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6. Safeguarding the Past

This advertisement for Remarque's book appeared in Canadian Forum, where it was very favourably reviewed by John Hurley. 1

The war book boom
I do not wish to leave the impression that the antiwar books were universally condemned in Canada. On the contrary, many of them generated very favourable reviews.

It might be suggested to those who spout about this subject at every war memorial service that some of the grimmer passages from such a book as this of Renn's might well be read daily in every school in this Dominion of ours. There is a possibility that the recruiting office might lose some of its glamor for our growing citizens. 2

Some one has told a part [of the veteran experience], has reached into the muck of the battlefield and wiped a few handfuls of the stuff across some sheets of paper ... [the book has] no glamor auriated from a comfortable distance by propaganda grinders, popular novelists, school historians, militant preachers, politicians or demagogues.' 3

Though the later poets undoubtedly come far closer to the truth of war, it is the high if mistaken idealism of the earlier writers that carries the real emotional appeal. One begins to fear that a later generation, if it reads war poetry at all, will turn to Brooke and Binyon rather than to Graves and Blunden and Sassoon. From the point of view of poetic judgement I suspect that they might be right, but that will be little consolation to those of us who wish to see war pilloried in all its ghastly futility. 4

Writing in 1929, John Hurley called Remarque's novel a valuable corrective to Canada's memory of the war: 'By universal consent a perfume, an air of dashingness, was thrown over the whole muggy business, and war emerged as something fine and shining which enabled young men to die gloriously prematurely encircled by appropriate halos.' Thanks to books like All Quiet, wrote Hurley, the temper was changing. 5

Many readers, however, were reluctant to cast off that perfume. Shortly before the peak of the war book boom, B.K. Sandwell identified 'the great difficulty about war in literature; there is no 'compelling similarity' between anything in it and anything in peace.' 6

The contradiction that troubled Sandwell was no obstacle to other critics. When approaching the canon of anti-war novels, critics troubled by their lack of any compelling similarity with pre-1914 values simply invented one. They chose to find in anti-war literature precisely the same sentiments that they found in Rilla of Ingleside, and wrote review of books that probably would have infuriated their authors. Examples of this are legion. Saturday Night praised Journey's End for revealing 'the power of men to rise under stress to something like nobility,' and later complimented the film version of the play as 'beautiful and gripping.' 7 A Vancouver reviewer wrote that Sherriff's play evoked a 'keen, tense enjoyment of a nature that makes the heart throb and renews what is, perhaps, a too languishing memory of the great sacrifices made by the dead and the living heroes of the Great War.' 8 For Alexander Knox, too, Journey's End brought back positive memories of the war; theatre-goers returning home after the play, he observed, 'heard the faint voice of half-forgotten days, the accents of faith and heroism, they saw the poppies of Flanders and the green fields of home.' 9 To Knox and many others, the play was not a cathartic or an exposé but an exercise in nostalgia.

Canadian contributions to the canon elicited similar responses. Canadian Bookman praised A.H. Chute's The Real Front for finding less glory in war than in a Chicago slaughterhouse. However the reviewer continued in terms that might seem entirely contradictory: 'But in the more genuine glory, in the glory of courage in the face of death at its most hideous, of endurance under such tests as man has never known before, of unselfishness when every instinct urged the reverse, of idealism, of gentleness, of chivalry to a foe lost apparently to every impulse of humanity, of utter consecration of every faculty to the common task - in such glory Captain Chute has, thank God, not found this war to be lacking' 10

By the same token, Nathaniel Benson saw in Acland's All Else is Folly 'a subtle indefinite skein of red running through the black of this story which links it up with that epic of youthful heroism of 1915, 'Tell England'.' When Benson noted that the hero, Alexander Falcon, had something of the spirit of Rupert Brooke in him, he was obviously seeing something deeper in Falcon that the man who, in the middle of a gallant chagre against the enemy, is overwhelmed by the urge to urinate and who, when lying wounded in a shell-hole, considers sending back a selfless message to his troops but instead conveys an imperious demand for stretcher bearers to rescue him. 11

In Leslie Roberts' When The Gods Laughed, Gray Thornton is cashiered for being drunk in the trenches and, while in London, he falls in with harlots. Raymond Mullens, however, ignored this part of the book and instead focussed on the conclusion, wherein Thornton redeems himself with his gallantry in battle. The book, he wrote, 'can only serve to create admiration for the young men of the Dominion who served in the trenches ... [it captures] buoyancy of spirit, a sense of personal responsibility, a nonchalant courage.' Perhaps to escape the stigma attached to anti-war books, Roberts' publisher elected to advertise the book as 'a wholesome and most refreshing change from the sordid pictures of blood and lust with which the literary market has been flooded during the past few years.' 12 This despite the fact that When the Gods Laughed contains more than its fair share of smarmy YMCA workers, drunken soldiers, prostitutes and battered corpses.

For a final hint of what Canadian reviewers were looking for in a good war book, one might cite Raymond Mullens's review of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Mullens admitted Hemingway's talent but wished he had done more with it rather than write unlikeable characters and nasty dialogue: 'I hope that Hemingway's next novel will condescend to be a little more pleasing to those of us who, in our second childhood, long for a stirring and dramatic tale, a tale which will concern itself with some people whom we can admire ... Must all his lilies flower on a dung hill?' 13 Mullens was looking for a war book that was pleasing, stirring, and dramatic, and one which evoked feelings of admiration. In short, he, and thousands of other Canadians, were looking for war books in a traditional vein.

Suggestions for further reading

War history
• S.D. Badsley, '"The Battle of the Somme": British War Propaganda,' Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 3, no. 2 (1983): 99-116.
• George Egerton, 'The Lloyd George War Memoirs: A Study in the Politics of Memory,' Journal of Modern History 60, no. 1 (March 1988): 55-94
• Kieth Grieves, 'Nelson's History of the War: John Buchan as a Contemporary Military Historian, 1915-22,' Journal of Contemporary History 28, no. 3 (July 1993): 533-51. • Ken Ramstead, 'The "Eye-Witness": Lord Beaverbrook and Canada in Flanders,' The Register 12 (1984): 295-314.
• Lloyd L. Robson, 'C.E.W. Bean: A Review Article,' Journal of the Australian War Memorial 4 (1984).
• Tim Travers, 'Currie and 1st Canadian Division at Second Ypres, April 1915: Controversy, Criticism and Official History,' Canadian Military History 5, no. 2 (autumn 1996): 7-15.
• Tim Travers, 'From Surafend to Gough: Charles Bean, James Edmonds, and the Making of the Australian Official History,' Journal of the Australian War Memorial 27 (1995).

War fiction
• Corelli Barnett, 'Of Horrors and Scapegoats: Ending World War I Legends,' Encounter 50, no. 5 (May 1978): 66-74.
• Ted Bogacz, 'A Tyranny of Words: Language, Poetry and Anti-Modernism in England in the First World War,' Journal of Modern History 58, no. 3 (Sept. 1986): 643-68.
• Modris Eksteins, 'All Quiet on the Western Front and the fate of a War,' Journal of Contemporary History 15, no. 2 (April 1980): 345-65.
• Charles A. Fenton, 'A Literary Fracture of World War I,' American Quarterly 12, no. 2 (summer 1960): 119-32.
• Harro Grabolle, Hilda D. Spear, and Ian Wallace, 'British and German Prose Works of the First World War: A Preliminary Comparative Survey,' Notes and Queries new series 29, no. 4 (Aug. 1982): 329-35.
• J.T. Laird, 'Australian Poetry of the First World War: A Survey,' Australian Literary Studies 4, no. 3 (May 1970): 241-50.
• Jacqueline Manuel, '"We are the women who mourn our dead": Australian Civilian Women's Poetic Responses to the First World War,' Journal of the Australian War Memorial 29 (Nov. 1996).
• Gordon Martel, 'Generals Die in Bed: Modern Warfare and the Origins of Modernist Culture,' Journal of Canadian Studies 16, nos. 3&4 (fall-winter 1981): 2-13.
• Eric Thompson, 'Canadian Fiction of the Great War,' Canadian Literature 91, no. 4 (1981): 81-96.
• Jay Winter, 'Catastrophe and Culture: Recent Trends in the Historiography of the First World War,' Journal of Modern History 64 (1992): 525-32.
• Jay Winter, 'Les poetes-combattants de la grande guerre une nouvelle forme du sacre,' Vingtième siècle 41 (1994): 67-73.

Footnotes
1. Canadian Forum 9, no. 106 (July 1929).
2. Review of Ludwig Renn's War in Saturday Night, 31 Aug. 1929, 8.
3. C.M. Lapointe's review of All Quiet on the Western Front in Saturday Night, 15 June 1929, 10.
4. Edgar McInnis's review of Frederick Brereton, Anthology of War Poems, Saturday Night, 18 July 1931, 7.
5. Canadian Forum 9, no. 107 [Aug. 1929]: 392-4.
6. Saturday Night, 29 June 1929, 8.
7. Saturday Night, 28 June 1930, 6; and 5 July 1930, 6.
8. Review by Frank Hopwood, Vancouver Sun, 12 Nov. 1929, 10.
9. Alexander Knox, 'Lest We Forget,' Willison's Magazine 5, no. 3 [Sept. 1929], 21.
10. 'Weeding Out the War Books,' Canadian Bookman 1, no. 1 [Jan. 1919], 61.
11. Review in Saturday Night, 23 Nov. 1929, 8.
12. Review in Saturday Night, 1 Nov. 1930, 8. [The advertisement is on the same page.]
13. Review by A. Raymond Mullens in Saturday Night, 9 Nov. 1929, 8.