Tag Archives: history: wwi

Not So Quiet…, by Helen Zenna Smith

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The stench that comes out as we open the doors each morning nearly knocks us down. Pools of stale vomit from the poor wretches we have carried the night before, corners the sitters have turned into temporary lavatories for all purposes, blood and mud and vermin and the stale stench of stinking trench feet and gangrenous wounds. Poor souls, they cannot help it. No one blames them. Half the time they are unconscious of what they are doing, wracked with pain and jolted about on the rough roads, for, try as we may—and the cases all agree that women drivers are ten times more thoughtful than the men drivers—we cannot altogether evade the snow-covered stones and potholes.

Powerful novel about the experiences of a woman ambulance driver on the front during the First World War, by Evadne Price, Australian-born writer and playwright, who in the last part of her career was a writer of astrology columns for magazines (more fiction, I guess). She had not actually been a V.A.D. driver herself, but drew heavily from a friend’s diary. It was commissioned as a satirical riposte to All Quiet on the Western Front, but ended up as something very different.

The key thing about the book is the visceral description of misery, trauma and death on the battlefield – and I am struggling to remember reading any other portrayal of trench warfare that is quite so explicit about the daily horror of it all. Most accounts dwell on the awfulness of death, without giving much attention to the awfulness of life in that situation.

But tied in with this is a constant reflection on class and gender. The narrator is an upper class woman, and class divisions do not completely dissolve on the battlefield. There is a memorably psychopathic supervisor. The relatives at home have no understanding of what is being done in their name.

And there is plenty of sex as well, though much less explicit than the body horror of the trenches. The narrator has a couple of flings. Her fiancé is grievously injured and cannot have children. There is a particularly memorable passage where the narrator lies to her rich aunt to get money for her sister’s abortion.

My edition has a 50-page afterword by Jane Marcus, who puts the book in context with other writing about the war by both women and men, and mentions a few other figures that I have bumped into in my explorations, notably Mary Borden, who later ran the WW2 hospital founded by my grandmother’s aunt and F.T. Jesse, who my grandmother met in 1926. And the whole story is interesting context for my great-great-aunt’s efforts. But even without that personal element, it is gripping. You can get it here.

My edition has a striking cover, a portrait of a V.A.D. driver by Gilbert Rogers. Unfortunately it does not seem a very robust publication, and after a few days of carrying it around in my bag, the pages and binding began to warp. I see that Virago have also done an edition, which may be longer lasting (but won’t have the Jane Marcus afterword).

How Many Miles to Babylon?, by Jennifer Johnston

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Second paragraph of third section:

‘All I ever seem to do is boring Latin.’

Soon after reading some of her father’s work, I got hold of his daughter’s best known book. The only work of hers that I previously remember reading is The Captains and the Kings, at least thirty-five years ago.

This is a short, swift, very sad story about a friendship across class and religious lines in pre-first world war rural Ireland, which then plays out grimly in the trenches. There’s a wealth of hidden sexuality and buried family secrets, and the politics of conflict which plays out as much in the internal tensions of the Irish troops as with the Germans. It’s very well done. You can get it here.

Eastern Nights – and Flights: A Record of Oriental Adventure, by Alan Bott

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Living in Paris in the spring of 1925, my grandmother, Dorothy Hibbard, went to stay in the French countryside with her artist friend Jan Juta and his sister, Réné Hansard (born Henrietta Irene Louise Juta).

Rene invited me to go to stay at her little Provencale farm, Lou Miracle, at Mougins. Alan Bott was also there, an English writer who was helping Rene with some of her writing – at least that’s what I wrote to Papa. Alan had been in the R.A.F. and had been shot down in Palestine and made prisoner by the Turks; he wrote a book about it, Eastern Flights, which I still have, though only in a paper-back. At Rene’s I walked a lot while the others were working, and I did some work myself, though not much, I think. I also fell more or less in love with Alan.

By her account, she and Alan Bott saw a lot of each other, in Paris and in England, over the next year and a half, until they had a furious row when she wouldn’t wait for him while he was interviewing Rudyard Kipling, probably in September 1926. Less than a year later, she met and married my grandfather. Insert your own alternative history of my family here…

Alan Bott (1893-1952) is best remembered these days as the founder of Pan Books, the main paperback publishing rival to Penguin, and the first to publish James Bond, Modesty Blaise, and a bit later (long after he had died) The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He married Josephine Blumenfeld in 1930, and they had three children, the youngest of whom died in 2018.

However, he was also a British airman ace in the First World War, and shot down three German aircraft in France in September 1916 and then two more in the Sinai in April 1918, before being himself shot down and captured by Ottoman forces later that month. His book Eastern Nights – and Flights: A Record of Oriental Adventure is a record of his captivity and ultimate escape. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:

“For a walk. I was upset by the air raid. My head has been very bad since the smash, and sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m better now, and I give my word of honour that I will stay quietly in bed. Only say nothing to the Turks.”

It’s a thrilling tale, as Bott along with other Allied prisoners is transported from Palestine, to Damascus, to a dreadful prisoner-of-war camp in Afion-kara-Hissar in Anatolia, to Constantinople where, after some time faking mental illness, he escapes on a Ukrainian steamer to Odessa, and makes his way from there to Varna in Bulgaria, finally arriving at Thessalonica just as the Armistice is declared. The cultural history of the First World War, in the UK anyway, tends to concentrate on the Western Front, and it’s a useful reminder that there was a lot more going on elsewhere.

It’s also a healthy reminder that transport around that region, even in the late days of the war, was in some ways much easier in 1918 than it would be today. Bott’s observations on the cultural differences among the various cultures through which he travels are somewhat bigoted (there’s a horrible anti-Semitic passage about the Jews of Odessa) but still vivid and interesting. His favourite city is Damascus, which chimes with what I have heard from other Syria experts.

The whole book is online at Project Gutenberg, and you’ll read it very quickly, if you want. I do note that although my grandmother says that she had a copy, she doesn’t say whether or not she had actually read it.

Yanks Behind the Lines: How the Commission for Relief in Belgium Saved Millions from Starvation During World War I, by Jeffrey B. Miller

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

According to historian Branden Little, approximately 120 American relief committees were operating in 1914, including organizations such as “Father De Ville’s Milk Fund for Belgian Babies; the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee… King Albert’s Civilian Hospital Fund… the Belgian Relief Fund; the Belgian Relief Committee; and the Commission for Relief in Belgium.”

A few months ago I was showing off the delights of Leuven a friend who has recently moved to Brussels, and challenged her to guess which American president has a square named after him in the city. If you don’t already know, I confidently predicted, you won’t get it in your first ten guesses. I was right. The story of how future president Herbert Hoover co-ordinated the delivery of food to occupied Belgium during the First World War is not well known outside this country, and indeed is a fading memory even here.

This book is a brief but detailed history of the effort an amazing triumph of non-governmental diplomacy and organisation, with food bought in the UK and distributed to the Belgians (and northern French) living under occupation. Hoover had to fight turf wars with other American do-gooders, and establish clear demarcation with the Belgian relief committee about how the distribution was to managed; but those issues pale into insignificance in comparison with the need to get the British and Germans to allow the effort to proceed in the first place despite being locked in vicious war.

The Germans come out as the bad guys, no matter how you look at it. When the Commission for Relief in Belgium complained to the military governor that German soldiers were mistreating their staff, he refused to believe them and sent one of his own men to observe the situation on the ground. The undercover German soldier was beaten up, arrested and jailed by his own comrades who refused to believe his story.

A small team of young Americans, mostly young men, supervised the relief operation on the ground. The recruitment process was basically any Rhodes scholar, or other upper-class white male American student in western Europe, who spoke decent French (as most well-educated Westerners did in those days). That obviously meant that the ‘delegates’, as they were known, were mostly from the northeastern white elite, especially since they were paid a very meagre stipend on top of expenses so that those from a less wealthy background could not afford to do it.

But it reminded me of the OSCE and other international staff who I knew in Bosnia when I was working there immediately after the war of the 1990s, people who were recruited as much for availability as for expertise, whose main role was really to demonstrate the continuing commitment of the international community to the country. It’s not such an awful thing. Going back to the First World War, my grandmother’s elder brother, Lyman C. Hibbard, volunteered not in Belgium but with the ambulances of the American Field Service in France, and was awarded the Croix du Guerre for it.

The author himself is the grandson of one of the American delegates and the Belgian industrialist‘s daughter who he fell in love with, but he doesn’t let that colour the story, which relies on the copious documentation in English. He has laudably put a lot of his source material online for wider use. However, I see only two books in French and two in Dutch out of eighty in the bibliography.

One other point that is not mentioned: the captains of Belgian industry who were able to marshal local resources as part of the effort had made most of their money from exploiting the Congo.

Anyway, it’s a short and digestible book about a quietly heroic moment of history, which is not well enough known. You can get it here.

A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, by Samuel Hynes

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

War releases other aggressions too — all those hostilities that have been present in peacetime, but restrained — and so when war comes, other, ‘little’ wars come too: the war of the old against the young, the war of the old-fashioned against the modern, the war of the national against the foreign and of the conforming against the non-conforming. It is not surprising, then, that once the Great War had begun, conflicts of values began, and grew violent, or that qualities that cultivated Edwardians had taken to be the very signs of their nation’s civilization were seen to be the symptoms of a national disease.

I enjoyed this tremendously, a survey of the impact of the First World War on British culture – although the subtitle uses the word “English”, I’m glad to say that Ireland at least is referenced throughout. In 470 pages, Hynes looks at the brutal reset of the UK’s way of life that started in 1914, climaxed in 1916 and continued to reverberate long after the guns had formally fallen silent.

Almost every European family has a story here – my grandfather, born in 1880, was wounded three times in combat; his younger brother was gassed; one of his sisters lost her oldest son at Gallipoli, another lost her husband at Ypres. But Hynes’ focus is culture rather than combat, mainly prose writing, but also poetry, theatre, painting, sculpture, architecture and the nascent cinema industry, and he weaves an intense and diverse tapestry of how art responded to crisis and horror.

A lot of the names were familiar to me – Wells and Woolf dominating, of course, and Owen in poetry. Hynes does a great job of connecting them all together, mapping their mutual influences and in particular drawing out the changing perceptions of the war over time – those directly exposed to it realising the true horror of the situation quicker than those at home.

There is plenty of social commentary in the art, including the changing roles of women, and attitudes to sexuality. I had to grimly laugh at one quote from Asquith’s son, prosecuting a court-martial against a soldier for being gay, who he described in a letter to his wife as

a nephew of Robert Ross, lately a scholar at Eaton, who aroused everyone’s suspicions by knowing Latin and Greek and constantly reading Henry James’ novels.

Sounds like a wrong ’un, for sure!

The book gave me a lot to think about, and I picked up a couple of intriguing recommendations. Sonia: Between Two Worlds, a novel by Stephen McKenna, seems to pick up the Irish dimension and do a bit more with it. And the Sandham Memorial Chapel sounds like it is well worth a detour next time I have reason to venture to northern Hampshire.

This is a great summary of an awful time, and the art that it generated, some of which was great and lasting. You can get it here.