War
It is a blustery, rainy Remembrance Day here in Oak Bay. By luck, at 11:00 there was a gap in the rain clouds, so I expect the ceremony at the War Memorial in Uplands Park was, relatively, dry.
I often read Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That on Remembrance Day. It is an elegy to the English governing class World War One destroyed. It is also a memoir of a man who went on to be both an excellent poet and a wonderfully entertaining novelist. Graves simply could not write a bad English sentence.
Goodbye to All That is the story of a very young man going pretty much directly from a British public school, Charterhouse, into the Army and then out to the frontline trenches in France. He fought, was promoted, then wounded so gravely that his poor mother received a condolence letter. But Graves survived. The governing classes’ pre-War England did not.
Goodbye to All That is autobiography written by a deeply talented writer. Ford Maddox Ford’s Parade’s End is certainly autobiographical in that Ford served as an elderly sub-lieutenant and saw action at the Somme, but it is a novel, albeit in four parts, about the deep effects of the War on its participants.
Parade’s End is one of my favourite novels and the character of Tietjens captures the growing futility of the gentlemanly officer class in a world of gas and machine guns. The character of Tietjens’ wife Sylvia is one of the great female monsters in English literature.
While Tietjens tries to behave honourably at the Front, Sylvia is all about creating social, political and military trouble at headquarters and in drawing rooms largely for the sheer Hell of it…And, of course, she hates her husband. Hates his honour and his unflappability.
Parade’s End is about five times as long as Goodbye to All That. Graves was saying goodbye to a world which he hardly knew, wondering how it could have turned out so badly; Ford knew that world all too well and understood how the advent of the “new men” meant that country gentlemen like Christopher Tietjens’ day was over before the war even began.