World War I in Literature

Background

On June, 28, 1914, Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist. Nationalist fervor had been brewing in Europe, and Serbia was then under the dominion of the aging Austro-Hungarian Empire. The assassination was the spark; the accumulated tinder was composed of imperial and economic rivalries among major European powers. These rivalries had produced an arms race and a tangle of military and economic alliances.

Austria declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914; then Germany declared war on Russia and invaded Belgium; as a result of the invasion England declared war on Germany. The war of the Central Powers (Austria-Hungry, Germany, Bulgaria, Turkey) against the Allies (Great Britain and its allied nations, France, Russia, Serbia, Greece, Italy) had begun. Public antiwar sentiment kept the United States out of the conflict until April 6, 1917, when the United States joined the Allies, who had been receiving US support. President Woodrow Wilson had won reelection in 1916 with the aid of the slogan “He Kept Us out of War,” but the prowar position took precedence as a result of Germany’s sinking US ships and of the publication of an intercepted telegram from Germany to Mexico suggesting that Mexico ally itself with Germany. The war of attrition ended with the collapse of the Central Powers’ war machine in 1918.

Expectation of Adventure

When the US Congress declared war on Germany in April, the conflict in Europe had been, for more than two years, a war of attrition. Before 1915, the German offensive that had begun with the invasion of Belgium was stopped; both sides dug trenches, and the Western front line moved hardly at all until the end of the war on November 11, 1918. The belligerents had begun to abandon hope for a decisive victory and to seek merely to wear down the other side by defending their positions at any cost. Approximately ten million combatants were killed and twenty million were wounded, typically in battles of unprecedented ferocity that yielded, tactically, little or nothing.

The United States wanted to play a vital role in world affairs in the new century, but its military forces were modest in size and experience. The nation’s most recent war had been with Spain, in 1898, almost a generation before. Few Americans had experienced modern warfare, and none a war on such a scale, or of such futility. For professionals and volunteers alike it was possible, at first, to look forward to the expedition as a great overseas adventure, as an opportunity at last to prove oneself, and as a chance to enjoy a respite from the strict Victorian morals of home.

Europe seemed romantic and sophisticated, and British propaganda had effectively demonized Germany in the American imagination. Reporting from the front had always been tightly controlled by military officials, and the American press satisfied the popular demand for war news by reprinting items and tracts from Britain, which portrayed the enemy as a barbarous Hun, barely human and eager to commit atrocities against women and children. A wave of hateful anti-German incidents, aimed at immigrants, swept the United States. Thus propaganda, the thirst for adventure, and genuine patriotism served to shield writers on the home front from the reality of mechanized war. A considerable body of American World War I literature, particularly novels written by noncombatants before the armistice, reflects this early naïveté and is marked by the stirring rhetoric of glory, splendor, and sacrifice. These works’ language conveys the crusading spirit with which Americans entered the war, which was seen as a sacred mission to rescue civilization, to make the world safe for democracy, or to win “the war that will end war” (as H. G. Wells had called it). Even the work of some exceptional talents who were able to visit the front personally, for example Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, often reflects an innocent idealism that distinguishes it from the work of soldiers who saw extensive action. Wharton witnessed an attack at Verdun, but in her novels The Marne (1918) and A Son at the Front (1923), her sentimental enthusiasm for the allied cause becomes almost bloodthirsty in its zeal. In Cather’s novel One of Ours (1922) the author’s innocence of the soldier’s conditions is clear.

Disillusionment

The sharp contrast between the expectations of servicemen and their experience at the front produced a bitter irony that characterizes the antiwar novels of the 1920s. Whatever their other flaws, the force and authority of these works frequently elevate them over the patriotic works that preceded them. The deep disillusionment in works such as Thomas Boyd’s Through the Wheat (1923) and Elliot Paul’s Impromptu (1923) echoes through later fiction such as William March’s Company K (1933), Humphrey Cobb’s Paths of Glory (1935) and Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun (1939). Although America’s entrance into the war immediately shifted the balance of power, conditions for soldiers on the Western front remained physically and psychologically unendurable through most of 1917 and 1918. The novels of protest bear witness to the fact that American soldiers were ill-prepared to live for days or weeks without relief in the trenches. Rarely catching a glimpse of the enemy, soldiers lived in waterlogged trenches infested with rats and other vermin, and at any moment might be killed or mutilated by enemy shelling. Boyd’s Through the Wheat conveys the futility of missions into no-man’s-land, the land between the trenches where men marched into machine gun fire. The industrial age had revolutionized warfare and had made personal courage almost entirely meaningless; war proved instead to be dehumanizing, capricious, and bureaucratic. In literature about World War I the stoical, almost anesthetized, antihero displaces the brave warrior of old.

The radical discontinuity between ordinary life and life at the front made it difficult for war writers to comprehend and communicate their experience. They had lived in a world that most readers in America could barely imagine. In the decade following the armistice, certain writers evolved a rhetoric of disillusionment that directly opposed the romanticism of the earlier patriotic novels, and would have a lasting influence on literature. Noted critic Paul Fussell, in his landmark work The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), argues that the dominant characteristic of literature of the twentieth century is irony, and that this irony originates in the memory of the vast, bureaucratic, and futile war. World War I, it may be argued, marked not the end of war or the beginning of world democracy but rather the end of romanticism; the end of belief in the competence, good intentions, even the sanity, of national leaders; the end of the progressive assumptions of the nineteenth century; and the true product of what poet Ezra Pound described as “a botched civilization.”

In the literature written after the experience of World War I, rage is not directed against the enemy but rather against the soldier’s own military command, against politicians and zealots at home, and against the whole ideology and language of militarism. One of the early protest novels, John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers (1921) traces the ordeals of three privates, each a representative American type, as they resist the military’s determination to crush the human spirit. Andrews, the most memorable and sympathetic of the three doughboys, is an educated and sensitive musician who ultimately deserts and must face a firing squad. Each private is subdued by the military machine of his own country rather than by the enemy. Later, in his monumental trilogy, U.S.A. (1937), Dos Passos takes a longer view of the war’s impact: presenting a cross section of American voices from the beginning of the twentieth century through the 1930s the novel suggests that the war shattered American democratic ideals and made it possible for cynical capitalists to ruin a humane prewar society that had rewarded character and hard work.

Dos Passos served in the Norton Harjes Ambulance Corps alongside the young E. E. Cummings. Cummings’ first book, The Enormous Room (1922), is a tragicomic memoir narrating the author’s absurd trial and imprisonment in a French prison on the charge of treason. With frequent allusion to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684) as a narrative device, The Enormous Room describes a spiritual journey: The narrator learns that when officialdom proves itself to be amoral and insane, human dignity may be found chiefly among the people it persecutes. The worth of individual character emerges as the narrator fraternizes with the inmates in the camp’s “enormous room.” Cummings rediscovers an essential humanity in the midst of war, but many works see only the obliteration of humanity by war, and even camaraderie among soldiers cannot often survive the slaughter of body and soul.

The most celebrated American novel of the war, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) gave to disillusionment an unforgettable, and widely imitated, rhetorical form. Appearing in the same year as the English translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues (1928; All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929), Hemingway’s work also became an immediate best seller, suggesting that a decade after the armistice, embitterment reflected the postwar generation’s sense of identity. Hemingway’s American protagonist, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, leads an ambulance unit on the Italian front. Frederic falls in love with an English nurse after being wounded. During a chaotic retreat, Henry narrowly escapes being shot, preposterously, for treason, and Catherine dies while giving birth to their child. Solitary, laconic, almost numb, Henry incarnates the new American antihero, entirely disabused of the old illusions of nation, church, state, heroism, or glory. Against the hard truth of the war, the traditional language of patriotism and military adventure seems “obscene,” and a “rhetoric of understatement” to Frederic. “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

For the epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926), Hemingway borrowed a phrase that Gertrude Stein had heard from an auto mechanic: “All of you young people who served in the war, you’re all a lost generation.” The phrase “lost generation” came to be associated with American writers who lived and worked in postwar Europe, and observed it as outsiders, but shared with its people the experience of the war. This loose circle of expatriate artists continued the modernist experiments of the years before the war, but the artists did so with the conviction that an old civilization had ruined itself. T. S. Eliot dedicated his poem The Waste Land (1922) to a friend who died in the trenches, and it can be read—with its references to rats, demobilization, soulless industry, and spiritual drought—as a poem of postwar disaffection. The war also made a profound impression on William Faulkner, who trained briefly in Canada with the Royal Flying Corps. It furnished material for several of his works, including his first novel, Soldier’s Pay (1926); one of his last novels, A Fable (1954); and several stories. Faulkner’s war writing is unusual and controversial for conveying the meaning of war through symbolic devices rather than strictly realistic narrative: A Fable, for example, is the allegorical story of a Christlike corporal and twelve soldiers who refuse to fight. The commercial and critical success of Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War, published in 1991, shows that the war continues to fascinate even those who did not experience it personally.

In the twenty-first century, authors continue to return to explorations of World War I. Beginning in 2003, mystery author Jacqueline Winspear published a series featuring Maisie Dobbs, a private investigator who served as a nurse in France during the war. Throughout her cases and in her own life, Dobbs must deal with the lasting effects of the horrific war. In 2014, Winspear published the standalone novel The Care and Management of Lies, which follows five people caught up in the war in different capacities.

Canadian Literature

Canada, then still part of the British Empire, made no separate declaration of war and entered the war with Britain in August 1914. Canada’s considerable contribution to the war effort profoundly shaped its sense of itself as a player on the world stage. Unquestionably the most famous Canadian work to emerge from the war is John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields,” which continues to be recited at Remembrance Day ceremonies throughout Canada. Spoken by a dead soldier who urges the living to “take up our quarrel with the foe,” it reflects the consciousness of the early war years. No novel or memoir by a Canadian serviceman has found a comparable place in literature. Peregrine Acland’s All Else Is Folly: A Tale of War and Passion (1929) is an ambiguous novel, chiefly concerned with psychological and physical survival, and Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed (1930) is a harshly realistic antiwar novel. Timothy Findley’s novel The Wars (1977) represents a late attempt to treat in fiction the impact of the war on Canadian identity. A sensitive young officer drifts into a madness that appears to be the inevitable result of the insanity that surrounds him. His detestation of violence paradoxically impels him toward irrationally violent acts that symbolize the troubling ambiguities of Canada’s role in the war. In the 2005 novel Three Day Road, Canadian author Joseph Boyden explores the role of First Nations people in the war by telling the story of Cree soldier and sniper Xavier, who returns from the front lines emotionally and phsyically damaged.

Bibliography

Cooperman, Stanley. World War I and the American Novel. Johns Hopkins UP, 1967. A useful study of the principal themes that emerge from the American novel of World War I, with an emphasis on the hero and antihero.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford UP, 1975. Chiefly concerned with British literature, this book is an indispensable study of the war’s legacy.

Hynes, Samuel. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. Macmillan, 1990. Explores in detail the war’s effects on culture and the imagination.

Klein, Holger, editor. The First World War in Fiction. Harper & Row, 1977. A collection of scholarly essays treating the major American and European novels of World War I.

Leed, Eric. No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I. Cambridge UP, 1979. An intellectual history that draws heavily on literature, this book explores the profound changes of identity experienced by those who fought in World War I.

Onion, Amanda. "How World War I Changed Literature." History, A&E Television Networks, 26 Apr. 2018, www.history.com/news/how-world-war-i-changed-literature. Accessed 2 Oct. 2018.