Abstract
This chapter discusses the liminal experience in the war zone of Arnold Bennett, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Mary Roberts Rinehart, May Sinclair, and Edith Wharton between late 1914 and the months before the Battle of the Somme. I focus on how the authors dealt with the complexities of their liminal experience, and how—wherever possible—they expressed it in terms of an inherited tradition of war writing. The chapter also looks at how the authors’ nationality and gender play a significant role in their representation of the war experience, and to what extent traditional notions of war representation are challenged or perpetuated in their accounts.
Part of this chapter has been rewritten from Prieto, Sara. 2015. “‘Without Methods’: Three Female Authors Visiting the Western Front.” First World War Studies 6 (2): 171–185.
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Notes
- 1.
In the course of the war, “it came to be recognized that the mobilization of men and means was not sufficient; there must be a mobilization of opinion” (Lasswell 1927, p. 14) both at home and abroad. Words became an essential weapon in the struggle. For this reason, the government activated a propaganda campaign in favour of the conflict, in which several celebrated writers were involved. This campaign had a triple purpose: to encourage young soldiers to enlist, to keep up the morale in the civilian population, and to counteract German propaganda in neutral countries. In late August 1914, Charles Masterman organised two secret conferences which resulted in the establishment of the War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House. The War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House would soon become the most active of all propaganda departments established during the war (Taylor 1980, p. 877). It was responsible for producing and disseminating books, pamphlets, and periodicals overseas. Wellington House sponsored books which were published by private publishing houses to make it seem “that British propaganda was solely the creation of private citizens” (Buitenhuis 1989, p. xvii). Masterman’s objective was to mobilise and influence public opinion, most particularly that of neutral countries. To this end, he set up rallies, distributed posters, and created illustrated propaganda and pamphlets, which he expected to be of the “highest literary quality, academic in tone and scholarly in content, rather than simply propagandistic diatribes” (Sanders and Taylor 1982, p. 107). See Buitenhuis 1989, Sanders and Taylor 1982, and Taylor 1980 for further information on the propaganda campaign.
- 2.
The Germans introduced the use of poison-gas in April 1915 during the Second Battle of Ypres. The British were the first among the Allies to introduce this lethal chemical weapon during the Battle of Loos in September 1915.
- 3.
See Kelly’s 2015 introduction to Fighting France for further discussion on Wharton’s proposal to publish her war articles.
- 4.
Before Rinehart, Lorimer had asked Corra Mae Harris to spend a few weeks in London to provide the woman’s perspective of the war (Talmadge 1968, p. 74). See Prieto 2015, p. 4 for further reference.
- 5.
This is the same unit that allowed Philip Gibbs to have his experience under fire in October 1914. See Chap. 2 for further reference.
- 6.
Only two weeks after the meeting at Wellington House, all the authors who had attended the first conference published the Authors’ Manifesto supporting the war. The manifesto was signed by 54 distinguished British writers in order to support the British effort in the war. Authors such as Sir James M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, and John Masefield signed the document, which was published in The Times and the New York Tribune on 18 September 1914. As Samuel Hynes has noted: “no other war in England’s history had been defined and defended so quickly, and by writers of such stature” (1990, p. 27).
- 7.
In addition to A Journal of Impressions, May Sinclair published six more novels that deal with the war.
- 8.
In a sense, the texts written by Bennett, Conan Doyle, and Kipling give evidence of a particular feeling of enchantment towards the war in which the masculine ideal of heroism was a central element. This feeling and the rhetoric of masculinity and idealism was, as Andrew Frayn argues in Writing Disenchantment, “still current before and after the First World War” (2014, p. 11). See also Fletcher 2014 for further discussion on Victorian manliness and how the Great War put it to test.
- 9.
The censoring policies did not allow the authors to be specific about the places they visited, which explains the scarcity of geographical references that appear in their texts.
- 10.
The soldiers retired to these second-line camps to rest from the front.
- 11.
Hazel Hutchison reminds us that Wharton was not only an object of observation for the soldiers, but also a matter of interest for the French general public. As Hermione Lee explains in Wharton’s biography, a cartoon of the author and Walter Berry appeared on the cover of one of the May 1915 issues of Le Rire Rouge. This gives evidence of the reputation that Wharton had achieved in France (see Hutchinson 2015, p. 80 and Lee 2007, pp. 484–486 for further information).
- 12.
The first unit of Dr. Munro’s Flying Ambulance Corps was composed of Bert Bloxham, Marie Chisholm , Dorothie Feilding, Helen Gleason , Elsie Knocker, Dr. Reese, Dr. Shaw, May Sinclair, Rev. Fremlin Streatfeild, Robert Streatfeild, and Tom Worsfold (Atkinson 2010, p. 39).
- 13.
The Aalst incident took place on 27 September 1914, right before the Belgian retreat from Antwerp. It included the execution of twenty Belgian civilians (Horne and Kramer 2001, p. 73).
- 14.
In “Strategic Fictions?”, Andrew Griffiths questions Hynes’s assumptions on Buchan’s war writing and makes similar claims to the ones presented in this chapter. Whereas it is clear that Buchan was a propagandist, well-bred in the traditional rhetoric of war, Griffiths argues that his war texts also give evidence of an incipient fracture with the traditional rhetoric of war writing (see Griffiths 2016 for further information).
- 15.
The French seventy-five cannon is one of the most emblematic guns of the First World War. It was designed by Colonel Albert Deport in 1894 and it was in use until the Second World War . The cannon was an innovation because it was the first weapon to include a mechanism that kept the gun’s trail and wheels still during the firing. As a consequence, the gun did not have to be re-aimed after shooting, allowing more rapid fire.
- 16.
See Shover 1975 for further information on women’s imagery during the First World War.
- 17.
Teresa Gómez Reus and Peter Lauber explore Wharton’s impressions of the havoc that the war was causing through the figure of anthropomorphised images of “murdered houses” and decapitated churches, (2008, pp. 207–210). In similar terms, Alice Kelly concludes in her introduction to a new edition of Fighting France that Wharton developed her “own method, where she circuitously avoids the wooden crosses—or the war dead—relating the scars through imagery of the landscape and physical environs” (2015, p. 21).
- 18.
- 19.
As Hazel Hutchison argues, Wharton found it difficult to detach her own feelings and emotions from her descriptions, an aspect which is “both the strength and weakness” of her war essays (2015, p. 77).
- 20.
Rinehart discovered after her visit to the frontline trenches that it had never been part of the original plan to take her that far and that the Belgian officer that had given the order had made a blunder.
- 21.
See Prieto 2015 for further discussion on these images.
- 22.
“A Journal of Impressions in Belgium by May Sinclair.” The North American Review 202 (720) (November 1915): 779–781.
- 23.
- 24.
Sinclair had already been experimenting with modernist techniques of narration before the war (Wilson 2003, p. 188).
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Prieto, S. (2018). The Liminal Tunnel: Authorial Voices in the War Zone. In: Reporting the First World War in the Liminal Zone. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68594-6_3
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