First appeared in the Evening News on 29 September 1914. It sparked the legend about the ‘Angels of Mons’, who were subsequently claimed in other sources to have appeared during the British retreat from the town. Machen was at first willing to exploit the story’s popularity commercially and republished ‘The Bowmen’ in a short collection of war tales under the title The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (1915), but he was bewildered when the ‘incident’ in his story was taken as fact by many, particularly the Church. He tried to expose it as fiction in his introduction to the volume.
1. the retreat of the eighty thousand: the British retreat at Mons in 1914.
2. Sedan: a decisive victory over the French during the Franco-Prussian war, on 1 September 1870, by the German army under General Helmuth von Moltke (1800–91). French forces were vastly outnumbered.
3. ‘Good-bye, good-bye to Tipperary’: In the autumn of 1914, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ (1912) was a popular song among English soldiers and civilians.
4. What price Sidney Street?: Sidney Street, in Stepney, east London, was the scene of a showdown between the Metropolitan Police and a group of Eastern European anarchists in January 1911. Cornered after a failed robbery and the shooting of several policemen, two anarchists set fire to the building in which they were hiding and died during their attempt to escape. ‘The Siege of Sidney Street’ or ‘the Battle of Stepney’ was widely reported and even depicted on postcards.
5. Worldwithout end. Amen:final words of the ‘Song of Mary’ (Luke 1:46–55), sung as the Magnificat during Anglican evensong.
6. Harow: an Anglo-Norman battle cry.
7. the contemptible English: reference to a remark attributed to the Kaiser – but probably invented by the War Office – to the effect that the English were ‘a contemptible little army’. The name ‘Old Contemptibles’ was subsequently adopted as a term for the soldiers of the BEF.
Like most of McNeile’s war stories, ‘Private Meyrick – Company Idiot’ was first published in the Daily Mail during the war, and later appeared in his collection Men, Women and Guns (1916).
1. Expeditionary Force: the BEF.
2. a contemptible little army: see ‘The Bowmen’, note 7.
3. Kipling: Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936, see Biographies, p. 395).
4. Pay Corporal: a non-commissioned officer who, in addition to his usual duties, was in charge of a regiment’s payroll and connected administration.
5. Musketry returns: the records of the most recent shooting practice.
6. A Company: military unit, typically 190 to 200 soldiers; see also ‘Victory’, note 1.
7. Savez: ‘Understand?’
8. through the charge that won the day: the Charge of the Light Brigade – the British cavalry against Russian forces during the Crimean war in 1854, commemorated in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (1855) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892). The small British force attacked on a misinterpreted order and suffered heavy casualties.
9. If your officer’s dead and the sergeants look white: from Rudyard Kipling’s (1865–1936) ‘The Young British Soldier’, published in Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), which, by 1915, was in its forty-second edition.
First appeared in Montague’s collection of war stories Fiery Particles (1923). On 28 April 1923, Time magazine judged the volume as ‘not so important’ as Montague’s war recollections in Disenchantment (1922), but praised the author’s ‘humour, irony, [and] sympathy’.
1. Proserpine’s garden: Proserpine, the Roman goddess of the underworld, was the daughter of Demeter, the goddess of fertility. Dividing her time between her husband, Hades, and her mother, Proserpine spends four months of the year in the underworld and the remaining eight above ground with her mother. Her return to the upper world was believed to herald spring.
2. Mais assez gentil: ‘but pleasant enough’.
3. Le bon Dieu Boche: ‘the good German God’.
4. ne faut pas les embêter: ‘you don’t need to annoy them’.
5. Paisiblement: ‘peacefully’.
6. dixie-lid: the lid of a cooling pot.
7. Pas d’inquiêtude: ‘no trouble’.
First appeared in the author’s Roads to Glory (1930), and was published a year after his war novel Death of a Hero (1929).
1. C Company: military unit, typically 190 to 200 soldiers. The British army identifies its rifle companies by letter (usually, but not always, A, B and C).
2. the Dormouse in Alice: a character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), by Lewis Carroll (1832–98).
3. bally: euphemism meaning ‘bloody’.
4. zero hour: the co-ordinated moment of attack when the soldiers had to go over the top.
5. Siegfried Line: a defensive line of trenches and five forts, established in 1916–17 by the German army as a section of the Hindenburg Line in northern France, and named after characters from the medieval German epic Nibelungenlied.
6. Rosinante: Don Quixote’s horse.
7. maffick: from ‘mafeking’, to describe riotous celebrating, such as took place after the relief of Mafeking on 17 May 1900.
In 2000 ‘Heroes’ won an Edgar Award, the Mystery Writers of America award for the best short story. It was first published in an anthology of mystery stories, Murder and Obsession (2000), edited by Otto Penzler.
1. God’s an Englishman: popular nineteenth-century maxim of obscure origin, further popularized by R. F. Delderfield’s God Is An Englishman (1970).
First appeared in its author’s The Forbidden Zone (1929), a collection of sketches and stories based on her experiences as a nurse on the Western Front.
1. Casse-croû te: a snack.
2. Briquet: cigarette-lighter.
Published posthumously in Something Childish and other Stories (1924). Katherine Mansfield based the story on her affair with a ‘little corporal’, the French officer and writer Francis Carco (1886–1958).
1. ma mignonne: ‘sweetheart’.
2. mignonette: a plant with fragrant green-grey flowers.
3. ma France adorêe: ‘my beloved France’.
4. kepi: uniform cap worn by French soldiers.
5. vous ˆtes tout à fait aimable: ‘You’re very kind’.
6. toute de suite: ‘Now; immediately’.
7. juste en face de la gare: ‘directly opposite the railway station’.
8. Venez vite, vite: ‘Come quickly!’
9. un espècedesea-gullcouchê survotrechapeau: ‘a kind of sea-gull perched on your hat’.
10. Non, je ne peux pas manger ça: ‘No, I can’t eat that’.
11. Matin: Le Matin (1883–1944) was a French newspaper, with a print run of 670,000 in 1914.
12. Montez vite, vite!: ‘Get in quickly!’.
13. Ah, je m’en f…: polite abbreviation for ‘Je m’en fou’, meaning ‘I couldn’t care less!’
14. Prends ça, mon vieux: ‘Take this, old friend’.
15. Dodo, mon homme, fais vit’ dodo: a lullaby French baby-talk, meaning ‘to fall asleep’.
16. Premier Rencontre: ‘First Meeting’.
17. Triomphe D’Amour: ‘The Triumph of Love’.
18. Il pleure de colère: ‘He’s crying with rage’.
19. Picon: an alcoholic drink.
20. Mais vous savez c’est un peu dêgouˆ tant, ça: ‘This is rather disgusting, you know.’
21. N’est-ce pas, Mademoiselle?: ‘Isn’t that so, Miss?’
22. bifteks: beefsteaks.
23. souvenir tendre: ‘a fond memory’.
24. êpatant: ‘jolly good; terrific’.
First published in the Strand Magazine in October 1917. The text reprinted here has been taken from The Complete Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad, vol. 2 (1992).
First published in The English Review in November 1924, and subsequently included in The Best Short Stories of 1925, edited by Edward J. O’Brien.
1. ‘Chanson Triste’: a short piece for the piano by Peter Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), Opus 40 No. 2.
2. a common Bulgar soldier: Bulgaria had fought Romania in the Second Balkans War of 1913, and while Serbia, Greece, Romania and Montenegro joined the Allies, Bulgaria fought alongside Germany in the First World War. Britain and France declared war on Bulgaria in October 1914.
3. Dorrain: a town on the border between Macedonia and Bulgaria.
4. Rupert Brooke: English poet (1887–1915), made famous by his War Sonnets (1915) and ‘The Soldier’ in particular. He died of blood poisoning on a hospital ship in the Mediterranean. Brooke became a tragic symbol of Edwardian youth destroyed by the war.
5. and I shall find some girl, perhaps: the final lines of Brooke’s ‘The Chilterns’ (1916).
6. Omar Khayyám: twelfth-century Persian poet. He became famous in Victorian England when his Rubáiyát was translated by Edward FitzGerald (1809–1883).
7. Johnny: soldiers’ slang for enemy soldier.
First published in the September 1917 issue of Strand Magazine, subtitled ‘The War Service of Sherlock Holmes’. It also appeared in Collier’s on 22 September 1917 and in a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, entitled His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (1917).
1. the Kaiser: William II (1859–1941), the last German emperor and a grandson of Queen Victoria.
2. our good Chancellor: Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg (1856– 1921), in office since 14 July 1909. Even before the outbreak of war, Bethmann Hollweg doubted that Germany would win. He opposed unrestricted submarine warfare and was dismissed on 13 July 1917 under pressure from generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff.
3. four-in-hand: carriage drawn by four horses.
4. window-breaking furies: the suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union, led by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. The WSPU was founded in 1903, and from 1905 embraced acts of violence such as window-breaking or even arson to draw attention to their claim for women’s suffrage.
5. Rosyth: naval base and dockyard on the south coast of Fife, built between 1909 and 1916.
6. Carlton House Terrace: location of the German embassy in 1914.
7. Duke of York’s steps: the steps below the York Column, in London’s Waterloo Place, Westminster.
8. semaphore: optical telegraph or sign transmission with two flags or paddles, fixed to a series of relay-station towers to cover longer distances.
9. lamp-code: a means of transmitting information with signal lamps. The flashes can convey even complex information, and were used in the British Royal Navy well into the twentieth century during periods of radio silence.
10. Marconi: Guglielmo Marchese Marconi (1874–1937) developed the wireless radio-telegraph system, which he had patented in Britain in 1897.
11. Portland: a prison and naval base on the Devonshire coast, surrounded by artificial breakwaters.
12. Franz Joseph: Franz Joseph I (1830–1916), Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary and Bohemia since 1848.
13. Schoenbrunn Palace: residence of the Austrian royal family in Vienna.
14. Behold the fruit of pensive nights and laborious days: from William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (Act V scene 6).
15. the constabulary at Skibbereen: the Royal Irish Constabulary, one of Ireland’s two police forces in the early twentieth century.
Included in Maugham’s Ashenden, Or, The British Agent (1928), a cycle of short stories based loosely on Maugham’s own experiences as an agent during the war.
1. cochon: ‘swine’.
2. Allons, levez-vous: ‘Come on, get up’.
First appeared in Buchan’s The Runagates Club (1928), a collection of stories told by the members of the eponymous and fictitious London dinner club.
1. Generalstabsoffizier: General Staff Officer in the German army.
2. Falkenhayn: Erich von Falkenhayn (1861–1922), infantry general and chief of the German General Staff from 1914 to 1916. He was responsible for planning the German Western Offensive of 1915, and advocated total submarine warfare.
3. a place called Rosensee in the Sächischen Sweitz: Rosensee, a lake in a mountainous region of Saxony (Sächsische Schweiz).
4. violet rays: ultra-violet rays.
5. Junkers: a German country squire.
6. capercailzie: the wood-grouse, a large game bird found in mountainous regions.
7. Homburg: Bad Homburg; a popular German spa.
8. Champagne: in the autumn of 1915, the Allies resumed their offensive in Champagne.
First appeared in the Century, September 1915, and subsequently published in Kipling’s A Diversity of Creatures (1917).
1. cassowary: a large flightless bird.
2. Contrexeville: a spa in Lorraine. The name here refers to the mineral water bottled in the town.
3. Hentys, Marryats, Levers; Stevensons, Baroness Orczys, Garvices: popular novelists, widely read by the young: George Alfred Henty (1832–1902), Captain Frederick Marryat (1792–1848), Charles James Lever (1806–1872), Robert Louis Stevenson (1850– 1894), Baroness Emma Orczy (1865–1947) and Charles Garvice (1833–1920).
4. assegai: spear used in South Africa, and the name of the tree whose timber is used in its manufacture.
5. Brooklands: motor-racing track and aviation centre in Surrey, built in 1907.
6. ‘Laty!’: ‘Lady!’
7. Cassêe. Toute cassêe: ‘Broken, all broken’.
8. Che me rends. Le mêdicin! Toctor!: ‘I surrender. The doctor! Doctor!’ The pilot speaks French and English with a German accent: ‘che’ = ‘je’, and ‘toctor’ = ‘doctor’.
9. Ich haben der todt Kinder gesehn: literally, ‘I have seen the dead children’, but Mary Postgate’s German is faulty: ‘Ich habe die toten Kinder gesehen’ is correct.
First published in the Century in August 1917, and subsequently appeared in Aumonier’s The Love-A-Duck and Other Stories (1921), and Great Short Stories of the War (1930), ed. H. C. Minchin. In his study Aspects of the Modern Short Story (1924), A. C. Ward claimed that the protagonist of the story, Mrs Ward, was ‘a shining symbol of all bereaved mothers – not of England only, but of all the warring nations, friends and enemies made one in grief’.
First appeared in Argosy in May 1927, then in Galsworthy’s Forsytes, Pendyces and Others (1933).
1. Scott’s first Polar book: Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912), the most famous (and tragic) figure of the ‘heroic’ age of Antarctic exploration; he reached the South Pole behind his Norwegian rival, Roald Amundsen (1872–1928). Scott died with four companions while trying to return to base after reaching the Pole. He had published his account of the first National Antarctic Expedition (1901–4)in The Voyage of the Discovery (1905).
2. its lingering deadlock: from mid-September 1914 onwards, the Allied and German armies were caught up in stalemate on the Western Front. With increasingly deep trench systems on both sides, the cratered and wired no man’s land between them, the front hardly moved until the German spring offensive of March 1918.
3. ‘Connais-tu le pays?’ from Mignon: the opera Mignon (1866), by Ambroise Thomas (1811–1896), is based on a character from Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–6). The aria referred to here is the French version of Goethe’s poem from the novel, ‘Know you the land where the lemon-trees bloom’.
4. All the Drang – as the Germans call it: Drang translates literally as ‘urge’; the reference is to the German literary Sturm und Drang movement (i.e. ‘Storm and Stress’).
First published in April 1919, in Strand Magazine. During the war women temporarily replaced men in the home economy and public-service sectors. The version of the text reproduced here appeared in Lawrence’s collection England, My England (1922).
1. Thermopylae: a narrow mountain pass, site of a famous battle in 480 BC in which the ancient Greeks, led by the Spartans, successfully held back an army of Persian invaders in a desperate last stand.
2. Coddy: the nickname is ambiguous, since it implies that Thomas resembles a fish, but may also refer to the abbreviation ‘cod’ for ‘codswallop’ and reflect negatively on his conversation.
3. The Statutes Fair: a fun-fair.
4. on the qui-vive: on the look-out.
5. I’m afraid to, go home in, the dark: an allusion to the song ‘I’m Afraid to Come Home in the Dark’ (1908), by Egbert van Alstyne and Harry Williams. In it, a husband explains his nightly absences to his newlywed wife by claiming that he has had to stay at the club, not daring to venture out after dark.
Written in 1926, and taken from the author’s short-story collection of the same title, which first appeared in 1934. It is one of two stories addressing the First World War. The other, ‘Fräulein Schwartz’, relates the story of an elderly German spinster who experiences the war in London lodgings and is bullied into suicide by her hostile fellow lodgers.
1. Caporals: the American cigarette brand, Sweet Caporals.
2. Bon Dieu! Mais dêpeˆchez-vous donc!: ‘Good God! Hurry up!’
3. Jaeger trench-helmets: a close-fitting woollen cap of the balaclava type. Jaeger, the British knitwear company, offered a range of products for the forces during the First World War.
First published in the author’s The Thirteen Travellers (1921).
1. Duke Street: Tom is taking his walk in the prosperous neighbourhoods of Mayfair, Soho and Marylebone in the London Borough of Westminster. Bond Street and Oxford Street were then prominent shopping streets. Mayfair and Marylebone were well-to-do residential and commercial areas, while Soho was one of London’s less respectable areas, with many public-houses, restaurants and brothels; it was frequented particularly by artists and intellectuals.
2. Victoria: the area around Victoria station in the Borough of Westminster; it consisted mainly of commercial buildings and social housing.
3. DT: delirium tremens, caused by alcohol abuse.
4. Blackfriars: an area south-west of the City of London, bordering the river Thames.
5. pi—: pious, but used in a derogatory fashion.
6. the East End: notorious for its sub-standard accommodation and the poverty of its inhabitants.
7. East-End Settlement: the charitable settlement movement enabled future clergymen to experience the problems of the poor at first hand. Originating at Oxford University, the first settlement, a forerunner of community centres, opened in Bethnal Green in 1884, and in the following two years four more opened in London and one in New York.
8. vieux jeu: ‘old hat’.
9. Oxford House: the Bethnal Green settlement.
10. Rubicon: ‘to cross the Rubicon’ means ‘to take a significant step, or momentous decision’.
11. Marcella: a novel by Mary Ward –‘Mrs Humphrey Ward’ (1851– 1920)–published in 1894. Marcella, the novel’s socialist heroine, falls in love with a conservative landowner.
First appeared in Pan in July 1921, and exists in two versions: the short story, and a one-act play, published by Gowans and Grey in 1922. The story appeared in The Best British Short Stories of 1922 (1923), eds. Edward J. O’Brien and John Cournos.
1. Nothing in his life: from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Act I scene 4).
2. She wore a tam: tam-o’-shanter, a Scottish cap.
First published during the author’s lifetime in the Nation, March 1922, then in her collection, The Dove’s Nest (1923).
First published in the author’s collection, Truth Is Not Sober (1934).
1. Journey’s End: a highly successful play by R. C. Sherriff (1896– 1975), first performed in 1928. It is set in March 1918 and explores the relationships between a group of infantry officers, sharing a dugout on the front line prior to a major German offensive. In the most emotional scene of the play, the protagonist Stanhope watches helplessly as his friend Raleigh dies in his arms from a shrapnel injury. Sherriff had served as a captain in the British army during the war.
2. They shall not grow old …: the best-known lines of Robert Laurence Binyon’s (1869–1943) poem ‘To the Fallen’, first published in The Times, 21 September 1914; often referred to as the ‘Ode of Remembrance’.
3. In Flanders fields the poppies grow: from ‘In Flanders Fields’, a war poem by the Canadian officer John Alexander McCrae (1872–1918). It became famous even during the war and remains one of its most frequently quoted poems.
First published in the Saturday Evening Post as ‘Wave No Banners’ on 15 December 1962; subsequently appeared in Graves’s Collected Short Stories (1965).
1. We’ll keep the Red Flag Flying Still: correctly, ‘We’ll keep the red flag flying here’; from the anthem of the British Labour Party, ‘The Red Flag’, by Irish socialist James Connell (1852–1929).
2. Ivan Orfalitch: not an authentic Russian name, but used in the sense of ‘the next man in Russia’ or ‘my opposite number in Russia’.
3. amachoor propaganda: amateur propaganda.
4. nappoed: killed –‘nappoo’ was a common term for ‘gone’, ‘dead’ or ‘done for’ among the soldiers; from the French expression il n’y a plus, ‘there is nothing left’.
5. Delville Wood: the battle of Delville Wood was a subsidiary attack of the Somme offensive, lasting from July to September 1916.
6. Joffre: Joseph Joffre (1852–1931) was Commander-in-Chief of the French army from 1911 to 1916; he was replaced by General Robert Georges Nivelle (1856–1924) after heavy French losses at Verdun, and was given the ceremonial post Marshal of France.
7. Boy Greneer: soldiers’ term for the village of Bois Grenier, near Armentieères.
8. Mills bombs: a type of hand grenade adopted by the British army as its standard grenade in 1915.
9. Stilly Nucked: ‘Stille Nacht’.
10. Hully in West Saxony: the East German city of Halle, on the banks of the Saale river.
11. bundooks: a transliteration of the Hindi word for ‘gun’.
12. I want to go Home!: opening line of a popular soldiers’ song.
13. Dixie Lid: lid of an army cooking pot.
14. Old Von Kluck, He Had a Lot of Men: a popular First World War marching song, which began ‘Oooh, we don’t give a f***/ For old von Kluck/And all his German army’. General Alexander von Kluck (1846–1934) had been in charge of the failed ‘march on Paris’ in August 1914.
15. ‘Deutschland Über Alles’: opening line of the patriotic song ‘Das Lied der Deutschen’ (1841). August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798–1874) composed the lyrics, which expressed love of country. It was adopted as the German national anthem after the First World War.
16. Padre: regimental chaplain.
17. General French: Sir John Denton Pinkstone French (1852–1925) was chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1912 to 1913;in 1913, he was made field marshal, and in August 1914 took command of the BEF. He was replaced in December 1915 by Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig (see note 26), and appointed commander of the British Home Forces until the end of the war.
18. The King!: the toast is sufficiently neutral to be embraced by both sides: it might refer either to King George V (1865–1936) or Kaiser William II (1859–1941), who was also King of Prussia. Saxony, moreover, still had its own king, Friedrich August III (1865–1932).
19. Imshi: an Arabic phrase for ‘take off’ or ‘get lost’, here meant as an order to hide.
20. boko camarade: ‘beaucoup camarade’, i.e. great friends.
21. Nürnberg Youth Rally: a peace camp between young people from all countries that had participated in the Second World War. It was held in 1956– 7 in Nuremberg, a town particularly associated with Nazi atrocities; also, the Hitler Youth Movement had held rallies there.
22. sap-heads: shallow holes – usually shell craters – in no man’s land used as comparatively sheltered listening posts to monitor activities in enemy trenches.
23. brevet rank: a rank one degree higher than one is paid for, held on a temporary basis.
24. the big German mine: during the war, the German and British armies employed tunnelling companies to plant mines. As early as December 1914, ten German mines exploded under the British lines near Festubert; Graves’s own regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, witnessed a major detonation in June 1916.
25. General Sir Douglas Haig: Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig (1861– 1928) was made Commander-in-Chief of the British army in December 1915. He had served in Sudan and the Boer War, and in 1909 had been appointed Chief of the General Staff for India after working in the War Office for two years. Haig was responsible for the British campaign of slow attrition after the battle of the Somme.
26. La Bassêe Canal: La Bassêe is a town on the Somme connected to nearby Aire by an industrial canal. The area saw the last heavy battles of the early war in October 1914, prior to the establishment of the British lines.
27. minny-werfer: from the German word for trench mortar, ‘Minenwerfer’.
28. snobs: junior officers. Well-connected public-school men were likely to enter the army with a commission, unlike their working-class contemporaries.
29. bobbajers: bombardiers, or Royal Artillery corporals.
30. ‘Stern-Endeavour’ Haig: Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig (1861– 1928) was substituted for General French (see note 18) in the belief that he would instil the British war effort with new vigour.
31. Hock Solla Leeben: A German song used for birthdays and anniversary celebrations – correctly, ‘Hoch soll er leben’ (i.e. ‘three cheers for him’).
32. a brother killed at Loos: the battle of Loos, 25– 28 September 1915, during the wider Artois–Loos offensive by the French and British in the autumn of 1915.
33. chop wood in Holland: the Kaiser fled to the Netherlands from Belgium on 10 November 1918. The Dutch government granted him asylum on the condition that he would abstain from future political activity, and Wilhelm II confirmed his resignation on 28 November. He spent the rest of his life at his house in Doorn, reportedly passing his time in chopping wood.
34. Peace Treaty: Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919. It was strongly opposed in Germany and by many Allied politicians due to its particularly harsh reparation demands and the fact that Germany had to acknowledge sole responsibility for the war.
First published in the New Yorker in June 1975. The text used here has been taken from The Penguin Book of British Comic Short Stories (1990).
1. ESP: extra-sensory perception.
2. The Grand Old Duke of York: A popular nursery rhyme.
3. treaty of Brest-Litowsk: peace treaty between Russia, Germany and its allies, signed on 3 March 1918, in which Russia ceded a third of its population in the Baltic region, Finland and Poland, to the German Empire.
4. ‘I truly wish I were a fox or a bird’: from a letter D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930, see Biographies, p. 395) wrote to his former neighbour in Cornwall, the Scottish composer Cecil Gray (1895– 1951)on 12 March 1918. Having been evicted from their Cornish cottage the previous spring, the Lawrences were about to take a new house, which inspired Lawrence with panic.
5. Bernard Shaw who was telling somebody to shut up: the Irish playwright, Nobel Prize winner and socialist George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) strongly opposed the war and wrote numerous essays and articles against it. He was also an open critic of the Versailles peace treaty. His wartime writings were collected and published as What I Really Wrote About the War (1930).
6. Tout le monde à la bataille!: ‘Everyone to arms!’ A reference to General Foch’s (1851–1929) Meuse-Argonne offensive, 26 September– 11 November 1918. French, British and American forces were to attack along the entire Western Front, joining forces in a final effort at breaking the German lines.
7. the time the Vindictive was sunk in Ostend harbour: In a massive military action, British naval forces attacked the German bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge in April 1918, aiming to block the harbours. HMS Vindictive, laden with cement, was sunk to effect this blockade.
8. The Playboy of the Western World: a play by J. M. Synge, first performed in Dublin and subsequently in 1907 at the Court Theatre in London. It is set in a public-house during the early 1900s, where the main character, Christy Mahon, thrills a large audience with an account of how he allegedly killed his father.
9. Picasso was getting married: he married Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova on 18 June 1918.
10. the Silver Wedding of King George V and Queen Mary: the celebrations took place on 6 July 1918.
11. the Czar and his family: the assassination of the Romanov family in the wake of the Russian revolution. On 17 July 1918, Nicholas II (1868–1918), his wife and five children were shot in the basement of Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg to prevent their rescue by counter-revolutionary forces.
12. Bertrand Russell: an ardent pacifist, the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) opposed British participation in the war, and worked for the No Conscription Fellowship from 1916 onwards. In January 1918 he published an article in the Tribunal, suggesting that American soldiers might be used as strikebreakers in England after East End dockworkers had refused to load a ship bound for Russia, the Jolly George, with munitions in early 1918. Russell’s article was seen as criminal agitation, and he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.
13. A certain oration by Mr Asquith: Herbert Henry Asquith (1852– 1928), prime minister 1908–16. Blamed by many for the unsuccessful conduct of the Somme offensive, Asquith had resigned in December 1916 and was succeeded by David Lloyd George (1863–1945). As Liberal opposition leader, however, he remained a public figure, and gave the speech referred to here in Parliament, following Lloyd George’s, on 18 November 1918. Asquith’s eldest son, Raymond, was killed during the battle of the Somme in September 1916 (see note 18).
14. that damned Welsh goat: despite his public proclamations of (professional) friendship, Asquith did not like Lloyd George, whose takeover as prime minister ended Asquith’s tenure in 1916. Lloyd George was commonly considered a more fitting wartime leader; Asquith’s hesitant policies had been much criticized in the press.
15. I have a rendezvous with death: a poem by the American Alan Seeger (1888–1916), who served in the French Foreign Legion during the First World War.
16. Putting his arm around a lady’s shoulder in a Daimler motor car: Asquith was well known as a ladies’ man and had a number of intimate female correspondents, even though he was happily married. He had a prominent affair with young socialite Venetia Stanley (1887–1948), a friend of his daughter Violet, who eventually married one of Asquith’s protêgês, the Liberal MP Edwin Samuel Montagu.
17. What passing bells for these who die as cattle?: the opening lines to ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ by Wilfred Owen (1893–1918).
18. All things have become new: From Asquith’s speech, on 18 November 1918, to the House of Commons, in support of a resolution to congratulate King George V on the conclusion of the Armistice. Asquith’s interpretation of the war stressed its ‘purifying’ effect on the British people and the righteousness of the British cause, stating that the war ‘is and will remain by itself as a record of everything Humanity can dare or endure – of the extremes of possible heroism and… of possible baseness, and above and beyond all, the slow moving but in the end irresistible power of a great ideal’. The full text can be found in Speeches by the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, KG (1927).
First appeared in the Spectator, 23/30 December 1989. It was subsequently included in two anthologies of short stories, Best English Short Stories 2 (1990) and The Minerva Book of Short Stories 3 (1991).
First published in the New Yorker, 13 November 1995, and subsequently appeared in the author’s Cross Channel (1996).
The cemeteries mentioned in this story – Cabaret Rouge, Caterpillar Valley, Thistle Dump, Quarry and Blighty Valley – are all British and Commonwealth war cemeteries on the Somme. Herbêcourt has one for troops from the United Kingdom and Australia. Some accommodate a few German graves.
1. field-service card: field postcards, given out in the trenches to be sent as a faster substitute for letters and speed up the process of censoring. The soldiers could delete information that did not apply to them, but were not allowed to add any message of their own.
2. Thiepval: the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme was opened in 1932. Thiepval is the largest British war memorial in the world, displaying the names of nearly 74,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers who fell on the Somme between July 1916 and March 1918 without a known place of burial.
3. Ulster Tower: commemorates the men of the 36th Ulster Division, who fought and died on the Western Front.
4. THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE: from the Book of Ecclesiastes, chosen for the Imperial War Graves Commission by Rudyard Kipling, who also composed the standard inscription for the headstones of the unknown, ‘A soldier of the Great War… Known unto God’.
5. Brigadier Sir Frank Higginson’s domed portico: shelter building at the entrance to Cabaret Rouge cemetery, designed by Higginson (1890–1958) in his function as secretary of the Imperial War Graves Commission.
6. Sir Edwin Lutyens: the distinguished architect (1869–1944), appointed to the Imperial War Graves Commission in 1917–18.
7. the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month: the exact time of the Armistice of 1918. Since 1945, the Armistice has been commemorated on Remembrance Sunday, the second Sunday in November, when the fallen of all conflicts since 1914 are remembered. On 7 November 1919 King George V issued a proclamation calling for the observance of a two-minute silence in ‘reverent remembrance of the glorious dead’; it still takes place on 11 November each year, and at the services of Remembrance across the United Kingdom.
8. Maison Blanche: German war cemetery north of Arras.
9. howitzer: a gun for high-angle firing of shells.
10. Monsieur Un Tel: ‘Mr So-and-So’.
11. triumphant Marianne: idealized female figure, symbolizing Liberty, Reason, and the French Republic.
12. cockerel: the cockerel is a French national symbol, which derives from the Latin gallus: it translates both as ‘inhabitant of Gaul’ (i.e. France) and ‘cockerel’.
13. Imperial War Graves Commission: from 1914, a branch of the Red Cross was charged with marking the graves of fallen soldiers. In 1915 the duty was transferred to the army’s newly set up Graves Registration Commission, at which point it was decided that all British and Commonwealth dead soldiers were to be interred abroad where they had fallen. In 1917 the Imperial War Graves Commission was founded by Sir Fabian Arthur Goulstone Ware (1869–1949), and in 1960 it became the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Ware had led the original Red Cross unit.