Wilfred Owen to Gorky

Press, 13 February 1982, Page 17

Wilfred Owen to Gorky

Voices from the Great War. By Peter . Vansittart. Jonathan Cape, 1981. 303 pp. $25.55. (Reviewed by A. J. Curry) It is difficult to believe that there could be anything new to be said about the First World War. the Great War, as it was called. There have been published numerous histories of the conflict from all sides, volumes of poetry, memoirs and autobiographies, books of pictures, all about a war which has since preyed on the imagination as no other war has ever done.

Vansittart's book is an anthology from a wide variety of sources. Poets, novelists, historians, journalists, and even the popular song writers of the time are all represented, together with private diarists and letter writers. The contributors range from the famous to the unknown: from Wilfred Owen's “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori". to: My otd man's a dustman.

He fought at the Battle of Mons, He killed ten thousand Germans, With only a couple of bombs. One lay here, one lay there, one lay round the comer, And one poor sod urith his leg hanging off Was crying out for water. Other contributions came from such diverse figures as Rosa Luxembourg (the German Communist murdered by Army officers in 1919), Nicholas 11. Gorky, and T. E. Lawrence, to name but a few. There is the dreadful verse of Horatio Bottomley. and accounts of soldiers shaking the hands of dead comrades as they pass along familiar trenches. The contributions are arranged chronologically. with linking and explanatory passages provided by the anthologist. The conjunction of the ribald and the terrible, the noble and the obscene is. oddly enough, very successful and probably paints a truer picture of the times than any single author ever could.