The Great War and Modern Memory by Fussell Paul;

Author:Fussell, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 1975-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

SURVIVALS

Nobody alive during the war, whether a combatant or not, ever got over its special diction and system of metaphor, its whole jargon of techniques and tactics and strategy. (One reason we can use a term like tactics so readily, literally or in metaphors, is that the Great War taught it to us.) And often what impressed itself so deeply was something more than language. Not a few works written during the war, and written about matters far distant from the war, carry more of the war about them than is always recognized. Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, published in 1918, is an example. Strachey was working on it all during the long years of heartbreaking frontal assaults on the German line, and the repeated and costly aborting of these attacks seems to have augmented his appreciation of the values of innuendo and the oblique, of working up on a position by shrewd maneuver. In working up on the Victorians, the “direct method,” as he says in his Preface, won’t do: “It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict [the Victorian Age]. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear. …”96 (We may be reminded of I. A. Richards blowing up the Hindenburg Line in 1926.) In the same way we can observe how Strachey’s impatience with Haig’s Scottish rigidity and faith in a Haig-like God underlies some of the acerbity with which he treats the last of his Eminent Victorians, General Gordon, slaughtered at Khartoum for his stubbornness and megalomania.

Data entering the consciousness during the war emerge long afterward as metaphor. Blunden conceives of memory itself as very like a trench system, with main stems and lesser branches, as well as “saps” for reaching minor “positions”: “Let the smoke of the German breakfast fires, yes, and the savor of their coffee, rise in these pages [of Undertones of War], and be kindly mused upon in our neighboring saps of retrogression.”97 In 1948 Sassoon, searching for a figure to indicate the relation of his wartime poems to their context of civilian complacency, chooses to see them as Very lights, “rockets sent up to illuminate the darkness.”98 Stephen Spender reports on his father’s “fairly extensive vocabulary of military metaphor.” He remembers: “Whenever one of us asked him a favor, he would hold his head down with a butting gesture, and, looking up from under his shaggy sandy eyebrows, say: ‘You are trying to get round my flank.’ ”99 One result of the persistence of Great War rhetoric is that the contours of the Second War tend to merge with those of the First. In 1940 eighteen-year-old Colin Perry was observing the London Blitz from the perspective of Great War memoirs, of which he was a devotee. As he says, “I like reading books about the last war in this one.”100 The

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