I chose this book as part of my WWI and WWII reading list and knew absolutely nothing about it before reading it except that it was about one of the world wars! I think I must have got some of the reading list from another book. I suspect it was Edward Thorp’s ‘A Man For All Markets’.
The early tone of the book is so acerbic and mocking it takes a while to get used to. The hero, George Winterbourne, is immediately presented as a rather unflattering suicide in WW2 and I initially thought the title might be in some way sarcastic. His family history, childhood and adolescence are then recounted by an unnamed narrator, a fellow WW2 soldier with whom George had seemingly discussed these events. These episodes are filled with such scorn and derision I began to wonder if there was going to be anything the narrator didn’t dislike and treat with disdain. The prose’s main characteristic is anger and its objects of attack are Imperial Britain, the public school system, the ‘kicked back side of the empire’, society and its strange habits. This constitutes the first book.
The second book is about George’s attempts to be an artist in London and his love affairs while he is living there. Sexually it is quite a liberated book and I somehow hadn’t placed Freudian inspired open relationships in pre-WW1 England. The narrator is critical of conventional attitudes to relationships and sex. This aspect is probably semi-autobiographical and, like many of the scenes and experiences, could be from the author's life.
The language and style are quite alien and it feels dated to read. There are lots of strange phrases like ‘toadying’ and an assumed fluency in Classical Mythology, French, Latin and all sorts of other things that don’t feature so heavily in the modern consciousness but seemingly did amongst certain classes in the early 20th Century. A positive interpretation of this could be that the book is historically accurate. Unscientific though it is, the book had a feel of authenticity about its scenes, characters, internal monologues and goings-on.
The third book is where the prose really loses its angry, acerbic tone and changes to one of gravity as it relates scenes of heartbreaking exhaustion and deprivation. As well as the many harrowing descriptions of violent and bloody trench warfare, perhaps equally distressing is George’s return on leave to London. The contrast between before and after the war is stark. It is a distressingly bleak and unresolvable picture of a broken man. Discombobulated and unable to function in a society that simultaneously glorifies and wants to forget about the war, he wanders the embankment emptied of homelessness by the war and wonders how a government can find £5m a day to fight the Germans during war but couldn’t find any money to help the homeless during peace. Unaccustomed to anything but snatches of sleep during shelling and material discomfort he struggles to adapt to the world he left behind, seemingly changed, or broken, irrevocably. I found the poem at the end very moving after the emotional battering I had taken in Book 3!
“Eleven years after the fall of Troy
We, the old men - some of us nearly forty -
Met and talked on the sunny rampart
Over our wine, while the lizards scuttled
In dusty grass, and the crickets chirred.
Some bared their wounds;
Some spoke of the thirst, dry in the throat,
And the heart-beat, in the din of battle;
Some spoke of intolerable sufferings,
The brightness gone from their eyes
And the grey already thick in their hair.
And I sat apart
From the garrulous talk and old memories,
And I heard a boy of twenty
Say petulantly to a girl, seizing her arm:
“Oh, come away; why do you stand there
Listening open-mouthed to the talk of old men?
Haven’t you heard enough of Troy and Achilles?
Why should they bore us for ever
With an old quarrel and the names of dead men
We never knew, and dull forgotten battles?”
And he drew her away,
And she looked back and laughed
As he spoke more contempt of us,
Being now out of hearing.
And I thought of the graves of the desolate Troy
And the beauty of many young men now dust,
And the long agony, and how useless it all was.
And the talk still clashed about me
Like the meeting of blade and blade.
And as they two moved further away
He put an arm about her, and kissed her;
And afterwards I heard their gay distant laughter.
And I looked at the hollow cheeks
And the weary eyes and the grey-streaked heads
Of the old men - nearly forty - about me;
And I too walked away
In an agony of helpless grief and pity.”
I started out thinking this was an average and overblown book but by the end I thought it was both beautiful and insightful. It was a heartbreaking description of the chaos that war can wreak on a single human life. Its brutality seems so at odds with the sentient humanity of an individual like George, it was unbelievably sad to read about his psychological demise and suicide. In the end the angry, sardonic tone of the first two books seems more understandable given the kind of trauma the narrator must have endured. He too knew George, and countless others, and would have experienced first hand what a senseless destruction of life it all was.
