Fiction
War
IT is strange thafonly now, ten years after the War ended, are we being given the bulk of first-hand accounts and imaginative re-creations of those weary days. It is an alarming-crisis, too ; for we are bound to suspect that somehow or other we have achieved a perspective, a historical sense for the War, an attitude to the whole human catastrophe ; and as soon as we
do that, there is a risk that we can put it comfortably in the background and accept it as a " once-upon-a-time." " We learn nothing from history, except that we learn nothing from history." Is the War becoming history, of that kind ?
Two things will tell against this tendency. The first is the diversity of accounts which we are given ; so that the War is really spread panoramically before us and it is none too easy- to fit it into a single image. Consider Siberian Garrison, for example. This book is a most poignant and vivid story of a backwash of the War ; the communal life of a prison camp in. Siberia ; the attempts to keep up discipline and military tradition ; the sexual problems, the conflicts of personality, the reactions of the War situation, the Russian Revolution, the peace of Brest-Litovsk. It is one of the necessary books for an understanding of the War ; and all the more so because,. although the War hangs over it like a cloud, it is chiefly the story of human beings and human societies in a peculiar en- vironment. There is no axe to grind. We are just thrown, into an unfamiliar situation and allowed to feel our way about it.
The man from whose reactions the story of Siberian Garrison is mainly told is a Hungarian cadet-officer captured by the Russians during his first spell (or almost his first spell} in the front line. M. Markovits himself, we learn from the publishers, had six years' experience of a Russian prison camp, and it is quite clear that all the descriptions are authentic. It is not possible to give an adequate idea of the fullness and reality of his novel ; but it is no overstatement to call it one of the greatest of War books. Perhaps the most memorable scenes in it happen when the War is over, and the prisoners are left derelict in Russia, alternately under the control of Bolsheviks, White Guards, and Czechoslovaks ; with freedom to return to their own countries but with no possibility of doing it ; stricken by famine and plague, and decimated as thoroughly as if they were in the middle of the fighting.
One aspect of the War's aftermath is shown also in The 19. A company of Bolshevik soldiers is conducting a queer sort of guerrilla warfare against Koltchak and the Japanese : queer, because they are almost completely isolated from other
Soviet forces, living a kind of family life under their company- commander. The story is in :part an illustration of the revolutionary spirit in post-War Russia, with its abolition of barriers and its deepening of human contacts ; in part a testimony that character remains much the same, with the same courage or cowardice displayed, the same distinctions of human fibre. It is a good, informative, and notable piece of work ; but it has by no means the width of canvas we find in Siberian Garrison.
The second fact that should help to keep us from falsifying our perspectives is that we are learning the impressions and the outlook of participants. Mr. Brophy, in his anthology The Soldier's War, has conveniently gathered together ex- tracts from the works of English, French, and German soldiers. The principle on which he made his selection was to take " those writers who seemed beyond question to be artists, and to represent each of them by an excerpt of some length which
should be complete in itself." This book, too, may be called .
a necessary book ; and one of its chief uses is that so many
aspects of the War are included, and they are seen through such different personal focuses.
In Mr. Liam O'Flaherty's novel, The Return of the Brute, there is, as might be imagined from the title, rather too much weighting of the scale. " A man's book," the publishers call it ; the bombing squad of whose slow annihilation it tells are " tough lads " ; and their fate is related with " that final starkness and terror which only a genius can portray." Apart from this " excess of strength," however, Mr. O'Flaherty has really produced a luminous and concentrated study of tragic circumstances, with a certain shameless realism which is not often found, even in our most outspoken War books. There is a monstrous farcicalness in some of the incidents, which brings before us an unrevealed aspect of the War ; as in Cor- poral Williams' eagerness to assert his authority and to " crime " the men of his section in the trenches themselves : " Wait till I get you out of the line. You'll be for it. I'll make you hop."
There is no need to do more than announce that M. Henri. Barbusse's two War novels, Under Fire and Light, are now pub- lished in one volume at the price of an ordinary work of fiction. These books have not been superseded by later accounts of War experiences ; they will remain sources for our final perspective, and, if they have their due effect, keep us
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