Memories of the Great War: Graves, Sassoon, and Findley

SISTER M. L. MCKENZIE Memories of the Great War: Graves, Sassoon, and Findley In recent years, several new books about World War I have appeared, ranging from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel August 1914 (1971) to Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) and Peter Vansittart's Voices from the Great War (1981). These writers are continuing the critical examination ofthe First World War that was begun by poets and novelists even while it was in progress. Henri Barbusse was the first novelist to attempt to shock the public into an anti-martial frame of mind with Le Feu (1916). While many of their contemporaries were engaged in war propaganda commissioned by the government,' some British soldierpoets , including Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen, startled their readers with realistic verses written in the trenches and while on leave or in hospital in England. In the decades immediately following the war, writers continued to question its glory. In 1928, Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen Nichts Neues offered a pattern for the study of innocence wasted and destroyed by war. In the same year, Siegfried Sassoon began his attempt to understand and record what had happened to him. His memories are found both in the semi-fictional trilogy comprised of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), and Sherston's Progress (1936), finally published together in 1937 as The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, and in the more directly autobiographical Siegfried's Journey: 1916-1920 (1945). Graves's recollections of his war experiences form a significant part of Good-bye to All That (1929)., The features common to all these works include stark realism in depicting the horrors of conflict, an emphasis on the psychological effects on individuals, and an ironic probing of the motivation behind the war as well as of the manner in which it was conducted. These qualities have become characteristic of a tradition of war literature in this century. With his novel The Wars (1977),' Canadian writer Timothy Findley joined this group of international writers who continue to recall the First World War. The Wars, written sixty years after the conflict, not only achieves the immediacy of personal experience through the narrative method involving pictures, diaries, interviews, and otheraids to memory, but also employs the perspective of the present to explore the meaning of the past. This focus lends the novel an admonitory tone, suggesting perhaps that humanity still needs to profit from the lessons the ironically labelled 'war that will end war' offers. Critics of the novel have concenUNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 55, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1986 trated mainly on the ambiguous character of the protagonist Robert Ross, considering his inherited traits, the mythic quality of his life, and his reluctant confrontation with violence, or have treated such technical matters as Findley's use of photography.' In a 19B1 study, however, Eric Thompson discusses the novel's relation to Canadian war fiction, specifically to three realistic novels set in World War I and published between 1929 and '937: All Else is Folly: A Tale of Passion (1929) by Peregrine Acland, Generals Die in Bed (1930) by Yale Harrison, and God's Sparraws (1937) by Philip Child. He considers these novels significant not only because of 'their hard-hitting realism but even more their pursuit of themes deeply embedded in the Canadian experience of modern life.' Thompson finds The Wars 'firmly in the "tradition" of the genre inaugurated by Acland and Harrison and developed by Child: pointing out that Findley 'employs its characteristic motifs.' He concludes that Findley's contribution to this genre is the creation of 'an enormously poignant drama of personal heroism in the midst of war." Equally interesting and rewarding parallels to Findley's fictional treatment ofwar can be found in the works of the British soldier-poetsand memoirists mentioned above. Findley directs our attention specifically to these British writers when he associates Lord Clive Stourbridge with the poets who took part in the Somme offensive, adding: 'Other poets who were present on the First of July, besides Stourbridge and Sassoon, were Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen. Both Sassoon and Graves have written accounts...