISBN: 9780195133325

Paul Fussell

Landmark study of World War I, describing its effects on the nation.

The Great War and Modern Memory

Andrew John Kinney

This is a wonderful, deep book which looks at the literature of the Great War, and the cultural imprint of that war which still echoes today in so many ways. I have known of this book for years, and finally picked it up after my reading of Into the Silence reacquainted me with the WW1 experiences of young British men. Fussell has given me a detailed introduction to new authors whom I knew of, but had not read, like Edmund Blunden. Fussell of course also deals with the War Poets like Sassoon and Owen, who burn with rage at the waste and injustice and hypocrisy of the war, as in Sassoon's Suicide in the Trenches:

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Blunden, on the other hand, is a gentle soul, who, by his own account, was "not eager to go to France", but went from a sense of obligation as did so many of that trusting, well-meaning generation. Blunden ends his Undertones of War with a reference which clearly applies to himself, about a "gentle shepherd in a soldier's coat". Blunden was as loving of the land, and of its birds and plants as he was of people, and his horror at what he saw he saw extended to the wanton destruction of the French countryside by artillery. He taught English literature in Japan after the war, and once said his favorite Japanese poem was about a farmer who goes to fetch water at a well, and finding that a morning glory vine had twined around the handle of the bucket there, chose to seek his water elsewhere. Blunden was deeply affected by the war of course, and he never really shook off the closeness of death, its hunger to eat the living, and it seeped into all his poetry thereafter, as in The Skaters.

Fussell reflects on the remarkable literariness of the officers and soldiers of that war, and suggests with good reason that no war before or since has had such well-read combatants. This was especially true of the British; officers make allusions to literature in every letter and in many official documents, and even Privates compare events they've witnessed to scenes in this or that Shakespeare episode. 

The obliviousness of the generals, particularly Haig, to the abominable conditions at the front is not passed over, but neither does the author dwell on it at length - it is a given. Haig's Somme offensive, which cost the British 420,000 men and achieved nothing, is the archetype of the pointless slaughter of the war. Haig's complete ignorance of the real conditions at the front lines, which he never once visited in four years, led to tactics so stupid as to be criminal, but that is not news. What Fussell looks into is the literature this hopeless situation produced and it's lasting effect on how we think about war, about the press, and about political and military leaders. "Never such innocence again" as 1914.

Fussell gives an interesting analysis of Graves' Goodbye to All That, which is a wonderful book, but as I came to learn, is not entirely factual. He also deals with Sassoon's semi-autobiographical Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man, which are not nearly as good as his poetry, nor as readable as Graves. Fussell dips into many other authors, British and American, who were either Great War veterans or were deeply influenced by the war, like Mailer, and his last chapter is chock full of possible future reading, but the most attractive (and unread by me thus far) is Blunden; his kindness and gentle nature perhaps made him a more even-handed judge of the horrors he experienced. And Fussell is a WW2 combat veteran who is well prepared by his wartime experience and academic career to be the interpreter of such men as Graves, Sassoon, Owen, and Blunden. 

There is much more to be found in The Great War and Modern Memory than I have expounded upon above, and if you have even a passing interest in the Great War era or its literature, this book will richly reward you.

The Great War and Modern Memory

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