Return to the source

In four hours I’ll be boarding a train that will take me back to London ON for the first time since the completion of my MA at the University of Western Ontario in the fall of 2008.  It’s not that I’ve had no reason to go back since then – the people I like are still there, the city still has things to appeal to me.  It’s just never come up, somehow.

Still, all that changed when I was informed that several departments at the university had joined forces to hold a conference that’s right up my alley.  The Great War: From Memory to History will run from November 10th through 12th, and will see scholars from all corners of the earth meet to discuss the ways in which the war has been chronicled, remembered, even misunderstood.

One of those scholars is me, as it happens.  I’ll be presenting a paper detailing the history of alternate histories of the war, which will provide a sense of the war’s place in allhistorical studies and offer inquiry into just why there aren’t more retro-speculative engagements with a military and cultural event that had such awesome consequences.  Arthur Conan Doyle and Jorge Luis Borges will both be cited; it will be a hell of a show.

I look forward to the trip immensely as a chance to return to the city I called home for five years and reconnect with the people and places that meant so much to me, but also as an opportunity to meet other academics in my field.  This will be the first time since the development of my obsession with this subject that I’ll be in the same room with more than one other person who’s just as interested in it as I am.  It should be quite a treat.

A report will surely follow, so stay tuned.

An unsung heroine

The BBC is reporting the discovery that a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry – a young woman named Mabel Elliott – was instrumental in breaking up a German spy ring in 1915.  The enterprising chemist was working as a censor for the War Ministry in London and intercepted letters sent by an “American” businessman to his contacts in Holland:

The German spy, Anton Kuepferle, had arrived in Liverpool from the United States, under the guise of being an American citizen and wool merchant.

But Miss Elliott found that his business letters to an address in Holland contained secret writing in lemon juice, which when treated revealed information about defence deployments around London and Royal Navy movements around the coast.

Mr Kuepferle was arrested and accused of spying, using invisible ink to send messages to the German secret services.

US newspapers carried stories of his claim to be an innocent American salesman – and described how he had been under surveillance in his hotel room near Victoria Station in London.

But before his trial had been concluded, the accused spy was found hanged in his cell, after apparently using a silk scarf to kill himself. He was said to have left a message admitting that he was a German officer.

A further two spies who were accomplices of Mr Kuepferle were also caught.

Not a very surprising discovery – such things likely happened quite regularly – but a useful reminder that the plots of so many juvenile novels at the time were not just fanciful.  To go through that section in Hager and Taylor’s The Novels of World War I: An Annotated Bibliography (for example) is to pass entry after entry consisting of something like, “Tom and his pal Jack/Mary and her friend Kate notice something suspicious and save the day by uncovering a German spy ring.”  It does tend to sound a bit monotonous, but it was a fruitful note to strike.  With little else they could actually contribute to the war effort, children – diminutive, innocent, unnoticed – could at least relish the prospect of becoming sleuthing informers.

Miss Elliott’s story also stands as a much-needed reminder that there were, in fact, plenty of German spies in England.  A thing can have propagandic value – can be used, literally, as propaganda – and still be quite true.

The Macrone Conspiracy

This was originally produced as a comment on a post at Prof. Holger Syme’s excellent blog, but I’m pleased enough with it to reproduce it here.  A commenter on Prof. Syme’s ongoing series of posts about the absurdity of the Shakespearean authorship debate humourously extended the idea to other works of literature – in this case, those of Dickens:

Are you then implying, Steven, that “Sketches by Boz” and other, even greater tomes of literature could actually have been written by an uneducated former pauper named Charles Dickens? –And that his storehouse of knowledge was found in books and in travelling the streets of London? Preposterous. Who is this mysterious, inimitable “Boz”-REALLY?

And so:

With regard to the true authorship of the Sketches by Boz, all evidence points to the matchless James Boswell (1740 – 1795), whose meditations upon his time in London and the individuals whose society he enjoyed have proven so enriching to readers interested in that city.

The discovery of his private papers at Malahide in the 1920s saw a number of his personal journals published for the consumption of an enthusiastic public, but orthodox scholars failed to realize that those papers constituted only what had been left over after the same collection had been thoroughly plundered almost a century before.  The Anglo-Irish publisher John Macrone had been on holiday at the castle in 1831 and discovered the trove of papers in an attic while seeking a place to smoke his pipe in defiance of his hectoring wife.  The papers found in that dusty trunk were of two characters; the smaller part were the personal journals and recollections that would be rediscovered later, but the greater consisted of dozens of bound manuscripts and an assortment of loose, diminutive works, all of them largely fictional pastiches of life in London as Boswell had seen it.

For indeed, the Sketches, as Macrone described them upon the commencement of their publication in 1833, began their lives as yet further episodes from Boswell’s endless wanderings about the streets of the Capital.  The most famous of his fictional engagements with the City and her denizens, of course, can be found in Boswell’s Life of his greatest creation – the ironical lexicographer, Dr. Samuel Johnson – but the short vignettes that Macrone appropriated were those which had been cut from that impressive tome for want of space.  The decision to excise them was made all the more simple by the degree to which their style differed from that of the rest of the book; they were written at a time when a particularly vicious case of the pox had seen Boswell heavily dosed with laudanum, and the work produced during this period was scarcely recognizable as his own.  Many of the larger, discrete manuscripts were noted to originate from this period as well.

Macrone was immediately presented with a problem: the texts he had purloined were clearly set in a London far removed from the one in which he wished to propagate them, and contained many references to political and social matters that would immediately date them in the eyes of an astute reader.  Inasmuch as they had an excess of things undesirable, so too did they lack much that was desired: nowhere at all were to be found any mention of the defeat of the Corsican Tyrant, the reigns of those august monarchs George IV and William IV, the widespread adoption of the steam engine in transport, or any one of a hundred other minor details that lend verisimilitude without straining plausibility.

By way of a solution, Macrone – no mean prose stylist himself, owing to the classical education enjoyed during his upbringing and a shrewd understanding of the tastes of that novel and growing “reading public” – exercised a program of strict substitution.  Where the texts were anachronistic (elaborate periwigs, the American Question, the latest triumph of Mr. Garrick), he replaced the offending passages with references to something modern (locomotive rail travel, the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act, His Grace the Duke of Wellington).  Where the speech of certain characters was too old-fashioned and affected to pass as contemporary intercourse, he rewrote each line in a dialect of some sort – the ever-inscrutable Cockney being a favourite.

Not wishing to hazard all on a single toss, Macrone started by releasing only a handful of minor pieces from among the reams of paper he had stolen – the Sketches already alluded to.  The first such sketch appeared in the December issue of The Monthly Magazine, and proved an immediate hit.

The reader will no doubt feel, with the benefit of hindsight, that Macrone’s chosen pseudonym of “Boz” was scarcely adequate concealment, and this eventually proved to be the case.  No one ever seemed to suspect that James Boswell was actually the author of the works being devoured by all the reading world – an honour not accorded to his writings in decades – but wide and loud was the cry for the mysterious author to step forward and reveal himself.  Macrone was thus faced with yet another problem.  The successes of such poetical gentlemen as Messrs Byron, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley had shown the public ready to make heroes of its favoured authors, but Macrone had nobody to present to them upon whom could be laid the laurels.  He could scarcely step forward and claim himself the tales’ originator; his friends and family knew him and his habits too well to believe that he would have the time to write at such length and with such insight.

Fate cast a line into his hands.  His weekly round of the local inns and pubs had brought him into contact with a young man of little prospects but great personal charisma.  This ill-starred fellow had been born into modest means but soon reduced to the most abject poverty, with his father sent to the debtor’s prison at Marshalsea and all the family forced to work for their support and the patriarch’s release.  He spent his days working in a warehouse for pennies, and fell into the habit of taking a pint or two on his way home.  It was while thus occupied that Macrone first found him, and a fast friendship developed.  It turned out that the young man had literary aspirations – had even looked into becoming a reporter of political speeches.  It was too perfect.

That man’s name was Charles John Huffam Dickens.  This ill-schooled issue of poorhouse and prison agreed to lend his name to the Boswell manuscripts that Macrone intended to slowly publish over the course of the coming years, the proceeds of the ruse being split 80/20 – in Macrone’s favour.  Macrone showed him the dozens of Boswell’s novels and stories that were already complete, needing only the substitution of modern elements for the old.  Dickens understood well what was expected of him.

In 1836, “Boz” was revealed as Charles Dickens, and all of England rejoiced.

In 1837, John Macrone – aged 28 and in excellent health – died suddenly, mysteriously, and without warning.  Dickens contacted the greatest authors in England to contribute to a small volume, The Pic-Nic Papers, the sales of which would raise money for Macrone’s widow.  She received 450 pounds, and brought all relations with Dickens to an end.

It is surely a matter of complete coincidence that, that very year, an inexperienced young girl named Alexandrina Victoria ascended the throne…

Against Anonymous

[I've decided to eschew my usual film review format because this isn't really a review so much as it is a revilement.  I do not think anyone should see Roland Emmerich's Anonymous (2011), of which the best that may be said is that it proves even an absurd fiasco can be boring.  It's also been a while since I've reviewed any films at all, here, so falling back into the mode wouldn't exactly be as easy as one might hope.

Still, for the sake of consistency in the master list of reviews, consider this a 4/10.]

The Cavalry Went Through

[Cross-posted from There Are Real Things; yes, this means I'm regularly writing again - and with colleagues, at that!  More stuff will gradually be posted here, too, as I get back into the swing of it.]

The Cavalry Went Through
Bernard Newman
Gollancz; 1930 .
288p.  First reading.

While poring over Cyril Falls’ immensely useful War Books: A Critical Guide, a 1930 index of what Falls considered to have been the most important or interesting books about the Great War that had yet been written, I stumbled across an entry in the “Fiction” section that immediately caught my eye.  Everything else had been in the familiar line of short stories illustrating “slices of life”, or somewhat fictionalized memoirs, or novels drenched in painstaking verisimilitude.  Those who spend a lot of time studying the War will be familiar with the problem.  Anyway, The Cavalry Went Through, a book of which I had never heard written by an author of whom I had also never heard, stood out from the rest of them like fire on a mountaintop.  All the other books were focused on coming to grips with what happened, or with complaining about what happened, or with even just, in whatever sense, expressing what happened; The Cavalry Went Through is purposefully about what did not happen.

The field of speculative historical fiction is an especially rich one, albeit one often populated by second-tier (if prolific) writers.  Harry Turtledove is a prime example of this trend, though there are others.  For his own part, Bernard Newman was more at home in the espionage and counter-espionage genre, writing some hundred books (both fictional and non-fictional) on the subject while maintaining a lively career as a lecturer and public intellectual.  His first novel, though, was The Cavalry Went Through, and it was informed as much by Newman’s own very real experiences during the Great War as it was by whatever mischievous impulse tends to motivate those determined to unsettle history with their prose.

The concept of The Cavalry Went Through is simple enough: a brilliant, charismatic and entirely fictitious British general arrives on the Western Front in 1915 after astonishing successes in the African theatre and, through a mixture of unorthodox methods and an abandonment of the unofficial British “spirit of the defensive”, brings the War to a conclusion with the rout of the German army in Summer of 1917.  The way in which this happens is militarily sound but narratively difficult; it relies on coincidences and such that are, as Falls puts it, “wildly improbably and [which] could hardly stand detailed criticism.”  The fact that our victorious general never loses an engagement – never even comes close – is significant, but the ideas in play are nevertheless amazing.

For it is not just in some conventional manner that Gen. Henry Berrington Duncan establishes himself as the most famous man in the world.  Very far from it.  He is an intriguing mixture of Jan Smuts and Napoleon Bonaparte – beloved by his men, respected by his enemies, and never willing to let the established canons of military propriety get in the way of exploiting any weakness his opponents happen to offer.  His men wear any old uniform, and speak familiarly to one another regardless of rank.  Their parades and inspections are a disgrace.  More importantly, though, there is no respecting of persons: good ideas are good even if they come from a subaltern.  Every man under his command has been taught intermediate German – to expedite interrogations and the deciphering of captured documents – and instead of idling away with chess or checkers or cards in their leisure time they play a game of Duncan’s own devising, in which the practical possibilities of Western Front trench warfare are replicated on game boards constructed to be accurate topographical representations of the stretch of lines upon which the soldiers find themselves.

In short, General Duncan has no interest in merely holding on to the territory behind him.  He’ll never gain it for Britain even if he wins.   It’s not his territory: it belongs to Belgium and France.  There is no conceivable reason for him to be content with a stalemate, and he pushes for complete victory at all times.

The methods he employs in doing this are fascinating.  Realizing quickly that the tentative, cautious quality of British operations in general has been keeping them from making any significant gains (while also preventing them from incurring any significant losses), Duncan instead opts for bold strokes at unexpected points.  His means of achieving these bold strokes are notable.  Rather than sending the entire line forward in an attempt to take and hold the German trenches opposite them, he instead employs a squad of incredibly stealthy African scouts to go ahead in silence, kill everyone in the initial German trench for a hundred yards or so in both directions (again in complete silence), and then sends a single-file stream of highly-trained commandos through the gap – and this always in the dead of night.  This procedure is repeated at each successive support line, and more and more men pour through the aperture.  Some of them attack the German lines from the rear, acutely aware of how intolerable a night attack from that direction can be, but most of them disperse into the countryside behind the lines in groups of two or three to wreak as much havoc as they possibly can before being captured or killed.  Some of them return to tell the tale, but not many.

Duncan – and, by necessity, Bernard Newman – anticipates the absolutely essential nature of small, squad-based combat when it comes to modern warfare, but that isn’t all.  When the time comes to finish the fight and send the Germans rushing back to Berlin, the methods he employs are of a sort that seem more modern than the time in which he was writing would allow.  It comes down to this: to win the War in 1917, General Duncan employs a mixture of what we now call Blitzkrieg (which had not yet been really articulated by anyone), suicidal intelligence measures (which were then thought to be intolerably unsporting and are even now quite iffy), and the terror-bombing of Berlin from the air (which did not happen at all during the War, for any reason, so far as I’ve been able to discover).  He willingly gives up strategically useless territory regardless of its political significance, valuing the potential for pincer movements more highly.  He rejects utterly the interference of cabinet ministers and other nuisances, articulating (in some cases quite literally and not without anger) a vision of the successful general as being by necessity a sort of unaccountable dictator.  It succeeds in this case because Henry Berrington Duncan is a good man, but we must wonder at its universal applicability.

There’s lots more here to like.  While the book is not what I would call high literature when it comes to its depth or tone, there are numerous completely enjoyable vignettes in which the bolder exploits of certain minor characters are described.  Another source of fun (for those inclined towards such things) can be found in thinly-disguised historical figures under suggestive false names (Lord Kitchener becomes Lord Khartner, after his popular sobriquet, “Kitchener of Khartoum;” the two successive British commanders-in-chief, Sir John French and Sir Douglas Haig, are collapsed into Sir John Douglas;  Worton Spender, one of the main characters, is apparently Winston Churchill; and so on).  Another high point is a thrilling section in which the 1915 failure at Gallipoli is avenged by the successful invasion of the Dardanelles and the fall of Constantinople.

Some criticisms must be offered, however.  Apart from the narrative implausibility of it all, as noted above, there’s a certain tendency towards under-description of action throughout the piece.  This often presents itself in the form of an annoying tic of Newman’s; I lost count very quickly of the number of times he resorts to describing something as “indescribable” or “beyond description” – once thrice on a single page.  The under-descriptive problem manifests itself most notably when it comes to the cavalry to which the book’s very title alludes.  It really is a thrilling and beautiful moment when the gap in the German lines is consolidated and the great wave roars in, but we don’t really hear much more about it afterward, unfortunately.  This is the moment towards which the book – and the actual war – had been working all along, but it’s all we can do to hear even a hint of what the cavalry actually accomplishes once the breakthrough is achieved.  That’s fine, I guess, because we can well imagine it, but still… come on, Newman.

There are also moral concerns.  Though Duncan takes a very sympathetic view of how soldiers with shellshock or other nervous problems should be treated (indeed, his position on this is exemplary), he is much less interested in questions of dignity and humane treatment when it comes the enemy.  At several points throughout their shared adventures Duncan and Newman-as-narrator complain bitterly about having had to take actual prisoners, preferring it immensely when the enemy is either caught by surprise before he can throw down his arms or else simply refuses to do so.  The tactics of the commando teams sent behind the German lines also warrant caution; while they are undoubtedly effective, there’s a monstrousness to them that cannot easily be vindicated in Just War terms.  Newman’s response to this problem in a footnote is hardly satisfactory: “Certain critics have condemned the methods of the [commando] troops as brutal: of course they were, but so is all war.  There is no differentiation in degrees of brutality.”  We cannot easily agree.

All in all, it’s a fast, basically satisfying read.  Those with a pronounced interest in speculative militaria generally or the Great War particularly will likely be better served by The Cavalry Went Through than most, but just because a book is narrow in application doesn’t mean it can’t be a success.  I doubt very much that it’s still appreciably in print, so you’ll probably have to consult a library (and likely inter-library loan, at that) to secure a copy, but it’s well worth the effort.

It takes all kinds to make a war

Life is hard for everyone, even behind the lines.  One Pvt. A.J. Abraham, looking back to his arrival in France in 1918, recalls the somewhat bewildering difficulties faced by the good-natured Tommy as he made his way to the front:

The natives took no notice of us until we moved off, then a number of children, carrying trays of chocolate, emerged from doorways and alleys, and bore down on us.  A bright pretty little girl of about ten or eleven came prancing up to me with her tray. . .  She quoted me one franc for a slab of a make unknown to me . . . and I was able to produce the correct amount.  A man in front of me called to the same girl as she turned away from me and said that he would like a similar bar.  She handed him one and he proffered half a crown which she snatched and immediately skipped away without offering him any change.  As a franc of that time was equivalent to ten pence she had got herself a dissatisfied customer and he called out to her, “Here, what about my change?”  This sweet little girl replied, “Garn you fuckin long barstid” and galloped off to another part of the column.

Oh dear.

From Belloc’s Letters

In 1958, Robert Speaight – a Hilaire Belloc scholar, among other specialties – released a volume of Belloc’s collected letters.  This puts me in the uncomfortable position of being intensely grateful in a practical sense while being filled with a seething rage in a scholarly sense.

Some of you may remember my fulminations against the editorial practices employed by the editor of the edition of George MacDonald’s Sir Gibbie that I read.  Speaight’s editorial malfeasances aren’t worse than those of Ms. Yates (which almost defy belief) , but they’re still pretty horrifying in their own right.

Speaight was confronted with several choices, and he made all the wrong ones.  He had access to a massive collection of Belloc’s letters, but he chose to only include some of them in the volume in question.  Many were excluded for not being interesting (in his opinion), but still more were excluded because they had already been reprinted in any one of a half-dozen now-completely-obscure memoirs and biographies of Belloc that had come out prior to Speaight’s own.  If I had access to those books I might not mind so much, but I don’t.  Very few people do have such access.  Such is the state of Belloc scholarship.

In any event, the uncollected letters — whether reprinted in other volumes or not — returned to the custody of those who had initially shown them to him, and – all of those people now being quite dead – the prospect of ever tracking them down again in such a fortuitous manner seems unlikely indeed.  But hey, at least we’ve got the letters he did want to include, right?  Right?

Well, mostly.  Speaight was understandably limited by what letters were actually available in the first place, so the selection as it stands is oddly sparse in terms of Belloc’s most intimate relationships due to the state of other estates and their collected papers.  There are almost no letters from Belloc to Chesterton in this volume, for example, and none at all from Belloc to anyone in his family – including to his wife – apart from one or two to his youngest son, Peter.  All of the great tragedies of Belloc’s life are entirely glossed over in this collection.  The death of his still-young and much beloved wife in early 1914, the death of his son Louis (in the Royal Flying Corps) in 1918, the death of Chesterton in 1936, the death of his son Peter (on active service as a marine in 1942) — all nowhere to be mentioned, for the most part, in any of them.  It’s a crying shame.

Speaight might at least have included the rest of the available correspondence in full, but no.  That would be too something.  Too freaking reasonable.  Instead:

Only a few of his letters are produced here in full.  My aim has been to give a picture of Belloc’s versatility, and often it has seemed worth while to give a mere sentence or two when a joke, a couplet or a pregnant observation were embedded in matter which would otherwise have no interest for the reader.

Weeeeeep

I had hoped to be my own judge of what held interest for me — especially as I must now examine Belloc with the ruthless lens of the dissertation writer — but still… I am glad that we’ve got what we’ve got.  Sort of.

All of which is just a prelude to the following, which is a delightful selection (I guess) from a letter Belloc sent to Lady Juliet Duff in August of 1923:

I have had such a funny experience.  An old tout who writes tosh verse in the British Museum all about God and on the lowest level, sent me his tosh verse to “express an opinion which might be added to the many he had received from distinguished people.”  I opened the document he enclosed — and there was half of England, all saying how much they admired his verses.  Nancy Astor, the Bishop of London, Baldwin, Winston, Bottomley, Lloyd George, the Archbishop of Canterbury — at least a hundred of the people who love the limelight and all falling over each other to praise his silly stuff under a vague impression — which all such people have — that one must keep well with everyone.  The only dignified reply was from Haig through a secretary to say that he had received the verses.  Nancy Astor wrote saying they raised people nearer to Christ, and the Bishop of London said they were a gleam of light in a world which had, alas! forgotten Gawd.

He ought to be crushed to a pulp in a mortar and then drawn through a sieve.

Whether he means the poet or the Bishop of London is more than I can say.

Oddly enough, several weeks ago I put it to a frustrated colleague that I cared as much about what Siegfried Sassoon thought of the conduct of the Great War as I did about what Earl Haig thought of poetry.  That little snippet about Haig’s reply to this poet was pretty gratifying, as a consequence.

History over immediacy

From an astounding e-mail I just received from the university:

For Remembrance Day 2010, the Senate of the University of Ottawa has resolved to grant academic accommodation that will allow students, if they so desire, to attend November 11 activities between 10 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. without affecting their academic average. The following is a copy of the Senate resolution:

The Senate asks professors who teach courses on November 11, from 10:00 to 11:30 a.m., and who have scheduled exams or other assignments for this period, to offer, as far as possible, academic accommodation in order to allow students who want to partake in Remembrance Day activities to do so without having their academic average affected.

Good.

The Great War: Still winning since 1918*.

[* = From an excellent turn of phrase by Edmund Blunden, speaking in however biased a manner of the Battle of the Somme in 1916: "By the end of the day both sides had seen, in a sad scrawl of broken earth and murdered men, the answer to the question.  No road.  No thoroughfare.  Neither race had won, nor could win, the War.  The War had won, and would go on winning."]

The Trench (1999)

Given that so much of my absence from regular posting has been occasioned by how engrossed I’ve become in working on my doctoral thesis, I figured this latest Return To Blogging might as well have something to do with that thesis.  If only to keep us all sane.

William Boyd’s first – and only – outing as a director sees him deliver a film about the Great War that is less a compelling engagement with its subject than it is a thoughtless pastiche.  This is a terrible shame, to be sure, as movies about 14-18 lie pretty thin on the ground, and it’s irritating to have one of the few modern examples of this genre be so miserably poor.  5/10

 

The Oval Bookshelf

There’s a short and somewhat provocative article at NRO concerning the reading habits of the President(s) of the United States.  It’s not great, to be sure, but it does point to an issue of considerable interest to those in the discipline in which I work: what do people in power read for pleasure?  Or – more importantly – for personal edification and enlightenment?

There have been regrettably few major modern engagements with this issue, and I guess the power dynamics involved may account for that.  The presidents and prime ministers and popes and so forth could potentially subject us to a census concerning our reading habits, if they wished; we have no authority by which to similarly examine them.  The best we can do with living rulers is to snap up chance glimpses of books sitting on their desks or being carried by aides, or wring a morsel or two from a non-policy-oriented interview.  It becomes somewhat easier, posthumously, as we can examine their personal papers, letters, notes, and so on, to develop a picture of just what (if anything) they were reading.

The article above notes that Obama recently mentioned he was reading Edmund Morris’ The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.  And well he should!  It’s terrific.  It reminded me that I had been meaning to make a post about Roosevelt’s own reading habits – which were expansive, to say the least – but I simply don’t have the time to go into it in any depth just now.  Those likely to be reading this blog will perhaps be gratified to discover that he greatly enjoyed Leacock’s Nonsense Novels, Chesterton’s Heretics (if I remember correctly), and various works of Kipling, with whom he also kept up a lively correspondence.  They were sources of grim comfort to one another when their respective sons were killed in the Great War (John Kipling at the Battle of Loos in 1915; Quentin Roosevelt in action with the USAAF, shot down in 1918), and had certain sympathies on certain subjects besides.

More on that later, though.