Collectivized cultural of the 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 war i glasses. In other words, 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. I will use it interchangeably with disenchantment because war writers of the 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. From our work in this class, you know that history is oftentimes 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. With interpreting it that way. The First World War is seen as bloody shambles, the lost generation, a precursor to the false start leading to the Second World War, which is seen by 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 conflict through lenses designed for our own convenience. There is something very likable in us doing this. Very much so. Its 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, thats our role, to get to the heart of things, to push back against easy generalizations. To question their foundations and strive 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 by his principal threater, the western front. The combat experience in the western front was brutal. Soldiers adapted to their experiences, though, with surprising resilience. Most who served in the trenches, most who served in the west returned 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. Now, 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 also 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 war memoirists and the poets is about lived experiences. Its about personal history. But memoirs are also written to show something greater than just a collection of war anecdotes, greater than war stories. The first First World War generated hundreds of american and british war books. Many of them 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, understones of war, 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 our way through this last week. The second is Ernest Hemingway, which says Something Interesting about American War Service and about an american soldier coming home. The third, much less wellknown regrettably so is an essay, the epilogue to a war book written by charles kerrington 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 some americans and britains 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. Falls 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 the war books 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 war scenes have been justly acclaimed to be exlent. 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 that suicides were as common as blackberries. He is, in short, another example of an intellectual, whose intelligence with regard to the war penetrates a much shorter distance than that of the plain man. Rather caustic review of Robert Graves. When we left off with Robert Graves, we had him still in the trenches. Last week, we examined graves serving in the western front. Hes at the battle of luth. He witnesses what he regards as this amazing screw up of the british army within the trenches, 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 nice about me. So, graves is wounded in the trenches. Graves comes back and hes recuperating back in england. And he starts to think a bit 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 didnt fall into a regular group of kind of forms these friendships among the other soldiers, seems kind of like an outsider which we already saw from his life earlier than the war, seems it was the same situation. He seems to be 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. Hes not a great team player. You see a little bit of that. So hes 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 hes 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. Hes able to buy into the regimental history. He takes a lot of pride in the group of men he is serving with, 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, and slightly reluctantly, good soldier. He deeply loves his regiment. He admires many of the men he served with. He is able to recognize her heroic qualities in the actions he sees at the western front. At the same time, graves is very conscious of lampooning what he thinks is 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 kind of 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 recognizing that the wars conduct is not ideal on the western front. When i say the wars conduct is not ideal in graves eyes, well, how do you think graves opinions are shifting and changing wards 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. So how does graves adjust . How does he reconcile this war experience with an idea of homecoming . What do you think . What do you think . Whats your impression of him . Yes, laura. Eventually he tries to pick up where he left off. He goes back to oxford, even though he doesnt technically finish it. It seems a rough transition going back into civilian life. They do talk about how he tried to go back with Officers Training and things before that and saw how he would be able to get back in the swing of things. But it was actually much more difficult. He kept having flashbacks to earlier parts of the war. So that didnt work too well either. Right, graves comes back with a case of shellshock, right . He identifies coming back with these memories of the war and gives us all kinds of examples of them. 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 which he continues afterward to use, 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 then afterward in the last third of the book, he is really discussing this idea of trying to make a kind of normal life. But would you consider his life kind of a normal life . Would you consider Robert Graves homecoming to be typical of british veterans . Yes . I think it was a little more intellectual than most of them coming back, and i think he really struggles. He tries oxford, he ends up going to egypt to do some teaching, which doesnt turn out to be that great. Also, hes married. His wife is 18, i think, and he 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 do a lot of things which would normally take a along time. Over the course of a lifetime, he tries to do this fairly quickly. Instead of taking things slowly. Thats how it is. Its like he was trying to make up for lost time. Yeah, yeah, i would agree with that. I totally agree with laura. I think one thing that hes trying to do, just as she was saying, hes trying to recover this lost time. Hes 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 doing to say it seems on the small, daytoday scale that his experiences are more aligned with a typical british soldier coming home. The fact that he does react to everyday items in a new and kind of almost frightened way. So the little nuances and how it affected his daily life and how he interacts with people and objects seems more typical than this extraordinary going to oxford post war life he led. 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. But theyre all people in transition. Charles carrington, 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 t. E. Lawrence. Why do you think hes including that in the book . Why do you think graves is putting in this runin with t. E. Lawrence . Name dropping. Name dropping. So he 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 kind of this middle eastern adventure hero. And graves puts him in. He says 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. Its noncharacteristic of graves to name drop t. E. Lawrence. He has been doing that throughout the entire book. Right. Hes name dropped everyone else throughout the book. Hes talking to hardy about poetry. Drinking ale with t. E. Lawrence. He is talking to sassoon, helps them out when he is going to be courtmartialed. Kind of all these Great British literary figures and hes putting himself in their world. Because he very much was in their world. He writes a biography of lawrence that sells pretty well in this same period. Small biography of t. E. Lawrence that we can summarize by saying Robert Graves loves t. E. Lawrence. He loves writing about him and loves lawrence as the idea. But hes struggling with himself. Hes industrial writing war poems. He is trying to make a living by his pen. He is living this bohemian life theyre living in a cottage outside of oxford, trying to run a shop, et cetera. But then hes doing things that are pretty normal, ways in which hes trying to restart his life. He gets married. He has children. He obsesses over things like diapers. He on obsesses over things like money. So, he does try to have very much a normal life. When he leaves oxford and he goes off to cairo, he is trying his hand at a professional life as a teacher. Does not go well though, right . Goes back to being a writer, and eventually he says goodbye to all that. Now the really complicated question we need to ask with Robert Graves is what do you think he says about british war memory . I got to tell you, i dont know the answer to this question, and ive been struggling with this for a long time. I always ask students, what are we supposed to get from graves . I cant figure it out yet. So i need you to try to help me figure this out. What is the takeaway of this mans autobiography . Of his experiences in the war . I think one of the most remarkable about it is actually looking at how its the guys in the trenches, who would have been noncommissioned officers, the leaders on the ground and in the trenches who are really making the movement. Whereas the higher echelons of the british army, the ones in the regiment going through all of these difficulties, more firsthand than some of the officers is what hes going to look towards. I find find vals answer very interesting. Does anybody else . Why do you think i find her answer so interesting . What shes saying if im doing it inaccurately, throw your pen at me. Graves show us something about how military life works on the western front. The war is being fought by these Junior Officers and the men underneath them. In the words of Charles Carrington it is a sub all turns war. It is a war being waged on the front lines. Graves is trying to show us that. He is lampooning the higher ups. He is trying to show a something of spirit or spree to court within these small units. I find this really interesting. I think there are people out there who would push back against what val is saying and say, hang on, graves doesnt redeem anything in the war. But i think they might not be listening to val as closely as they should be. What she is saying is, though graves likes to lampoon heroism or military hierarchy, he does not really lampoon the notion of heroism of individuals, necessarily. He likes a lot of traditional martial things. Do you think thats a pair docks within his writing . Yes . I certainly think it is a reflection of himself and his life before as an intellectual. He is representational of the split in classes and how that is parallel to the military. He is certainly doing that. I think it definitely shows. I think that was somewhat of a common place in the british army is having that rigidity in social class as well as in the military, so it shows. Okay, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. You are approaching the memory of graves is rather nuanced. Is that what i am getting . Graves is more complicated. Kevin, youre shaking your head. Hes a bit more complicated than that. When the book comes out, people like falls only see one side of Robert Graves. They see the name dropping Charterhouse School boy with a bad attitude. But what they are overlooking to some degree is the stuff at the beginning here, graves trying to show something of battle. Trying to show that this war is a little bit different. A little bit different in the way it is being fought. And within an elite regiment like the royal welsh, what val said is essentially right. That its still being fought in this kind of traditional way where morale matters. Mor