Reading and the First World War

Readers, Texts, Archives

Shafquat Towheed, Edmund King

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137302717
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Ranging from soldiers reading newspapers at the front to authors' responses to the war, this book sheds new light on the reading habits and preferences of men and women, combatants and civilians, during the First World War. This is the first study of the conflict from the perspective of readers.

Part I

Reading and the Formation of the Literary Canon

1

‘Khaki and Kisses’: Reading the Romance Novel in the Great War

Jane Potter

‘What is wanted […] is the friendly companionship of a good and kindly book to take the mind away from the contemplation of the terrible environment.’¹ So stated The War Illustrated in December 1915, demonstrating that despite publishers’ initial fears that public interest in and purchasing of books would wane in the harsh conditions of war, print culture remained essential to maintaining and bolstering the mood of both soldiers and civilians between 1914 and 1918. Herbert Jenkins for one averred that,

If the war has proved anything it has been the folly of forecast, and in nothing have the prophets been further from the truth than in the anticipation of its effects upon books. People are now reading more than they have read for many years past, and the sale of cheap books has been remarkable.²

Perhaps more so than during any conflict before or since, books and periodicals played an essential role in the First World War. The trade in Britain was in its ‘Golden Age’: technical innovations, marketing and advertising strategies, and distribution networks were firmly in place. Literacy levels were higher than they had ever been thanks to the Education Acts that had continually improved school provision since the 1870s. With little competition from other media, reading was an important source of distraction from the hardships of war. Those on active service, whether in the trenches or convalescing in hospital, were a captive audience and ‘the demand for the novelist who could dispel the boredom of war was limitless’.³ Publishers responded enthusiastically to this demand. Jenkins, this time writing in the Daily Mirror of 1915, asserted that novels were invaluable sources of comfort and amusement for ‘the man at the Front, the wounded, the bereaved’, and declared that he had personally ‘received many very touching testimonies of the gratitude of those who want to forget things occasionally for an hour or so’.⁴ His assertion can be verified to some extent by Signaller John Ivor Hanson, who observed in his wartime journal that, ‘Books of all kinds circularise among the troops … something readable is a boon; it passes an otherwise monotonous hour and helps us forget.’⁵ The hero of Joseph Hocking’s novel All for a Scrap of Paper (1915) tells us that

literally tons of periodicals, novels, and other light literature had been forwarded [to the troops], evidences of the fact that millions at home, although they were unable to fight, were anxious to help those who could.⁶

Similarly, George Sarratt, the tragic hero of another wartime novel, Missing, by Mrs Humphry Ward, remarks to his new wife Nelly:

bless you, nobody talks about their feelings at the front. We’re a pretty slangy lot in the trenches, and when we’re in billets, we read novels and rag each other – and sleep – my word, we do sleep!⁷

The self-referential nature of such quotations demonstrates how books permeated the public consciousness on many levels, and were part and parcel of the war experience. Wilfred Owen, while at training camp, was found by his brother Harold to be reading a popular novel, Rest Harrow (by Maurice Hewlett): ‘I asked him if he was enjoying it; giving a little shrug, he replied, “It distracts me most pleasantly.”’⁸ Having been to the front and convalescing in hospital, however, Wilfred complained to his mother, ‘one of the sisters brought me some novels, about as palatable as warm water to a starving jaguar’.⁹ Thus it was Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu that fed Owen’s imagination when interpreting his own experience of war, especially in ‘Strange Meeting’: ‘Nothing before [it] had given such an appallingly vivid description of trench warfare or combined it with such passionate political conviction.’¹⁰ Whilst at sea between Southampton and Cape Town, Lance Corporal Roland Mountfort is equally caustic about the cheap reading he is offered:

I wish to goodness I had a few decent books. I took a couple with me & they have issued a hundred sevenpenny editions for circulation on board – mostly piffle of Le Quex’s [sic] &c, which you read in about an hour & a half, kick yourself for so much wasted time, & hawk round for three or four days trying to swap for some more bilge of the same sort … With a little decent literature to vary the recreation I should be moderately happy.¹¹

The eclectic book choices of another war poet, Edmund Blunden – from Shelley and Thomson to H. G. Wells – show, as Helen Chambers has observed, ‘how a sensitive and self-conscious literary young man responded to the trench experience’.¹² But, as with other analyses of the literature of the Great War, a focus only on the canonical writers leads to an incomplete and perhaps even misleading picture of the reading habits of the majority of the population.

Novels and stories had always shaped views of warfare – and this was especially true for the generation that came of age in the Great War. In ‘Conscript Courage’, one of the short stories in Boyd Cable’s Action Front (1916), Gerald Bunthrop is described as ‘a man utterly averse to any form of soldiering, much less fighting, very reluctantly driven into the Army by force of circumstance and pressure from without himself’. We are told that:

Before the War the Army and its ways were to him a sealed book. Of war he had the haziest ideas compounded of novels he had read and dimly remembered, and mental pictures in a confused jumble of Charles O’Malley dragoons on spirited chargers, half-forgotten illustrations in the papers of pith-helmeted infantry in the Boer War, faint boyhood recollections of Magersfontein [… .] His slight conceptions of war, then, were a mere matter of print and books and pictures, and the first months of this present war were exactly the same, no more and no less – newspaper paragraphs and photos and drawings in the weeklies hanging on the bookstalls.¹³

That the reality of war was nothing like that portrayed in ‘the weeklies hanging on the book stalls’, or in novels, did not hamper the need for reading material and books were the currency by which those at home might recompense soldiers for their services. The Camps’ Library was praised by an American soldier in the following terms:

Of all the boons that have been booned by the British Public on the British fighting men, one of the best is the distribution of books and magazines carried out by the Camps’ Library. I dunno who or what the Camps’ Library is, or where it sprung from, but the people that run it – well, I take my hat off to them every time.¹⁴

While the Camps’ Library scheme was, as Edmund G. C. King has pointed out, a well-organised operation, there were also a multitude of ad hoc, often hastily assembled, libraries set up for individual military units.¹⁵ R. E. Grice-Hutchinson describes one such effort – a Royal Field Artillery library for its gunners – in 1918 and in doing so also indicates the practical issues surrounding the acquisition of books, not least of which was the surge in prices that inevitably followed the harsh conditions of wartime production:

I was up early and round to the machine-gunners about their piano for to-night’s concert … After making all the arrangements […] I went over on [horseback] to C. R. A. at Rance about a circulating library, for which we have been given the sum of 500 francs. It is difficult to know what to order, but I was lucky enough last night to find a catalogue from The Times of all kinds of cheap and pocket editions. But the price nowadays is awful! The little 7d. editions are now up to 1s. 9d., so we shan’t get very many for our money.¹⁶

Nevertheless, books were a patriotic commodity and as important as any other item that could be provided by those at home. In an editorial entitled ‘The Solace of Literature in the Trenches’, The War Illustrated acknowledged that the home front had misjudged the needs of the serving soldier:

we knitted him a Balaclava helmet to keep his head warm, and omitted to provide anything to supply the inside of his head. We remembered his stomach and forgot his brain. We thought long and hard about his food, and not at all about what used to be called mental pabulum.¹⁷

Such food for the mind meant that, as one officer commented, ‘the war was happily driven from their minds by the “magic carpet” of some book of travel or romance’. He noted how ‘the boys hardly gave me time to note down the names of the books before they were off with them […] Even the Commanding Officer made a bee-line for “There is No Devil” as a relief in his morning tour of inspection.’¹⁸ Theodore Wesley Koch, in his Books in the War: The Romance of War Library Service (1919), describes another kind of distribution of books, one that is bound up with the image of the ministering angel, the Red Cross nurse, with ‘a vehicle that resembles a tea-wagon, on noiseless rubber wheels [that] rolls into the wards, stopping at every bed and allowing each patient to make a selection before moving on’.¹⁹ A letter sent home from Le Havre by Private Laurence Attwell in 1915 provides a glimpse of how one soldier used a camp-based lending library – in this case, run by the YMCA – and hints at the popularity these kinds of facilities could have in an otherwise straitened entertainment environment:

the Y.M.C.A. building in our Camp is now in full swing. It is crowded out somewhat, but it is nevertheless a very great boon to us … The life in this camp seems to be an unending series of duties of one kind or another – fatigues, guards and pickets. On the other hand, we have so many things that the poor fellows in the firing line cannot get. The Y.M.C.A. have a small library and I have borrowed George Borrow’s Wild Wales … At present I have been able to keep up with the news, for we can purchase the Paris edition of the Daily Mail. It costs 1 ½d or 15 centimes and consists practically of the 4 middle pages of the London issue.²⁰

In Oliver Hastings, V.C. (1916), Archibald Harris is a bookish young man when he meets up with the hero, Oliver Hastings. That Harris’s mind is stocked with literary references becomes apparent when he comments that a particular sergeant ‘puts me in mind of Judge Pitman in one of Max Adeler’s yarns’.²¹ Max Adeler, the pseudonym of Charles Heber Clark (1841–1915), was the author of such fantasy short story collections and novels as Transformations (1883), Elbow Room: A Novel without a Plot, first published in 1876 with numerous reprints in the 1880s, and The Quakeress (1905). Later Harris is found by another young officer, Vivian Drummond, to be ‘sitting on the fire-step with his back to the wall of the trench, smoking his pipe and reading from a small pocket edition’, which turns out to be Scott’s Lady of the Lake. Harris says,

I’ve just been round all the sentrie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Reading and the Formation of the Literary Canon
• Part II: Writers’ Reading and Responses: Ford Madox Ford and Edith Wharton
• Part III: Reading and the Masses: America and Italy
• Part IV: Reading and National Identity: Australian Soldiers’ Reading at the Front
• Part V: Reading and Group Identity: War Artists and Conscientious Objectors
• Part VI: Reading the News: Newspapers in Belgium, France and Germany
• Bibliography
• Index