Having noted in my last post that I ended 2023 with a number of unfinish projects, I thought I would start the new year listing those that I hope to make progress with if not actually complete over the coming year. This is not a resolution (I’m possibly a bit late for that on Epiphany), but rather a hope to the point of intention.
Writing:
Janaury/February: Two book reviews. I’ve read both books and have a good sense of what I want to say, but I have negotiated a bit more time for both of these as I know that I will get very little writing done once marking and postgraduate studentship applications come in in a couple of weeks.
April: Two conference presentations.
Discussant on a panel in military welfare history as a sub-field. My contribution will be considering intersections with histories of disability and gender.
‘The Playboy, the Father, the Scholar and the Brute: Ambridge Masculinities in Historical Perspective’ for the 2024 Academic Archers conference. I am very excited about this one, and can’t wait to start writing this properly. It has been a couple of years since I last attended an AA conference, which are some of the most fun out there.
The big one: The book. This will definitely not get finished this year, but the goal is to end the year with at least a couple of full chapters in place, and possibly even an agent for it.
And the new project: One of the books I’ve been reading for review has inspired me to think again about the status of ambulance drivers and non-combattant care-givers (or not). I think there may be a journal article in this, drawing together some of the material that I was only able to mention in passing in An Equal Burden.
Knitting:
The cardigan that I started as a lockdown project. I have finally built up the courage to steek it (successfully, I think), but now have to complete the button bands and grafting. This may require another ball of wool from the supplier.
Three family sweaters. Every year for Christmas I give my husband and two children the wool for a new sweater, which I then knit for them. This year I began my husband’s before Christmas, intending it for his birthday, after last year’s effort ended up far too tight in the arms and chest due to a miscalculation. However, as I have chosen an extremely complicated fair isle pattern, it is taking considerably longer than anticipated. Thankfully, the children’s sweaters should be more straight forward, so I may actually complete these before the weather gets too warm to wear them this year.
And the new project: Today’s clearout of the bathroom cupboards in advance of the builders arriving tomorrow disclosed the sad fact that the baby blanket my mother made when my son was born had fallen victim moths. So I spent an hour today unravelling it, ending up with approximately six 50g balls of lovely, soft DK wool which, for sentimental reasons, I would like to make into something new. I’m not sure what yet, but all suggestions will be gratefully accepted.
Quilting:
Autumnal quilt. My first full-sized bed quilt which I am very, very slowly hand quilting. Not one that I can see getting completed this year, but I would like to make more progress on it than I have done in the past 12 months.
Alice’s Wonderland quilt: A Block of the Month project from Alice Caroline which I started in January 2022. All that remains is to attach the final four borders, after which I will take it to be long-arm quilted at my local quilt store. It is intended as a gift and I am not yet confident enough at hand quilting to take this aspect on (nor to do I have the time if it is to go to its recipient – currently age 4 – before they leave home for university).
And the new project: Because I clearly can’t resist the siren call of the new project, I have signed up for another Alice Caroline BoM project this year. Hopefully this one will be a little bit quicker, now that I am more confident of my technique.
In the kitchen and the garden:
These are less unfinished projects from last year than annual events which come around every year. Nonetheless, they fall under the heading of projects, and very enjoyable ones, too.
Marmalade. The making of this year’s batch will be made more interesting by my current temporary impairment relating to my knee injury, which requires brace and crutches and means I am only partially mobile.
Germination: We still don’t have a greenhouse (a very long-term unfinished project), so some time in the next few months the window sills will start to play host to pots of seeds in anticipation of one of the summer’s main garden projects, the veg patch.
The front bed: Yet another project that is now several years old. Having removed a hugely overgrown berberis, I now need to finish digging out all the stones to replant with a callicarpa and bulbs. This one, however, will have to wait until the weather improves.
And the new project: For Christmas, my husband asked for and received a cookbook about plant-based baking. I may have rashly agreed to try making plant-based cinnamon rolls at some point…
As I say, I won’t complete all of these projects, but I hope to finish some and at least make progress with the rest. Whatever else it turns out to be, 2024 looks to be a busy year.
This end-of-year reflection was originally going to be titled ‘The Half-finished Year’, a reference not only to my ever-expanding folder of started but unfinished blog posts and the 2500 words of my next book, but also the two sweaters and three quilts that I am currently working on, as well as the unpainted front hallway and bathtub sitting in the living room that await attention when I get home. But, as I sit in a hotel room in Italy with my leg in a brace while the rest of my family is out skiing, I have come to realise that the reason that this year has been shaped so profoundly by the unfinished is because of the time that ill health has taken from me.
The year started with a minor but mortifying facial disfigurement in the form of a failed dental implant. It is ending in a broken ACL, the aforementioned brace, and uncertainty about how long recovery will take and what it will mean for all the activities and projects I have planned so far for the coming year. In between came multiple trips to the dentist, the doctor and the hospital, diagnosis of three conditions, two chronic, one temporary, the consequent prescriptions (including two attempts for the chronic conditions which resulted in distressing and painful side effects) and more blood tests than I would wish on my worst enemy.
Through all of this, I have not taken time off of work. I have continued my roles as wife and monther and have kept reassuring friends and family that I am fine, or at least managing. And in many ways I am lucky. The dental work has provided me with a successful prosthetic for the lost tooth. The three of the four medications I am taking are preventative rather than therapeutic. None of the conditions I suffer are life threatening. And while my current physical impairment is disabling, it is also temporary, even if rehabilitation is going to be counted in months at minimum, not weeks as I might wish. As someone who both works in the fields of disability and medical history, and has lived through the terminal illnesses of both parents, I know how fortunate I am that my various forms of ill health are identifiable, relatively painless and highly treatable, and that I live in a country and society where I have ready access to the care and treatment I need, as well as a support network of family and friends.
But while resilience may be an admirable quality in some ways, not least in providing a sense of continuity which is itself therapeutic, it cannot be a permanent state of being, as any old rubber band will show. Something, somewhere had to give in this year that has done its best to break me, physically and psychologically. It may not have succeeded entirely, but it does seem to have robbed me of significant amounts of time and, with it, my ability to complete projects, particularly those related to writing.
Which is not to say that this hasn’t been a year of progress in some ways. Indeed, I am managing, with this post, to publish more than one post for this blog this year, an improvement on my output for 2022. I now have a very clear idea of both the shape and content of my next book, although the form will require the sort of concentrated writing time that I definitely haven’t had this year and probably won’t in the coming year. I will even have new publications in the new year, in the form of a book chapter which fell victim to Covid delays and at least one book review. And I have managed to steek a cardigan for the first time, a terrifying technique in knitting that involves taking scissors to a piece of work knitted in the round to create an opening.
These achievements, small as they are, remind me that, unlike an old rubber band, I may be damaged but I am not yet broken. But, as I enter the new year in a damaged state, I do so with the knowledge that I cannot simply bounce back to a state of full productivity, as much as I might wish to do so. I need time and space both to heal what has broken this year and, when I am strong enough, to give my many unfinished projects the attention they deserve. So I will start this new year not with resolutions but with the hope that I will be able to find or make the time and space for convalescence and recuperation and with them the ability and courage complete some, if not all, of my half-finished projects.
I wish you all a healthy, contented and hope-fulfilled new year.
Last week I attended the Social History Society annual conference, held this year in Essex. It was the first time I attended this conference since 2013, when it was held in Leeds and where I presented my first paper on what would eventually become An Equal Burden. This time, I presented not-quite-the-first paper on what I intend to be my next book, on the social history of demobilization after the First World War in Britain.
It was an enjoyable, if hot and exhausting, few days. The Essex Business School in built on the precepts of a tropical glass house and, despite a torrential downpour which deafened us on the first day, the humidity remained a noticeable factor throughout. And there were a lot of papers to cram in, particularly on the final day when I spent a fair amount of time dashing around the building, trying to hear as much as possible. But it was lovely to catch with old friends and colleagues, some of whom I hadn’t seen in person since well before the pandemic, and hear about exciting new research, particularly from postgraduate research students. Honor Morris and Mandy Barrie, both writing about working-class women’s experiences of feminism at either end of the 20th century, produced engaging and intriguing analyses which makes me excited to read more of their work. Clare Tebbut’s paper on a complicated story of a trans(?) marriage in the interwar years, and Jessamy Carlson’s discussion of child protection in the same period, both chimed with my own work, prompting me to rethink the significance of my arguments about the time frame of developments in the entangled relationships between the domestic and state welfare provision.
The highlight of the panels I attended, however, was the final session on Friday, when Julia Laite, Cath Feely, Laura King and Lucinda Matthews-Jones discussed their uses of their own family histories in their historical work. Separately, the four papers were fascinating studies in their own right; together, they suggest important new methodologies for those of us who work on histories of emotions, material objects and the everyday. This was, in fact, the second event on the topic that I had attended in as many weeks, following the roundtable discussion hosted by the IHR’s Contemporary British History Seminar, where Julia and Laura spoke alongside Michael Roper and Matt Houlbrook, both of whom have written or are writing histories which included consideration of their own families. That so many important historians in fields related to my own (and who I have had the honour of working with over the years) should be developing practice in this area suggests that this is an approach I need to consider exploring in my own work. Certainly listening to Cath’s discussion of the ways in which her great-grandfather’s death was mythologised through his First World War service, and how the wider historical context and her expertise as a local historian shaped her research into the story, suggested a number of questions about the returning soldier and the legacy of the First World War that I want to pursue further in my own work.
But that work won’t be through my own family history and Friday’s panel, in combination with the IHR seminar, has forced me to think about why not. After all, I have my mother’s archive, including both her own papers and the research she conducted into her parents’ histories in the final years of her life, sitting in my spare room in half a dozen boxes. Why not use them as a springboard for my discussion of 20th century domesticities, or integrate the information they contain into my analysis? No, the connections between my family’s history and the First World War are not obvious, but I am, at least in part, a historian of the everyday in time of war. There may be relevant stories of the quotidian in my own family’s experiences of the war. And, even if there are not, I do not need to be defined solely as a First World War historian for my entire career, even if this is how I predominantly see myself. Indeed, my current project is not about the war itself but about its resonance through the lives of those who lived through it throughout the rest of the 20th century. Surely there will be members of my family whose lives can help me explore the process. If not, there must be other stories they can tell of 20th century British social history, from the intimate variation on the special relationship that was my parents’ marriage to the changing nature of women’s employment across at least two generations. Why should I not think about exploring these?
And yet I still find I cannot. My mother’s archive sits in the spare room unexamined, as it has done for four and half years now. There is always something more urgent to do, either professionally or privately, than opening those boxes and exploring their contents. And the reason for this avoidance is that the emotions that such research would evoke are still too powerful for me face in order to do this work.
In the discussion session following Friday’s panel, Michael Roper asked about the role of grief in the work each of the panelists were undertaking, pointing to the ways in which his own work on his family’s history, incorporated into his new book, Afterlives of War, formed part of the process of grieving for his late father. And maybe someday I will be able to use my mother’s archive to work through my grief over losing her too early at 73. But the primary emotion I feel when contemplating those boxes and the work that they represent, both that done already by my mother and that which I would need to do to integrate them into my historical practice, is fear.
I am still working out what, precisely, I am so frightened of. It has, I am sure, something to do with the anger I still feel about my mother’s death, an anger that swells every time I read of another celebrity dying of pancreatic cancer. But there is also the fact that the history contained in the files is that of my mother as much as that of my more distant ancestors. As I noted in my own question to the panel, none of them were working directly on histories of family members more proximate than grandparents. I asked if they thought too-close generational proximity makes the work of integrating family history and academic history harder. As the discussion touched on, proximity brings into focus the fact that family histories are, in the end, emotional histories and these emotions, as Laura King argued in her paper, are a direct challenge to the idea of the pre-eminence of objectivity in professional historical practice.
I am, among other things, a historian of emotion, something I was reminded of listening to Julie-Marie Strange’s tribute to Joanna Bourke on her retirement earlier this week. I am one of the many heirs and beneficiaries to Joanna’s pioneering work in the field, which has and continues to profoundly shape the questions I ask, the sources I explore, the arguments I make. And I do not merely analyse historical emotions but engage emotionally with the past. I regularly respond to the grief of wartime loss or the anger of injustice in the treatment of the disabled or dispossessed when reading archival sources. But when asked to consider my family history, I do not know how to manage the emotions it makes (or threaten to make) me feel. Even contemplating the boxed archive feels overwhelming and, to protect myself, I continue to turn away.
Citing Richard White’s Remembering Ahanagran, Laura spoke of the cruelty inherent in intimate histories of subjectivity and emotion which rely on the analysis of the stories that individuals tell about themselves. I am all too aware of this, having provoked fury on the part of one descendant of a man whose diaries I quoted in my first book, who felt that my interpretation was an insult to his ancestor. This is also a point that has been made in relation to personal essayists and authors of autofiction, such as Rachel Cusk, who use (exploit, even) their intimate relationships – with parents, with partners, with children – to produce work for publication. This was a discussion that my mother herself was familiar with. Her own writing, principally her MFA dissertation, explored her complex relationship with her father, but was only written after his death. Her diaries, which she asked to be burnt without reading after her own death, almost certainly grappled with her feelings about motherhood, including reflections on her perceptions on her relationships with us, her three children. Telling the stories of interpersonal relationships, whether in the past or the present, has immense power, the power to enlighten, inspire, even comfort, but also the power to disrupt and harm.
So the fear I feel when faced with my mother’s archive is, at least in part, fear of the damage I will do – to myself and to others, not least my two siblings, my children and theirs – by trying to negotiate the boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity that the process of doing family history as an academic historian demands of us. I agree with Laura’s central argument that we need to challenge the reification of objectivity in academic history, and that family history can help us to do this. But, at least for now, I cannot participate to this methodological project through the doing of family history. I can, however, contribute through the process of thinking about and exploring the emotions that prevent me. There is, I believe, a story to tell in not doing family history as well.
This was the year that I was going to write every day. Just a little, to get into the habit. I failed (as this blog provides clear evidence). In fact, I have written less this year, either for work or my own amusement, than ever before. No, I do not count emails. I end the year continuing to battle what feels like ever-growing writer’s block, an unfinished article mocking me from my drafts file, while my book tantalizes me with exciting ideas that I never manage to get down on paper. I keep reminding myself that the excitement is worth the struggle – to make the time, to think hard, to find the order of words that satisfies. Maybe in the coming year I will find a way to make such reminders a reality.
This was the year I was going to run a bit further than I ran last year. Just a little, maintaining the distance I had achieved over a few more days. I failed, running just over half the distance I covered in 2021. I try to excuse myself by pointing out that I caught Covid, rapidly followed by a truly dreadful non-Covid cold. But it is an excuse; my distance was well down on the previous year by the point I fell ill. A combination of the ridiculous summer temperatures, a return to travel which saw me attend two conferences overseas and visit my family in the US three times and an insanely busy autumn term all conspired to throw me off course. All I can do is try again next year.
This was the year I achieved a significant professional milestone and have come the closest I have ever been to simply walking away from my job. The academic environment is increasingly unpleasant to work in, with the space for the aspects of the job that I love (the research, the writing) ever more squeezed by demands of bureaucracy which take no account of disciplinary norms or the level of expertise that academics bring to the job. For the moment, I am committed to my students, my colleagues, my collaborators. But I am coming to recognize that this is unsustainable for me personally and I need to find an exit strategy in the near-to-medium, rather than the distant future.
This was the year that I swam – in the North Sea, off the south coast, in rivers in Colorado and the Lake District. I swam with friends, with family, on my own. Each swim brought me a moment of solace missing from the rest of my year. I will write about them soon.
This was the year that I read less than I hoped, but what I did read was, more often than not, what I needed. Two series in particular – Sarah Moss’s trilogy of Night Waking, Bodies of Light and Sign for Lost Children, and Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet – spoke to me in the moment that I read them in ways they could have done at no other point in my life. My only sadness is not to have been able to share the joy of Smith’s novels with my mother, a Dickens scholar. She would have loved them. With a to-be-read shelf now topping the 30-book mark, I am determined to make more time for reading. Of all my identities, I have been a reader longest, something I perhaps forgot at points this year. I will try to remember it in the coming year.
This was the year I found the greatest joy in making and creating. Most of my projects are yet to be finished. The quilt for my niece, pieced together at a rate of 10 patchwork blocks a month still remains without its five borders, backing or sashing. A cardigan I have been working on for myself continues to grow but slowly towards the neck and the terrifying challenge of steeking. But I won first prize for both my bread and my marmalade at the village fete this year, undoubtedly my proudest achievement of the 12 months. I will continue to make time for this work in the coming year.
This has been an odd, confusing year of extremes, of weather, of emotion, of accomplishment. I end the year in as hard a place as I have ever been, but there is promise for the future. I do not know what sort of year next year will be. I can only hope there will be more writing, more running, more swimming, more reading, more making.
Wishing you and yours a happy and healthy new year.
Every year since 2013 I have posted a reflective blog post at some point between Christmas and New Year. I posted throughout my chidren’s early childhoods, when Christmastime was a welter of preparation and lack of sleep. I posted through my parents’ illness and in the wake of their deaths. I posted the year I caught a stomach bug and spent much of the holiday feeling extremely sorry for myself.
But not last year. Somehow, there didn’t seem much to say last year, after a year of anxiety and restrictions, with yet another lockdown (and its attendant home-schooling-while-full-time-teaching-on-line stresses) on the horizon. And that failure to post seems to have set the tone for this past year, a year in which I have failed to write.
I don’t mean that entirely literally. I have written syllabi, reports, and many, many comments on students’ work. I have drafted an article (currently under review following a revise-and-resubmit) and wrote three new talks on my research. I even submitted a short story to a competition over the summer (it didn’t get long-listed, so no feedback). And yet it has still been a year when I have felt blocked in my writing, when nothing has flowed, when I have struggled to find my voice on the page.
It is not just that I have not posted on this blog since July 2020. Having entered the pandemic with ideas for three major pieces of writing, all of them have stalled. The proposal for the monograph based on the research from Men, Women and Care remains unwritten. I have done nothing about the trade history beyond speaking to a couple of possible literary agents. And the novel I started so blithely remains stubbornly stuck at 25,000 words.
There are, of course, good, explicable reasons for this lack of writing productivity. The above-mentioned home-schooling-plus-on-line-teaching absorbed much of the start of the year. The hybrid return to campus in the autumn, along with the resumption of my children’s extra-curricular schedules (choir, rugby, drama, riding) brought its own set of stresses and challenges. As for the summer … I’m not actually sure what happened to the summer this year. Whatever it was did not involve putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).
Writing in a pandemic is hard, and I am trying my hardest to be kind to myself and not to berate myself over the lack of progress. But the fact is that reflecting on this writing block makes me feel sad and anxious in a way that is different from the sadness and anxiety I have felt (and often felt acutely) in past years.
I need to write. I need get the ideas in my head on paper (or a screen). I need to make mistakes, cross things out, find the perfect phrase, delete whole paragraphs and then rewrite them. And I have plenty to write. In addition to the monograph, trade history and novel, there is a blog post on the White Feather campaign I want to write, an article with a deadline next month and the character I have left in limbo in an incomplete AO3 story. Those three new talks should, I hope, form the basis of monograph chapters and there is a call for papers for an edited collection which could give me scope for exploring a key angle to emerge from Men, Women and Care.
So, for the first time in many years I am making a specific New Year’s resolution, one which I intend to hold myself accountable for. Every day for the next 365 days, I will write for a minimum of half an hour. It doesn’t matter what it is – a blog post, fiction, a draft chapter, a proposal. It doesn’t matter when in the day it is, although I do know I write best in the mornings. It doesn’t matter if I am working that day or on holiday, at home or traveling (as I hope to be doing come the spring). For half an hour every day I will write in the hope of getting my writing muscles working again, just as I have this past year sought to get my running muscles working again.
So there is the marker I am placing in 2022. Given the current state of the world, I have no confidence in making any predictions for what the new year may bring, but I will enter it with some hope that there will, at least, be a few more posts on this blog than last year, and maybe even a draft book (or two) by its end. I can but hope.
So I will close this piece of end-of-the-year writing by wishing you all a hopeful, health and happy new year.
The Cornish Coast Murder (British Library Crime Classics)
Spoilers for The Cornish Coast Murder throughout.
One of the things that this extraordinary summer has allowed me to do has been to catch up on reading my way through my shelf of ‘to be read’ books. I don’t mean that the shelf has become emptier; I have been buying nearly as many books as I have read. Nonetheless, I have finally read all but one of the books that were waiting to be read when we moved house two and half years ago. (Wade Davies’ mammoth Into the Silence at over 600 pages is still proving too much of a challenge; I will tackle it eventually.) So last week I finally got around to reading John Bude’s The Cornish Coast Murder, one of several British Library Crime Classics editions that were given to me as a Christmas present several years ago.
The Cornish Coast Murder, first published in 1935, the same year that Dorothy L. Sayers published Gaudy Night, as Martin Edwards points out in his introduction, is very much a standard Golden Age detective novel of the puzzle variety. That is, the focus of the narrative is on the murder plot, with very little in the way of characterization. Indeed, the characters are such archetypes that the key players tend to be referred to as the Inspector, the Vicar or the Doctor (although we are given their names and some physical description). The interest and momentum of the book is generated by uncovering the method of the crime (including possibly the first description of the sort of forensic tracing of bullet trajectory popularised by early series of CSI), with contemplation of motives and morality reduced to an afterthought in the final few chapters. It thus fits well into Alison Light’s description of the interwar whodunit as ‘a literature of convalescence’, ‘as insensible to violence as it could be. … As many critics have noted (usually dismissively) it is the lack of emotional engagement in the detective fiction between the wars which matters.’ [1]
So no, The Cornish Coast Murder is not one of the great novels of the Golden Age. This is no The Nine Tailors (1934), The Beast Must Die (1938)or even And Then There Were None (1939). But it is of particular interest to a social and cultural historian of the First World War with an interest in detective fiction on two counts. Firstly, there are the various suspects and witnesses. Since writing my Phd, half of which looked at the figure of the wartime hero in interwar detective and crime fiction, I have been on the hunt for ex-servicemen, and particularly disabled ex-servicemen, in such fiction. The Cornish Coast Murder stands out for having not just one such character, but four. Two of them are said to be suffering from a psychological wound of war. Three of them are suspects, one a witness and one, ultimately, the murderer. The second, related, aspect of interest is the murder weapon, a service revolver, described in some detail. Indeed, as with ex-service characters, there is not merely one but a second which acts as a significant red herring for much of the novel.
Taken together, these two aspects of the novel mean that there is an awful lot of war and its legacy, for both individuals and society, in this book. This stands in direct contrast to Marzena Sokolowska-Paryz’s assertion that ‘In the interwar period, detective fiction retained its distinctive autonomy as a genre, refusing to embrace the subject matter of the war or its repercussions in the present.’ [2] In making her argument, Sokolowska-Paryz quotes John Scraggs’ assertion that ‘The Golden Age fixation with the upper class, or the upper middle class, is further compounded in British fiction of the period by the fact that the physical and social settings are so isolated from the postwar depression that it is as if the Great War never happened.’ [3]
These are pretty extraordinary assertions. One only has to have even a passing acquaintance with the works of Dorothy L. Sayers to take issue with both of them. The war and its legacy for the present are central to her novels, whether in the form of her shell-shocked ex-service detective (Whose Body? (1923)and passim), plots which turn on the ex-service status of suspects and victims (The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928), The Nine Tailors (1934)), or passing references to social impacts such as the refugee crisis and ex-service employment or lack thereof (Whose Body?, Clouds of Witness (1926), The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Gaudy Night). Sayers, to be sure, is something of an outlier within the genre, both in the sophistication of her novels as socially reflexive literature and the extent to which the war is referenced throughout, but she is certainly not alone. Examples of war reference can be found in the work of Ngaio March (Enter a Murderer (1935)) and, of course, both Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings have wartime backgrounds. Like these, what Bude’s plethora of ex-service characters demonstrates is the extent to which the war underpinned everything in interwar society. It did not need to be made the explicit subject of interwar detective fiction (although it could be); its violent legacy, including moral panics over both the brutalisation of ex-servicemen by war service and, conversely, the psychological damage inflicted by war which might lead them to lose control which forms the definition of Ronald Hardy’s shellshock in Bude’s novel, is always there, emerging at various times and in various ways, as it must have done off the page as well as on.
Sokolowska-Paryz and Scraggs’ arguments, and indeed Light’s, can thus be read as an interesting manifestation of the debate about what makes for an ‘authentic’ depiction of the war by post-war fictions. This debate has been going on since at least 1919, and not solely in relation to literary fiction. As Mark Connelly has argued, for the film critic Annie Winifred Ellerman, who wrote under the pseudonym Bryher, ‘realism about the war could mean one thing – only its horrors and miseries. This ideological position then categorically denied that chivalry, honour, or bravery were part of the reality of war. Alternatively, if they were accepted, they were either wasted in such an ignoble pursuit and/or such a tiny component of war as to be irrelevant. In turn, this meant that any depiction that foregrounded these qualities was inherently flawed, and worse still, fundamentally immoral.’ [4] Conversely, Cyril Falls, the literary critic and ex-serviceman, complained in 1959 that ‘The flood of anti-militarist literature, for the greater part fiction, which poured from the presses, deriding the leadership from top to bottom, treating patriotism as a vice when not a fraud, as it was bathed in blood and rolled in mud, was astonishing. It was far from being representative’.[5] While two sides to the debate of what constitutes an ‘authentic’ representation of the war clearly emerged in the interwar period, it is interesting that the Bryher position seems to have come so clearly to dominate contemporary criticism of the detective genre. If it isn’t brutally realist and violent, then it is not, by Sokolowska-Paryz, Scraggs or Light’s argument, a depiction of or reference to the war and its social legacy in Britain. While Sokolowska-Paryz does discuss the more heroic representation of the war in Anne Perry’s Joseph Reavley novels in her analysis of contemporary detective fictions about the war, these form only one of the five series she examines, with all the others adhering to the disillusionment narrative.
Webley Mk IV Revolver
Which brings us to the second interesting element of The Cornish Coast Murder, namely the service revolver. In Bude’s novel, the revolver (or rather the two revolvers, one belonging to the shell-shocked suspect Ronald Hardy and one belonging to the murderer) is the subject of much discussion and description. Both are Webley .45s, the standard issue service revolver during the war, with the Mark VI replacing the Mark IV and V from 1915. Issued to officers, pipers, range takers, airmen, naval crews, trench raiders, machine-gun teams and tank crews, service revolvers were not carried by every serviceman but nor were they reserved solely for the officer corps. Thus while Hardy’s monogrammed revolver reflects his former rank as a junior officer and his social status as a middle-class author, the murderer, a manual labourer, ‘scrounged [his] in France, before being demobbed in ’19, and several rounds of ammunition.’ [6] One of the suspects, Cowper, the groundsman at Greylings, served as a Lance Corporal in an undisclosed regiment but never handled a revolver during his service.
While two service revolvers in one novel is slightly unusual, these weapons appear with some regularity in interwar detective fiction. Christie, who as a pharmacists during the war, knew more about poisons than guns, tended to label the pistols that appeared in her novels as ‘army service revolvers’. Sayers, meanwhile, has the murdered in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club shoot himself in the head. The type of gun used is not specified, but given the setting of a serivemen’s club (and the themes of the war and its legacy which are central to this book in particular), the reader might easily conclude that the weapon was a service revolver.
What is interesting is the extent to which in more contemporary detective fiction with a wartime or interwar setting, the service revolver has, in large part, been displaced by the bayonet as a weapon with wartime associations. [7] On my recent rewatching of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, for example, I was interested to note that bayonets were used twice, once as a murder weapon in Dead Weight (2013) and once by a disabled ex-serviceman when confronted with evidence of drug theft from a medical clinic in Blood and Money (2015). Sokolowska-Paryz points to the symbolic significance of the bayonet as the murder weapon in Rennie Airth’s Rivers of Darkness (1999), noting that the ‘sexual overtones of the killings is made apparent through the psychoanalytic meaning of the bayonet’ as a substitute penis. [8]
The symbolism of the bayonet, however, goes beyond its Freudian overtones. As Paul Hodges has argued, it was a weapon fetishized during the war and after as one of masculine aggression and face-to-face combat in ways which led to its use in wartime atrocities such as the killing of prisoners of war and the wounded. [9] Used in infantry training to instill aggression in the private soldier, its use as a weapon in modern industrialised warfare was generally perceived by servicemen as futile, a throwback to an earlier age. It is thus the symbolic inverse of the service revolver, a middle-class officer’s weapon associated with duty and honour and fired from a distance. Even when duty leads to violence and the taking of life, there is always an explicable motive, including the defense of the domestic, a common justification for war service. The distance between murder and victim, meanwhile, is particularly emphasized in The Cornish Coast Murder by the fact that the murderer fires from a boat, requiring three widely spaced shots to hit his target. The revolver, therefore, comes closer to wartime artillery as a fatal force, a distanced and almost random form of killing.
The service revolver and the bayonet can thus be read as emblematic of the two interpretations of the war at the heart of the debate over authenticity – the technologically advanced form associated with honourable (or at least explicable) motivations and the middle-class officer corps and the brutal, apparently futile form associated with psychopathy and men damaged physically or psychologically by war. It is interesting to note that there appears to have been a decisive shift from one to the other as the symbolic weapon of the war between detective fictions of the interwar period and those of the past quarter century which have the war as its setting. As I start to think about the wider implications of this shift for understandings of the war and its legacy, I would be interested in hearing about appearances of both weapons in other fictions, both then and now. I promise not to wait as long to read them as I did with The Cornish Coast Murder.
[1] Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), p.70.
[2] Marzena Sokolowska-Paryz, ‘The Great War in Detective Fiction’ in The Great War: From Memory to History, ed. by Kellen Kurschinski, et. al. (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2015), p.84.
[3] John Scraggs, Crime Fiction (London: Routledge, 2005), p.48.
[4] Mark Connelly, ‘The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands (1927) and the Struggle for the Cinematic Image of the Great War’ in The Great War, ed. by Kurschinski, et. al., p. 317.
[5] Cyril Falls, The Great War (New York: Putnam, 1959), p. 421, quoted in Ian Andrew Isherwood, Remembering the Great War: Writing and Publishing the Experiences of World War I (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), p. 160.
[6] John Bude, The Cornish Coast Murder (London: The British Library, 2014; first published London: Skeffington & Son, 1935), p. 275.
[7] By bayonet I mean here the rifle bayonet; interestingly, the Webley Mk VI could be modified to take a small bayonet as well.
[8] Sokolowska-Paryz, ‘The Great War in Detective Fiction’, p. 94.
[9] Paul Hodges, ‘They Don’t Like It Up ‘Em!’: Bayonet fetishization in the British Army during the First World War’, Journal of War & Culture Studies, 1:2 (2008), 123-138, DOI: 10.1386/jwcs.1.2.123_1.
I was in Cambridge on 11th September, 2001, but I went home to New York City for the Christmas holiday that year. My memory of that holiday is dominated two experiences: first seeing the city skyline without the domination of the Twin Towers as the cab drove me from JFK to Manhattan, and sitting for days at a time on the sofa in my father’s tiny apartment on 79th and Broadway reading the obituaries of those who died in the New York Times. Every day the paper included several pages of these, brief biographies, some accompanied by photographs, of the cross-section of New Yorkers and Americans who had lost their lives so inexplicably and suddenly. I found my old babysitter and a girl I had studied history of art there; I was introduced to firemen and cleaners, bankers and parents, real people with real lives cut brutally short.
On Sunday, the New York Times again placed a list of the dead at the heart of its publication, this time a list of those who lost their lives to Covid-19 as the number of pandemic fatalities in the US neared 100,000, over 30 times the number who died on 9/11. This time there was no space for pictures, even the short life stories of the 9/11 obituaries. Instead the front page lists names, ages, place of residence and, for most, a brief phrase describing something which made that person unique. These descriptions range from the banal through the humorous to the startling. They capture working lives, domesticities, private passions. They help to illustrate the claim of the sub-heading that these ‘were not simply names on a list. They were us.’
In all, the front page, and the continuation on page 12, lists 1,000 names, 1% of the marked death toll. It is, for me, as for so many others, profoundly moving in its personalisation of the loss that this pandemic is causing, not just in the US but across the world. But does it, as my cousin, who specialises in the visualisation of enormous numbers, asked, really convey the scale of this loss? Remembering these people as individuals is important, he implied, but in doing we lose a sense of the enormity of what 100,000 deaths really looks like.
The tension that my cousin is flagging here is one that has shaped commemorative practice for over a century, at least in the Anglophone world. While epidemic and pandemic illness have shaped society through extensive and profound loss of life for centuries, the First World War (and the ‘flu pandemic which followed it) brought this tension into focus as concentrated mass death occurred for the first time in a world of the nation state and global communication. Each death in and of itself was a personal tragedy and a loss to a community, but it was also, in the case of the deaths in war service, a death in the service of the state and thus required a more public marking. In Britain, this came in the form of casualty lists, published initially daily in the press, and later, as the numbers grew, weekly. Visually, these lists bear a startling resemblance to the New York Times cover, although they include none of the personalising details, only name, rank and unit of service.
It was after the war, however, that the process of naming the dead as a way of remembering them as individuals rather than as part of a mass truly came into its own in Britain. The decision not to repatriate the dead meant that traditional forms of naming on gravestones were precluded for all who died overseas. The loss of bodies meant that, for many, even a corner of a foreign field was an impossibility. Instead the names themselves became the markers and the memorials, both at home and overseas. It is impossible to travel around Britain without encountering a memorial listing the names of the dead – churches and churchyards, in schools and universities, on railway station concourses and street corners. The pattern is repeated in memorials overseas, most notably Lutyen’s monumental arches at Thiepval, with their overwhelming list of the 73,000 names of the missing of the Somme.
Panel of names, Thiepval Memorial, Thiepval
Thiepval seems, one way, to illustrate the problem of naming as a way of commemorating the enormity of mass death through naming. The scale of the memorial is such that it is impossible to see some of the names in its highest reaches from the ground. The names of the dead on my local village war memorial may mean little to me as an incomer of three years’ standing, but I can still read each and acknowledge them as individuals in a way that the sheer scale of Thiepval precludes. Unlike Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial, which most notably took on the tradition of naming as commemorative practice in the US, those visiting Thiepval cannot touch the names, as those visiting Washington often do. Sensory connection, whether of eye or fingertip, seem to be denied. The visitor to Thiepval risks being overwhelmed by the size, the number, the enormity of so many names who cannot be comprehended as individuals.
Blackshaw Head War Memorial
And yet Thiepval remains one of the most profoundly moving memorials to British war losses, inspiration for at least two generations of historians and cultural critics. The invocation of names, with their assertion of an individuality, and individual loss, mirrored in the gravestones of the Commonwealth War Cemeteries across the world, aids our perception of the scale of loss, rather than distracting from it. Smaller local war memorials can have a similar effect, particularly once one is aware of their prevalence. The relentlessness of encounter wherever one travels in Britain serves to bring home the sheer number of dead as profoundly as any weekly gazette of casualties or daily listing of obituaries. The dead are many, but they are not numbers. They are names – of soldiers, students, workers, congregation members, parents, children, siblings. This, then, is the power that the mass listing of names has in commemorative practice, to bridge the gap between the unknown individual and the incomprehensible scale of loss. Names make not just the dead but the meaning of their deaths as one of many known to us. They never were just names on a list, then or now. They were, they are us.
I had all the best intentions. I was going to post regular on my –
[‘Mummy, is my porridge ready?’ ‘No, can you get ready to do Joe Wicks, it will be ready when you are done.’ ‘Don’t want to do Joe Wicks.’ ‘You need some sort of exercise. If you don’t do Joe Wicks, I’ll have to take you for a long walk later.’ ‘Fine, I’ll do Joe Wicks but it’s so unfair. This is the worst day of my life!’ *loud stomping*]
blog. I was going to write about the links between Covid-19 and the history of wartime medicine. I was going to write about the militarisation of medical language. I –
[‘Mummy! He’s pushing me!’ ‘I’m not! She’s getting in my way!’ ‘For goodness sake! You stand there; you stand there. Face the television and watch what you are supposed to be doing!’]
was going to keep a daily diary, an outlet for my anxieties, a record of the social history of –
[‘Right, you go have a bath and you go practice your piano.’ ‘But he always has a bath first and do I have to do my piano?’ ‘I want to do my piano.’ ‘Fine. You do you piano and you have a bath.’ *5 minutes later* ‘That’s enough water! Please can you do that again – and don’t rush this time.’ *dramatic sighs all round*]
corona virus, a boon to future generations of historians.
But of course it hasn’t happened. Partly because –
[‘Are you out of the bath? Dressed? Right, come do your piano please while your brother has a bath.’ ‘No!’ ‘You need to do your piano practice.’ ‘Want to do it later.’ ‘No, you are going to do it now.’ *stomping, followed by discordant banging on the keyboard over the sound of running water*]
not a lot of what I have to say feels very original. The comparisons with the 1918 flu –
[‘Time to get out of the bath, please.’ ‘What work do I have to do?’ ‘Do I have to do writing?’ ‘I don’t understand this maths.’ Can I work in my bedroom?’ ‘Not if you are going to listen to Harry Potter while you work.’ ‘But I work better listening to things.’ ‘Mummy, is strange a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, or preposition?’ ‘Go get you dictionary and look it up.’ ‘No! Why do I have to! This is too hard! I hate you!’ ‘Are there 180 degrees in a right angle?’ ‘I can’t answer you both if you talk to me at the same time!’]
have been relentless, and the subject isn’t really my area of specialism. Discussing the resilience of medical caregivers –
[‘Can I make coffee?’ ‘Go on then.’ ‘Mummy, what does this mean?’ ‘What does what mean?’ ‘This.’ ‘Which one are you talking about? Show me.’ ‘This one!’ ‘Which of these sentences is an example of a modal verb? Hang on, let me check what a modal verb is.’ ‘Here’s your coffee, Mummy.’ ‘Thank you, sweetie.’ *spends the next five minutes wiping up spilled coffee grounds, dripped coffee and biscuit crumbs* ‘What’s for lunch?’ ‘Soup.’ ‘Don’t want soup, we always have soup, why can’t we have pasta!’ ‘Because I can’t get pasta from the shops.’ ‘It’s not fair! I never, ever get what I want and you always get what you want!’ ‘Please just get on with your work.’]
feels unnecessary with all the articulate voices of medical caregivers bearing moving witness to that resilience. Yes, there will come a time to –
[‘I’ve finished my worksheets.’ ‘Have you done BBC Bitesize?’ ‘But the internet isn’t working.’ *checks internet connection* ‘Yes, it is, you just have to wait for the page to load.’ ‘Stupid computer! I hate you! – Oh, now it’s working.’]
unpick the meaning of heroism as it has been applied to key workers, but I’m not sure that it has come yet. And as for my own stresses and strains –
[‘I’m hungry!’ ‘Fine, I’ll get lunch. Can someone lay the table, please?’ *I lay the table* ‘If you’ve finished, can you put your dishes in the dish washer, please?’ ‘Do I have to? She’s not doing it!’ ‘She will do it when she finishes her fruit.’ *dramatic sighs* *I clear my dishes, wash up the cooking utensils, wipe down the table*]
I’m certainly not the only parent struggling to balance working from home, home school and keep my family fed and exercised. I am not the only –
[‘What do I do now?’ ‘Have you done Duolingo? Typesy?’ ‘Yes, yes.’ ‘Please can you tidy your room? Yes, you can listen to Harry Potter.’ ‘Where’s Dad?’ ‘He’s in the office, recording a lecture. Please don’t go in there – did you hear what I said? What are those things attached to the side of your head?!’ ‘Ears?’ ‘Well – use them!’]
struggling with anxiety about how to support my children’s mental and emotional health when they can’t see their friends, when I don’t know if they will be able to go back to school this year, when plans to visit family, both in the UK and in the US are indefinitely on hold.
And then there is the fact –
[‘I’ll take them for a bike ride.’ ‘Great. Have fun.’‘Mum, Dad’s taking us for a bike ride.’ ‘Yes, he told me, have fun.’ ‘Mummy, we’re going on a bike ride.’ ‘Yes, I know.’ ‘Where’s my helmet?’ ‘Where are my shoes?’ ‘I need socks, don’t I?’ ‘Do you really want to cycle in that skirt?’ ‘Have you seen the bike shed key?’ ]
that I am still at work. I am fortunate in not having had to scramble to put teaching on-line the way many of my colleagues have, but I have been supporting post-graduate students –
[‘Has the mail come?’ ‘I haven’t seen the mail man since you last checked the mail ten minutes ago.’ ‘I’m going to check anyway to see if my Beano has come.’]
who are anxious about funding, who can’t access vital archives, who are on the verge of submitting their dissertations and facing the prospect of remote vivas. I am still revising –
[‘What do I do now? I’m bored.’ ‘Why don’t you read a book? No, not one of your Beanos.’ ‘I don’t know what to read!’ ‘Fine, let’s go to your room to see if we can find something in the dozens of books on the bookshelf.’]
a REF impact case study, still working with a colleague to get the manuscript of a long-standing edited collection submitted to the publisher, still supervising –
[‘Mummy – he pushed me off the swing!’ ‘Mummy – she won’t let me have a turn on the swing!’ *sounds of conflict from the garden*]
my funded research project (although making very slow progress with any of the actual research myself). So I’m not getting very much writing –
[‘Can I watch television?’ ‘In five minutes.’ ‘But, Mum – !’ ‘Five minutes!’‘Mum, can I watch television?’ ‘Okay, okay, fine, watch television.’]
done, not even the book proposals I’m supposed to be writing, let alone anything else. Which is why I haven’t posted much on this blog.
But there is another, more difficult way in which the history of war has echoes in today’s crisis. Because, like so many battlefield casualties, those dying with or of Covid-19 are doing so far from their families. The emotional burden that this fact brings with it is something that the history of both British mourning practices and medical care in the First World War can tell us about.
The Victorian ideal of a ‘good death’ – the individual dying in bed surrounded by their loved ones with time to utter final profound, pious words – was, of course, always a myth. [1] That myth, however, was utterly demolished by carnage of the First World War. Men died in large numbers, far from their families. The technology of war had the power not merely to kill but to destroy, even obliterate bodies. The recording and reporting of deaths in such circumstances meant that official news could take time to reach families, often contained only the barest details and could, in some cases, be inaccurate. The result was the reinforcement of the importance of one mourning practice of the pre-war era, that of writing letters of condolence.
While official notification of death could be brief and brutal, a telegram informing the family that their loved one had been killed in action, died of wounds or was missing, it would almost always be followed, or indeed occasionally preceded, by a letter from a commanding officer. In many cases, this would then be followed by letters from the deceased man’s comrades; in some cases, particularly where a man was missing, presumed dead, extensive correspondences grew up between men’s families and the men of their military unit.
These letters were more detailed than the initial announcement, not only celebrating the character of the man in question, but also telling the story of his death. Depending on how well known the man was to his officer and comrades, these letters could be generic or personal in their description of men as individuals. But the detail they contained acknowledged the importance for families of knowing both that their loved one had been known as an individual and also how he had died. As E. K. Smith’s platoon sergeant wrote to his parents, he was ‘only too tell you what actually happened, & being as you say a parent myself, I know you would like even the smallest details concerning the sad event.’ [2]
The descriptions of the death itself could vary in detail, depending on when and where it happened. A death in the midst of an action could be more difficult to describe than one which occurred on quiet day in the line. Almost all, however, had one thing in common – the depiction of the death as ‘clean’ and usually quick. Gerald Stewart’s parents were reassured, for example, that ‘Your son was killed by a bullet and died without suffering any pain. He was not one whit mutilated, and as I looked down at his face as he lay in the battle field I remarked how bonny he looked.’ [3] W. Lindsey ‘was at the time of being wounded splendidly advanced and skilfully leading his men’ while A. R. William’s ‘died a soldier’s death giving his live saving the lives of his comrades.’ [4] Wartime letters of condolence did not seek to tell the truth of death to families who could not be there when their loved one died. Rather they sought to bring emotional solace by emphasising lack of suffering and even heroism in the face of death. While deaths from coronavirus may not lend themselves as clearly to stories of heroic action, the daily newspaper columns giving brief descriptions of those who died points to the need, both of families and society more broadly, to construct a narrative around individual deaths. The need to articulate death as meaningful only becomes more powerful when it occurs at a distance.
Not all or even most of those who died during the First World War did so on the battlefield, however. The system of medical evacuation, which emphasised clearing the ill and wounded from the field in order to leave it clear for combat, meant that many men died in one of the sites of medical care that made up the chain of evacuation. For men who made it as far back as a base or home hospital, there was the potential for their families to be by their sides. Wealthy families could pay to travel to and stay near where their loved one was hospitalised, even as far as the base ports in France. For the majority of families, such travel was beyond their means; in the case of fatal wounds and illness, grants were made available for families to travel to be with their loved ones at the point of death. The importance of such connections was acknowledged by the British state and society at the time.
However, even where money was available and families were able to travel, only a tiny minority were able to be at there for men dying in hospitals. And for men dying in Casualty Clearing Stations or dressing stations, family visits were never an option. For the vast majority of men dying in sites of care during the war, those by their sides at the end were care providers – nurses, chaplains and medical orderlies. To these men and women fell the task of ensuring not only that the story of a man’s death was told to his family but, even more importantly, that he did not die alone.
The emotional labour that this entailed was immense. George Swindell, a Royal Army Medical Corps stretcher bearer recalled the period he spent seconded to a moribund ward, nursing men whose wounds were too serious to treat alongside a chaplain, as one of the most difficult of his military service. [5] As Alice Kelly has noted in relation to nurses, ‘A large part of the … role was comforter, and all of the nurses’ accounts record the men seeking comfort from the author, both physically and mentally.’ [6] Chaplains, working in religious traditions of death bed visiting and vigil, might have some experience with this form of labour. Nurses and orderlies as a rule did not. Yet throughout the war they acted as bridges between the dying and their families, taking final messages to pass on to loved ones, reassuring the dying that they were cared for and not alone.
If the conditions reported on hospital wards in Spain and Italy are anything to go by, this is a form of labour that hospital staff will increasingly be required perform as part of their care for Covid-19 sufferers. The nature of the illness is such that they must be isolated from their family in extremis, and treated by carers shielded, where available, by extensive personal protective equipment. In such circumstances, where the dying sufferer is isolated, with limited physical contact with other people, the importance of communicating emotion between the sufferer and their loved ones becomes even more important. This will come, as it did for caregivers in the First World War, on top of immense physical strains to simply provide care for all those suffering.
Are there lessons to be learned from this history? Until comparatively recently, the emotional labour of carers was not the subject of much discussion. [7] And, as the late Sir Michael Howard noted, ‘historians may claim to teach lessons …. But “history” as such does not.’ [8] But in acknowledging the significance of the role that care providers, not just doctors and nurses but nursing assistants, orderlies, even cleaning staff, can potentially play in bridging the distance between the dying and those they love and who love them, we can, perhaps, more fully appreciate the care being given not only to the bodies of individual patients but to the psyche of society as a whole.
In 1917, Private W.H. Atkins wrote a poem in praise of the quiet heroism of the men of the Royal Army Medical Corps, including the nursing orderly:
Oh! it’s weary work in the white-washed ward,
Or the blood-stained Hospital base,
To number the kit of the man who was hit
And cover the pale, cold face,
…
To hold the hot hand of the man who talks wild
And blabs of his wife or his kids,
Who dreams he is back in the old home again,
Till the morphia bites, and he loses his pain
As sleep settles down on his lids. [8]
Today, in hospitals up and down the country and across the world, carergivers will be doing similar weary work. It may not earn as much recognition as the physical labour of medical caregiving or the danger that they will be putting themselves in of catching a potentially fatal illness. But this necessary emotional work is heroic nonetheless.
[1] Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); David Cannadine, ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain’ in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (London: Europa, 1981), pp.187-242.
[1] G. Gould, letter to Mrs. E. Smith, 24th January, 1916, Letters of E. K. Smith, Documents.2535, Imperial War Museums, London (IWM).
[2] Lt.-Col. S MacDonald, Letter to Mr Stewart, 14th April, 1917, Papers of G. Stewart, Documents.8572, IWM.
[3] W. Gillam, letter to Mr Lindsay, 4th August, 1917, Papers of W Lindsay, Documents.11765, IWM; Lt. Collinson, letter Mr Williams, Papers of A. R. Williams, Documents.4436, IWM.
[4] George Swindell, ‘In Arduis Fidelus: Being the story of 4 ½ years in the Royal Army Medical Corps’. TS memoir, RAMC 421, The Wellcome Library, pp. 118–19.
[5] Alice Kelly, ‘”Can One Grow Used to Death?”: Deathbed Scenes in Great War Nurses’ Narratives’ in The Great War: From Memory to History, eds. Kellen Kurschinski, et. al. (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2015), p.338.
After a week of reading (and commenting on) reviews of 1917, I have finally had a chance to see it. And yes, it is good, very good. Not perfect, but very good indeed.
*Spoiler alert hereon in*
So, what works? The device of the ‘single continuous shot’ (which isn’t actually) is engaging and hugely propulsive, linking and driving the different episodes of the narrative to gripping effect. The depiction of landscape is visually impressive, particularly in its range and variety. The narrative allows for movement through a huge range of different spaces, each of which is beautifully evoked. In particular, the two transitions from the area behind the lines into the trenches, with the communication trenches rising organically from the land, are incredibly moving, while the nighttime scenes of Écoust lit by flares are, quite simply, works of art.
Some of the incidental (and not so incidental) details are lovely, and attest to the level of research undertaken. The ubiquity and size of rats, the visceral horror of crawling over the bloated bodies of the drowned, men’s ability to sleep where they drop, the importance of rumour as the way in which soldiers understood their situation, the humour they employed to wile away time, are all evocative, effective images and references which give the film a sense of emotional authenticity.
Many of secondary characterisations are also beautifully done. Impressively, while all are brief, almost none are black-and-white. Even the Germans are shown as humans with agency, neither solely evil nor solely victims. Of the recognisable cameos, while both Mark Strong and Benedict Cumberbatch are very good (the latter in particular capturing once again something ellusive about the paradoxical nature of British martial masculinity in the period), Andrew Scott’s turn as a lieutenant awaiting his relief after a long night in the lines, stands out as pure Journey’s End.
And that characterization is important for understanding what makes this film such a good film about the First World War. Because its basis is not in the history of the war, but rather in the history of its cultural representation. Yes, the script writers have read soldiers’ memoirs (and possibly also letters and diaries) as well as, I suspect, more historical analysis than they have admitted to. Yes, the costume and set designers have consulted with all the right historical consultants. But the film makers as a whole have also clearly been influenced by the films, fiction and poetry that have so profoundly shaped our understandings of the war over the past century. So, in addition to Journey’s End (1928), we get references to the visual trope of going over the top that has defined First World War films since The Battle of the Somme (1916), to the unheimlich of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ (1918), and to the final dramatic scene of Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981). This is a film as much about, and as rooted in, the artistic interpretation of the war as it is the war itself.
This positioning of the film does not detracted from its quality as a work of cinematic art in itself. But it does help to explain some of the problems with it, because it is not a perfect film. Yes, there are inconsistencies and inaccuracies of detail which, for someone with a deep familiarity with the war and its history, can have the effect of breaking into any suspension of disbelief. As a historian of medicine and the war, while I cheered the use of first field dressings, both to bind wounds and staunch blood, I was always going to notice the continuity error where a bandage disappears and then reappears, complete with a hastily tied knot that apparently managed to survive some pretty extreme activities. (I’m not sure what it is with continuity editors and First World War hand wounds, but referencing the disappearance and reappearance of Thomas’s hand wound in Downton Abbey was probably not the the effect they were aiming for.) And having a man put his wounded hand into a corpse without any reference to the heightened risk of infection (even when he ends up at a medical unit a day later) feels like a wasted opportunity for an otherwise striking historical detail.
Are these niggly little details which won’t affect the viewing enjoyment of those who haven’t spent nearly ten years researching the history of British medical care provision in the war? Yes, of course they are. Even as they affected my ability to suspend my disbelief, they didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the film as a film. And, if nothing else, they have given me a very good argument to present to a publisher of the need for a good accessible history on this subject. But they are not the only, or even the main reason why I call this a very good but not a great film, although the classification of a dressing station as a CCS is symptomatic of the wider problem.
That wider problem, bluntly, is the necessity for films to compress historic realities. There isn’t the time for the film to portray the slog of several hours, over relays between multiple dressing stations, that was the reality of evacuation to a CCS. So dressing stations, and the work of Field Ambulance bearers and orderlies disappear, with space and time collapsed to represent an over-simplified image of the medical evacuation process.
As I say, this won’t be a problem for the vast majority of viewers, but it isn’t a narrative issue limited to medical evacuations. Unfortunately, it also effects the relationship between the two central characters in ways that are confusing and ultimately problematic for the film itself. On the one hand, Blake and Schofield are part of the same regiment, comrades in arms under the authority of the same chain of command from their sergeant on up. They know each other and they know (a bit) about each other. On the other hand, their partnership is presented as accidental, a result of proximity as much as of intimacy. This allows their backstory to be told through their conversation, which is a useful dramatic device, but it robs the relationship of any sense of the intimacy that developed between men who shared lives in the trenches. [1] The result of this apparent lack of connection between the characters is that it undermines the emotional connection forged with the audience. Ultimately, I found myself unmoved either by Blake’s death or Schofield’s contemplation of his family photographs. The importance of these men as individuals, with emotional lives beyond their immediate surroundings, was never developed enough for me to care about them as anything other than carriers of the film’s driving adventure narrative.
This, of course, is a key difference between the time-limited fictional representation of a film and a historian’s engagement with the historical sources which underpin. Reading a collection of letters or a diary covering months and years of war can demonstrate the development of a man’s (or woman’s) character over time, but it can, at times, be incredibly dull. Much of war is extremely boring, and that is reflected in the source material. Most men who served in the war were not great stylists. Their diaries and even many of their letters home are filled with in jokes, family gossip relating to unknown individuals and endless quotidian details about what they had for dinner or how cold the weather is. Films, particularly commercial films, cannot afford to be boring in this way, and 1917 is anything but boring. The compression of the narrative into just under two hours means that choices have to be made, and in this case the choice was made to flatten characterisations for the sake of narrative propulsion. It is, I think, a valid artistic choice in this case, but it has to be acknowledged as that, an artistic choice about how to represent the war. The history, and the men who made it, are inevitably more complex and complicated than any single film can capture.
So, a very, very good film rather than a great one and one which tells us more about the way in which we remember the war than about the war itself. However, as well as enjoying the film, I remain fascinated by the way in which it is being used by reviewers to project their own ideas about the history and meaning of the war, with The Guardian characteristically identifying it a pacifist film (it isn’t) and Variety locating firmly in the history of Hollywood films. And I think it has a great deal to say about the way in which our reading of the war has evolved over time, not least over the course of the centenary period. In fact, I would suggest that this film marks a good moment for Dan Todman to update The Great War: Myth and Memory (2005) to include another generation’s worth of interpretations of the war.
So, as a historian and teacher of history, would I recommend 1917 to students of the history of the war? Only in conjunction with primary sources to illuminate and deepen understanding of its representation. Would I use it as a source for teaching the history of the memory of the war and its cultural representation in Britain? In a heartbeat. It has earned its place in the canon of great Great War fictions.
[1] Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), Chapter 3.
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