The Great War of words Book

When Bill (aka Quo) recommended this to me a couple of weeks ago I really didn't think I would get to it anytime soon. I also decided that it would be a military book or sorts, dealing, perhaps, with how what is remembered of a war isn't necessarily what actually happened. If that had been what it was about, it would have been an interesting enough book, but this proved much better than I could have anticipated.

This book looks at how various (mostly British) writers wrote about the Great War and what their writing about the war meant for modern literature, and therefore how we then came to understand that war (and all wars subsequent to it). It also provides insight into what people 'wrote home' - so, normal writers too, not just poets and writers.

This is a glorious book. I have learnt so much from it, and as a piece of literary criticism I was thinking that it is perhaps as good an introduction to that subject as you can find. There are lovely bits to this. His discussion of the power of the number three throughout much of the English literary canon was masterful. He links this back to Christian imagery: innocence, the fall, redemption - and so you can see how this might be used when people were struggling to work out how they might represent this most horrible of wars.

The Great War was a mess of contradictions. Britain was even more divided by social class than it is now. As he says at one point, one's social location was immediately apparent by the clothes one wore and the accent one spoke. But a large part of social distinction depends on a kind of social distance - and social distance was obliterated in the endlessly turning human meat mincing machine that trench warfare proved to be. And given 'one's betters' where the people responsible for the endless waste of life all around you, that hardly helped.

The horrors needed somehow to be comprehended - but many of the usual ways of doing this - writing down what you were experiencing and trying to make it understandable - were barred due to censorship of mail from the front. The government even issued printed form postcards that soldiers could essentially tick a box and then send home, something later mocked by writers such as Waugh.

I think the last couple of chapters here that discuss homosexuality are among the most interesting in the entire book. Throwing so many young men together is going to be a problem at the best of times, but having them constantly believe (and with total justification) that they were moments away from death, that was hardly likely to make things better. The death/sex unity idea is very strong here. But as the author says, homosexual acts were barred, but mass slaughter was encouraged.

One of the 'threes' that I mentioned before turns up when he talks of a soldier in the trenches whose commanding officer got everyone in his unit to count off in threes - so soldier after soldier called out one, two or three until the whole unit had a number dividing them into thirds. Then everyone who was numbered three had to 'go over the top' - something that would prove an immediate death sentence, and something everyone already knew. The soldier tries not to smile at his luck at not being numbered three, but, of course, the person beside him is. So, he fixed his eyes on the trench wall in front of him. Can you imagine? Dear God, what a complete nightmare. 'I'm so glad it is you, rather than me…'

I didn't know that poppies had been a symbol of homosexuality prior to the war. And the dedications to fellow soldiers that I would have just taken as being the sorts of things soldiers say to each other - that we will always be closer than brothers and so on - clearly often had much deeper meanings than I'd suspected.

At one point in this he says that Churchill believed that the First World War never really ended, or rather that it only ended at the end of the Second World War. Its impact on literature is probably continuing in many ways up to today. My own generation may be the last generation to have met and who remember people who fought in that war. As is made clear in this book, for many of those who fought it was a constant presence throughout the rest of their lives.

I really liked this book - it is anything but your standard book on military history.