The War Books Controversy and Changing Attitudes Towards the War

      From 1927-1933, the bulk of the Canonical War Books were published. These included the following:
Memoirs of A Foxhunting Man Siegfried Sassoon (1928)
Undertones of War, Edmund Blunden (1928)
All Quiet on the Western Front, Eric Maria Remarque (1929)
Poems, Wilfred Owen (edited by Blunden, 1930)
Her Privates We, Frederic Manning (Now know as The Middle Parts of Fortune), (1929)
Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves (1929)
Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain (1933)
A Passionate Prodigality (Guy Chapman, 1933).

These are the books and authors that we now recognize as the formative texts of the Great War. They perpetrate the “mud blood and poppies” image of a war that is white, middle-class, often homosexual, shellshocked, and based entirely around the Western Front. They enforce the idea of a generation lost and embittered by the war, unable to exist in an uncaring society which deliberately shunned understanding of the war they had seen. This is the form of the war that is taught today in schools and is pursued through most historical writing, a myth which follows the ethos of Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est and champions his idea of “The Pity of War”.

It is essential to a cultural understanding of the war to investigate and counteract this myth. The War Books Controversy, occurring at roughly the same time as Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover was banned, astonished and outraged the civilian public. These people were unprepared for the vicious onslaught of these authors, and the ideas which they brought to the forefront of their works. The books highlighted the weakness of the individual, the fear and pettiness of the men who had served at the front. Addtionally, the reliance of many of the authors on the relatively new and still discredited area of psychotherapy gave a very negative view of the personal strength of the officer class. It seemed from the books that most of the men involved in the war were either monsters or feeble-minded; and the fact that these books were in the main written by what was supposedly the backbone of British society was even more un-nerving. Many people dismissed them as outright lies, whereas others felt that the books were a deliberate attack on the concepts of English National Identity.What is not discussed in modern readings is how soldiers responded to these texts. Whilst the texts told “the truth” about the war, they were the first to describe it in terms of horror, imcompetance, mental instability and dehumanisation. For many men this was a concept which they had actively taken part in suppressing; something they did not want to discuss or to reveal to their relatives. On the other hand, many civilians who had been well aware of the conditions in the trenches were also actively engaged in suppressing the unpleasant aspects of the war. The war books heralded a dramatic change in the way that the war was understood and depicted.

      In order to understand how violent this change was, extracts from a book called No Joke have been reproduced on this site (click here to read them). No Joke was published in 1929, but several factors prevent it form becoming part of the war books genre. Firstly, the author is known by the pseudonym Crascredo and is not identified specifically. Secondly, the book is illustrated by G.D.Armour; immediately relegating it into the domain of non-canonical literature. The book is separated into a series of short chapters, each dealing with aspects of army life during the war. However, No Joke is a strange book; one which seems unable to decide what it’s dominate message ought to be. It is at once bitterly cynical and dismissive, yet at the same time it still seems to uphold the pre-war ethos of the stiff upper lip. Despite the disparaging attitude towards the war that the book appears to suggest, No Joke closes with the conclusion that the war has been a success, a prelude to peace. The author anticipates that the completion of the conditions outlined in the Versailles Treaty will bring a new era of peace, and proclaiming “We have a prompting to conquer Fear and Greed, Suspicion and Hatred, and we have perhaps the courage to do so”.
  
       As the three chapters presented here show, No Joke makes an uneasy read; veering between anecdotal episodes and condemnations within the same paragraph. As a historical document, the book emphasizes the difficulty of transmitting the war experience. The erratic nature of the chapters and the ways in which each claim is always intensely justified demonstrates how authors were struggling to convey the war experience. No Joke seems to want to condemn the war, but lacks the tools to do so. Unlike the books and poems of Sassoon, Blunden and Owen, it does not establish a new voice. No Joke demonstrates how untransmittable the war experience has become in the period after the war; it cannot be conveyed within the parameters of 1920’s literature. Thus the jarring motion of the writing, veering between extremes assuring the reader that the soldiers “behaved in the only way that they could”, and the depiction of the war as a humourless disaster from which there were no salvageable merits.

       Books like No Joke are far more typical of the writing of the time. Genre fiction, thrillers and popular magazines were all engaged in presenting the war in a positive light, shielding the re-integrated population from the less pleasant aspects of the war. The bitterness and aggression found in earlier soldiers’ journals, songs and performances had been suppressed and sanctified for the civilian populace. Understandably, many returning soldiers had no wish to discuss their experiences, and again, although many people were aware of the “truth” about the war, it was neither discussed nor represented in popular ideologies. To talk about the war in a negative light was still seen as unpatriotic and cowardly – a poor reflection on the individual. There was however, an undercurrent throughout cultural production which surfaces in books such as No Joke. The huge amount of casualties alone were a highly visible reminder that the war had taken it’s toll on society, and although the concept of “the lost generation” that is perpetrated today is largely a myth, the establishment of memorials, the presence of veterans and the economic instability that followed the war were all highly visible indications that the war had altered society in a substancial way. The problem was representing these new ideologies in a satisfactory way. No Joke describes the Twentieth century so far as “a part of this life which has been so bitter for so many but remains so very interesting”, and this is its problem. Like so much of the literature of the time which has not survived into the millennium, it lacks a structure to describe the war experience, a structure that writers like Sassoon, Owen and Rosenberg only provided imperfectly. Hence No Joke tries to use comedy as a bridging device between making light of the situation, and presenting it utterly starkly, but is unsuccessful. Despite the authors’ claims, it is possible to read through his text and see that the war was being taken very seriously indeed. Crascredo’s writing struggles to make the war funny through anecdotes, whilst at the same time covertly recognising that the war could not possibly be seen as any kind of joke, unless it was a black one. At the same time, his writing is the start of the innovation that lead to the War Books Controversy; an attempt to break free of an obsolete style.

  During this period, war comedy was produced in a very uneasy way, eventually surpassed by the innovative war writers, whose new techniques replaced those of the 1920’s. These techniques no longer allowed comedy to be part of the war experience, as they relied on a starkness and unremittingly aggressive, violent recollection. It is this new ethos that presents an almost imcomprehensible barrier between texts about the war during the 1920’s and modern readers.

Extracts From No Joke. Main Page.