Opinion The war won
Whether presented as memoir or fiction, post-World War I writing returns to the same themes and attitudes.
By: A.O. Scott
I feel like a soldier on the morning after the Somme.” This line of dialogue, from an episode in the second season of the BBC series Call the Midwife, caught my ear recently as an especially piquant morsel of period detail. It is uttered by a doctor to a nurse after they have just assisted in a grueling home birth, an experience that is compared to the four-month battle in a muddy stretch of Picardy beginning on July 1, 1916, that was, at the time, the bloodiest episode of combat in human history, generating 60,000 casualties in a single day of fighting on the British side alone.
But why choose that particular calamity? Call the Midwife, based on a popular series of memoirs by Jennifer Worth, takes place in the late 1950s, not long after a war that, in terms of the sheer scale and extent of global slaughter, far eclipsed its predecessor. It is interesting that for this youngish doctor and nurse, the earlier conflict comes more readily to mind. The Somme is more accessible, and perhaps more immediate, than Dunkirk or D-Day.
The allusion may require a footnote now, but its occurrence in a television programme that is acutely sensitive to historical accuracy is a sign of just how deeply, if in some ways obscurely, World War I remains embedded in the popular consciousness. Publicised in its day as “the war to end all wars”, it has instead become the war to which all subsequent wars, and much else in modern life, seem to refer. Words and phrases once specifically associated with the experience of combat on the western front are still part of the common language. And we seldom notice that our collective understanding of what has happened in foxholes, jungles, mountains and deserts far removed in space and time from the sandbags and barbed wire of France and Belgium is filtered through the blood, smoke and misery of those earlier engagements.
Many British soldiers and officers arrived at the front steeped in a literary tradition that coloured their perception — a tradition that included not only martial epics and popular adventure novels but also religious and romantic allegories like John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. The central character in that medieval tale of desperate hardship and ultimate redemption is first seen as “a man clothed in rags” with “a great burden upon his back”, a description that seemed uncannily to prefigure the trench-weary conscript with his tattered uniform and heavy pack.
That soldier, in turn, with some adjustments of outfit and equipment, would march through the subsequent decades, leaving behind a corpus of remarkably consistent firsthand testimony. Whether presented as memoir or fiction, post-1918 war writing returns again and again to the same themes and attitudes. Among them are an emphasis on the tedium and terror of ground combat; the privileging of the ordinary soldier’s perspective over that of officers or strategists; a suspicion of authority and a tendency to mock those who wield it; a strong sense of the unbridgeable existential division between those who fight and the people back home; a taste for absurdity, sarcasm and black humour; and the conclusion that, whatever the outcome or justice of the war as a whole, its legacy for the individual veteran will be cynicism and disillusionment.
More recent events, and the imaginative response to them, might indicate the extent to which minds can change, and memories fade. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have wound down in bloody inconclusiveness, the men and women who served in them have started writing, and what they have produced should return us to the morning after the Somme. And the moral might have been written by the British memoirist Edmund Blunden, who derived a stark lesson from his own experience at the Battle of the Somme: “The War had won, and would go on winning.”
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