Five niness. Fittingly, we have a pockmarked, shell torn landscape behind the soldiers. Quick, boys, in ecstasy of fumbling. Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, but someone was still yelling out and stumbling then through the misty panes and thick green light as in a green sea, i saw him drowning in all my dreams he plunges toward me, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace if you could hear at every jolt, the blood, gargling from the frost corrupted lungs, my friends, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some great glory. That it is sweet and fitting to die for s country. These are of course the words of wilfred when, written as it was ongoing. Wilfred himself was a junior officer in the british army in the First World War. They are often reprinted words and they show us something about the brutality of war and the experience of war on the front. The totality of war. They also show us something political. In an argument here, especially in the last part where he talks about men dying for nations, for national cause. The mistakes of this one mans death becomes very high indeed in his eyes. This gives us a sense of what nations ask men to do in war. To complicate this, i want to give you a quotation from another war writer, a patriotic novelist who fought on the western front. His name was edwin hague. He reflected on war books, especially war books that show us the sore deadness of the great war in british memory. He writes, for the last 10 years, weve been submerged by a flood of socalled war books that depict the men who fought as brutes and beasts. Dissolution, drunken, and godless. Some of these works are just ordinary dull dirts he is not referring to wilfred owen as builder, but sensationalized war novels. He says we do not need to worry about these sensationalized accounts, but others are undoubtedly sincere. They are genuine. Their object is obvious and understandable, to paint war in such horrible colors that no one will ever fight again. You can certainly see that in owens column and you can see it in so much of the literature. So far, in this class, we have approached the topic of war and its impact on individuals, but also wars representation, and what i will simply call wars story. How war story works in culture and how historians approach that story within two frameworks. Using two case studies that we have spent time with all is midwester long, the impact of the civil war, of course, fought around us in the fields of gettysburg and more recently in the last few weeks our discussion about combat experience about the First World War, weve been able to recognize certain similarities within the cultural narrative s that are created by people who fight, but to come home, they survive conflicts and remember them afterwards. Some central questions we have exampled are, what motivates people to fight in wars . What sustains soldiers on campaign or at the front . How do soldiers cope with the experience of war . How did they change as a result of what they witnessed . In this afternoons class, dhou they show change . How do they write about it . How are memories created and articulated on paper . Our case study this afternoon is the First World War in british and american memory, and we are considering the wars impact on individuals and the much larger question of the memory of the war within british and american literature. You have read some examples about how the war impacted individual soldiers and how they treated it as a creative trope. The result of this creative enterprise their poems, their memoirs, their short stories these were created out of the aftermath of violence, violence on the western front. Their works demonstrates for a something of the wars memory, but we should use caution in using the term memory. As we have talked about kind of ad nauseum in the class, individual memories are not the same thing as a collective consciousness. Although individual writers are held up as being the voice of a generation or the experience of the war or the one book you need to read to know something about this or that conflict, these works exist within particular context. They were written for particular audiences. A good caution is a reminder of the way we have examined the british war poets. War poetry has had a Significant Impact on the way the british view the First World War. Many look at this as a tragedy, a wilfred owenization of the First World War. It looks at the impact through the lens of doomed youth. Doomed youth, lost generation, what ever grim moniker we want to use. This is another one of those problematic lenses that i believe we should remove from our world one glasses. We need a new prescription for the wars memory. We are going to be more aggressive we should cut out the cataract off disillusionment and with clear eyes view the war generation. Our case study this afternoon, war literature released in the 1920s, has to do with the value of literature to show us the emotional impact of war. We should have no doubt as to this value. But we should still, as historians, exercise good oldfashioned skepticism as to whether literature is an effective way of interpreting complicated historical experiences. We are trying to get at the heart of the notion of disillusionment. How we use it interchangeably with disenchantment, as war writers of this period did. It is a cultural trope. But why did it become the dominant voice to emerge from the experiences of the trenches . At the heart of our discussion this afternoon, you should all emerge questioning the way novels, memoirs, poems, films, madefortv miniseries, etc. Impact the way we view history. You know that history is often times framed by the way social groups choose to remember certain events. And we see this in the way that we remember conflict. The civil war is oftentimes interpreted as a redemptive national tragedy. And there are problems with us doing so. The First World War is seen as bloody shambles, the lost generation, a precursor to the false starts, leading to the Second World War, which is seen by the americans as noble victory. The greatest generation. Something that cements the rise of American Power before vietnam. Vietnam, seen as a political mistake. Despair, disillusionment, shame coming from that war. The oliver stone interpretation of vietnam. Each of these conflicts are of course complex. The way we remember them, we sometimes become victims of our own narrative reductiveness as we attempt to understand their vastness, their meaning, to understand our own identities. In order to understand who we are, sometimes we cut corners with the historical past. We see lenses designed for our own convenience. There is something very likable in us doing this. Very much so. It is comforting. But if you know anything about history, its not comfortable. It is messy. I was talking to one of you during office hours last week. How messy history is. How frustrating it is. And it made me very happy. Not so much the student, i think. History is messy. But as historians, that is our role, to get to the heart of things, to push back against easy generalizations. To question their foundations and stride to complicate what we think we know of the past. This is what we do when we enter cleos garden. So, let us leave cleos garden and go into the murkier trenches. The First World War, as you know, was a global conflict. It was waged by empires. It was fought in many different theaters. An angloamerican memory it is remembered primarily by its principal theater, the western front. The combat experience in the western front was brutal. Soldiers adapted to their experiences with surprising resilience. Most who served in the trenches, most who served in the west return home afterwards. Although of course many bore physical and mental scars of their war service. When the war ended in 1918, it was widely thought by the allies to be a victory over the central powers. In the decades that followed, the great wars hardfought legacy was internationally remembered in thousands of ways. It was remembered in stone. It was remembered in bronze. It was remembered in what is the subject of this class on paper by those who lived through it. Just as war monuments are meant to convey certain messages to the public, and they all have similar kind of language about sacrifice, about national virtue, about causes, tributes to comrades, etc. , war books have a memorial purpose. They convey the authors sentiments to the public at large. They are a forum for doing so. Memory in the hands of the writers, the poets is about personal experience. But memoirs are also written to Say Something greater than the collection of war anecdotes, greater than war stories. The first First World War generated hundreds of american and british war books. Many written by veterans, struggling to find a way to tell their story. In the late 1920s, some of the bestknown of these books were written and published. All quiet on the western front, goodbye to all that, a farewell to arms. Today we are questioning the way in which three authors interpreted the war. More specifically, how veterans interpreted their own homecoming. The first is Robert Graves, whose goodbye to all that we have been discussing and struggling through this week. Next, Ernest Hemingway, which says Something Interesting about the american soldier coming home. The third, much less wellknown known, an essay, the epilogue to a war book written in 1929. Through these three accounts, we hope to get at something, some kind of impression of what the war memory looks like in the late 1920s to americans and britons who lived through it. First, i would like to start with Robert Graves. Graves, i think is the closest to us, so we should probably start with him. I have put up a quote here from a critic, cyril falls. He was a british historian who avidly reviewed war books in the 1920s for the times literary supplement. I rather liked him because he compiles his war book reviews into a rather slim book called war books, in which he gives a paragraph reviewing all of them that come out after the First World War. And he reviewed Robert Graves as goodbye to all that came out in 1929. He reviewed it as such. His work has been justly claimed to be excellent. They are. In fact, among the few books of this nature that are of real historical value. His attitude, however, leaves a disagreeable impression. One might gather that thousands of men instead of a few hundred were executed, and suicides were as common as blackberries. He is, in short, another example of an intellectual, whose intelligence into the war penetrates a much shorter distance than that of the plain man. A caustic review of Robert Graves. When we left off with Robert Graves, we we had him still in the trenches. Last week, we examined graves serving in the western front. He witnesses what he regards as the amazing screw up of the british army, and then he does another battle where he is gravely wounded. More than gravely wounded. He dies in that battle, or at least that is how it is reported back to the family. Graves says at the time, i am not dead, but thank you for publishing something. So, graves is wounded in the trenches. He comes back and is recuperating back in england. He and he starts to think more on his military service. Last week we talked about the type of soldier Robert Graves is. How would you summarize Robert Graves as a soldier, do you think . How would you characterize him . Laura . He did not fall into a regular group of doughboys. He was on the fringes from the older soldiers. He was an outsider, which we saw from his life earlier. My he seems a bit of an outsider. In the charterhouse, on the western front he seems to be an outsider. He does not fit in with his regiment. You get that in the subtext of what he is saying. Robert graves is an intellectual outsider. He is not a great team player. You see a little bit of that. He is a little bit of an outsider. How does he view his war experiences . How is he changing during the war, do you think . Kevin, what do you think . He views it as a transformative experience where he is an outsider at the beginning of his life. He continues to be so during the war, but he also learns to get along with people a little better. He is able to buy and to the regimental history. He takes a lot of pride inervi , even if he is not necessarily the most liked figure. It gives him a new experience he is able to put to use. Graves appears to be a surprisingly, slightly reluctant, good soldier. He deeply loves his regiment. He admires many of the men he served with. He is able to recognize her relic qualities and a lot of the action he sees that the westerns front. At the same time, graves is very conscious of lampooning what he thinks his military idiocy, and he talks a lot about, you know, kind of the british army, the british armys officialdom and how the british army is screwing up the war as it is ongoing. He is able to talk about the great heroism of his own regiment, this great sense of esprit de corps of the royal welsh fusiliers, but at the same time war conduct is not ideal on time war conduct is not ideal on the western front. When i say the words conduct is not not ideal, how do you think his opinions are shifting and changing toward the notion of the war . The last section of his memoir is largely about graves coming out of the trenches and trying to deal with homecoming. Trying to create a life after the war, ok . How those graves are just . How do you reconcile this war experience with an idea homecoming . What do you think . What do you think . What is your impression of him . Yes, laura. Eventually he tries to pick up where he left off. He goes back to oxford, even though he does not really finish it. It rough transition going back to civilian life. But you talk about him trying to go back into Officers Training before that and now he thought he would be able to get right back in was much more difficult. He kept having flashbacks to earlier parts of the war. But did not work out too well either. Right, graves comes back with a case of shellshocked, right . He identifies coming back with these memories of the war and gives us all kinds of examples of this. Not being able to answer a telephone for the fear of a shock coming from it. Commandeering private peoples cars as they are passing on country lanes. His foul language, military style language, even though he has an infant at home. He changes that. Everyone has to change that eventually. Graves changes that. This is a period of adjustment coming back. He marries pretty quickly during the war and in the last third of the book, he is discussing this idea of trying to make a normal life. But would you consider his life a normal life . Would you consider Robert Gravess homecoming to be typical of british veterans . Yes . I think it was a little more intellectual than most of them coming back you really did struggles. He goes to oxford, is going to egypt to do some teaching, which does not turn out to be that great. Also, he is married. His wife is 18, i thinkhe is 22. They have four children fairly quickly. I think he is really struggling. It is typical for the veterans to struggle, but i dont see i dont think you see a lot of them going to oxford and egypt to teach. Right. For a way he is overcompensating for lost time. He does a lot of things he tries to do all of this fairly quickly, like going to oxford and taking the job in egypt. It was like he was trying to make up for lost time. Yeah, yeah, i would agree with that. I totally agree with laura. I think something he tried to do, just as she was saying, he was trying to recover this lost time, and he is also trying to redeem himself intellectually. Like, i am going back to england. I am going to redeem myself. I am going to go to oxford and i am going to restart my life and hopefully progress. Yeah, natalie . I was going to say on the small, daytoday scale, his experiences are more aligned with a lot of the typical british soldier coming home, the fact that he does react to a everyday items in a new and kind of almost frightened way. So, the way that it affects his everyday life seems slightly more typical than extraordinary yeah, you do see the struggle for normalcy that happens with graves. On one hand he does go to oxford and finds oxford to be full of ex serviceman, right . Full of young officers going back and getting an education. Also people in transition. Charles carrington, it he went to oxford around the same time as graves. There are a lot of ex officers. He runs into and becomes a super fan of t. E. Lawrence, right . He runs into him and is hanging out with him. Why do you think he is putting that in his book . Name dropping. Name dropping. So both you said at the start of the book he wanted to include things that would make it more popular and t. E. Lawrence was so popular. Yeah, he is like the avengers, iron man. He comes out of the First World War as this middle eastern adventure hero. And graves puts him in. He says kind of snidely later on, he puts them in to sell more books, but it is pretty apparent that graves really, really likes hanging out with lawrence. He has this tendency to be an individualist unless he is hanging out with someone uber special. These just seem to be the kind of people he gravitates toward though. It is noncharacteristic of graves to name drop t. E. Lawrence. He has been doing that throughout the entire book. Right, he is done that through the rest of the book. He is sitting with tom as a party, talking about poetry. Drinking ale with t. E. Lawrence. He is talking to sassoon, helps them out when he is going to be courtmartialed. All of these great, Great British literary figures and he is putting himself in their world, because he was in their he was hanging out with t. E. Lawrence. He wrote a biography of them that sold pretty well during this time. We can summarize and say Robert Graves loves t. E. Lawrence. He is still writing war poems. He is trying to make a living by his pen. He is living this bohemian life theyre trying to run a shop, etc. And he is doing things that are pretty normal, ways he is trying to restart his life. He gets married. He has children. He obsesses over things like diapers, money. So, he does tr