The Penguin Book of First World War Stories

The war's impact on the outlook and transformation of British society in the early twentieth century was significant – for example, with regard to the changing relationships of gender and class. Above all, however, it traumatized a generation, and gave rise to a nationwide process of mourning and remembrance that coloured the collective memory of the war for the entire twentieth century.
³

The First World War had long-term consequences for all participant nations, but Britain seems exceptional in the extent to which its memory has retained, rather than lost, prominence in public perception, through public commemoration, museums, school curricula, popular history, films, television programmes and, last but not least, literature.

Indeed, the First World War has been characterized as a ‘literary war': since education had spread considerably during the preceding decades, there was, according to Paul Fussell, an ‘unparalleled literariness of all ranks who fought the Great War'
⁴
–soldiers who not only consumed but also produced literature, especially poetry. At home, established and amateur writers were equally prolific, providing propaganda and morale-boosting pieces as well as more balanced and openly anti-war views.

In the war's aftermath, fictional and autobiographical narratives played a substantial role in the nation's coping with trauma, bereavement, and the reconstruction of private and public lives. The late 1920s and early 1930s even saw an outright war books ‘boom',
⁵
during which many of the now classic war memoirs and novels were first published: Edmund Blunden's
Undertones of War
(1928), Robert Graves's
Goodbye to All That
(1929), Siegfried Sassoon's Sherston trilogy (1928–36), Vera Brittain's
Testament of Youth
(1933) and Richard Aldington's
Death of a Hero
(1929). These well-known books are marked by ‘disenchantment'
⁶
with the war's just cause and present it as the sacrifice of a whole generation. With the trench poetry, these works have perpetuated a view of the war as a futile endeavour, bungled by incompetent generals, condemning thousands of men to a cruel death. This perception was identified as one-sided even during the war-literature boom,
⁷
and current research has confirmed that much of the middlebrow and popular fiction of the inter-war years offered a more patriotic, constructive and consolatory interpretation of the war than the handful of works that have become classics.
⁸

The widespread neglect of more affirmative views is in part a legacy of the 1960s, when there was a resurgence of interest in the First World War and its literature, which had been over-shadowed by the resonance of the Second World War. Faced with the nuclear threat, the decade engendered a strong peace movement, which preferred to see the First World War as pointless slaughter – an image disseminated in republished trench poetry and the war-critical memoirs and novels of the late 1920s.

The sixties' preferred interpretation had a crucial effect on the perception of all those who had no personal recollections of the war and its aftermath. The novelists who turned the war into a major subject during the final decades of the twentieth century, from Susan Hill in the 1970s to Pat Barker and Sebastian Faulks in the 1990s, all tend to retell the ‘great casualty' narrative, with its now stereotypical settings and trappings, in particular the muddy, rat-infested trenches of the Western Front, which has become
the
site of the war in Britain's cultural imagination.
⁹
At the beginning of the twenty-first century even writers of popular crime fiction, like Anne Perry and the Children's Laureate, Michael Morpurgo, have discovered the war as a central theme and keep its literary memory alive.
¹⁰

The majority of stories about the war were written between 1914 and 1918, and then until the early 1930s, when the experience of the war and its consequences were still of
immediate relevance to many readers. These decades were a heyday for the short story in Britain. A great number of periodicals offered a market for both more traditional storytellers (such as W. Somerset Maugham and John Galsworthy) and modernists (including Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield), who explored the short story's potential in terms of a new aesthetic. Through the latter in particular, the short story acquired the reputation of a form congenial to the modern condition. Its emphasis on isolated moments and mere fragments of experience, its art of condensation and ambiguous expression seemed ideal for capturing modern life with its hastiness, inconclusiveness, uncertainties and distrust of traditional beliefs.
¹³
For the same reasons, the short story was deemed to have an affinity to the first fully technological and industrialized war, which exploded extant norms of perception, interpretation and representation. Its aesthetic seemed highly suitable for articulating the experiences of the front with its moments of violence, shock, disorientation and strangeness. In 1930 Edmund Blunden (1896–1974), poet and memoirist of the war, emphasized, drawing on his own knowledge of the trenches: ‘The mind of the soldier on active service was continually beginning a new short story, which had almost always to be broken off without a conclusion.'
¹⁴

During the inter-war years, a time of ‘badly shaken values', the short story became an alternative to the lyric poem for writers ‘hit in the face by a clash of material events it was impossible to ignore'. H. E. Bates (1905–74), a successful writer of stories, went on to say that ‘(n)o poetry of great consequence came out of that generation…, but many short stories did'.
¹⁵

Few stories written during the war and its aftermath were radically experimental or self-consciously modern, but many depart from conventional plot-oriented narration, resist closure and use forms like the impressionistic sketch, the dramatic monologue or the dialogue scene. In this anthology, such elements are most clearly discernible in Katherine Mansfield's ‘An Indiscreet Journey' and Mary Borden's ‘Blind'. At the same time, a great number of war stories were told in traditional and sometimes even formulaic ways, aiming to provide accessible
interpretations for a mass audience in modes that encompassed the heroic and tragic as well as the suspenseful and comic.

But if such a vast and various body of war stories
was
produced, why did most of it slip out of literary memory? One possible explanation is that, as soon as it had ended, the First World War became an issue of mourning, intense retrospection and social analysis. In the context of mourning, some of the war's poetry would become, in the words of Andrew Motion, a ‘sacred national text'.
¹⁶
The memoir and the novel established themselves as major domains for depicting the long processes of trauma and healing, or for analysing the war's impact on an entire society. The short story lacks the scope to investigate individual and social lives in all their dimensions, and although it can address the theme of memory quite effectively(as the final section of this book shows), its strength is the ‘momentary' outlook – not only in terms of thematic preferences: stories require a relatively brief time to write and be published and can thus react more immediately to events and attitudes of the day than novels or memoirs. This topicality also means that some stories may date easily and lack interest for the general reader of later decades.

For its survival, a story depends on the more permanent medium of an author's collection or a multi-author anthology. But story compilations, and especially thematic ones, tend to have a restricted market appeal. Of the ‘classic' representatives of the war's literature, only Richard Aldington had a volume of stories still in print in the 1990s, and only because the Imperial War Museum decided to republish
Roads to Glory
(1930) in 1992.
¹⁷
To date, there has never been a major anthology of British stories of the First World War, although they featured prominently in the multinational anthology that was part of the war-books boom and for which Edmund Blunden wrote an introduction,
Great Short Stories of the War
(1930).
¹⁸
Its editor, H. Cotton Minchin, stated in his prefatory note that this was ‘the first substantial collection of short stories of the Great War to be published' and expressed his hope that it might be found ‘of permanent value'.
¹⁹
It was reprinted once in 1933, in a cheap edition, and again in 1994, in time for the eightieth anniversary of the war's outbreak.