A Portable Monument?: Leonard Mann's Flesh in Armour and Australia's Memory of the First World War

Leonard Mann's Flesh in Armour (1932) has been called Australia's best-known and finest novel about the Great War, "le grand classique du roman de guerre Australien."¹ One of its most recent readers, the Australian historian Peter Stanley, commends it as "perhaps the most insightful and honest of Australia's Great War novels."² He was struck that a returned serviceman should be so outspoken about the prostitutes in London, about mutiny, even about suicide—aspects that Charles Bean, Australia's official war historian, had passed over, and which have since been sidelined by a commemorative community that regards the Great War's battlefields as the place where their nation came of age. The war was a landmark in Australian history, the first international crisis to face the newly federated Commonwealth. Of the 300,000 Australians who served overseas, at Gallipoli, in the Middle East, and on the western front, 60,000 died fighting, as many as in the American Expeditionary Force—but from a population of only 4 million.³ Two of the war's key dates are still of national significance today: on Remembrance Day Australians commemorate the end of hostilities on November 11, 1918; on Anzac Day they mark their first major engagement in that conflict, the landings on the Gallipoli Peninsula in the early morning hours of April 25, 1915. "Anzac," an acronym for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, is a sacred term in Australia, endowed with meanings of mateship, bravery, and endurance, and protected by law since 1916.⁴

On a superficial reading, Flesh in Armour's publication history seems to confirm the book's reputation as a fine and insightful response to the war that remains Australia's costliest conflict. With the exception of Frederic Manning's Her Privates We (1929/1930), a novel that occupies a tricky middle ground between British and Australian war writing, Flesh in Armour is Australia's Great War novel with the longest shelf life. In the received account of its reception, the book was an immediate success with critics and readers: with the award of the Australian Literature Society's gold medal for outstanding novel of 1932, Mann's literary merits were established, his reputation with publishers vindicated.⁵ According to these views, the book had come at just the right moment. As Robin Gerster notes, "1932 was a good year to publish a novel which, as Flesh in Armour does, rejoices in the uniqueness of the Australian character." At the height of the Depression, Australians yearned for "books of the tribe,"⁶ and Flesh in Armour was just that, "a chronicle of national tradition," providing much-needed depth and direction to the fledgling myth of the Anzacs. As a result of this demand, the story goes, the entire first edition quickly sold out.⁷

And yet Flesh in Armour's checkered biography complicates this success story. Privately published in 1932, the novel was rejected by publishers in 1933 and 1968, and saw new editions in 1944, 1973, and 1985. It is currently out of print in Australia, available only from secondhand bookstores or from the University of South Carolina Press, which issued a new edition in 2008, as part of the Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Series. Book reviews and archival material, including publishers' records and letters from Mann's contemporaries, further challenge the image of the book as a comfortable site of memory. Where previous work on Australia's literary remembrance of the Great War highlighted continuities—an obsession with martial heroism—these sources reveal a more nuanced picture of shifting tastes and competing expectations.

The Great War was, and remains, a particularly bookish war, "a period of intense and unparalleled creative activity."⁸ It is a conflict that many (at least in the English-speaking world) first encounter through literary texts, notably the poems of a handful of soldier poets: Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Siegfried Sassoon. Their war is "Hell!" "a certain cure for lust of blood."⁹ It is played...