Quote of the Day (Ford Madox Ford, on an Author’s First Lesson)

“The first lesson that an author has to learn is that of humility…. Before everything the author must learn to suppress himself: he must learn that the first thing he has to consider is his story and the last thing that he has to consider is his story, and in between that he will consider his story."—English novelist and editor Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924)

Flashback, July 1916: Somme Stalemate Saps War Spirit

As it completed its second full year, World War I bore all the marks of an unprecedented gash across the landscape of civilization. The Battle of the Somme, the Allied campaign to change the grim arithmetic of casualties and futility, only worsened matters. With 1.5 million shells fired, the biggest artillery bombardment the world had ever seen (even heard in the South of England) as a week-long rologue, British and French soldiers rushed forth into battle on July 1, 1916, only to be cut down by the waiting German guns—60,000 British casualties in those 24 hours alone, including 20,000 dead, the greatest loss of life in the nation’s military history.

Could it get any worse? No, but it could remain remarkably bad throughout the month and well into autumn, as the Somme would soon feature commanders who used Napoleonic tactics rendered obsolete by modern weaponry; common soldiers left physically and psychically wounded in ways little understood at the time; and writers who sought to make sense of it all. When the fight ended four months later, the British incurred more than 400,000 casualties, while their French allies lost 200,000 and the Germans half a million. Together with the Battle of Verdun (discussed in this prior post of mine), the Somme came to symbolize the horror of trench warfare.

(Believe it or not, the image accompanying this post comes from a British propaganda film meant to drum up homefront spirit during the fight, The Battle of the Somme. Well, I guess this image of a badly wounded soldier could have been worse—if it showed the rats that the soldiers had to contend with, not to mention the gas masks frequently worn there.)

Oh, yes—and the futility and basic absurdity of such warfare, for the battle was waged not on as site of military significance, but at the spot on the map where British forces adjoined their French allies.

Reading these last two paragraphs reminds me of nothing so much as America’s Civil War. But Britain’s leaders, let alone those of the other nations in this conflict across the Atlantic, seemed to have learned nothing from the conflict that had occurred across the Atlantic a half-century before, and so they were doomed to suffer similar outward convulsions and internal divisions.

That enormous single-day loss of life, for instance, will remind Americans of the bloodiest 24 hours in their own history, the Battle of Antietam—except that the Somme was even worse. The number of British dead, wounded and missing in action for this one day was more than double the combined Union-Confederate toll for the legendary Civil War battle.

Although the depth of the carnage is reminiscent of Antietam, the manner in which the first day of the Somme unfolded resembles nothing so much as the third day of Gettysburg. An offensive-minded commander (for the British, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig; for the Confederates, Robert E. Lee) preceded an order to attack with an unprecedented artillery barrage—in the case of Gettysburg, a morning shelling that was the greatest seen in the Western Hemisphere to that point; at the Somme, a week-long bombardment. Far from softening the defender up as intended, the bombardment was largely ineffective (e.g., British medium-range fire fell consistently short of its target, and 30% of the shells were duds). 

And so, khaki-clad British troops—many the product of the “New Army” swelled by recruitment posters featuring military hero Lord Kitchener, sunk by a submarine only the month before—marched into sunlight in perfect order along a 15-mile front, across open fields, like so many sitting ducks, under the watchful gaze of three ranks of Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops safely entrenched, on higher ground, in dugouts. 

Only minutes before the fateful assault, an operation to disrupt the German defenses occurred in the form of two huge mines, containing more than 100,000 pounds of explosives. The advancing “Tommies” could then, the thinking went, exploit the resulting confusion around the two craters to avoid the enfilade fire that would surely come from the Germans.

Civil War buffs will recall a similar plan involving Ulysses S. Grant’s Union forces in the summer 1864 Petersburg campaign. The resulting “Battle of the Crater” resulted in 4,000 Union casualties. On the other hand, the mining operation meant to ease the capture of La Boiselle Salient led to nearly 12,000 combined casualties in Britain’s 8^th and 34^th Divisions. British planners had not reckoned with the possibility that German intelligence, piecing together newspaper articles, soldiers’ indiscreet talk and reports from spies, would figure out that the twin explosions would in effect provide advance warning of the follow-up assault by the Tommies.

Over the years, Haig has been excoriated so soundly and repeatedly that in some quarters, a reaction has even occurred in his favor. A number of his partisans say he learned from his mistakes, with some claiming that he came around to see the value of new weaponry. One historian, William Philpott, even nominated him as Britain’s greatest general.

But Haig’s lack of imagination—his inability to grasp how tactics had to evolve in the face of new technology—is nowhere better illustrated than this passage from a 1926 when he still saw a future for horses in combat:

“I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the men and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse—the well-bred horse—as you have ever done in the past.”

Even a relatively sympathetic historian such as Peter Hart—who argued, in The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front, that “Haig’s way was excruciatingly painful but it was the only realistic way at the time”—ends up acknowledging the myopia of the general and his subordinates:

“There seemed to be no limit to the number of times that it had to be demonstrated to them that isolated attacks on a narrow front would not succeed without overpowering artillery to devastate everything in both that and the adjoining sectors. The British rarely seemed to realise that an attack to 'improve' a tactical position did not do so unless it succeeded. Too often there was no proper analysis of how many guns and shells needed to be fired to subdue a given frontage and depth of trench lines. And there seemed to be no limit to their optimism that the German Army and the entire German Empire stood ready to collapse if there was just one more push towards Bapaume.”

The Somme was also remarkable for the authors who lived long enough to recapture the experience of the campaign, in one fashion or another, in their writing, including:

*Alan Seeger, an American who, before being killed on July 4, 1916, wrote “I Have a Rendezvous With Death,” a poem taken to heart by the young John F. Kennedy;

*J.R.R. Tolkien, whose grittily realistic battle scenes from his Lord of the Rings trilogy reflect his service in the Somme;

*Robert Graves, whose bitter 1929 antiwar memoir Goodbye to All That narrated his participation in the attack on the High Wood three weeks into the campaign, where he suffered a wound so grievous that his parents were mistakenly informed of his death;

*Wilfred Owen, trapped underground at the Somme, was transferred for treatment of his shell shock to Craiglockhart War Hospital, where he began to write the verses that made him the most acclaimed British poet of the Great War;

*Siegfried Sassoon, Owen’s fellow shell shock victim at Craiglockhart—and who, unlike his friend, survived the war;

* Ford Maddox Ford, who translated his experience with shell shock into the novel sequence Parade’s End.

In this small sample of soldiers, the number of shell-shock victims from the Somme looms large. But they were only a handful compared with the total number of those afflicted with this disease, later called combat fatigue and post-traumatic stress syndrome. A 2011 article on the BBC Web site by Joanna Bourke, a professor of history at Birkbeck College, estimates that by the end of WWI, the British Army had dealt with 80,000 cases of this. Altogether, war neuroses represented one-seventh of all personnel discharged for disabilities from the British Army.

An article by neuropathologist Daniel Perl in the scientific journal The Lancet Neurology, then summarized in a New York Times Magazine article last month by Robert F. Worth, offers the hypothesis that blasts in modern warfare can leave scars on the brain. TNT, first used by the German Army in 1902, was employed on a far greater scale in WWI, leading to development of shell shock.

The Allies learned hard lessons about fighting at the Somme, lessons they were able to apply in outlasting the Kaiser’s military machine (with American help) over the next two years of the war. But it came too late for the men who fought at the Somme in July 1916. Peter Simkins, a historian at the Imperial War Museum, noted, in an interview for the Great War documentary on PBS, that veterans of the Somme were primed to go “over the top” in taking enemy positions, but it was all for nought then:

"But it's sustaining the impetus of the advance once they've gone over the top that's important. If they've got the wrong weapons with which to fight, if they're carrying rifles and bayonets and they're up against machine guns, the formula is wrong.”

Quote of the Day (Ford Madox Ford, on Why People Can’t ‘Have What They Want’)

"Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing."— Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)

This Day in Literary History (Death of WWI Novelist Ford Madox Ford)

June 26, 1939— The dismissive comment by the attending physician in the clinic where Ford Madox Ford died—“It is obvious that Monsieur has always done whatever he wanted in life”—might have been unkind to a dying man, but it was also true. The 65-year-old British man of letters took little care with his health and even less with his finances—one of the reasons why he died poor, sick and homeless in Deauville, France.

In his last days, Ford—an editor and mentor to writers on both sides of the Atlantic, and a writer of much distinguished fiction and verse of his own--had tried unsuccessfully to interest publishers in a work of his warning against the imminent threats of anti-Semitism and totalitarianism.

He would have been appalled, though hardly surprised, at the notion that the land he was visiting would be overwhelmed by these forces within a year of his death. Those dark forces resulted from a world war even more calamitous than the one in which, a quarter century before, he had sustained grievous physical and emotional wounds, all chronicled in two of the most heralded fictional works of WWI, The Good Soldier and the tetralogy Parade’s End.

When, as an undergrad, I went to interview Frank MacShane concerning his recent book on John O’Hara, he joked about being called “the biographer of the stepchildren of literature.” I knew about his judicious works on O’Hara and Raymond Chandler, but I did not realize that an earlier subject—Ford—might have been even more unjustly maligned by posterity. Few writers have been as prolific—and as at such a frequently accomplished level—as Ford.

I became interested in the life and work of Ford after watching a DVD of a BBC adaptation of Parade’s End by Tom Stoppard (a member of the Ford Madox Ford Society), starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall as the spectacularly mismatched couple, Christopher and Sylvia Tietjens. While contending with idiotic commanders on the Western front in France, Christopher must also cope with a volatile wife who makes him the subject of much gossip—a situation with some similarities to the author’s tumultuous private life.

A childhood friend with whom he eloped in his late teens, a rumored affair with his sister-in-law, three subsequent women whom he regarded as spouses, and numerous other lovers led many to regard Ford with some disdain, lowering his critical reputation. This was unfortunate, as Ford played a key role in promoting the careers of many he edited, including Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Jean Rhys, and D. H. Lawrence.

One of his discoveries was Ernest Hemingway, hired by Ford, at the suggestion of Pound, as one of his editors on The Transatlantic Review. Soon, the talented young American grew tired at what he regarded as the pretenses of the man 25 years his senior. It wasn’t merely Ford acting as if he was “so goddam involved in being the dregs of an English country gentleman.” No, what galled Hemingway even worse was Ford’s references to his war record. “De Maupassant, Balzac, the Chartreuse de Parme guy [Stendhal], they all made the war, or didn't they,” Hemingway complained to Pound. “In any event they just learned from it. They didn't always go on under the social spell of it. I'm going to start denying I was in the war for fear I will get like Ford to myself about it.”

That didn’t happen. In fact, even before Hemingway ended up back from the Italian front, it hadn’t happened. As I noted in a prior post, by the time he got back home to Oak Park, Ill., the young ambulance-driver volunteer, wounded in a mortar attack, had already exaggerated the real courage he displayed on the front. It was the start of a bent toward fabulism that extended to, but did not end with, the aspiring novelist’s economic background (he was not, as he told third wife Martha Gellhorn, born in a slum) and his athleticism.

Hemingway would include a short, sharp portrait of Ford in The Sun Also Rises in the form of Henry Braddocks, an editor heavily involved in Parisian carousing. Ford was big-hearted enough to overlook that and praise the novel. Hemingway repaid this forgiveness with a positively acid characterization of Ford in A Moveable Feast under his real name.

The future Nobel laureate would have hated the thought of it, but he would have more than a bit in common with the critic who had mentored him in his youth. Among the common threads in their lives:

11)      Both earned a reputation as unreliable memoirists. Ford’s began to develop in earnest as a result of a reminiscence he published about Conrad after the latter’s death in 1924. Conrad’s widow disputed a number of details in it. But Hemingway’s tales in A Moveable Feast were sneakier and more malicious. Not only were several people (e.g., Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein) dead, but nobody else was in earshot of them and Hemingway to contradict what he wrote more than 30 years after the fact.

22)      Both were Roman Catholic converts who did not stay tied to the faith for long. Ford converted at age 19, but practiced the faith only intermittently throughout the rest of his life. Hemingway converted in his late 20s in order to marry his second wife, Pauline. His practice of the faith did not last much beyond his conversion. Nevertheless, faith figures prominently in each novelist’s most important works. Fr. Consett, Sylvia’s confessor in Parade’s End, becomes a martyr to the cause of Irish independence, while Jake Barnes’ quiet but insistent faith in The Sun Also Rises stands in marked contrast to the utter lack of faith in anything among his friends.

33)      Both men were womanizers. There is really only one point to add to the details about Ford’s complicated love life above: despite being considerably overweight (and, if Hemingway is to be believed, smelly), Ford attracted numerous women over the years through his vast erudition and generosity. As part of his legend—one that became suffocating with time—Hemingway carved out an image of himself as a hard-drinking womanizer.

44)      Both created narrators symbolic of a generation or class damaged by WWI. The very first sentence of Parade’s End is heavy with symbolism: “The two young men—they were of the English public official class—sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage.” These men, born to rule Britannia, will see their world upended, in every conceivable way, by the war. In the case of Tietjens, he will be devastated by shell shock at the front. Lt. Frederic Henry’s wounding in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is believed, by most biographers of the novelist, to be an accurate representation of his own experience. Jake Barnes’ genital wound in The Sun Also Rises is even more serious—in fact, emblematic of an entire generation left psychically unmanned by WWI.