E. W. Hornung’s Unpublished “Diary,” the YMCA, and the Reading Soldier in the First World War

On the afternoon of 2 September 1914 Charles Masterman, Liberal cabinet minister and newly installed head of the War Propaganda Bureau, convened a secret meeting at Wellington House, formerly headquarters of the National Health Insurance Company.¹ Some of Britain’s most high-profile authors had been invited, and no fewer than twenty-five attended in person, each keen to contribute to the Allied propaganda offensive. At the conference table that afternoon were, among others, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Masefield, Thomas Hardy, and H. G. Wells. Rudyard Kipling sent his apologies but promised to help the Bureau in any way he could. Attendees at that first meeting, along with others recruited subsequently, would soon start to make determined writerly interventions on behalf of Britain’s war effort.² Ford Madox Ford started writing When Blood Is Their Argument for Wellington House in September 1914. A second propaganda book, Between St. Dennis and St. George, followed in January 1915.³ Conan Doyle brought Sherlock Holmes out of retirement to fight the Germans in “The Last Bow.” Both Kipling and Conan Doyle toured the front lines and wrote of their experiences in propagandistic form, Kipling as France at War (1915), Conan Doyle as A Visit to Three Fronts (1916).⁴ Writers associated with Wellington House would ultimately produce some of the most influential and widely read British books of the war: John Masefield’s Gallipoli, Arnold Bennett’s Over There: War Scenes on the Western Front, Ian Hay’s First Hundred Thousand (1916), and John Buchan’s Hannay thrillers.

The conflict did not necessarily loosen its grip on these authors even after the Armistice. For Kipling, the world after 1918 was, as he described it in one letter, “a land of ghosts.”⁵ After the loss of his son, John, at the Battle of Loos, Kipling spent years trying to find out what ultimately had happened to him. After the war, he devoted himself to writing a history of John Kipling’s regiment, the Irish Guards, and threw himself into work with the Imperial War Graves Commission.⁶ Conan Doyle would travel to other realms in search of his dead son, Kingsley, recording what he believed were spirit messages from him and other war casualties in Pheneas Speaks, issued by his own Psychic Press and Bookshop in 1927.⁷ Despite their passionate and enduring support for the Allied cause, both writers have, as Dorothea Flothow has written of Kipling, become “symbols” in popular memory of parental grief and the private tragedies of war.⁸ They have been incorporated into the postwar narrative of disillusionment, even though both maintained a strong belief in the war’s righteousness even after the deaths of their sons.

The speed with which Britain mobilized its publishing industry and popular writers for war illustrates the extent to which the First World War was a conflict about competing national cultures, fought with words as well as weapons. While the attempts of Kipling, Conan Doyle, and the other Wellington House authors to influence the war’s course by writing books are well known, the “self-mobilization” of Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, the crime novelist and short-story writer E. W. Hornung, is less famous. Born on 7 June 1866, a year later than Kipling, Ernest William Hornung’s life and career shadowed and intersected with those of his better-known associates in almost uncanny ways.⁹ Already a published novelist at twenty-six, Hornung met Conan Doyle’s younger sister, Constance, in 1892, and they were married a year later.¹⁰ He evidently made a good first impression. “I like young Willie Hornung very much,” Conan Doyle wrote to an aunt. “He is one of the sweetest-natured most delicate minded men I ever knew.”¹¹ The couple’s only child, Arthur Oscar Hornung, was born on 24 March 1895. As the Hornung family regularly holidayed in the same Swiss skiing village as the Kiplings, Oscar, as he was known, and John Kipling grew up knowing each other well. Despite their age difference and the fact that they attended different public schools (Kipling, Wellington School; Hornung, Eton), by the time of the First World War, John Kipling regarded Oscar as his “closest friend.”¹²

Between 1898 and 1905, Hornung wrote a series of crime stories that would make his name as an author. Hornung’s characters, A. J. (Arthur) Raffles and his accomplice Harold (“Bunny”) Manders, were in many ways conscious mirror images of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.¹³ A thief rather than a detective, Raffles was an occasional first-class cricketer by day, who switched to cat burglar at night and during the off-season to finance his lifestyle. The stories, eventually collected into a single volume in 1906, were immensely popular, despite the objections of some commentators—like Conan Doyle himself—who felt that they sided too heavily with their criminal protagonists.¹⁴ Like Kipling, Hornung was also dedicated to promulgating the ethos of the public school. His 1912 novel Fathers of Men centres on a working-class boy who attends—and eventually succeeds at—Hornung’s old school, Uppingham,¹⁵ and he gave addresses at and wrote poems and songs for a number of other English public schools.¹⁶ By the eve of the First World War, however, Hornung’s career was in decline. He had killed off Raffles in the South African War (significantly, perhaps, Raffles volunteers for action after first devouring accounts of the action in the London newspapers) and none of his subsequent characters proved popular with readers.¹⁷

Then, in July 1915, Oscar, serving as a second lieutenant in the Essex Regiment, was killed by shell fire at Ypres. Unlike Kipling, who was paralyzed by grief after his son’s death, Hornung responded to his bereavement with a series of energetic actions. He compiled a memorial volume of Oscar’s letters for private circulation, joined an antiaircraft battery, wrote the widely circulated poem of patriotic mourning, “Wooden Crosses,” and then volunteered for overseas service with the YMCA, eventually operating a short-lived lending library for soldiers near Arras in February and March 1918.¹⁸ Two years before his premature death on 22 March 1921, Constable published Hornung’s Notes of a Camp Follower (1919), a lighthearted popular account of his war experiences.¹⁹

It turns out that Notes of a Camp Follower is not the only surviving record of Hornung’s YMCA service. Although his biographer wrote in 1999 that there “are, it seems, no ‘Hornung papers’—or, if they exist, they are extremely well concealed,”²⁰ a small selection of papers was retained by Shane R. Chichester (1883–1969), his friend and devotee, and after his death by members of Chichester’s family. When presented to the University of Birmingham’s Cadbury Research Library in 2003, they contained a typescript of a war diary that Hornung kept between December 1917 and March 1918 in the form of letters sent home to his wife, Constance.²¹ Verbal parallels indicate that Hornung used this diary extensively as source material for Notes of a Camp Follower, although it also contains many details and incidents that he chose not to reproduce in the later memoir. Also among the papers are Hornung’s correspondence with Chichester (1901–1921) and an extensive series of book lists relating to the Arras library’s successor, a YMCA lending library for troops of the British Army of Occupation that Hornung operated near Cologne in 1919. Taken together, Hornung’s memoir and unpublished papers are a revealing—and hitherto largely overlooked—account of the day-to-day operations of a First World War soldiers’ library. They provide an insight into the cultural, religious, and personal motivations that impelled one British author to volunteer for war service.

While popular understandings of the war locate the soldier’s experience of war firmly in “the trench” and assume that the conflict was a radically disjunctive event,²² soldiers were never entirely removed from the civilian front, nor were they necessarily alienated from their prewar selves. Instead, as Joanna Bourke has argued, “reality” remained firmly rooted at home, and soldiers “continued to be engrossed in the day-to-day lives of their families and friends.”²³ A key means of maintaining these bonds was the act of reading. As Paul Fussell has written, “The efficiency of the postal service made books as common at the front as parcels from Fortnum and Mason’s, and the prevailing boredom of the tactical situation, together with the universal commitment to the ideal of cultural self-improvement, assured that they were read as in no other war.”²⁴ The traffic of letters between civilian and fighting fronts kept soldiers in touch with family and books brought or sent from home allowed soldiers to maintain ties with their prewar civilian identities. Soldiers’ wartime reading experiences, such as those Hornung observed and subsequently recorded in his diary, provide ways of mapping the intersection of these competing worlds.²⁵ What makes Hornung’s observations especially important, however, is that they centre on the reading tastes and habits of ordinary soldiers—elusive subjects in the historical record of reading in wartime. Fussell, as we have seen, argues for the centrality of literature to the First World War experience, but, as his reference to Fortnum and Mason’s parcels indicates, his focus is limited almost exclusively to a small section of the officer class.²⁶ The officer-readers he lists are practically a Who’s Who of Britain’s postwar intellectual elite—Robert Graves, the Boswell editor R. W. Chapman, Siegfried Sassoon, and the art critic Herbert Read.²⁷

With their focus on “common readers” at the front, Hornung’s memoir and “Diary” both complement and challenge Fussell’s model of a “literary war.” Although necessarily mediated through Hornung’s authorial voice, the anecdotes of wartime reading he recorded demonstrate the variety of uses that books could be put to in wartime. Fussell’s officerintellectuals typically use books as source material for future literary composition. Hornung, however, observes his YMCA-tent readers using books in other ways—as tokens of home or portals for temporary psychological escape from war, but also as a means of asserting an intellectual or civilian identity apart from war. While Fussell demonstrates the ultimately-not-terribly-surprising fact that university-educated officer-poets read during wartime, Hornung shows that soldiers from the ranks were also anxious both to read and to be seen reading. Books—especially classic and popular fiction—offered the private or noncommissioned soldier implements for carving out intellectual or social spaces for themselves independent of rank or uniform.

Within a few months of hostilities starting, British booksellers were noting a steady—and wholly unexpected—surge in sales.²⁸ Publishers had been bracing themselves for a slump in demand for books brought on by wartime conditions. As an August 1915 article in the Bookman observed, however, early pessimistic assumptions that “nobody” was “buying” were not borne out on the ground. W. H. Smith reported that “business [had] been much better of late” and that sales of “six shilling novels” were “going very well.” Jones and Evans noted that most of their fiction sales were in the form of “cheap editions, which were being bought in large quantities by people … sending them to soldiers at the front.”²⁹ Governments, charities, and voluntary organizations registered the same “hunger” for books among the wartime public and quickly sought to harness this new reading potential for their own ends. British soldiers were soon being practically bombarded with texts, the dissemination of which was meant to maintain morale and strengthen soldierly understandings of national culture.³⁰ The scale of these efforts to supply soldiers with reading material was unprecedented in the history of the British army, and their success would ultimately inspire similar—albeit larger—book provision schemes during later conflicts involving British and American forces, particularly World War II.³¹

The YMCA recognized the importance of providing soldiers with spaces for reading and writing early in the war. Tent-based Reading Rooms were seen as important sites of intervention in soldiers’ daily lives, where the Association could exert its educational influence and help to increase morale.³² They were locations where British popular and “recreational culture” could be regulated and administered for both spiritual and military purposes.³³ Writing from a YMCA tent at Le Havre in 1915, the Reverend J. K. Thomson observed that the men in uniform around him seemed “sensitive to the serious side of life as never before.” They were, he wrote, deeply appreciative of the material comforts the YMCA could offer them in Le Havre—“warm stoves, refreshments, music, writing materials, and a circulating library of books”—and this gratefulness, combined with the uncertainty of their lives as soldiers, made them “tinder” for the Association’s evangelical mission.³⁴

Individual YMCA volunteers quickly discovered that the strategically timed gift of a book could be a way of establishing an emotional or spiritual connection with soldiers encountered in the tents. Jessie Wilson, soon after arriving at Hut 15 in Harfleur in 1915, befriended one serviceman while she worked behind the counter. When he came to say goodbye to her—the first “personal” farewell she had had from an individual soldier—she offered him “a book for the train, for which he was grateful out of all proportion.”³⁵ Wilson thereafter often used a book to initiate this kind of closer, pastoral relationship with individual soldiers. She records meeting one private in the Scottish Rifles—“handsome as a god”—who professed an interest in the sermon he had just heard. As he was leaving, she

hastily picked up a book … for the journey and went to wish him “good luck”.… I shall never forget the sweetness of his smile nor his wonderful eyes as he thanked me.… I never saw him again but had several letters from him; serious discussions of the heavy stuff I sent for his reading. The novel that also went in each parcel was dismissed with: “The novel which you also sent is much appreciated by the platoon and is handed from one to the other.”³⁶

The YMCA offered its middle-class volunteers—particularly those at managerial level—a large degree of autonomy. There was often little oversight of day-to-day operations and, as Walter J. Morrison later recorded, the subsequent freedom that YMCA secretaries and “Hut leaders” had to “practically … do as [they] liked” led to many instances of waste and poor performance.³⁷ Amateurs often found themselves performing complex professional duties with which they had had little or no experience in civil life. This could result, as Morrison candidly observed, in YMCA personnel occasionally making “a sorry mess of things,”³⁸ but at the same time it also offered amateurs possibilities for action that they would never have encountered otherwise. It was into this operational context—ambitious yet sometimes disorganized, with large potential spaces for individual agency—that Hornung arrived as a YMCA volunteer in France in early December 1917.

Hornung was initially assigned to canteen work, selling cigarettes, candles, and biscuits, and pouring mugs of tea and coffee. In Notes of a Camp Follower, he described these tasks in jocular, sentimental terms. It was, he reflected, “perhaps … the least skilled labour to be had in France,” but at least it put him within sight of ordinary soldiers. “The accents” of his customers were, he wrote, “from every district … and were those of every class…. They warmed the blood like a medley of patriotic airs, and I commenced potman as it were to martial music.”³⁹ Addressed as they were to his wife, Constance, Hornung’s diary entries reveal rather more about the personal motivations he had brought with him to the front than does Notes of a Camp Follower. Sleeping under canvas reminded him, he wrote, of “old times in the Bush”—a reference to his experiences as a young man in the Australian outback, which had provided the inspiration for his early novels and short stories.⁴⁰ He hoped, he records in the “Diary,” to see his nephew Kingsley, Conan Doyle’s son, and “perhaps some who knew darling Oscar,” and to advance into the lines, where he might “write letters” in a dugout like the one from which his son had written to him earlier in the war. “Has any civilian writer,” he asked, “had a better chance than this” to observe the ordinary routines of military life?⁴¹

Comments like this indicate that he was already thinking of the “Diary” as source material for a future book. Hornung’s simultaneous vocations as librarian, “potman,” and author meant that the war experiences he recorded in both his diary and subsequent memoir became thoroughly intertwined with the experiences of reading and writing. After his tent-mates went to sleep, Hornung often stayed up reading James Grant’s The Romance of War, allowing its unabashedly Victorian modes of representation to percolate into and frame his own experience of military life.⁴² When he received permission to advance into the lines and help operate one of the YMCA’s forward canteens over Christmas 1917, his diary announced triumphantly: “the Area of Romance at last.”⁴³ He also could not resist using his new position to gain market intelligence on what the ordinary soldiers around him were reading. Before going up the line, he told Constance that he had just overheard one of his orderlies quoting Conan Doyle’s Rodney Stone (1896) and playfully suggested that she convey this news to its author.⁴⁴

While in France, Hornung also used the opportunity to make contact with friends of his dead son and other public-school boys he had known before the war, who were now serving in the lines. One of these soldiers was Carlos Paton (Peter) Blacker, a former Eton schoolmate of Oscar’s, now a captain in the Coldstream Guards. On 16 January 1918, Blacker invited Hornung to camp overnight with him and some of his fellow officers, and in his memoirs, he left a sympathetic portrait of Hornung at work behind the lines:

Being a civilian dressed in nondescript khaki, he brought a touch of home to his “customers” (as he liked to call them). Everyone admired him and was grateful for the strong sweet tea which he dispensed. He would encourage his “customers” to talk about their homes which they were glad enough to do. It got around that he was a distinguished writer. His Raffles books were popular…. He had offers of help and by no means suffered from loneliness.⁴⁵

Blacker’s memoir hints at Hornung’s hunger for emotional connection in the trenches. He may have been somewhat taken aback, however, had he ever had the chance to read Hornung’s own diary account of his night with the Coldstream Guards. After staying up with Blacker listening to Wagner on the mess hut gramophone, Hornung joined his dead son’s friend in his own billet. Waking in the night, he “smoked a pipe, and listened to the dear lad breathing like a baby in his sleep; and I thought … how often of old I have listened anxiously for Oscar’s breathing, when he used to sleep in our room—to make sure that he was still alive!—Well I know now that he is infinitely more alive now than he was then, and he has never been nearer to me than he was that night.”⁴⁶

In this intensely personal exchange with Constance, Blacker becomes an all-too-obvious surrogate son for Hornung. The sound of Blacker’s breathing enables Hornung to momentarily collapse memory and present experience into the same space, providing the brief illusion that Oscar is alive still. In his 1941 memorial volume, E. W. Hornung and His Young Guard, Shane Chichester wrote that Hornung “developed a deep friendship with many of the lads” he met during his visits to public schools—indeed, his friendship with Chichester stemmed from such a meeting—and that his desire to visit the “fighting men” into which these “lads” had grown was a product of this enduring interest in “school life.”⁴⁷ The kind of intense emotional connection that Hornung experienced in Blacker’s hut, however, reveals more about the private landscape of feeling that underpinned his pilgrimage to the trenches. YMCA service offered Hornung the chance to process his fatherly grief by forming new, temporary father-son relationships with other men.⁴⁸

In early January 1918, YMCA authorities decided to make more direct use of the author in their ranks and instructed Hornung to take over one of their existing huts in Arras and convert it into a reading room and circulating library for troops.⁴⁹ The new venture allowed Hornung to bring his various interests and ambitions together in a consolidated way—furthering the patriotic cause that had consumed his son, ministering to soldiers through books, and observing common readers in the field and supervising their tastes. It was, he noted in his “Diary,” “a noble chance. I am quite certain I shall be the humble means of exciting just the very atmosphere that is wanted and to give a wide, high outlook and to infuse the right spirit…. No expense is to be spared in the way of books, papers, and magazines.”⁵⁰ The kernel of the library that Hornung assembled in the Rest Hut came initially from YMCA sources, but he found that these first books “were a motley herd: the sweepings of unknown benefactors’ libraries” and “the leavings of officers and men,” juxtaposing awkwardly with “the first draft of cheap masterpieces from the base.”⁵¹ Hornung soon began to supplement this initial, almost random assortment of books with more deliberate acquisitions. He wrote to publishing contacts in Britain to solicit donations, with a particular eye on recent publications.⁵² A trip to the YMCA’s “book department” at Le Havre secured 150 new titles, handpicked from their “well-stocked shelves” by a ladder-climbing Hornung.⁵³ By mid-February, he recorded that he was “up to the neck in Library preparations,” but that he had nevertheless amassed over a thousand books and was overseeing their labelling and cataloguing “on the best British Museum principles.”⁵⁴ Longman’s, meanwhile, had replied to his “begging letter” by sending a parcel of new books and he hoped that other publishers would soon follow suit.⁵⁵ By the third week of February, he and an assistant had compiled a complete copy of the catalogue by staying “out of bed till several successive midnights.”⁵⁶ Hornung, meanwhile, publicized the Rest Hut by taking a succession of visitors on tours around the premises before its official opening.

Both Hornung’s “Diary” and memoir contain detailed accounts of the Rest Hut’s furnishings and the attractions and facilities it offered. An official photographer had been due to record the hut’s operations on film, but as events transpired, he would not arrive before YMCA personnel were forced to evacuate Arras during the German Spring Offensive.⁵⁷ The almost photographic precision with which Hornung described the hut’s interior in Notes of a Camp Follower clearly reflects this lost opportunity. He evidently aimed to reconstruct the hut in prose where other forms of visual record had failed him. From Hornung’s descriptions, the pains he had taken to configure the hut as a space specifically set aside for reading become clear. There would, he had been adamant from the outset, be no billiard table.⁵⁸ He had arranged with YMCA carpenters for skylights to be fitted, so that there would be sufficient natural light overhead for soldiers to sit and read. Inside, four small trestle tables had been grouped together and, concealed with a “nice new American” tablecloth, formed the newspaper and periodicals desk.⁵⁹ Stoves stood at either end of the hut, surrounded by a ring of wicker armchairs, each with its own ashtray. The genteel, quasi-civilian nature of these furnishings was deliberate. The seating arrangement was, Hornung wrote, a deliberate “imitation of the club smoking-room,” whose general “atmosphere” he meant to evoke in “the body of the hut.”⁶⁰ The Rest Hut, in other words, was a consciously hybrid, consciously masculinized space—one that placed the contents and accoutrements of the gentleman’s library within reach of the “workingclass seeker” in uniform.⁶¹ It sought to recreate the kind of urban working-class reading space the Rest Hut’s customers may have been familiar with in peacetime but raised a pitch in terms of social class.⁶² New books, direct from the publishers, had their own table, a feature that Hornung was evidently especially proud of. Along the wall against which the issues desk sat, the books themselves were arranged in five long shelves, “thirty yards,” as Hornung put it, “of good and bad reading.”⁶³ At the entrance to the hut, Hornung himself had installed—inexpertly, he allowed—a boot-scraper, so that soldiers coming into the library “could leave the mud of war outside our hut.”⁶⁴ The point of this carefully crafted literary refuge from the front was, he wrote to Constance, to gain access to “the thinking and reading men as they have not been got at hitherto; [to] feed … the intellectually starved or starving, [while] always remembering that they are fighting-men first and foremost, and prescribing for them both as such and as the men they used to be…. I want to create an atmosphere in which they can forget, and yet go back to the forgotten thing with new heart and zest.”⁶⁵

The illusion of the library’s separateness from battle was only temporary. While the Rest Hut may have been designed to simulate the experience of using a library in the civilian world, Hornung ultimately saw the role of books at the front in utilitarian terms. They were food for soldiers’ minds, a kind of tonic that would allow them to perform military tasks with renewed vigour. The “rest” provided by the Rest Hut—like the wartime reading experience itself—was intended as a brief punctuation mark in a soldier’s daily routine, after which he was expected to resume the business of fighting.

Unbeknownst to Hornung, however, the Rest Hut’s opening was to practically coincide with a critical new phase in the war, one that would bring the library’s operations to a halt almost as soon as they had started. On 21 March 1918, the German High Command launched Operation Michael, as the “Kaiserschlacht” or Spring Offensive was officially code-named, with a massive artillery barrage along the front.⁶⁶ In his diary entry for that day, Hornung bleakly acknowledged the “fun,” describing how he had been woken early that morning by British counterbattery fire near the town.⁶⁷ By March 23, German shells were falling regularly in Arras itself, and the town crier instructed all French civilians to evacuate the town by 3:30 that afternoon. The YMCA quickly followed suit, with all personnel other than a small medical party ordered to leave that night. Just before Hornung and his YMCA colleagues drove away from the town, they observed two or three German shells fall in the street immediately outside their headquarters.⁶⁸ A scene witnessed elsewhere on that day by stretcher-bearer Frank Dunham suggests what may have happened to any YMCA stores left at Arras that survived the shelling. In the village of Ytres, southeast of Arras, Dunham watched evacuating troops systematically strip an abandoned “canteen marquee,” “filling their haversacks” and pockets with “eatables and smokes.”⁶⁹ Whatever the ultimate agent of destruction was in this case, neither the Rest Hut’s furnishings nor its book stock were ever recovered.

Hornung’s writings provide a detailed insight into the establishment of, and ideological underpinnings behind, one YMCA soldiers’ library. What can they reveal, however, about the library’s contents and the experiences of the soldiers who used it during the five weeks or so it was open? Hornung kept an issues register, organized by author, in which he recorded every title loaned and the dates of its issue and return.⁷⁰ This was packed in the “one too heavy piece of luggage” Hornung took with him from Arras on the evening of 23 March 1918, but it was not, apparently, among the papers that the Cadbury Library acquired from the Chichester family.⁷¹ A typed copy of the library’s catalogue mentioned in Notes of a Camp Follower is similarly untraceable.⁷² This lack of independent documentary evidence means that any attempt to reconstruct the library’s book stock and usage patterns is necessarily reliant on Hornung’s own testimony. Mediated though it is through Hornung’s viewpoint, a surprisingly large amount of information about readers and titles can be harvested from Hornung’s two narratives. He regularly recorded individual anecdotes of soldierly reading in the “Diary” when they caught his fancy, occasionally noting borrowers’ names, ranks, and units. His accounts of the library’s opening and final days are particularly rich in these kinds of details. From these remaining fragments of evidence, it is possible to recover something of the soldierly experience of textual encounter in the Arras Rest Hut and, along with it, some idea of the reading habits of the soldiers who used it, their motivations for visiting, and their impressions of the author who sat behind the desk.

Of the roughly 1,200–1,300 volumes in the library by early March,⁷³ forty-two are identified by title in either the “Diary,” Hornung’s correspondence with Shane Chichester, or Notes of a Camp Follower. These include works as diverse as Charles Lamb’s Elia, Patrick Simpson’s The Fact of Christ, and J. J. Bell’s 1915 war novel Wee Macgregor Enlists. In all, Hornung records fifty-three authors who had one or more volumes on the shelves of the Rest Hut, the most frequently mentioned of whom was Charles Dickens, who had at least four—A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, and The Pickwick Papers. Other writers whose works were evidently available in the Rest Hut, but for whom title information is not recorded, include Arnold Bennett, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, Ethel M. Dell, John Galsworthy, H. Rider Haggard, O. Henry, Maurice Hewlett, A. E. W. Mason, Phillips Oppenheim, Dorothy Vachell, H. G. Wells, Stanley Weyman, and Oscar Wilde. This list places the bulk of the Rest Hut’s holdings firmly within the category of the “middlebrow.”⁷⁴ Moreover, the presence of Wellington House authors such as Bennett and Galsworthy perhaps reflects the boost to their profiles these writers received due to their highly visible involvement with the wartime political establishment.⁷⁵ Hornung also provides some hints as to what was not available in the library. Delays in dealing with the YMCA stores meant that, for instance, the two complete sets of Kipling he had wanted had not arrived by the time the Rest Hut was forced to close. “The Y.M.C.A. are maddening people to order things through,” he complained to Constance.⁷⁶

The most sustained description Hornung provides of soldiers interacting with these books appears in his account of the Rest Hut’s first day, initially written out for Constance in a diary entry dated “22 February, 12.30 p.m.” and later expanded and revised for Notes of a Camp Follower. The Rest Hut finally opened its doors, he recorded, at “two o’clock sharp” on 20 February 1918.⁷⁷ There had been no queue as there was outside a typical YMCA canteen and Hornung initially feared that his hut was a “wash-out.”⁷⁸ However, he wrote, “in a few minutes [soldiers] began to blow in, one or two at a time, like leaves, and in half-anhour or so the … newspaper and magazine table … was surrounded by solemn faces.” Their eyes, he noticed, were drawn immediately to the prominently displayed new books table and Hornung observed with evident satisfaction that the chairs around it were soon “seldom without some big man buried in a book.”⁷⁹ After about half an hour, the first library patrons “began to come up to the counter” to look at the catalogue and to talk to Hornung himself.⁸⁰ The first reference enquiry, however, was an embarrassing anticlimax. A Scottish soldier asked for “anything of Walter de la Mare’s” and had to go away empty-handed, leaving Hornung feeling like a “Philistine” for not having ordered any of his works.⁸¹ Other interactions had more positive outcomes. The first four books to go out on issue were George Meredith’s Richard Feverel, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Across the Plains, Hilaire Belloc’s Mr Clutterbuck’s Election, and, to his surprise and delight, Hornung’s own Shadow of the Rope.⁸² His first three customers had been, he noted, a group of “very superior young … stretcher-bearers” from the Royal Army Medical Corps.⁸³ In all, twenty-three books were borrowed by soldiers that afternoon.⁸⁴

According to the retrospective analysis of his issues book that Hornung sketched out in Notes of a Camp Follower, the borrowing patterns observed on that first day were typical of what was to come. Hornung calculated that something like 87 percent of books issued in the Rest Hut were works of popular or classic fiction.⁸⁵ The most heavily borrowed author during the library’s span of operations was the comic novelist “Ian Hay” (John Hay Beith), but this may have been, Hornung suggested, simply due to the number of his books on the shelves. The Rest Hut had practically all of Hay’s works, most in multiple copies, and this abundance may have tipped the scales in his favour.⁸⁶ One of Hay’s books, his lighthearted, though avowedly propagandistic, account of service in a Kitchener battalion, The First Hundred Thousand (1915), became the single most-read title in the library. All four copies were out on issue almost continuously, and none of the four was ultimately ever returned—genuine testimony, Hornung allowed, to Hay’s popularity.⁸⁷ The prominence of The First Hundred Thousandand its 1916 sequel, Carrying On: After the First Hundred Thousand, in Hornung’s issues book is not surprising. References to these books appear in soldiers’ letters and diaries frequently during the First World War, suggesting that they were widely circulated among military readers.⁸⁸ While undergoing flight training in Wiltshire in March 1916, Second Lieutenant Gwilym Lewis wrote to his parents: “I have dipped well into The First Hundred Thousand. It is a first rate book, and awfully popular. There are about six copies here, and everyone is shouting ‘after you.’ It is very funny and everything is so absolutely true.”⁸⁹ Other soldiers confirmed that the attractions of this book were its humour and its supposedly accurate depiction of military life. John Brown, in training at Ripon a few weeks before Lewis, drily informed one correspondent: “I have read a lot this winter, but done little else…. Ian Hay’s First Hundred Thousand … is a great description of this war and its jokes, some of which I have made myself.”⁹⁰ Significantly, perhaps, this was the kind of “war book” that could be shared with relatives at home without causing them undue concern. Lancelot Spicer, serving in trenches near Armentières in December 1915, sent his father a copy of The First Hundred Thousand for Christmas, assuring family in an accompanying letter that it was “very true to life.”⁹¹ This was a “war book” from which war itself was oddly absent. As Samuel Hynes puts it, Hay “had found a means of seeing war and the military life in the best possible light.”⁹² His account provided the illusion of realism, while decorously excluding the unpleasant or upsetting aspects of war from view. For the soldiers who used the Rest Hut, many of whom were serving in Scottish regiments, The First Hundred Thousand may have had an additional appeal. As David Goldie has observed, Hay’s book has a specifically Scottish context, depicting, as he puts it, “the process through which working-class Scotsmen of low self-esteem and dubious morality are welded into a cohesive and principled force by their Anglo-Scots officers.”⁹³ Scottish soldier-readers may have felt that this book addressed them in an especially direct way.

Lise Jaillant has recently linked Hay, another pseudonymous officer-writer, “Sapper” (Herman Cyril McNeile), and John Buchan with what she calls a “successful war writing brand” created during the conflict by publishers Hodder & Stoughton.⁹⁴ All of these writers, she notes, shared the same agent, publisher, and sales apparatus, and all were known for their ability to mix military realism with comedy in a satisfyingly “justified narrative.”⁹⁵ Due to these characteristics, she argues, these authors could be marketed not only to civilians seeking “a better understanding of the war,” but also to soldiers, who would “recognise” and appreciate the “settings” they depicted.⁹⁶ Despite the fact that the most-borrowed title in the Rest Hut was a “war book,” Hornung himself resisted the conclusion that this genre was generally popular with soldiers in active zones. Most of the men who used the library had, he insisted, what he called a “fighting reader’s distaste for ‘shop.’”⁹⁷ Fewer than 3 percent of borrowers, for instance, had taken out nonfiction books about the war’s political dimension. Instead of war books, the vast majority “wanted something to take them out of khaki, and nearly nine out of ten pinned their faith to fiction.”⁹⁸ Paradoxically, Hornung suggests, the very thing that gave British soldiers the stomach to fight the war was access through reading and popular culture to the periodic illusion of escape from it.

Hornung was perhaps guilty of romanticising his soldier-readers in denying that they had much interest in “shop.” Certainly, his correspondence with Shane Chichester suggests that some, at least, had a decidedly present-focused, utilitarian approach to war reading. A postscript to a letter asking for further book donations notes that, “Any little munition book—work on explosives—would soon find readers. Send small parcels only.”⁹⁹ However, other soldiers did record their distaste for novels and stories too obviously connected with the war—works, perhaps, by writers like “Sapper.” Lance-Corporal Roland Mountfort wrote home from a billet in Souastre in February 1916, acknowledging a parcel: “Thanks for the magazines. I wish to goodness they would leave off writing war stories. Do you imagine anyone ever reads them? I’m jolly sure I don’t.”¹⁰⁰ When asked by his family if he wanted any reading material sent out to him in France, Lance-Corporal Edward Trafford replied simply: “Yes a book is always welcome but no war stories, thanks.”¹⁰¹ These notes of complaint resemble later comments about wartime reading patterns reported to Mass Observation in the Second World War. In her analysis of Mass Observation responses, Katie Halsey observes that generally speaking “‘war books’ are shunned, while books with ‘plenty of action’ to distract the mind are valued.”¹⁰² Halsey’s subjects are civilians, but the testimony of Mountfort and Trafford suggests that there were similarly resistant readers in active zones in France during the earlier conflict.

Other testimony supports the idea that what was most appreciated under wartime conditions was something to take a soldier’s mind as far away from war as possible. Soldiers’ descriptions of their own reading practices in active zones suggest that escapist, rather than topical or patriotic, reading matter could be an effective way of alleviating combat stress.¹⁰³ Under shell fire especially, having a novel to read—or even just the ability to flip through its pages—could be a valuable source of distraction. Subjected to counterbattery fire on the Bellewaarde Ridge in Flanders in August 1917, Second Lieutenant Huntly Gordon tried to read The Pickwick Papers. Although he was too terrified to take in any of the words, he found that the simple mechanics of holding the book and turning its pages allowed him to maintain composure.¹⁰⁴ Trafford reported using Ian Hay’s prewar romance novel A Man’s Man (1909) similarly when under shell fire at Bois Carre in October 1915.¹⁰⁵ Soldiers, in other words, did not necessarily have to read the books they brought with them particularly closely—or even at all—to gain use from them. A book in a combat zone could have meaning simply as an object. Unopened, it could be a symbol of the familiar or everyday world beyond the war. The act of reading, skimming, or holding it, meanwhile, offered a soldier a way of occupying the mind and preventing the intrusion of unwanted thoughts, particularly in situations where physical movement was limited, such as periods of prolonged bombardment.¹⁰⁶ Reading thus joined the repertoire of psychological coping strategies that Alexander Watson has outlined in his cross-cultural study of frontline troops in the First World War. The ability to absorb oneself in a book, and the physical rituals involved in handling it, provided an element of “structure” and “control” in an otherwise “chaotic environment.”¹⁰⁷

Hornung’s accounts of the Rest Hut suggest that many of its borrowers used books to perform similar acts of mental escapism. On the hut’s opening day, one Scottish soldier had asked for Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, specifically telling Hornung that he would be taking it “up the Line with him.”¹⁰⁸ Poetry anthologies like the Golden Treasury were well suited to trench reading, due to their fragmentary and episodic nature. These could be read discontinuously, whenever bits and pieces of spare time were available.¹⁰⁹ More lengthy narratives could provide appropriate sites for deeper forms of mental absorption. Also issued on the hut’s first day was a copy of Lorna Doone. The book’s borrower, a Scottish private, returned it shortly thereafter, reporting to Hornung that he had read it “forthwith from cover to cover in the trenches” and was now back “by special permission for something else as good.”¹¹⁰ Hornung reported that there was a steady demand for Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, and that these books were “really read,” going by the number of days they typically stayed out before being returned. Moreover, a serious novel like A Tale of Two Cities tended to be more appealing to soldiers heading for a spell in the trenches, he believed, than the comic titles in the Dickens canon.¹¹¹

The willingness of some ordinary soldiers to tackle classic literature and the pride with which they displayed their autodidactic impulses evidently impressed Hornung. He could acknowledge the attractions of an author of simple romances like Charles Garvice, while perhaps privately enjoying the incongruity of seeing a title like Just a Girl in the grip of a burly soldier from a frontline regiment.¹¹² However, a note of masculinist condescension accompanies his descriptions of those readers who habitually borrowed romance novels.¹¹³ They always, he noted, seemed to “hunt … in couples” and most were, he thought, either in the Army Service Corps or assigned to other forms of light or noncombat duty in Arras.¹¹⁴ A soldier who expressed an interest in the canonical, on the other hand, quickly gained Hornung’s attention. He was particularly struck by the degree of “cultural literacy” he encountered among some of the hut’s working-class borrowers. But for his conversations with individual soldier-readers, he wrote, he would not “have known that rough poor lads were reading Ruskin and Carlyle, that a Northamptonshire shoemaker was as likely as anyone else to be steeped in Charles Lamb, or a telegraph-clerk and his wife [would] tramp the Yorkshire dales with Wordsworth and Keats about their persons…. I … would never have imagined such men if the God of battles had not put me to school in my Rest Hut for one short half-term.”¹¹⁵

The “Diary” contains slightly more detailed accounts of these soldiers. The “rough poor lads” who read Ruskin and Carlyle were described as “one or two quite rough diamonds who will only read Carlyle, Ruskin, Lamb, or Poetry! No fiction.”¹¹⁶ The “telegraph-clerk” was a thirty-nine-year-old wireless signaller from Teesside, who kept a personal manuscript anthology of poems in his field notebook. A post office worker before the war, he told Hornung that he and his wife would take a month off every year to go tramping on the Yorkshire moors, reading “Poetry … by the wayside,” and that this month’s holiday would see him “through the other eleven.”¹¹⁷ Hornung seems to have identified with this middle-aged volunteer on an additional, unspoken level. The Yorkshire dales were, he noted in his “Diary,” “Oscar’s country”—a landscape encoded with private meanings for Hornung after years of prewar outings there with his wife and son.¹¹⁸ These working-class readers closely resemble the roughly one-quarter of manual labourers identified as “intellectually well-equipped” in the 1918 Sheffield People’s College survey that Jonathan Rose has analysed in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Like the respondents in the 1918 survey, the autodidacts Hornung describes in these passages measured their cultural capital in English classics, particularly those of the Romantic and Victorian periods.¹¹⁹ For Hornung, finding his own tastes reflected back at him from this unexpected direction appears to have been enormously gratifying.

There was another group of regular borrowers that Hornung regarded with slightly more ambivalence. These were young soldiers who, Hornung guessed, had been “Clerks etc.” prior to enlistment, a group that included the Royal Army Medical Corps men—members of the Second Battalion, Third City of London Field Ambulance—who had taken out the first three books on the hut’s first day.¹²⁰ He certainly appreciated the literary enthusiasm shown by members of this “unusually brainy unit.”¹²¹ However, he could not help noticing how their ideologies and inclinations—“intellectual,” “more or less Pacifist”—diverged from his own and how this divergence manifested itself in their borrowing patterns and literary horizons. If the working-class autodidacts’ essentially conservative tastes corresponded with Hornung’s own sense of literary value, the young “high-brow” clerks were men of “a new type”—“Wellsian, Shavian”—for whom the Rest Hut provided a focus for collegiality and ideological reinforcement of a kind that Hornung had not necessarily envisaged.¹²²

Despite the surface distances that separated these groups of library users, all appear to have used the Rest Hut’s book stock and social spaces in broadly similar ways. For the intellectually inclined former clerks of the 2/3rd London Field Ambulance, the library promised the same attractions that Geoffrey D. Spurr attributes to the prewar London YMCA—“respectable recreations and self-improving services.”¹²³ Like other YMCA facilities, it offered a way of maintaining contact with a particular form of “respectable” masculine identity, one that, as Spurr has shown, appealed to Edwardian clerks especially.¹²⁴ For both these soldiers and the working-class autodidacts with whom they shared the facilities, the hut promised another potential benefit—the opportunity for intellectual self-assertion through reading choice. Many of the interactions with individual soldiers that Hornung records testify to soldiers’ eagerness to affirm their civilian identities through books and make clear to him the degree of their intellectual seriousness.¹²⁵ One Scottish private who wanted a theological text responded with scorn when Hornung offered him a religious novel by Mary Augusta Ward instead. “I’m no believer in her,” he exclaimed.¹²⁶ Later, after the YMCA had augmented his stock of religious books with a large donation, Hornung offered the same soldier Norman Macleod’s Caraid nan Gadheal (1868), only to find that he did not read Gaelic. However, he told Hornung with a “shy twinkle,” had “it been Hebrew,” he “micht [sic] have managed.”¹²⁷ At that moment, the “Jock” allowed his temporary military identity to fall away, giving Hornung a privileged glimpse of the prewar theology student underneath.¹²⁸

Even the readers of “low-brow” romances whom Hornung gently mocked in Notes of a Camp Follower fitted within these broader patterns of book use. While the former clerks of the RAMC may have used the Rest Hut to reinforce their sense of intellectual and lower-middle-class belonging, romance readers looked to books as props for similar acts of bonding with other men. Hornung reported to Constance that a “certain Private Jeremiah and his chum” were systematically working their way through all the Charles Garvice titles in the Rest Hut.¹²⁹ These romance readers, who “hunted in couples,” may have read together in scenes of improvised trench domesticity similar to those Joanna Bourke has reconstructed from contemporary diary entries: “two friends who would lie together in the trench’s candlelight, reading books such as [Wilkie Collins’s] Blind Love and [H. Rider Haggard’s] The Pearl Maiden to one another” before going to sleep.¹³⁰ The reading lives of “Private Jeremiah and his chum” hint at the role books could play in fashioning the war zone into a space for the practice of male intimacy.¹³¹ For all of these Rest Hut readers, books offered ways of reconnecting with their prewar civilian identities or reinforcing social bonds with others in the context of service. These engagements demonstrate how seamlessly popular and middlebrow fiction could mesh with the rhythms and routines of trench life.

There was one particular form of personal relationship that parties on both sides of the hut’s issues desk were especially eager to initiate—that between individual soldiers and Hornung himself. As YMCA volunteer Jessie Wilson had done at Harfleur, Hornung quickly learned how useful a book was as a prompt for conversation or as a shorthand introduction to the personality and tastes of the soldier who wanted to borrow it. He was also quick to develop emotional ties with particular soldiers. Writing to Constance, he described how the Scottish borrower of the Golden Treasury on the hut’s first day had spontaneously exclaimed “Keats!” when coming across his titles on the shelf. “My heart went out to him,” he wrote, “and will be waiting for him when he comes down again” from the trenches.¹³² Soldiers, on the other hand, seem to have been surprised to have encountered a “live author” in the Rest Hut and flattered by any attention he gave them. In his “Diary,” Hornung could not resist recording one young soldier’s boyish “delight” in discovering that the writer of the book he had asked for—Raffles—was none other than the man behind the counter. “It was delightful,” he wrote, “to find how popular my old villains still are.”¹³³

No matter how diminished his literary celebrity was by 1914, Hornung had clearly become something of a military tourist attraction in the Arras area by the time the Rest Hut ceased operations. “Most of the men know … about me” now, he admitted to Constance after the hut had been open two weeks, and “ask for my books with a twinkle.”¹³⁴ Even soldiers who seem to have barely known who Hornung was found his presence at Arras in some way notable. In his personal diary for 1918, Private A. L. Ellis of the 2/3rd City of London Field Ambulance recorded that “the Y.M.C.A. Hut [in Arras] was in charge of a Mr. Horning [sic]—editor [sic] of ‘Raffles’ etc.”¹³⁵ For soldier-readers who were better versed in the Hornung canon the chance to converse with him about his own books was too good an opportunity to miss. The pleasures attendant on both sides of the exchange are apparent in Hornung’s description of one conversation in the hut on 8 March 1918. “Private Moffatt,” the library’s most loyal customer, whom Hornung described as “a very canny young Jock, who reads a book every day of his life,” approached the counter and “asked if he might criticise” Hornung’s novel, Stingaree (1905). Hornung obliged:

“The ending was no [sic] satisfactory,” said Private Moffatt, and also reproved me for killing Raffles in the Boer War. I agreed, and said what I would give to have him out here as a British spy camouflaged as a Y.M.C.A. worker. So we yarn, while I very deliberately gum the label into a book that has not been out before and stamp the fly-leaf with my lovely rubber stamp. I believe [the men] enjoy these solemn rites as much as I do, and they are a grand cover for a chat.¹³⁶

After a short spell spent recuperating from fatigue at the St. Valery Rest Camp, Hornung returned to London in April 1918.¹³⁷ By the beginning of June 1918, he had already thrown himself into writing what would afterwards become Notes of a Camp Follower.¹³⁸ However, overworked and already asthmatic before his war experiences in 1917 and 1918, Hornung began to decline physically soon afterwards. After operating a second YMCA lending library, this time for British soldiers occupying Cologne in 1919, and seeing Notes of a Camp Follower through the press, his health gave way completely. On holiday in France in March 1921, he caught a cold, which developed into pneumonia, and he died at St. Jean de Luz at the age of fifty-four.¹³⁹ A few months later, starting in July 1921, Conan Doyle started to record what he believed were spirit communications from his dead brother-in-law. Through Conan Doyle’s spirit-guide, Pheneas, Hornung reported: “Arthur, this is wonderful … I am with Oscar…. I am working and feel so well. It is so nice to be free from my asthma.”¹⁴⁰ The afterlife—according to Conan Doyle’s senescent fantasies—had magically reintegrated the fragments into which the Great War had shattered the pre-1914 world. Hornung was even writing again, although his ghost was vague about exactly what a professional writing career looked like in the spirit realm.¹⁴¹

In their profound desire for emotional reintegration, Conan Doyle’s imaginings resembled Hornung’s belief that he could get closer to his dead son by subjecting himself to what Oscar had undergone in the front line. In their grief, both writers retreated into the authorial imagination, expressing their desire for reunion with dead family members through books and writing. Conan Doyle looked to written communications from the spirit world to bring him into contact with Hornung and the dead Kingsley, printing the results of these séances in books in order to convince others of the reality of life after death. Hornung, on the other hand, absorbed himself utterly in the conflict that had claimed Oscar, clearly relishing the chance to make emotional connections with men his son’s age. By ministering to soldiers through tea, biscuits, and books, Hornung was, as Peter Blacker later put it, “honouring the memory of his son by giving the humblest service to those whose experience came closest to Oscar’s.”¹⁴² Notes of a Camp Follower and the “Diary” were Hornung’s attempts to immortalise that experience, to capture in writing what he called the “unselfishness and simplicity” of “our noble rank-and-file.”¹⁴³

Notes of a Camp Follower is, of course, ultimately an idealised account, compiled by an author whose stomach for the war was—unbe knownst to him—perhaps stronger than those of many of the soldiers he encountered. Blacker, for instance, recalled having to bite his tongue whenever Hornung railed against pacifists, mistakenly assuming that Blacker, as a serving officer and ex-public-school boy, shared his politics.¹⁴⁴ Despite the organising presence of their author, however, both Notes of a Camp Follower and the “Diary” it was based on ultimately testify to the diversity of soldierly experience in an active zone and Hornung’s inability as YMCA librarian to entirely control the reading experiences of his soldier-customers. The anecdotes embedded in both narratives record instances of individual agency that Hornung had not anticipated. Soldiers could be serial romance readers as well as fighters, “hunting” books “in couples” and reading aloud to each other in acts of “improvised domesticity.”¹⁴⁵ Others could be loyal users of the Rest Hut but never so much as pick up a book—“resting” for hours in armchairs but never being tempted to explore the shelves around them.¹⁴⁶ Finally, as Hornung discovered, the Rest Hut’s users were not simply passive receptors of books but agents in their own right, for whom the choice of books could be a powerful means of intellectual self-assertion. A book, in this case, offered a way of reclaiming a specifically civilian identity independent of uniform. It could be a means of bridging the gap between prewar and wartime identity through what J. G. Fuller calls the “continuity of enthusiasm.”¹⁴⁷ As Hornung himself was moved to observe, “it is a rest to the fighting man to pursue his peace-time interests or studies at the front. Nothing … takes him out of khaki quicker; and that,” Hornung concluded, “is what his books are for.”¹⁴⁸