Reporting the First World War in the Liminal Zone

British and American Eyewitness Accounts from the Western Front

Sara Prieto

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319685946
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe

This book deals with an aspect of the Great War that has been largely overlooked: the war reportage written based on British and American authors' experiences at the Western Front. It focuses on how the liminal experience of the First World War was portrayed in a series of works of literary journalism at different stages of the conflict, from the summer of 1914 to the Armistice in November 1918.
Sara Prieto explores a number of representative texts written by a series of civilian eyewitness who have been passed over in earlier studies of literature and journalism in the Great War. The texts under discussion are situated in the 'liminal zone', as they were written in the middle of a transitional period, half-way between two radically different literary styles: the romantic and idealising ante bellum tradition, and the cynical and disillusioned modernist school of writing. They are also the product of the various stages of a physical and moral journey which took several authors into the fantastic albeit nightmarish world of the Western Front, where their understanding of reality was transformed beyond anything they could have anticipated.

© The Author(s) 2018

Sara PrietoReporting the First World War in the Liminal Zonehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68594-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Reporting the First World War in the Liminal Zone

Sara Prieto¹

(1)

University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain

End Abstract

The summer of 1914 marks the beginning of one of the deadliest wars in the history of mankind. The First World War, known as “the Great War” for the sheer ferocity of its gargantuan battles, dealt a devastating blow to Victorian and Edwardian society and its values. On 3 August 1914, Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, prophesied in a private conversation the consequences that the outbreak of the war was to have for European civilisation: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time” (Spender 1927, p. 14). A day later, the lamps had definitely “gone out”; Britain declared war on Germany and Western society was plunged into a dark struggle that would last for more than four years. The shadows of the war would continue to haunt the collective memory of the fighting nations up to the present day.

Many people predicted that this conflict would be “the end of humanity” (Hobsbawm 2010, p. 22). Military tactics had little in common with those of previous wars and many of the technological innovations of the industrial revolution were adapted to be used on the battlefield. As a consequence, lethal weapons such as poison gas, tanks, or fighter planes became part of the combat experience for the first time. Millions of men were mobilised to face machine guns and explosive shells from which they were trying to hide in muddy, lice-infected, and often waterlogged trenches.

For most of the four years that the conflict lasted, the civil population of the warring nations was only dimly aware of the true human cost of the war. The Home Front was kept in a state of ignorance because the governments had imposed a very tight censorship control on the press. Newspapermen habitually gave a distorted vision of the conflict and the way that events were unfolding on the fighting fronts. Thus, when the war ended, and the veil was lifted, the true dimensions of the war, the ferocity of its battles, and the traumatic effect that the mass slaughter had inflicted on those involved in it became evident. The truth about the war that began to emerge after the Armistice in 1918 would severely shake people’s confidence in the veracity of the press for decades to come. A chasm separated the world that had existed before the war from the world that emerged after the cataclysm. As Samuel Hynes affirms, the devastating blow the war dealt to Victorian and Edwardian society and its values makes “the years after the war seem discontinuous from the years before” (1992, p. ix).

This book deals with one aspect of this cataclysm that has been largely overlooked in the academic treatment of the event. It focuses on how the First World War was portrayed in a series of works of literary journalism .¹ The texts under consideration were written by different British and American authors who visited the Western Front at different stages of the conflict, from the summer of 1914 to the Armistice in November 1918, and they were all published during the war. In addition, it includes one coda on the portrayal of the war that some of these authors produced after the signing of the Armistice.

My approach towards the term “literary journalism ” follows the definition of the genre provided by the International Association of Literary Journalism: “not journalism about literature but journalism that is literature.” The genre works largely in narrative form and, as John C. Hartsock explains in A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form (2000), it is a body of writing that “reads like a novel or short story except that it is true or makes a truth claim to phenomenal experience” (2000, p. 1). Norman Sims elaborates on, in The Literary Journalists (1984), a definition of the genre: “Unlike standard journalism literary journalism demands immersion in complex, difficult subjects. The voice of the writer surfaces to show readers that an author is at work” (1984, p. 3). On the other hand, “unlike fiction writers, literary journalists must be accurate. Characters in literary journalism need to be brought to life on paper, just as in fiction, but their feelings and dramatic moments contain a special power because we know the stories are true” (ibid.). Nevertheless, just like in fictional accounts, literary journalism “draws on immersion, voice, accuracy, and symbolism as essential forces” (ibid).

The First World War is the literary war par excellence. It is probably the conflict that has generated the largest amount of literature, considering the numerous letters, journals, memoirs, newspaper articles, essays, poems, accounts, and fictional stories it inspired—and continues to inspire. Among all these literary representations, the work of the “War Poets ” has stood out as the main object of attention for traditional criticism on First World War writing. Authors like Richard Aldington , Robert Graves , Wilfred Owen , or Siegfried Sassoon consolidated a cynical and disillusioned vision of the war based on their long and brutal experience in the trenches. Couched in a blunt, bitter, and deeply ironic language, the writings of Graves, Owen, and Sassoon have come to be considered as the most legitimate representations of the war.

Arguably the two most canonical studies on the literature of the First World War written in English, Paul Fussell ’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) and Samuel Hynes ’s A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (1990) have endorsed this reading of the war. Fussell argues in his seminal work that the soldiers’ traumatic experience in the trenches reversed all traditional forms of war representation. The Horatian belief that associated war with the notions of “honour,” “duty,” and “sacrifice,” was challenged head-on by the so-called War Poets who privileged instead an ironic and disenchanted vision of the European conflict. Their traumatic war experience gave the impetus to new forms of writing purged of pompous metaphors and misleading euphemisms, privileging a plain and direct style that does not shy away from the ugly truth. The most anthologised War Poets and other less renowned writers who transmuted their war experience into prose are the main literary exponents of what Samuel Hynes has summed up as “the Myth of the War,” “the story of the war that has evolved, and has come to be accepted as true” (1992, p. ix):

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. (p. x)

Fifteen years after the publication of The Great War and Modern Memory, Hynes went beyond the confines of Fussell’s influential study to explore the origin and impact that “the Myth of the War” has had on English culture. Together with his analysis of the works of numerous War Poets, Hynes also discusses the manner in which “the Myth of the War” is represented in newspapers, magazines, films, diaries, and letters, most of which were written by combatants. Although Hynes acknowledges the relevance that certain texts written by non-combatants, such as Vera Brittain ’s Testament of Youth (1933) and May Sinclair ’s A Journal of Impressions in Belgium , have for his study (1992, pp. 93–95; 435), his interest remains focused on the manner in which the bitter realities of the war shaped the mind-set of the fighting men and the way they represented their experience in writing.

The belief that only combatants and ex-combatants could adequately capture the horrors of the war has often resulted in the critical neglect of other testimonial narratives written by many who witnessed the war but were not involved in any form of fighting. This has affected the literary reputation of the written testimonies of numerous nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers, as well as of those journalists—men and women—who visited the different war zones and wrote about the conflict. This “combat-centred” perspective has been challenged in the last three decades by cultural and feminist historians, as well as by literary critics such as Margaret Higonnet, Claire Tylee, or Jay Winter. As the latter argues in his essay “Shell-Shock and the Cultural History of the Great War” (2000), “there were others who suffered, whose voices we must also attend” (p. 11). These voices, particularly women’s responses to the war, have been reassessed in some measure during the last thirty years. Several anthologies and collections of texts written by women have been published, giving evidence of the variety of women’s literary responses to the trauma of the First World War.² All these anthologies compile the works of several women who through their diaries, eyewitness reports, poetry, and fiction responded to the brutality of the war. At the same time, several essays have discussed the value of these testimonies or fictional accounts.³

Women scholars have primarily focused on the works of fiction, poetry, or testimonial representations of nurses and ambulance drivers in the war zone. However, the branch of criticism that h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Reporting the First World War in the Liminal Zone
• 2. Pioneers: Entering the War Zone
• 3. The Liminal Tunnel: Authorial Voices in the War Zone
• 4. The Turning Point? Journalists at the Somme
• 5. The American Rite of Passage
• 6. Incorporation: Post-war and Disenchantment
• Back Matter