Paul Fussell on the literature of war

Gillespie's use of "The Happy Warrior" can be contrasted with Sassoon's. In one sense, The Memoirs of George Sherston can be considered a long series of adversary footnotes to Wordsworth's poem. Sassoon mentions it very often, and always ironically. At one point he writes a farewell letter like Gillespie's to Aunt Evelyn, and writes it in what he calls "the 'happy warrior' style": he is ashamed of it afterwards and ridicules it. And perhaps he is rejecting something more than Wordsworth's poem. One of the "allegorical" paintings of George Frederic Watts admired by Sassoon's mother, and which she took him frequently to view at the National Gallery, was The Happy Warrior, depicting an armored youth being vaguely approached by a very sexless pre-Raphaelitish woman representing, doubtless, Death. In rejecting the Happy Warrior Sassoon is rejecting a whole Victorian moral and artistic style.

 It is to be expected that a soldier like Anthony French, who has been brought up on Pilgrim's Progress, will know how to use related devotional texts for consolation. Attacking on the Somme in September, 1916, he moves forward at a high port with his friend Bert:

The macabre surroundings strangely affected me. I thought of the pale horse in Revelations and of him that sat upon it. Clinging to calmness but desperate for sympathy I broke the silence and asked Ben what he thought of it all. He gave a wry smile. Then, "The Psalms. 'Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death'...." "That's it," I said. To myself I repeated "I will fear no evil . . . no evil . . . I will fear no evil," and was soon comforted."

Clearly, there are advantages in having a little literature, either sacred or profane. "Not being given to prayer," as he says, Cyril Falls got through a bad shelling by "repeating a school mnemonic for Latin adverbs, beginning: 'Ante, apud, ad, adversus.' 

PROBLEMS OF FACTUAL TESTIMONY!

 One of the cruxes of the war, of course, is the collision between events and the language available-or thought appropriate-to describe them. To put it more accurately, the collision was one between events and the public language used for over a century to celebrate the idea of progress. Logically there is no reason why the English language could not perfectly well render the actuality of trench warfare: it is rich in terms like blood, terror, agony, madness, shit, crucify, murder, sellout, pain and hoax, as , well as phrases like legs blown off, intestines gushing out over his bands, screaming all night, bleeding to death from the rectum, and the like. Logically, one supposes, there's no reason why a language devised by man should be inadequate to describe any of man's works. The difficulty was in admitting that the war had been made by men and was being continued ad infinitum by them. The problem was less one of "language" than of gentility and optimism; it was less a problem of "linguistics" than of rhetoric. Louis Simpson speculates about the reason infantry soldiers so seldom render their experiences in language: "to a foot-soldier, war is almost entirely physical. That is why some men, when they think about war, fall silent. Language seems to falsify physical life and to betray those who have experienced it absolutely-the dead."  But that can't be right. The real reason is that soldiers have discovered that no one is very interested in the bad news they have to report. What listener wants to be torn and shaken when he doesn't have to be? We have made unspeakable mean indescribable: it really means nasty. 

Whatever the cause, the presumed inadequacy of language itself to convey the facts about trench warfare is one of the motifs of all who wrote about the war. The painter Paul Nash found the look of the front "utterly indescribable," and to H. H. Cooper "the smell rising from the bloated bodies was beyond description."  Even to a man destined to become a professional writer, the fact of the constant artillery thunder audible on the line seemed quite incommunicable. Robert Graves says in an interview:

The funny thing was you went home on leave for six weeks, or six days, but the idea of being and staying at home was awful because you were with people who didn't understand what this was all about.

 [LESLIE] Smith: Didn' t you want to tell them? 

GRAVES: You couldn't:  you can't communicate noise. Noise never stopped for one moment-ever.

In August, 1915, Sergeant Ernest Nottingham tried to indicate what the noise was like by saying, "Ah! the exultation of the roar of the bombardment veritable! Hour on hour's ceaseless rolling reverberation."  But clearly the rhetoric of Byron confronting the ocean wouldn't do.

 Nor would the hearty idiom of boys' adventure stories in which the young hero never failed to stand up and play the game serve to transmit the facts about modern mass man in the attack. This idiom was still being tried as late as 1918 by Edward G. D. Liveing in his book Attack, praised by Masefield in an introduction as "a simple and most vivid account of a modern battle." Liveing's account of the attack on  Gommecourt on July ', 1916, proceeds through such cliches as "fleecy clouds" and "the calm before the storm" to observations like "battalions of infantry, with songs and jests, marched up . . . ready to give battle. ' "Men not too badly wounded," we are told, "were chatting gaily." We hear of "a very plucky young fellow" and are assured that "our boys rushed forward with splendid impetuosity." The more sensitive Alexander Aitken perceives both the impracticality of this sort of idiom and its source. Of the experience of being hit at the Somme, he says, "Even then no thought of death came, only some phrase like 'sledge-hammer blow,' from a serial read years before in a boys' magazine." 

 A striking example of a man tied up in an unsuitable language is E. Norman Gladden, author of Ypres, 1917: A Personal Account (1967). Fifty years after the war he is still mired in cliches like Liveing's. The difference is that where Liveing's are those of the boys' serial, Gladden's are those of the weighty and judicious club man, fond of Elegant Variation and the idiom of solemn lunchtime calculation ("some alternative," "all reasonable odds"). Actually Gladden's powers of emotional recall are acute: his difficulties are all with style. What he wants to say is that before an important attack he felt scared but went to sleep anyway. He has been watching shell-bursts cutting the German wire "for the morrow": 

The morrow.  My heart stood still at the thought. These last hours before a battle were always the most torturing. From the comparative safety of our fortified position the forthcoming experience assumed proportions of difficulty and horror that transcended the realms of possibility. If only some alternative were open. But 1 knew that I had no choice-and I could see no valid reason why I should again escape mutilation or death. All reasonable odds seemed to be against it. Fortunately I was very tired and decided that the best thing to be done was to get some sleep. Such is the resilience of youth that my invitation to Morpheus was completely accepted.

(The troops, by the way, uninhibited by linguistic scruple and scornful of pretension, lowered the expression "the arms of Morpheus" to "the arms of Murphy"; from there it was a short way to "Murphyized," as in "No, I didn't see it: I was Murphyized.") 

Some other problems of style attend one of Kipling's most honorable and decent works, the two-volume history The Irish Guards in the Great War, which he published in 1923 in part as a memorial to his dead son who had been in that unit. Honorable and decent do not go too far: Kipling performs the whole job without mentioning his son, who appears only in the list of dead, wounded, and missing at the end, together with hundreds of others. Again, the difficulty exemplified by Kipling's Irish Guards is that of finding an appropriate rhetoric; and it implies the larger question of what style is suitable for history. More specifically, how are actual events deformed by the application to them of metaphor, rhetorical comparison, prose rhythm, assonance, alliteration, allusion, and sentence structures and connectives implying clear causality? Is there any way of compromising between the reader's expectations that written history ought to be interesting and meaningful and the cruel fact that much of what happens-all of what happens?-is inherently without "meaning"? Kipling's admirably professional description of the advantageous German positions at the beginning of the British attack on the Somme illustrates the problems: 

Here the enemy had sat for two years, looking down upon France and daily strengthening himself. His trebled and quadrupled lines of defense, worked for him by his prisoners, ran below, and along the flanks and on the tops of ranges of five-hundred-foot downs. Some of these were studded with close woods, deadlier even than the fortified villages between them; some cut with narrowing valleys that drew machine-gun fire as chimneys draw draughts; some opening into broad, seemingly smooth slopes, whose every haunch and hollow covered sunk forts, carefully placed mine-fields, machine-gun pits, gigantic quarries, enlarged in the chalk, connecting with systems of catacomb-like dug-outs and subterranean works at all depths, in which brigades could lie till the fitting moment. Belt upon belt of fifty-yard-deep wire protected these points, either directly or at such angles as should herd and hold up attacking infantry to the fire of veiled guns. Nothing in the entire system had been neglected or unforeseen, except knowledge of the nature of the men who, in due time, should wear their red  way through every yard of it.

A version of this designed to do nothing but describe would go like this: "The Germans had been strengthening their defenses for two years. It was a defense in depth, exploiting the smooth slopes ascending to their high ground. They fortified forests and villages and dug deep underground shelters in the chalky soil. They protected their positions with copious wire, often arranged to force attackers into the fire of machine guns." But would anyone want to read that? Would it satisfy those who expected the performance of the Irish Guards in the Great War to be interesting? More important, what fun would it be for anyone to write it? It is more challenging for the professional writer and gratifying to the reader to confront effects like the almost poetic symmetrical, interlocking assonance and alliteration with which Kipling orchestrates his climax: men who . . . should wear their red way through every yard of it.

Strictly speaking, it would seem impossible to write an account of; anything without some "literature" leaking in. Probably only a complete illiterate who very seldom heard narrative of any kind could give an "accurate" account of a personal experience. Stephen Spender says that he knew such a one, named Ned, while with the National Fire Service in the Second War:

 Because of his illiteracy he was the only man in the station who told the truth about his fire-fighting experiences. The others had almost completely substituted descriptions which they read in the newspapers or heard on the wireless for their own impressions. "Cor mate, at the docks it was a bleeding inferno," or "Just then Jerry let hell loose on us," were the formulae into which experiences such as wading through streams of molten sugar, or being stung by a storm of sparks from burning pepper, or inundated with boiling tea at the dock fires, had been reduced. But Ned had read no accounts of his experiences and so he could describe them vividly.

 Actually, to narrate anything Ned would have had to learn somewhere the principles of sequence and unity and transition and causality, but let that pass. Spender's illustration is instructive.

 Charles Carrington is anything but illiterate. Indeed, he is so consciously literary that in the interests of an accurate documentary narrative he has tried to refine out of A Subaltern's War everything that might appear too artful. His memoirs of the war, he says in his Preface, "were not intended to be literary studies." He does not claim for them, he insists, "any literary merit: they are simply records of everything I could recall, every action, word or emotion, in a vivid personal experience which I felt [in 1920] to be beginning to fade from my memory." But ob-serve what happens when he sets out "simply" to "record" experience which has made a deep impact: literature comes rushing in and takes over, just as Impressionist painting floods in to dominate Hugh Quigley's Passchendaele and the Somme, determining what he chooses to notice. Carrington thus describes the variety of night activity on the line: 

Some skilled officers and men crawled, boy-scout fashion, to listen and observe near the enemies' lines; some wrestled like the slaves that built the Pyramids at dragging baulks of timber, coils of wire and engineering tools by main force to the line; some with torn and bleeding hands struggled Laacoon-like to twist and strain new strands of barbed wire into the entanglement a few yards in front of the posts.

A man dying with a bullet through his head becomes, as Carrington thinks about the melodrama of his last moments, almost admittedly a character in a novel: "A gurgling and a moaning came from his lips, now high and liquid, now low and dry-a 'death-rattle' fit for the most blood-thirsty of novelists." And he goes on: "Old Mills [wounded in the stomach], tough, bronzed, ginger-moustached and forty-one years old, lay beside this text 'that taught the rustic moralist to die.' " One can hardly get more English-literary than to compel into one's account of "what happened" a line, even if slightly misquoted, from Gray's Elegy. (The poem must have offered a terrible temptation, occupying as it did a prominent place virtually in the center of the Oxford Book.)

 The point is this: finding the war "indescribable" in any but the available language of traditional literature, those who recalled it had to do so in known literary terms. Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence, Pound, Yeats were not present at the front to induct them into new idioms which might have done the job better. Inhibited by scruples of decency and believing in the historical continuity of styles, writers about the war had to appeal to the sympathy of readers by invoking the familiar and suggesting its resemblance to what many of them suspected was an unprecedented and (in their terms) an all-but-incommunicable reality. Very often, the new reality had no resemblance whatever to the familiar, and the absence of a plausible style placed some writers in what they thought was an impossible position. Speaking of the sights and sounds on the Somme in September, 1916, Alexander Aitken writes: "The road here and the ground to either side were strewn with bodies, some motionless, some not. Cries and groans, prayers, imprecations, reached me. I leave it to the sensitive imagination; I once wrote it all down, only to discover that horror, truth-fully described, weakens to the merely clinical."  But what was needed was exactly the clinical-or even obscene-language the literary Aitken regards as "weak." It would take still another war, and an even worse one, before such language would force itself up from below and propose itself for use. It was a matter of leaving, finally, the nineteenth century behind.

THE PROGRESS OF EUPHEMISM 

Actually, the war was much worse than any description of it possible in the twenties or thirties could suggest. Or, of course, while it was going on. Lloyd George knew this at the time. "The thing is horrible," he said, "and beyond human nature to bear, and I feel I can't go on any longer with the bloody business." He was convinced that if the war could once be described in accurate language, people would insist that it be stopped. "But of course they don't-and can't know. The correspondents don't write and the censorship wouldn't pass the truth."  If censorship was  one inhibition on the truth, another was the British tendency towards heroic grandiosity about all their wars. Americans and British have always been divided on the matter of the style thought suitable for war. It is significant that what the Americans call "The Unknown Soldier" the British elevate to "The Unknown Warrior." 

 The American historian Barbara Tuchman has studied this British habit of "raising" the idiom of warfare, and in speaking of British accounts of their military performance in Burma in the Second War, she says with some acidity,

No nation has ever produced a military history of such verbal nobility as the British. Retreat or advance, win or lose, blunder or bravery, murderous . folly or unyielding resolution, all emerge alike clothed in dignity and touched with glory.... Everyone is splendid: soldiers are staunch, commanders cool, the fighting magnificent. Whatever the fiasco, aplomb is unbroken.  Mistakes, failures, stupidities, or other causes of disaster mysteriously vanish. Disasters are recorded with care and pride and become transmuted into things of beauty.... Other nations attempt but never quite achieve the same self-esteem.

Writing in the Daily Mirror on November 22, 1916, W. Beach Thomas managed to assert that the dead British soldier even lies on the battlefield in a special way bespeaking his moral superiority: "Even as he lies on the field he looks more quietly faithful, more simply steadiest than others." He looks especially modest and gentlemanly too, "as if he had taken care while he died that there should be no parade in his bearing, no heroics in his posture." Notice the date of this: nine days after the four-month-long Somme attack had finally petered out. The number of British soldiers killed and wounded since the first of July had reached 420,000.

From:  Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London; Oxford University Press, 1981), pp.169-75.