The Great War and Modern Memory

433 Pages·2013·2.53 MB·English

by  Paul Fussell

The Great War and Modern Memory
Other Books by Paul Fussell
Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England
Poetic Meter and Poetic Form
The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism:
Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke
Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing
Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars
The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations
Class: A Guide through the American Status System
Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays
Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War
BAD: or, The Dumbing of America
The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters
Editor
English Augustan Poetry
The Ordeal of Alfred M. Hale
Siegfried Sassoon’s Long Journey
The Norton Book of Travel
The Norton Book of Modern War
Co- Editor
Eighteenth-Century English Literature
P AUL F USSELL
The Great War
and Modern
Memory
1
1
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Published in the United States of America by
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© Oxford University Press 1975, 2000, 2013
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1977
ISBN for 2013 edition: 978-0-19-997195-4
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system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of
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the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the fi rst edition as follows:
Fussell, Paul, 1924–
The Great War and modern memory / Paul Fussell.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.
Contains a new afterword.
Includes bibliographic references and index.
ISBN 0-19-513332-3 (pbk.)
0-19-513331-5
1. English literature—20th century—History and criticism.
2. World War, 1914-1918—Great Britain—Literature and the War.
3. Memory in literature. 4. War and literature.
PR478.E8F8. 2000 8209’358–dc21 99-43295
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To the Memory of
Technical Sergeant Edward Keith Hudson, ASN 36548772
Co. F, 410th Infantry
Killed beside me in France
March 15, 1945
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
List of Illustrations viii
Introduction by Jay Winter ix
Preface to the Original Edition xv
Credits xviii
Chapter 1 A Satire of Circumstance 3
Chapter 2 The Troglodyte World 39
Chapter 3 Adversary Proceedings 82
Chapter 4 Myth, Ritual, and Romance 123
Chapter 5 Oh What a Literary War 168
Chapter 6 Theater of War 207
Chapter 7 Arcadian Recourses 251
Chapter 8 Soldier Boys 293
Chapter 9 Persistence and Memory 336
Afterword 363
Notes 371
Index 390
Illustrations
Plumer, the King, Haig 16
British home front recruits 21
Map : the line at the end of 1914 42
The King inspecting model trenches 48
A trench on the Somme 49
Duckboards going forward, Ypres Salient 52
Siegfried Sassoon 101
The Golden Virgin 144
Near Zonnebeke, the third battle of Ypres, 1917 151
David Jones 158
Robert Graves 227
Edmund Blunden 279
Hill 60 from the air 289
Wilfred Owen with Arthur Newboult 315
Battle of Passchendaele, November 1917 359
Introduction
I first met Paul Fussell en route to an academic conference in
Germany in the late 1970s. We were heading by car to a meeting on
“War Enthusiasm in 1914,” a reaction to war we both detested, and I no-
ticed that whenever we reached a crossroads, or passed a hill, Paul would
scan the horizon in a quick and methodical manner. After an hour or so, I
asked him what he was looking for. He said it was a refl ex from his army
duty he still could not change. Whenever he passed a point of interest, he
scanned the landscape for the best place to put an anti-tank gun. His daily
journey home on Route 1 in New Jersey, he said, provided many such
opportunities to scan the landscape for good defensive positions. This was,
he added, one of the ways in which he was still stuck in the Battle of the
Bulge, which had left him with a piece of shrapnel in his thigh and a
cosmic skepticism about the arbitrariness of survival in war. His wartime
service did more than that. It helped make him one of the fi nest scholars
of his generation.
Fussell was a great historian, one who found a way to turn his deep,
visceral knowledge of the horrors and stupidities of war into a vision of
how to write about war. I use the term “historian” deliberately, though he
professed literature throughout his academic career. What he accom-
plished, not singlehandedly, although centrally, was to break down the
barrier between the literary study of war writing and the cultural history
of war. When he published T he Great War and Modern Memory in 1975,