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That final sentence carries with it, surely, a clear if coded reference to the new style of writing about the recent war that was beginning at that time to make increasingly significant waves, a style of which, evidently, though not unexpectedly, Cyril Falls did not wholly approve. Heralded much earlier in the decade by C. E. Montague’s grounding-breaking book,
Disenchantment
, first published in 1922 – the message of which was clearly implied by its title – the books which now dominated the literary scene were to become the most famous and influential to emerge from the First World War, a conflict which to this day has never been allowed to slip quietly into the past, but remains a permanent focus of controversy. It is a conflict on which after almost a hundred years, (to borrow a key-note phrase from another area of continuing cultural disagreement), many still look back in anger.

To name some of the titles which appeared at this time: the year 1928 saw the publication of Edmund Blunden’s
Undertones of War
, while 1929 produced a positive harvest including Richard Aldington’s
Death of a Hero
, Robert Graves’s
Goodbye to All That
, Charles Carrington’s memoir
A Subaltern’s War
(written under the pseudonym of Charles Edmonds), and the English translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s
All Quiet on the Western Front
, a striking ‘take’ on the war from the point of view of the former enemy.

Falls’s comments on the above were mixed. He had high praise for Edmund Blunden, claiming that his memoir was ‘probably the only single book we have had in English which really reaches the stature of its subject’; he saw some virtue in Richard Aldington’s offering, in spite of describing it as ‘one of the bitterest war novels that has been written’, but he was deeply critical of the works by Graves and Remarque. For the latter he had no time at all, blaming his book’s runaway success on the massive publicity campaign that had preceded its arrival; and condemning it as ‘frank propaganda’ by an author who ‘appears to know singularly little of certain of the details which he describes’. He praised Graves for his excellent war scenes, but found that overall his attitude ‘left a disagreeable impression. One might gather that thousands of men instead of a few hundred were executed, and that suicides were as common as blackberries. He is in short an example of the “intellectual”, whose intelligence with regard to the War penetrates a much shorter distance than that of the plain man.’ He had highest praise of all for Charles Edmonds: ‘The writer does not make war any prettier than its ugly self, but he shows that ordinary men endured it without becoming the shambling woebegone spectres so often depicted. These spectres would not have been victorious against the worst troops in the world. Mr Edmonds lets us see how and why the real men were victorious against the best.’

The following year, 1930, provided a further crop, including, as already stated, Cyril Falls’s own
War Books
, which appeared late enough to catch
Everyman at War
but too soon for Siegfried Sassoon’s
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
, though he had warm praise for its already published predecessor,
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
, which, while mainly a paean for a lost peace, managed to include some brief war scenes which he found ‘impressive’.

Another book of that year for which I think Falls would have not have found place even had it appeared in time, but which I see as a work of considerable significance in the present discussion, in that it enshrined a markedly different view of the world of the Western Front from that purveyed by the majority of the books mentioned above, was the collected reprint of the most famous of the trench magazines produced during the war,
The Wipers Times
.

The story of the founding of that magazine has been often told. In brief, two officers of the 12th Sherwood Foresters, Captain (later Colonel) F. J. Roberts and Lieutenant (later Major) J. H. Pearson, found an abandoned printing press somewhere in the ruins of Ypres, ‘capital’ of that infamous killing-ground known as the Ypres Salient, ‘acquired’ it, and turned their unofficial ownership of it to excellent effect by producing between February 1916 and December 1918 over twenty editions, which won such a reputation for good writing and wit that all but its last two issues were republished in Britain to considerable acclaim while the war was still in progress.

In 1930 it was thought timely to give the magazine a further airing, in a handsome collected edition, with a Foreword by a commander widely admired by the troops during the war, Field Marshal Sir Herbert, now Lord, Plumer, and an Introduction by the chief editor, F. J. Roberts. Roberts had mocked the military hierarchy and joked about almost every aspect of the Western Front war, but he had firmly believed in the justice of the cause for which so many had suffered and died, and he had not been pleased to find that the new wave of publications flooding the nation’s bookshops appeared to denigrate the values in which he and his like had so firmly believed.

He declared his hand at once in the volume’s dedication. Whereas an earlier compilation had been dedicated to those who had ‘gone west’; this volume carried a more assertive message, doubtless devised by Roberts himself:

TO THE SOLDIERS OF THE SALIENT
AND THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WAR

The ‘truth about the war’ was, clearly,
his
truth as he saw it, not the new truth now being promulgated to the disadvantage of the old.

He showed his hand even more pointedly in his Introduction by resorting to a rousing foray in the house style of
The Wipers Times
which had been its special hallmark, harking back to the time of the great German offensive launched on 21 March 1918, which, historically, had been the event that was most responsible for taking his magazine off the presses for much of the war’s final year. Far from yielding ground to the best-selling titles commanding the field in 1930, he took a deliberate, brilliant lunge at them, as it so happened, very much in line with the views expressed by Cyril Falls:

Hastily taking two aspirin and placing helmet, gas, in position, I looked out of the door, only to find the beautiful March morning obscured by what seemed to be one of London’s best old-style November fogs. Shouting for batman, Adjutant, Sergeant, Sergeant-Major and the Mess-Waiter, I emerged into the chilly air, which was being torn and rent in the most alarming way. All was
not
quiet on the Western Front, the Sub-Editor and I drank a case of whiskey, shot the Padre for cowardice and said “good–bye to all that”. (The influence of these modern War Books is most insidious.)

Sadly, this was Roberts’ last bow. He faded from the scene, wrote no more about the war or any other subject, emigrating to Canada to take up his pre-1914 profession as a mining engineer and dying in obscurity in the 1960s. The founder of
The Wipers Times
was not honoured as he surely should have been by an obituary in the newspaper whose title he had deliberately mimicked when founding his own publication,
The Times
of London.

The riches emanating from that highly productive year 1930, however, are not yet exhausted. For it also saw the first appearance of another remarkable book which has won a considerable reputation:
Soldiers’ Songs and Slang
, collected and edited by John Brophy and Eric Partridge, both literary figures of considerable distinction, but, unlike Blunden, Graves, Aldington or Sassoon, former soldiers who had served not as officers but in the ranks. They offered a radically different perspective on the war of the Western Front, the viewpoint of the anonymous, unprivileged lower depths of the vast organisation that was the British Army, especially the shilling-a-day infantrymen who were at everybody else’s beck and call, and who were frequently officially referred to not as soldiers but as ‘rifles’; their status being defined less by the uniforms they wore or even the names they bore but by the weapons they carried. The new book added their hugely eloquent, ribald, funny, often world-weary voices to the rising clamour.

Soldiers’ Songs and Slang
was to go through several editions in the 1930s, re-emerge as
The Long Trail
in the 1960s, and it has now re-appeared in a new printing as
The Daily Telegraph Dictionary of Tommies’ Songs and Slang
in 2008. (I confess to having been part of this process, having proposed its resurrection in the first place and contributed a new Introduction.)

But to return to the subject
of Everyman at War
, where does this book, also published in 1930, fit in this fascinating parabola of literary effusions?

Basically, I see it as firmly, and I would suggest proudly, occupying a substantial territory in the middle ground, between the high-octane literary works of the Graveses and the Sassoons of this world – to which the names of Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney would be added in due course – and the writings and utterances of the ‘warrior or warriors unknown’ who devised the songs and the slang saved for posterity by Brophy and Partridge. The authors of the sixty pieces here reprinted were writing straightforwardly about what they knew, about what they saw, about what they experienced, and they clearly – as Falls swiftly realised – were untouched by any modish cult or trend in the literary circles of the time. They wrote as themselves, not in response to any school of thought or wind of change, and, in Falls’s view, were all the better as chroniclers of the recent war on that account. As the reader will see, they were all were meticulously identified by the editor with details as to their service careers, so that friends and relatives would be aware of the fact of their contribution to the historical records, but their essential virtue is that collectively they constitute the ‘Everyman’ of the original title – the ordinary citizen, the unsung mass -and it is good to see this remarkable volume returned to its rightful place in the public domain with that title restored.

And there is, I should add, some quite outstanding writing here, writing that deserves to be remembered and not, as it were, allowed to be airbrushed out of historical memory. To name just one contribution, the terrifying plight of a fearful ordinary soldier caught up in a failed ‘over the top’ advance during a major battle has never been better evoked for me than in the account, only seven pages long, entitled ‘Ordinary War on the Somme’. The author was former Private Fred Ball, who enlisted with the Liverpool Pals in January 1915, crossed to France in November that year and served continuously in France for the remainder of the war, then went to Germany with the Army of Occupation, finally being demobilised in March 1919, never having sought or received promotion. And he is just one of sixty.

The credit for all this must go to the editor of the book, C. B. Purdom. Essentially he wanted no fine writing, no show-off from his contributors, he wanted them to write in a clear, straightforward manner about what they had seen and experienced and to do so at minimal length. The result is a book which is of such overall quality that it cries out for a reprint. There is much talk these days of ‘forgotten voices’ when it comes to war subjects. Here we have sixty too-long-ignored voices which deserve to be remembered. I cannot recommend this book too highly. In fact, in view of its virtual disappearance for almost eighty years after its original printing, I believe it might fairly be described as a rediscovered classic, worthy of joining the rich ranks of books of permanent value in relation to the Great War of 1914–1918.

Who was C. B. Purdom? He was Charles Benjamin Purdom, born in 1883, died 1965. Perhaps his principal legacy relates to the founding of new towns such as, first, Letchworth Garden City and, subsequently, Welwyn Garden City, a subject in which was interested from 1902 onwards, championing the concept of this revolutionary style of communal living in a number of books written over several decades. Married in 1913, he appears not to have served in the First World War, though in the Second World War he held posts in the Ministry of Food, the Ministry of Supply and the Ministry of Information. He subsequently interested himself in the problems left by the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign, publishing in 1945 a book under the title
How Shall We Rebuild London?
A lifelong passion was the theatre. At one time he was general secretary of British Equity, at another he edited a magazine entitled
Theatregoer
, and over the years he poured out a spate of books on the subject, including such titles as
Producing Plays, The Pleasures of the Theatre, Producing Shakespeare
, a biography of the dramatist and producer Harley Granville Barker, and
A Guide to the Plays of Bernard Shaw
. It was his period as editor of the magazine
Everyman
, between 1928 and 1932, which led to the production of the present work. It was his idea, presumably launched in 1929, to invite readers of the magazine to send in brief personal accounts of their experiences in the war which had involved so many of his juniors and contemporaries, with a view to including the best of them in a new anthology.

But it is time for him to tell his own story, and I now hand the baton to him, inviting the reader to turn to his excellent and illuminating Introduction.

Malcolm Brown

January 2009

These narratives of the War are not the work of practised writers but of soldiers telling their personal experiences. They have therefore an interest that War novels or stories or official records do not possess. A few of them are by sailors and by men in the Air Force, and by women; but the greater number are by men of various ranks who served on the different Fronts, most of them as privates in France and Flanders. They show what War is from the soldier’s point of view. It is a restricted point of view, of course, but it is concerned with realities, and for that reason important.

The narratives came to be written in this way. A few months ago a friend was talking to me with admiration of Barbusse’s
Le Feu
, and remarked incidentally that he had not yet written his own story of the War, though he intended to do so before he got too old. He served in the ranks in Flanders during practically the whole period of the War, and had, he thought, something to tell that had not yet been told. I urged him to sit down and write his account before it had gone from his mind, and he went away declaring that he would start upon it that very day. But he has not done it and
I
do not think he ever will.