STRAY LEAVES

Southland Times, Issue 20044, 4 December 1926, Page 13 (Supplement)

STRAY LEAVES

DISILLUSION (By Quenten C. Pope.) C. E. Montague will never do anything better than “Disenchantment.” Not one of his other books has the same sweep, the same effect of revelation to the reader. But then not one of his other books is concerned with a subject as large. There is fine writing in ‘Tiery Particles,” choice phrasing and wit and scholarship and wonderful lightness of treatment. There is acute analysis and evidence of a fine taste in "Dramatic Values.” There are flashes of brilliant phrasing and sustained satire in “A Hind Let Loose,” which suffers from a crabbed style and is very obviously Montague feeling his way towards that original expression which he later attained. "The Right Place” is one of the best books of its kind. “Rough Justice” is a novel which only Montague could have written as it is written. But it is not what he says but the way he says it that holds the attention. And 1 turn back to “Disenchantment” once more. This book will remain the classic of the war. Philip Gibbs’ “Realities of War” may be ranked with it and Masefield’s “Gallipoli” may join the band. But “Disenchantment” is easily first. For here, without exaggeration, without bitterness, but with philosophy and sympathy and humour, the whole story is told. The style, too, is arresting. It is not perfect prose, but it is vivid and original. There are sentences of perfect cadence, there are others gnarled and twisted in a vain attempt to express a thing in a manner different from all else. But the sum of the book is that it matters more than any other prose work of the period.

The failure of the writers to meet the war is now traditional. Our war literature consisted of studies in hysteria and melodrama. We had to wait until 1924 for our best war novel, “The Spanish Farm.” In their war works the novelists merely reflected public feeling. A later generation may be amazed at Rose Macaulay’s “Non-combatants” or Ewart’s “Way of Revelation,” yet both are in a sense history and both mirrored the national mind. This was the sort of thing that the public bought greedily, plus the balderdash of Frankau and the printed record of the jangling nerves of Gilbert Cannan. Undoubtedly our novelists entered the war with as much idealism as the New Army recruit. You may see that by the ending of Arnold Bennett's “Roll Call,” a novel which, I suspect, must have been seeking a decent conclusion when the war happened along and provided it. But before long Bennett had progressed to the point of the cheap sentiment and tawdry naughtiness of “The Pretty Lady.”

naughtiness of “The Pretty Lady.” And so it went on. To be philosophical in the war years was to be treasonable. No one had the world cataclysm in focus save only Sassoon, whose discontent, I suspect, was constitutional, but whose courage, undeniably, was great. No one, that is to say, save Montague, whose sharp vision was then playing round the dumps of France. And jin “Disenchantment” he gives us a complete philosophy of the war. From the time when the New Army answered the call this book goes calmly and lucidly to the post-war years and the remedy for our present discontents. We learn of the “handsome and boundless illusions” of the first volunteers and of their eagerness to discharge what they considered to be an obligation of honour. Their selfrenunciation was extreme, their anxiety to get “over there” made them the keenest soldiers. And then came the beginning of disillusion, the “finding out” of the old army, the realisation that their superior officers were not as wonderfully competent as they wore represented to be. Misgivings grew into suspicion and with the transfer to France came certainty. The whole history of the war follows, the intolerable tedium of trench life, the failure of the church when its missioners proved for the men “too fussily bloodthirsty,” the disgust of the army with the politicians and the Press, and the long autumn of the campaign, the very real respect that the men had for the German troops, their savage rage at the reports of deliberate outrages committed by the enemy, and finally the perishing of the last illusion. “One leaf which had gone pretty yellow by now was the hope of perfect victory—swift, unsoured, unruinous, knightly . . . Troops in the field become realists. Ours had seen their side visibly swelling for more than two years, till Jack had become a heavier weight than the giant and yet could not finish him off. We knew that our Allies and we outnumbered the Germans and theirs. We knew .that we were just as well armed. We had seen the Germans advancing under our fire and made no mistake about what they were worth. Our first vision of victory had gone the way of its frail sister dream of a perfect Allied comradeship. French soldiers sneered at British now, and British at French. Both had the same derisive note in their voices when they named the ‘Brav’ Beiges.’ Canadians and Australians had almost ceased to take the pains to break it to us gently that they were the ‘storm troops’ the men who had to be sent for to do the tough jobs; that, out of all us sorry home troops, only the Guards Division, two kilted divisions and three English ones could be said to know how to fight. ‘The English let us down again’; ‘The Tommies gave us a bad flank as usual’—there were the stirring things you would hear if you called upon an Australian division a few hours after a battle in which the lion had fought by the side of his whelps.”

There is much more, of course. The way in which the Regular Army clique triumphed, ousting the new soldiers from any chance of a high command; the manner in which the staff which had neglected to learn its job in peace muddled along in war, these and other unpleasant things. The blunder of Loos, the butchery of the Somme, of Arras, of Flanders and Cambrai, how we “had the enemy stiff at Arras” two full years before the war ended, how the troops waited for the order to go ahead and none came, and how after two days the Germans stole back under cover of nightfall to trenches from which they had fled in disorder. And finally, a splendid piece of writing, the description of the blow by the Allied armies after the failure of the German thrust at Paris in the autumn of 1918, and of the ultimate success.

Yet even in victory there is disillusion. “We awoke from delight and remembered. Four years ago, three years ago, even two years ago, a lasting repose of beatitude might have come W’ith that regaining of Paradise! The control of our armies, jealously hugged for so long, and used, on the whole, to so little purpose, had passed from us, thrown up in a moment of failure, dissension and dread. While still outnumbered by the enemy we had not won; while on even terms with him we had not won; only under a fdFeign commander-in-chief and with America’s inexhaustible numbers crowding behind to hold up our old arms, had our just cause begun to prevail. And now the marred triumph would leave us jaded and disillusioned, divided, half-bank-rupt, sneerers at lofty endeavour, and yet not the men for the plodding of busy and orderly peace; bilious with faiths and enthusiasms gone sour on the stomach. That

very night I was to hear the old Australian sneer again. The British corps on their left, at work in the twisty valley and knucklesome banks of the Somme, had failed to get on as fast as they and the Canadian troops on their right. ‘The Canadians were all right, of course, but the Tommies'. Well, we mi~ht have known.’ ”