The Somme | The Coward

RE: Review by George Ball of
The Somme & The Coward
by A.D. Gristwood

From: cecil@warwickave.co.uk

To: carlosamantea@yahoo.com

I have just been shown George Ball's comments --- made three years back, but still on the web --- on the introduction I wrote to Donald Gristwood's terrible account of fighting on the Western Front in the First World War in his two short novels, The Somme and The Coward. I trust I have the right of reply, albeit very late.

May I quote what George Ball said?

'There is a rather opaque introduction to these two novelettes from one Hugh Cecil, presumably drafted by the University of South Carolina Press to frame the setting of the novels with a brief biography of Gristwood.

'Unfortunately, Cecil doesn't seem to much care for the writing, nor does he address its virtues and power. He cites the author's "disparaging account of the army," a "lack of balance in his low estimate of human nature," and an absence of "an essential element of tragedy."'

'Historian Cecil, obviously a gung-ho militarist, takes two of the most gripping tales out of WWI ... and doesn't get it. He wants, perhaps, a tale of bravery in the line of fire, of man's noblest spirit rising up at time of crisis, a crown in the diadem of Empire and Humanity. Perhaps he has never seen war; he certainly has never participated in the nerve-jangling, heart-wrenching, soul-frying never-ending terror of mayhem that was life in the trenches of WWI. His view of the worth of these two books is not only flawed, the introduction he cooked up is damnably otiose. For in the midst of unbearable horror, Gristwood has found a beauty which, so brief, so painful, it brings to mind the words of Camus, "Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time."'

I'm sorry if Mr Bell found the introduction 'damnably otiose;' too much military detail perhaps, but I was writing for a readership which includes many interested in the history of warfare; and to call me a 'gung-ho militarist' is ridiculous. The decision to reprint Gristwood's far from militarist book was largely my own. Nobody else has traced his short and very sad life. The story of this wrongly forgotten man, which involved lengthy detective work, was upsetting --- his depressing pre-war job, the awful ordeal of the war, the devoted father's worry about his son, the brief moment of literary attention, much of it unfriendly, then disappointment, the unrelenting mental and physical illness, both stemming from the war, the suicide, the loneliness of the parents' later life.

Sixty years on, I visited 'Avalon' where Gristwood died, finding it for sale and unoccupied; and afterwards located his grave, in the failing light, in a corner of Dorking Cemetery. It was hard not to identify with Gristwood, and nothing could be a more chilling demonstration of the dreadful effects of that war than this melancholy tale.

I have to say that there is scant beauty in either of Gristwood's stories (certainly if you compare them with the best of World War I writers such as Sassoon, Williamson, Yeates or Manning --- none of whom are 'pro-war' or 'gung ho'), but I accept that I did not do justice to the imaginative quality of Gristwood's two novels. I take this opportunity to mention one particularly poignant image in the book which will remain in every reader's mind: that of Everitt's (the protagonist's) father (symbolising security, affection, and prosaic domestic sanity) all-ignorant of the hell his son is going through, and settling down for an afternoon nap in his armchair at the very moment when a mere hundred miles away on the Somme, his son is crouching, terrified, in a shell hole by enemy fire in no-man's land, while knowing exactly what his father must be doing at that moment.

I would now accept Mr. Bell's criticism that I was insufficiently sympathetic towards Gristwood's point of view. My introduction was written over six years ago, since when much has happened to modify my judgment. Even so, I remain of the opinion that the two Gristwood novellas, though completely sincere, lack the generosity of spirit which can be found in other 'anti-war' works by veterans in the same period. Taking HG Wells as his model, which he does, he echoes Wells's vein of contempt and lack of heart which mar the writing of that otherwise superb writer. I would like to quote two paragraphs from my introduction so that the readers may form their own judgment of George Ball's review. Of Gristwood I say:

Yet for all his persuasive detail, there is a lack of balance in his low estimate of human nature and in his own self-contempt. Because of this, Gristwood's grim indictment of war lacks an essential element of tragedy. Better-known British authors like Frederic Manning, Siegfried Sassoon, Richard Aldington, and V. M. Yeates have some of Gristwood's bitterness; their message is painful but mitigated by a relish for life and by human sympathy, which raises their work above his level. Nothing like the deep affection felt by these other writers for their comrades appears in his book. Nobody in it speaks in the tones of the stoical, grief-stricken Private Pritchard in Manning's

when Corporal Tozer tries to comfort him after his friend has been killed during the Somme battle:

"That's all right, Corporal," answered Pritchard evenly. "Bein' sorry ain't going to do us 'ns no manner o' good. We've all the sorrow we can bear of our own, wi' out troubling' ourselves wi' that o' other folk. We 'elp each other all we can, an' when we can't 'elp the other man no more, we must jest 'elp ourselves. But I tell thee, Corporal, if I thought life was never goin' to be no different, I'd as lief be bloody well dead myself.'

and:

Apart from his grave in Dorking cemetery, the book is A. D. Gristwood' s sole monument. Questioning even comradeship and courage as it did, it incensed some ex-servicemen proud of their record and failed to make the impact that the author hoped. It came too early to attract a wider readership.

and

are not masterpieces, but the author's readiness to abandon any pretence of gentlemanly reticence liberated him from many of the inhibiting literary conventions that often weaken war writing of that time. The power of

lies in its unhappy voice. Gristwood spoke out where others dared not, for self-justification maybe, but also to tell the truth about the fighting as he understood it [I would have preferred to have said 'experienced it' ... HC]. "The rhetoric of a thousand journalists will never bring home to the civilian a tithe of what war is," he wrote. "The ghastly futility of the thing; its blasphemy of God and human nature; its contemptuous denial of Christianity; its mechanical cold-blooded cruelty --- only those who saw these things face to face can measure their horror. And those who know cannot share their knowledge."

Are either of these passages expressions of a 'gung-ho' mentality?

--- Hugh Cecil