Pursuing a Thread: World War I

The literature of World War I is immense; it seems that every politician and military leader who had a part in it published a memoir. Having finished Barbara Tuchman's celebrated popular history The Guns of August, about the opening month of the war, I've been looking carefully at her Sources and Notes for suggestions for follow-up reading, and I've already scored a winner. Tuchman mentions that Brand Whitlock, the United States Minister to Belgium when the war started, is a "writer of distinction" -- I had heard of him as a political novelist -- and recommends his Belgium, which was published in two volumes in 1919 and takes up 1,500 pages (at that length, I thought, it had better be good). I found the first volume at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh library, and Tuchman is right -- Whitlock is a wonderfully perceptive writer, and his prose is gorgeous. The chapters set in spring and early summer 1914, before most people saw the war coming, are hauntingly evocative and elegiac in quality; the skills of a practiced novelist are highly evident. Since Belgium was a best-seller, copies of the set can be had reasonably on the second-hand market, so I ordered the two volumes and anticipate their arrival shortly.

Tuchman also recommends Brigadier-General Edward L. Spears's Liaison 1914 as "by far the most interesting book in English on the opening campaign in France," and it has been kept in print; I found a library copy of this book also, but haven't started it yet.

My interest in the creative literature of World War I, the poetry and plays and novels, is of long standing, and I've read two full studies of it (both concentrating on English language works): Paul Fussell's deservedly influential The Great War and Modern Memory, and Hugh Cecil's The Flower of Battle. I've also read two complete anthologies of British World War I poetry, Brian Gardner's Up the Line to Death and I.M. Parsons's Men Who March Away, read several of the key poets (Sorley, Owen, Rosenberg, Brooke) in greater depth, and dipped extensively into Patrick Bridgwater's study-cum-anthology, The German Poets of the First World War. As I dig back into the era, I should have more to say about this extremely interesting corpus of literature. Charles Hamilton Sorley, who died at 20, has been in particular a profound personal influence on me since I was a teen-ager.