The Penguin Book of First World War Stories (2 page)

The variety of outlooks on the war in the stories assembled here is determined by genre and style, but also other variables: whether a writer is a man or a woman, experienced the war him- or herself or belongs to a later generation, whether and where he or she actively served in the war and, of course, whether a story was written during the war or from a temporal distance. Since there was at no time a unified perception of the war, the stories have been grouped into thematic sections rather than chronologically: ‘Front', ‘Spies and Intelligence', ‘At Home' and ‘In Retrospect'. This arrangement brings differences in experience and attitude to the foreground. It juxtaposes, for example, male and female impressions of the front and represents the latter not only with a nurse's story, Mary Borden's ‘Blind' (1929), but also with Katherine Mansfield's ‘An Indiscreet Journey' (1915), which gives a more unusual and entirely selfish reason for a woman's presence in the ‘forbidden' militarized zone of France. The ‘Front' section, as with all others, also mixes periods, including Anne Perry's prize-winning mystery story ‘Heroes' (2000). It investigates notions of heroism and cowardice from the perspective of the late twentieth
century, but it also illustrates how strongly the memory of the First World War has now crystallized into an archetypical Western Front. Other stories in this section remind us of other theatres of war: Conrad's ‘The Tale' (1917) is about the war at sea, while Arthur Wells's ‘Chanson Triste' (1924), an apt illustration of the ‘literary' war, is set in Bulgaria and hence on a front that has almost completely disappeared from the British cultural imagination.

Even though various impressions and interpretations of the war have always existed side by side, we must distinguish the three major phases of origin for stories about the war: 1914–18; the inter-war years; and, finally, the resurgence of interest since the 1960s. The stories collected here date from all these phases, but with a strong emphasis on the early decades when production of stories was abundant and interpretation of the war highly contested.

Positive views of the war as a necessary and patriotic event appear more frequently before rather than after 1918. This is reflected in this anthology, which starts with one of the first stories of the war to become famous, Arthur Machen's ‘The Bowmen', published as early as September 1914. A story of the supernatural, it associates the British soldiers who had bravely fought heavy German forces before their retreat from Mons on 23 August 1914 with the small victorious army of the battle of Agincourt in 1415, which has become famous as the patriotic centrepiece of Shakespeare's
Henry V
. Not only does Machen's story mask a British defeat, it also suggests that the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was guarded by celestial powers. Conan Doyle's story about the war effort of Sherlock Holmes, ‘His Last Bow', was written and published in 1917, after even more military disasters, and revived a view that had welcomed the war as a cleansing force: the bitter ‘east wind' that Holmes evokes in his final remark will leave England a cleaner, better and stronger land. Like Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling worked for the War Office.
²²
His story, ‘Mary Postgate' (1915), shows the enemy, a fatally wounded German airman whose plane has crashed in England, from the perspective of an elderly spinster who seeks revenge for the death of the young man she
helped to bring up. But even stories written during the war sometimes presented a more friendly view of the enemy. In Stacy Aumonier's ‘Them Others' (1917), a woman is concerned about the fate of the German family she knew before the war. Wartime stories also vary significantly in their portrayal of the men who fought. ‘Private Meyrick – Company Idiot' (1916), written by the once-popular ‘Sapper', portrays an incompetent who, in his own tragicomic manner, dies a hero. Conrad's ‘The Tale' describes an officer's dilemma after he has sent the crew of a ship to certain death.

Stories of the inter-war years are likewise diverse in approach and sentiment. ‘Trench stories' of that period, by such authors as C. E. Montague (‘A Trade Report Only', 1923) and Richard Aldington (‘Victory', 1930), tend to be war-critical and emphasize the horror and human tragedy of the war. But by that time, remembrance and healing had also become a major theme. Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Fly' (1922) explores a father's grief six years after his son was killed. Published in the same year but in a completely different spirit, Harold Brighouse's ‘Once a Hero' casts a satirical light on a hypocritical cult of public commemoration that serves the living more than it does the ‘glorious' dead.

A decade later, the pain of remembering had abated, as Winifred Holtby's ‘The Casualty List' (1932) suggests: to the old woman in this story, the daily obituary of natural deaths has become more real and affecting than the lists of casualties she recalls from the war. The necessity for 1920s Britain to recuperate even underlies a story that looks back to the hidden war of intelligence: in John Buchan's ‘The Loathly Opposite' (1928), two men from a former decoding unit suffer ailments that may result from their exhausting efforts during the war. That they find a cure in the former enemy's country reflects late-1920s pacifism and the desire to achieve reconciliation with Germany.

Other stories of the time raised more controversial issues: that British soldiers had been shot for desertion, for example, like the underage volunteer in John Galsworthy's ‘Told by the Schoolmaster' (1927). The difficulties returned soldiers experienced in readjusting to post-war Britain are the subject
of Hugh Walpole's ‘Nobody' (1921); his protagonist only regains a purpose in life when he forms a new affiliation with the working classes and thus stands for the reorientation with which his society as a whole was confronted. The war's impact on conceptions of gender is another prominent theme of the post-war years.
²³
While D. H. Lawrence's ‘Tickets, Please' (1919) sketches a war caused by women's entry into ‘male' working domains, Radclyffe Hall's ‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself' (written 1926) depicts an ageing lesbian who longs for the active role, freedom and temporary acceptance that work as an ambulance driver had afforded her during the war and which she lost with the Armistice.

Although their number decreased dramatically after the caesura of the Second World War, stories about the First World War continued to be written after 1945. Not unexpectedly, their main concern is how the war is remembered across the gap of time and how this memory is passed on to future generations. Robert Graves's early 1960s story about the ‘Christmas Truce' of 1914 explicitly includes a man who wishes his war veteran grandfather to march with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. By the end of the twentieth century, few First World War soldiers were left, and the character in Julian Barnes's ‘Evermore' (1995) anticipates that the war's collective memory will fade. But this story itself helps to perpetuate its memory, as do the others in the anthology's final section. Muriel Spark's ‘The First Year of My Life' (1975) and Robert Grossmith's ‘Company' (1989) indicate in their own original ways how the war continues to haunt later generations, figuratively and, as Grossmith's ghost story suggests, even literally.