How quickly living tradition turns into history. The Great War of 1914-18.has almost entirely receded from memory. Very few of that generation are alive to tell their stories, and as for their children, they have their own war, the Second World War, to occupy and puzzle their memories. In the minds of the young people of our own day the two wars merge into one vaguely apprehended rumor of violence.

No doubt this is why, about twenty years ago, the First World War began to be a subject for historians and critics. The battlefields of the Western Front proved to be rich fields for scholarship. As a result, there is no shortage of information, opinion, and interpretation of that war, but it is almost entirely book-derived. The complexities of experienced memory have given place to the rather simple conventions of the researcher and writer.

Samuel Hynes’ A War Imagined is a cultural history of England during the war of 1914-18 and the years immediately after it. The focus is chiefly upon literature, with some attention to painting, drawing, sculpture, and cinema, and even a little to music. The range of material covered is wide. For instance, comment upon the popular writers John Buchan, Dornford Yates, “Sapper,” and Warwick Deeping provides a surprising context for a reference to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, followed in turn by a discussion of-the state of women’s rights after the war. A book so encyclopedically compiled is bound to include familiar material, but it is equally sure to include things that will be interesting as well as new for almost everyone. To give a few examples from my own reading of the book, I had not known that G.R. Nevinson was so powerful a draftsman, or that Sir William Orpen had such a strong vein of satire in him. I now want to see more of Orpen’s pictures, and to read his memoirs as well. Hynes has also made me curious about the war memoirs of Colonel Repington. To judge from the quotations, he was an interesting man as well as a very good writer. And then there are the piquant details that any book as fat as this should supply: I am delighted to learn that Malcolm Sargent, a notorious womanizer, should have conducted the British Women’s Symphony Orchestra.

Hynes’s book is not all fun and discovery, however. There is a thesis organizing its materials and directing its narrative of the war’s influence on English culture. It is a familiar, even a conventional one:

A generation of innocent young men, their heads full of high abstractions like Honour, Glory, and England, went off to war to make the world safe for democracy. They were slaughtered in stupid battles planned by stupid generals. Those who survived were shocked, disillusioned, and embittered by their war experiences, and saw that their real enemies were not the Germans, but the old men at home who had lied to them. They rejected the values of the society that had sent them to war, and in doing so separated their own generation from the past and from their cultural inheritance.

Hynes repeatedly describes this thesis as a myth, a word which suggests that he might not think it true, but he hedges by defining myth as “not a falsification of reality, but an imaginative version of it.” For all that, his use of the thesis suggests that he believes it. He continually repeats the idea that the war caused “a gap in time,” a “radical discontinuity” with the past, which he finds exemplified by all the major work of the period, and much of the minor. For instance, he praises Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” and the “Hell Cantos” of 1925 very highly, the first as an elegy for a dead civilization, the second as an Inferno representing postwar England. He believes that Pound finally took the war seriously because, “It confirmed the corruption of English culture.” In these and other passages one detects a note of agreement between Hynes and his authors. When he writes, “Hell was England-after-war—the ruin that Masterman saw, that Montague saw, that Lawrence saw, and that they all hated,” it is apparent that, at least for the time being and for the purpose of writing his book, he agrees with them.

The result of that unreflective acceptance of writerly authority is a conventional book that never asks the more interesting questions of its materials. Where, for instance, did Pound get his emotions about civilization and war? It is no use insisting, as the myth requires, that the experience of war must authenticate the art and poetry based on it, if we then say that Ezra Pound wrote a great war poem without ever setting foot in a trench. If he did, then the whole thesis, that it was the soldiers’ unprecedented experience that created a new reality, collapses. It appears that one can get just as worked up about a “botched civilization” from reading newspapers as from suffering a bombardment—a method Pound was to employ for the rest of his career. Nor is Hynes very informative about the war poets themselves, whom he treats for the most part as passive embodiments of his thesis. One would hardly guess from his account that there was anything eccentric or personal in the backgrounds of Graves, Sassoon, or Owen that might have affected the poetry they wrote.

In short, this book confuses art and history in ways not cleared up by the evasive word “myth,” and the result is not so much the history of a culture as of the development and transmission of a received idea about it. And even so, having grown up in an England that remembered the First World War very well, I’m in a position to say that as a book about the English people’s understanding of the war’s effect on their culture, A War Imagined is as wrong as many of the writers whom it quotes. It represents the opinion of a tiny minority. In my experience, even people who enjoyed the war writers’ work did not always believe the version of the war presented; they accepted it as any reader accepts a writer’s fiction or personality. As for the ex-servicemen, the war had been a terrible and unique experience for them. All the ex-soldiers I knew had been in some way marked by it, but none of them believed that it was either a unique historical event, or that it had separated them from their past. In some cases it made the past more precious to them. And they all treated the silly journalistic ideas that it had been fought “to make the world safe for democracy” or “to end wars” as meaningless rant. They knew well enough they had served for king and country, as serviceable a way of putting things as any.

Very early on, too, I understood something that never surfaces in Hynes’s book, that in important ways the Boer War had made a strong prior impression on that generation’s imagination. The Boer War exposed the weakness of the empire, and its losses had been keenly felt. The elegiac feelings it aroused, expressed in the Waggon Hill epitaph (sneered at by Hynes), in Elgar’s and Stanford’s music, and in the poetry of Kipling and Newbolt, prepared and strengthened people’s minds for the losses of the Great War. In fact Newbolt’s “Vigil,” printed as Hynes tells us in the Times on August 5, 1914, but written as Newbolt said “in mystical anticipation” 16 years earlier, appears in his Collected Poems of 1912 among poems about the Boer War. Those poems (like the soldier poems of Housman not even mentioned by Hynes) also make the contrast between pastoral England and foreign battlefields that was so basic to the best poetry of the 1914-18 war, including Siegfried Sassoon’s.

Another fact not mentioned by Hynes, but relevant to his thesis, is that the American Civil War anticipated the high casualty rates of the Great War. The unpleasant realities of the American war made a strong impression in England, and that may be why The Red Badge of Courage, arguably the first modern war narrative, was initially more successful there than in America. What happened on the battlefields of the Great War could hardly have been a surprise to everyone in England.

The notion of “radical discontinuity” really is a myth, and like other myths it has various uses. Used by a writer like Lawrence to explain the war as a uniquely modern event, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. After all, historical discontinuity was one of the premises of modernism. The myth also expressed the trauma and dismay of some of the men who experienced the war. In that case it conveyed an intensely personal emotion. It was certainly never a fact: the most obvious thing about postwar England was its continuity with the past. No doubt that is what so irritated the disappointed prophets of apocalypse like Pound and Lawrence. The Great War was an immense tragedy, but no more than any other event did it validate the modernist anticipation of the end of history.

After the lapse of over seventy years we can see that it is best to take longer views. History always has tricks up its sleeve. The music of Charles Villiers Stanford, for instance, whom Hynes consigns to the dead past, is now being played again. He was a kind of Anglo-Irish Dvorak, a nationalist whose style was a dialect of a common European musical language, and so, by modernist principles, unacceptable. Yet the music proves to be very good indeed, and his setting of Newbolt’s “Farewell” and “The Middle Watch” are intensely felt pieces.

But one doesn’t have to argue from details. In England the same classes that provided the subalterns of the first war provided the fighter pilots and junior officers of the second, and to say, as Hynes does, that they went “expecting nothing except suffering, boredom and perhaps death” misses the point of their performance just as the jingoistic formulas of 1914 misrepresent their predecessors’.

This is a book to read for its information. As a portrait of a period described by Anthony Powell as “given over to mixed and changing symbols,” it is a disappointment.

 

[A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, by Samuel Hynes (New York: Atheneum) 514 pp., $29.95]