CARICATURES OF THE WAR

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 28 May 1930, Page 3

CARICATURES OF THE WAR

NOVELS OI : TWO KINDS Novels about (lie War are mainly divisible info Iwo kinds, '‘The ‘limes” remarked in a leading article recently. The first have some, sincerity about, tin'll). Either their authors have returned with a personal grudge again,si society and are determined to revenge themselves for their sufferings, expounded in not uullatlering detail, and to ’write, will ‘‘vex somebody.” Or they are determined, like the old fresco-pain-lers when they pielured Hell, so lo scare, horrify and revolt I lie reader that ho shall never think of war again without trembling and nausea. Fortunately for peace if has more honourable safeguards than a philosophy founded on disgust and fear. Fortunately for human nature it is never likely to. tall so low as these writers hope, nor in the War itself did it sink at all commonly to the depth of their fevered caricatures. The -War novelists in this class have no chance of giving ns the truth along with the facts. They are bound lo specialise in the discreditable. The second class of War novel, like the native guide, is merely selling the grisliness of the battlefield for what it will fetch while the market lasts. The recipe is simple. Emotion is recollected, rearranged and moated up in tranquillity. All the ingredients of the convention go in—mud. oaths, explosions, blasphemy, injustice, cowardice, drink, physical horrors, sex, introspection, insanity. Given some narrative faculty, anyone could do it hy this time. Tins is war of the ‘‘War books.” These meaningless atoms of driven humanity, surrendered to every fear and passion that comes, jockeyed by imbecile or malignant commanders and doomed to die for nothing, these, strange to remember, are our. countrymen, and such is the Army in which they served. Stranger still, the Arm} - was not defeated, Stranger again, a very large part of England to-day consists of the same men—and, since the ‘‘War books’’ ate lio respecters of sex—of the same women.

THE PURPOSE OF THE WAR "The Times” endorses Mr Douglas ■Terrold’s conclusion that the War books are not about the War. They are rather accounts of personal experience. in the War and personal grievances against the War. From this ommission the subsequent perversions, greater or less, inevitably follow. There is no perspective. There is even no tragedy. Tragedy is noble suffering for a sufficient cause. The War books forget or ignore the cause and the massive effort and endurance of either side fall from the heroic to the meaningless. Let the present and future see to the prevention —which is not the passive avoidance—of war. The past, in England, was given the choice between self-sacrifice in war and peace with ignominy; and it freely chose war. It fought the War for a purpose deeper than self and nobler even than peace. True that the past will be betrayed if its lesson is lost. It is immediate beLrayal if its lesson is lost, ft is immediate betrayal to mock and bespatter it. A man may turn buck, not with regret or remorse, huL. with hope, to the permanent truth that glows in the incandescence of 1914. It is the proof that civilisation is worth saving and has the strength to save itself. That a war of four years could not be fought without disillusionment* says nothing, or says no more than that strength and fatigue arc old companions. That it would be fought without sacrifice was not the common expectation of those who went out and of those who sped iheiri. Since it is little more than 15 years ago memory can still call witnesses who will not or cannot testify themselves. Those witnesses, as they came home on leave from the trenches, may have ignored or concealed many facts that the War books have since paraded. But at least they have bequeathed the essential truth that they were neither disillusioned nor drunken nor dissolved in self-pity.