The Penguin Book of First World War Stories (46 page)

8
.
Maison Blanche
: German war cemetery north of Arras.

9
.
howitzer
: a gun for high-angle firing of shells.

10
.
Monsieur Un Tel
: ‘Mr So-and-So'.

11
.
triumphant Marianne
: idealized female figure, symbolizing Liberty, Reason, and the French Republic.

12
.
cockerel
: the cockerel is a French national symbol, which derives from the Latin
gallus
: it translates both as ‘inhabitant of Gaul' (i.e. France) and ‘cockerel'.

13
.
Imperial War Graves Commission
: from 1914, a branch of the Red Cross was charged with marking the graves of fallen soldiers. In 1915 the duty was transferred to the army's newly set up Graves Registration Commission, at which point it was decided that all British and Commonwealth dead soldiers were to be interred abroad where they had fallen. In 1917 the Imperial War Graves Commission was founded by Sir Fabian Arthur Goulstone Ware (1869–1949), and in 1960 it became the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Ware had led the original Red Cross unit.

Aldington, Richard (1892–1962)

Born in Portsmouth as Edward Godfree Aldington, he grew up in Dover. He studied at University College, London, but left without a degree to become a writer and journalist. In 1912 Aldington joined the Imagist movement, and edited the avant-garde literary periodical the
Egoist
. He was a close friend of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. He went to France as a soldier in mid-1916 and remained in the army until the end of the war. Soon afterwards he published a collection of poems,
Images of War
(1919), and his novel
Death of a Hero
(1929) deals with what he perceived as the soldiers' archetypal experience of the war: profound disillusionment with and loss of faith in humanity.

Aumonier, Stacy (1887–1928)

The descendant of an old Huguenot family, Aumonier was an artist before he turned to writing in 1913. John Galsworthy regarded him as ‘one of the best short-story writers of all time'; and A. C. Ward claimed, in his
Aspects of the Modern Short Story
(1924), that Aumonier's war stories resembled ‘an English epic of the Great War' (252). Aumonier captured the varied reactions to war of his fellow countrymen, and portrayed the destruction of what many thought of as an English pre-war idyll in ‘The Match' (1916).

Barnes, Julian (1946–)

Educated in London and at Oxford, Barnes has worked as a lexicographer, reviewer, editor and television critic. He is now a full-time writer and occasional translator, and lives in London. He has published crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. For his ‘serious' novels,
Barnes has won numerous awards, both in Britain and abroad, and his works have been shortlisted frequently for the Man Booker Prize. To date, he has published two volumes of short stories –
Cross Channel
(1996) and
The Lemon Table
(2004).

Borden, Mary (1886–1968)

Born in Chicago, the daughter of a businessman. While travelling in Europe at the outbreak of the war, Borden decided to set up a hospital unit on the Western Front. She stayed in France for the duration, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French government. She met her second husband, Edward Spears, while serving in France, and went to live with him in England. Of Borden's novels,
Sarah Gay
(1931)is also loosely based on her own war experiences. Her collection of sketches, poetry and short stories,
The Forbidden Zone
(1929), derives entirely from her war experiences.

Brighouse, Harold (1882–1958)

Brighouse grew up in Manchester as the son of a businessman, and, after an apprenticeship in a company selling shipping equipment, went to work in the cotton trade. In 1902 he moved to London, where he embarked on his writing career. Brighouse was a prolific playwright, who also wrote eight novels, a number of short stories and worked as literary critic of the
Manchester Guardian
. Many of his plays feature Lancastrians, and the factory setting of
Once a Hero
may also owe much to his roots in a manufacturing town.

Buchan, John (1875–1940)

Educated in Glasgow and at Oxford, Buchan was a barrister, journalist, publisher and politician. He wrote and published his first novels while still at university. During the war he was a correspondent for
The Times
, and, in 1917, was made director of information for the Secret Service. Buchan was created Baron Tweedsmuir, and in 1935 moved to Canada as its governor general. He wrote a large number of historical novels and many short stories, published in seven collections and in magazines such as the
Spectator
and
Blackwood's
. However, his literary fame rests primarily on his spy thrillers, most famously
The Thirty-Nine Steps
(1915).

Conrad, Joseph (1857–1924)

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. His parents were Polish nationalists and belonged to the impoverished gentry, but Conrad was orphaned young and moved to Marseille at sixteen to seek his fortune at sea. After several years as an apprentice on sailing ships, he joined the British Merchant Navy in 1879. Once he had passed the required exams, he became a captain and a naturalized British subject. He embarked on a professional writing career in the 1890s, drawing on his travels and experiences abroad. Of his many novels and short stories, ‘The Tale' is the only one to address the First World War.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan (1859–1930)

The son of Irish immigrants, Doyle grew up in southern Scotland and studied medicine in Edinburgh. He soon began to write, producing historical novels, plays, poetry, treatises on military history and spiritualism, but he is best known for his Sherlock Holmes stories. An ardent patriot, he had already been an apologist of the Boer War, about which he wrote a propaganda pamphlet and a history. During the First World War, he agreed to work for the War Propaganda Bureau, alongside other popular writers like Rudyard Kipling, John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells and Thomas Hardy. In the war he lost not only his son, Kingsley, but a brother, two brothers-in-law and two nephews.

Galsworthy, John (1867–1933)

After Harrow, Galsworthy studied law at Oxford, but decided to become a writer. As a novelist he remained one of the most widely read British authors until the 1950s. His fiction won him many awards, most notably the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932, for
The Forsyte Saga
. During the war, Galsworthy donated all his literary income to the war effort and various relief funds; he also wrote for the War Propaganda Bureau. However, his attitude towards the war, and particularly towards the vilification of the enemy in the press, was not uncritical. His sister Lilian was married to the Bavarian painter Georg Sauter, who was interned during the war, to Galsworthy's indignation.

Graves, Robert von Ranke (1895–1985)

Graves was born in London. He enlisted at the beginning of the war, although he had an Oxford scholarship, and his first poems appeared while he was serving in the army. At the battle of the Somme he was wounded so severely that his family was informed of his death, but he recovered, albeit with lasting damage to his lungs. After the war, Graves took up his place at Oxford, and later lived in Cairo, Mallorca and Pennsylvania. From 1961 to 1966, he was professor of Poetry at Oxford University. He perceived himself primarily as a poet, although he produced several successful novels, such as the best-selling
I, Claudius
(1934), a memoir and works of non-fiction.

Grossmith, Robert (1954–)

Born in Dagenham, Essex, Grossmith spent seven years in Sweden as a translator and teacher, then did a PhD at the University of Keele. His doctoral thesis,
Other States of Being: Nabokov's Two-world Metaphysic
, was published in 1987, followed by a novel,
The Empire of Lights
(1990).

Hall, Radclyffe (1880–1943)

Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born in Bournemouth. Her parents separated shortly after her birth, and after her mother remarried, she was brought up by governesses. Hall attended King's College in London and lived in Germany until a legacy enabled her to move to London at the age of twenty-one. There, she lived first with her older (married) lover Mabel Batten, then with Batten's young cousin, Una Troubridge. Early on Hall had realized her lesbianism and had many unhappy youthful love affairs. She and Troubridge remained together until Hall's death, from cancer, in 1943. Hall remains best-known for her overtly lesbian – and initially banned – novel,
The Well of Loneliness
(1928).

Holtby, Winifred (1898–1935)

Born into a wealthy Yorkshire farming family, she went to school in Scarborough. There, she witnessed the shelling of the town by German destroyers in December 1914 and wrote about it for a local paper, and later in her novel,
The Crowded Street
(1924). She gained a place at Somerville College, Oxford, but took a year off in 1917– 18 to join
the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps. After the war, Holtby formed a lifelong friendship with Vera Brittain. Holtby's best-known literary work is her novel
South Riding
(1936). An ardent socialist, feminist and human-rights campaigner, she also wrote for various newspapers and magazines, including the
Manchester Guardian
and
Good Housekeeping
.

Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936)

Kipling was born in Bombay, but educated in England. After his return to India, he wrote for newspapers, in which many of his early poems and stories were also published. After a wave of success with his short stories about British colonial life he returned to England in 1889. In his collection of verses
Barrack-Room Ballads
(1892), he coined the archetype of the British soldier, Tommy Atkins. Kipling was a patriot, and some of his texts – notoriously his poem ‘The White Man's Burden' (1899) – have been read as inherently racist. However, he was also a critic of the Empire, and pointed out social problems at home. He first witnessed warfare in South Africa during the Boer War. During the First World War, he worked for the War Propaganda Bureau and was later appointed to advise the Imperial War Graves Commission. His son Jack was killed at the age of eighteen in 1915, and several of his First World War stories betray a loathing of the enemy. In his post-war story ‘The Gardener' (1926), Kipling emphasizes remembrance and mourning rather than hatred.

Lawrence, D. H. (1885–1930)

Born into a Midlands mining family, Lawrence was educated in Nottingham and worked as a teacher before he became a full-time writer. In 1914 he married Frieda von Richthofen Weekley – a distant cousin of fighter pilot Manfred von Richthofen. In 1917, suspected of being German spies, the Lawrences were forced to leave their home in Cornwall. They were denied passports while the war lasted, but left England in 1919. The novel
Kangaroo
(1923)reflects the Lawrences' experiences during these years, but Lawrence also wrote a number of short stories about the war, which were published in
England, My England
(1922). The title story of this volume was first published in the
English Review
, October 1915, and presents the war as the means of self-destruction for a doomed and decadent English society.

Machen, Arthur Llewellyn Jones (1863–1947)

Machen was born to a clergyman father in Monmouthshire, Wales. Growing up in a lonely environment, immersed in Roman remains and Welsh folklore, he developed a lifelong fascination with the mythical and supernatural, and became famous for his ‘supernatural' fiction and ghost stories, which had been popular in Britain since Victorian times. At various times Machen earned a living as an actor and journalist, most notably for the
Evening News
.

Mansfield, Katherine (1888–1923)

Katherine Mansfield is one of the best-known authors of the modernist short story. Born in Wellington, New Zealand, she moved to London to attend Queen's College, then took up writing. She had many affairs, and eventually contracted gonorrhoea, which was left untreated and may have led to her infection with tuberculosis, of which she died. Her second husband, John Middleton Murry, edited her letters and unpublished works after her death. During the First World War, her brother was killed at the front, but ‘The Fly' and ‘An Indiscreet Journey' are her only two stories that address the war directly.

Maugham, W. Somerset (1874–1965)

Born in Paris, he lived in France until the age of ten, when he was orphaned and moved to the home of a clergyman uncle in Kent. He attended King's School, Canterbury, and subsequently went to Heidelberg University, then to London to study medicine. Maugham qualified as a doctor in 1897, the same year in which his first novel,
Liza of Lambeth
, was published. Maugham habitually drew on autobiographical experience for his writing. Too old to enlist for military service, he served as an ambulance driver at the Western Front for five months during the First World War. He also worked for British Intelligence in Switzerland and Russia.

Montague, C. E. (1867–1928)

Born to Irish Catholic parents, who had emigrated to England, Montague was educated in London and at Oxford. He was invited to work for the
Manchester Guardian
on trial after his graduation, and wrote in favour of Irish Home Rule, opposed the Boer War and, initially, the First World War. Once war had been declared, though, he hoped
that full support of the British war effort would help to end the conflict quickly. Already over forty-one, he was allowed in the trenches for a brief spell in 1916, but went on to work for Military Intelligence, writing articles and censoring letters and news reports. Montague's later writings about the First World War, above all his book of essays
Disenchantment
(1922), attempt to expose the inhumanity of warfare and show his disillusionment with the war.