Introduction

It’s the kind of bookstore where wars go to die, there on the lowest, dustiest, most morgue-like shelves—at least in this country. The books will rest on slightly higher, easier-to-reach shelves in Canada, Australia, Scotland, and England, where the Great War lasted longer, killed more, went deeper into the national memory. In the United States, World War I is a bottom-shelf memory, well below World War II and the Civil War, slightly below Korea and Vietnam, and only one shelf higher than the Spanish-American conflict, though the two collections often bleed into one.

A cranky, chain-smoking, opinionated old guy owns the bookstore, because that’s who owns good used bookstores—cranky old guys whose only virtue is their love of books. If you’re lucky, he’ll have a friendly, endearingly nerdish teenager manning the cash register, and he or she will point you to the basement when you ask about books on war. The light switch will be hard to locate, there will be piles of bound National Geographics to edge your way around, the sump pump will still struggle with last week’s soaking, and, when you do find the right shelf, you will have to get down on your knees in the muck and twist your head sideways to see what they have.

You’ll sometimes smell them before you see them—books published between 1914 and 1918 are a hundred years old now, and they’ve taken on a distinct aroma. Bananas gone soft is what you think of first, with hints of garlic and mildew, then something that somehow manages to combine a vulgar dampness with an acrid dust. A trench might have smelled that way—a flooded trench outside Ypres circa 1916, only in place of bananas would have been much worse smells.

A bookish boy, I spent a good part of my tenth and eleventh summers leafing through my grandparents’ encyclopedia, which had been passed on to my parents in the hope it would contribute to my and my sister’s educations. It was old and out of date even then; published in the 1920s, it had represented a serious investment on the part of a family with little in the way of disposable income. When I leafed through the volumes, they exuded the sweet, cloying smell characteristic of a book’s old age—and so the smell became forever linked in my mind with my favorite section, the one on the World War, with its old black-and-white illustrations of soldiers, cannon, tanks.

They didn’t look like any soldiers I’d ever seen pictures of, which confused me greatly. The only World War known to me was the one that ended ten years before, my parents’ war, the one I watched movies about, the war against Tojo and Hitler. You mean to tell me, I asked myself, there was an earlier World War? The soldiers in the encyclopedia wore helmets that looked like inverted pie plates and had their legs wrapped in what looked to be bandages; the tanks were rhomboid-shaped, as harmless-looking as hippos; the airplanes had doubled or even tripled wings. Fascinating—and when I pressed the pictures in toward my eyes, the pages smelled like bananas.

So it caught my attention early, World War I. I remember, a few years later, playing touch football with my pals in a grassy, doo-doo-covered park near the Long Island Rail Road station. We used jackets to mark one corner of the end zone and a twenty-foot-high monument mounted on a plinth for the other. I liked showing off my vocabulary in those days. “Go out to the plinth and cut right. Hut, two, three!” I told my receivers during the huddle, but none of them knew what I meant.

And none of them ever read what was written on the monument, much less pondered its implications—though, already the writer-in-embryo, I did both. It commemorated the 42nd Division, the famous “Rainbow” Division, which before going overseas in 1918 had been stationed in the camp that had once covered our little park. The division was called “Rainbow” because it was made up of National Guard units from thirty different states; among its famous members were Douglas MacArthur, Wild Bill Donovan, and Joyce Kilmer, who had not only written a famous two-line poem about trees but had a rest stop named after him on the New Jersey Turnpike. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald had been stationed there.

So, when our game finished and my pals all left, I scuffed my way through the fallen oak leaves and stood by the monument, peering up. It was carved out of something called “rainbow granite”—gray and smooth as it seemed from the distance, its graininess sparkled when you got up close. Engraved on the side was a tall, very grave-looking doughboy presenting arms with his rifle, his legs wrapped in what I prided myself on knowing were called “puttees.”

He seemed taller and straighter than the soldiers in my grandparents’ encyclopedia, or the ones in the World War II movies; he was wasp-waisted, as if the puttees continued under his uniform up his middle. I put my face up close to his legs, inhaled deeply. But no. He didn’t smell like old encyclopedias. He smelled like warm stone, with a bittersweet tincture of autumn.

(I read later that two out of three soldiers who served in the Rainbow Division were wounded or killed in France, so my senses weren’t making up the bitter half.)

Years later, visiting Edinburgh, still a young man, I happened upon a ceremony marking Remembrance Sunday, the British version of what in this country used to be called Armistice Day; this was 1976, so the Great War had ended fifty-eight years before. There in the square outside St. Giles Cathedral, the historic center of the Scots’ world, a vast congregation was assembled, one that was composed largely of the same aging men I had noticed walking up from the New Town beside me, many with decorations and campaign ribbons on their lapels, or shilling-sized red poppies.

They now formed themselves in three long ranks on the north side of the square; on my side, troops were lined up at parade rest, staring with fixed attention toward the distant cathedral steps, where men in black and scarlet robes moved in ways that made no sense to me, but obviously had something to do with the flags and battle flags gathered there, the honor guard of young soldiers, sailors and cadets who now, at a single barked command, went rigidly to attention.

A bit slow on the uptake, it took me a while to realize this was connected to the poppies, the medals, the fixed concentration on the faces of those aging men. Remembrance Sunday—well, here was the remembrance all right, the Brits at their ceremonial best, complete with an army band playing the slow march from Holst’s The Planets. No more poignantly martial music, given the echoes it had there, has ever been composed.

Just before the music became unbearable in that mingled note of victory and sorrow it so perfectly conveyed, it stopped, and in the silence where it had been came the high, lonely toll of the cathedral’s bells striking off the hour. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Again came that hoarse shouted command, again the hell’s drumming in two separate raps against the paving stones, the rifle butts slamming down as every soldier in the square came to attention.

The old soldiers stood at attention, too, trembling, they stood so still, trembling with the rusty skill of rigidity, trembling with what they remembered. Men in their sixties, most of them, but at least a dozen were much older—men who remembered being boys, not in the Western Desert or Dunkirk, but on the Somme, or at Loos, or Cambrai. Watching them, scanning their faces, I realized it wasn’t something old and vanished that was being commemorated here, as with the Rainbow Division monument—not the memory of the Great War, but the actual event still in progress … that the war’s pain, sorrow, and pride were right there in the square, as tangible and solid and alive as it’s possible for anything to be.

I studied them very carefully, these men, their expressions. These were the soldiers in my encyclopedia come to life. These were the soldiers on my monument come to life. In their eyes, in their postures, was a war, a world, a time, I must be very careful to remember and preserve.

And so, thirty-five years now from that Sunday morning, a hundred years now from their war, I spend many hours on my hands and knees in dark bookstore basements, searching for what I can find to bring it all back. Many stores will have nothing whatsoever on World War I; others, in the shelf marked WORLD WAR II, will have mistakenly stacked books from World War I, as indeed, in future generations, the two wars may come to be conflated. But some bookstores, the best ones, will have a dozen or more books on the Great War, though, even on these rare occasions, most of the volumes I only glance at and immediately put back.

It’s not because they’re bad. Quite the opposite—many of these are splendidly written accounts that combine original historical research with deep human insight, allowing us to understand the events of the war with a perspective totally impossible for participants at the time. Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August. Leon Woolf’s In Flanders Field. Death’s Men by Denis Winter. The Face of Battle by John Keegan. The Danger Tree by David Macfarlane. Martin Middlebrook’s The First Day on the Somme. Lyn Macdonald’s oral histories. Gene Smith’s small classic, Still Quiet on the Western Front. Written fifty years and more after the war ended, these are the famous secondary sources referenced in almost every new history that comes out. I’ve read them all, learned lots, but when I find them on the bookstore shelf, I respectfully put them back.

And books written for the buffs, the reenactors, the military enthusiasts. There’ll be two or three of these, regimental histories, or tactical analyses published quite recently, so it seems they went directly from the publisher to the remainder bin to the basement. I include in this category the memoirs, the justifications, the apologies (well, not apologies—no generals apologized) written by the primary actors in the immediate aftermath of the war. Ian Hamilton was among the most sensitive Great War generals, a skilled writer and classicist, and yet he butchered men through his incompetence at Gallipoli, and after leafing through the two fat volumes of his Gallipoli Diary, I respectfully put it back.

A third category holds the famous classics that form the canon of World War I literature; it will be a rare bookstore that doesn’t have a copy of at least one of these memoirs or novels, though you’ll be lucky to find a first edition.

Sassoon’s The Memoirs of George Sherston. Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War. Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence. Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek. E. E. Cummings’s The Enormous Room. Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Paths of Glory by Humphrey Cobb. Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves. Arnold Zweig’s The Case of Sergeant Grisha. David Jones’s In Parentheses. John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers. Death of a Hero by Richard Aldington. Her Privates We by Frederic Manning. Written by survivors of the trenches, published in the 1920s in the hangover of disenchantment left by the war, these are the books everyone knows, the books that are constantly reprinted, studied, and taught, the ones that form the literature of World War I, dwarfing by their power and influence almost all the books written earlier. I’ve read them all, been moved by their passion, surprised by their humor, amazed at their honesty—but when I find them on the shelf I respectfully put them back.

The books I’m searching for are so forgotten, so unknown, they can be easier to find than you would think. No one wants them—books published during the war, in the years 1914–18, not written with the hindsight that came later, but in the white heat of the conflict, when none of the authors knew which countries would be victorious or whether Western civilization would survive. These are the books I’m looking for, and when I find one, I take it to where the light is better so I can examine what I’ve got.

Much of it will be wretched. Blatant propaganda written by hacks, tales of Hun atrocities, books written for children where the Kaiser is shot down as he flies a Fokker across the Somme, war correspondent accounts where the Tommy, doughboy, or poilu (French soldier) is always cheerful, and a hundred-yard advance is scored as a great victory. Wretched—though I find even the worst to be interesting and evocative. This isn’t history written fifty years after the fact, but the actual event in progress, so what you’re holding in your hand has a lot more life in it than most hundred-year-old artifacts. For the time being, I’ll put anything with a publication date of 1914–18 into my box as a potential keeper.

For instance—this one.

Its color draws me first. It’s red, terra-cotta red—there’s an appealing earthiness about the tone. On the front, slightly embossed, is a shield with inter-draped flags, though it’s hard to say of which countries. But one must be of France, because, studying the spine (there is no dust cover to peel back; none of these books ever have surviving dust covers), the title becomes plain, Fighting France, and below that is the name “Wharton.”

Could this be Edith Wharton, the Edith Wharton? I open the covers. The endpapers are a map of the French countryside between Varennes and Verdun, and then, turning to the title page, all becomes clear.

The War on All Fronts

FIGHTING FRANCE

From Dunkerque to Belport

By

Edith Wharton

Chevalier of the Legion of Honor

Illustrated

New York

Charles Scribner’s Sons

1915

It’s her all right, the famous American novelist, the pioneering woman writer, the pal of Henry James, the grande dame of American letters. What’s more, here’s her photo to the left of the title page, posing outside what the caption says is a “French palisade,” which, in the black-and-white fuzziness, looks like five or six wicker hampers piled on top of each other, with a protective hood through which two dapper French officers peer toward what you assume are the distant German trenches.

Mrs. Wharton ignores them and faces the camera, leaning on an umbrella. She wears a long black dress, furled around her legs as the umbrella is furled; around her neck is a white bib that makes her upper half look like a pilgrim; on her head is a rakish hat. It’s the kind of snapshot a husband or lover would take with his Brownie in the course of a Sunday drive—but there is that palisade behind her, those peering French officers, so it’s clear that this isn’t a pleasure jaunt, but a visit to the western front.

Edith Wharton—the author of Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth—wrote a book on World War I? How did that come about? How close did she get to the actual fighting? What did this woman of supreme sensibility and refinement, this novelist with real insight into the human condition, make of the tragedy?

Yes, definitely—a keeper, to be read as soon as I get home.

Here’s another, though the cover is funereal black and the lettering on the spine is hard to decipher. The German War by Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. “The German War”—is that what it was called at first? The book was printed in 1914, so it wasn’t “World War I” yet, nor even the “Great War,” but some bloody mess concocted by the Germans.

What was Doyle doing, publishing a book so early, when the fighting had barely started? A quick glance at the preface helps explain.

“These essays, upon different phases of the wonderful world-drama which has made our lifetime memorable, would be unworthy of publication were it not that at such a time every smallest thing which may help to clear up a doubt, to elucidate the justice of our cause, or to accentuate the desperate need of national effort, should be thrown into the scale.”

On the shelf next to Doyle, as if taking part in a chin-to-chin debate, is Justice in War-Time by Bertrand Russell. Russell the famous philosopher, Russell the mathematician, Russell the great popularizer of abstract thought—Russell who was one of the very few public intellectuals who dared speak out against the war while it was still in progress.

It was printed in Chicago by the Open Court Publishing Company in 1916—so maybe it was only in a still-neutral America that his antiwar writing could get published? There’s an old-fashioned bookplate pasted in front showing books arranged against a window, with the marvelous name “Kenneth Glendower Darling,” and a little epigraph: “Who hath a book hath but to read/And he may be a king indeed/His kingdom is his ingle-nook.”

Like any old book, it implicitly asks a question. Who was Mr. Darling, and why, in a world flooded with propaganda like Doyle’s, was he interested in Bertrand Russell?

Here is another book, a hundred-year-old version of a paperback, with covers so tattered and peeling it’s as if the book is drawing its last breaths in my hand: The German Terror; an historical record by Arnold J. Toynbee.

Toynbee? Wasn’t he a famous, highly respected British historian? The cover is gray around the edges, black within, with a garish German imperial eagle surrounded by jagged red flames—it seems to be rising from hell or sinking back again. There’s a map in front that needs care in unfolding, but is in perfect shape after that. “The invaded country,” it says, with bold red shadings showing the successive stages of the German advance through Belgium and France. The owner’s name doesn’t appear, but he or she, obviously an American, has scribbled something in pencil just above the publishing date MCMXVII. “We fought for freedom for ourselves in l776, and we now fight for freedom of the world.”

There’s another book next to it (a really good day at the bookstore, this, but I’m compacting dozens of visits, dozens of stores, into one miraculous one), the slimmest of the four. Treat ’em Rough: Letters from Jack the Kaiser Killer is the title, by Ring W. Lardner.

Lardner was the great American story writer and humorist—but what was he doing writing about war? The cover shows a caricature of a baseball player—small legs and torso, thick bat, big grinning face topped by a doughboy’s campaign hat—and he’s following through after walloping a baseball, only the baseball is the Kaiser’s mustachioed face tucked into a spiked pickelhaube helmet.

These books, after being published to what you assume was at least modest interest and receptivity, have gone on to hibernate through the next century, so it’s natural to wonder where they’ve spent the interval—what care or what luck resulted in their surviving long enough for someone like me to find them.

Take the one I have open on the desk, Essays in War-Time by Havelock Ellis, published by Constable and Co. in London in 1917. Ellis is remembered as a pioneering researcher into human sexuality, and is usually given credit for coining the terms “homosexual” and “narcissism.” He was an important name in his day, and it’s understandable that he would bring his far-ranging perspective, his eye for the big picture, to the war that was tearing apart the civilization that had made his career possible.

It’s easier to trace this book’s history than with most. Published in London, it obviously crossed the Atlantic to the States on a ship, perhaps as a kind of literary ballast to go along with British gold for American munitions. There’s a plate pasted on the endpapers, “The Gardner-Harvey Library of Miami University Middletown, Ohio,” while on the opposite page is handwritten “F. B. Amato, 26th June 1928,” and, below that, “From Mortimer and Daddy,” so it must have been on the family’s bookshelf until the 1930s. Did someone die then? Was the book then donated to the college library, which may have been interested because of Ellis’s reputation?

There’s a “Date Due” slip pasted on the back, but it only shows the book being checked out once, on Halloween 1960, with no dates stamped below it. The library, seeing the poor checkout record, must have discarded it at some point, probably in the 1970s, possibly offering it in a campus book sale, where some book lover found it and brought it home.

After that, it’s harder to guess. Whoever bought it could have died, and his or her heirs probably donated it to yet another book sale, this one perhaps a fund-raiser at the local library or school. Someone thought well enough of it to load it in their car and drive it across the country, but then it must have ended up in the possession of someone who had no use for it whatsoever. It was somehow transferred to the Whatley Antiquarian Book Center in Whatley, Massachusetts, where (stopping to use their restroom on the way back to New Hampshire) I found it in 2009, and, taking it home, became probably only the third or fourth person to read it cover to cover in a hundred years—and found it to be informative and fascinating, with a perspective on the war far beyond what you would think that anyone writing in the midst of it could possibly achieve.

But here’s the remarkable thing. As little read as these books are today, as thoroughly forgotten, there are lots of them—books and essays written on the Great War, during the Great War, by the best writers of the day, the greatest novelists, dramatists, poets, and philosophers. List the names and you’re listing the literary giants, the Nobel Prize winners, the ones who are still read, studied, and reverenced today. James, Conrad, Shaw, Bergson, Chesterton, Wells, Yeats, Rebecca West, Edmond Rostand, Romain Rolland, Hardy, Masefield, Mann, Cocteau, Gorky, Niebuhr, Dewey, and a dozen others of comparable rank.

Add to these the books written during the war by writers who later became important (Henry Beston, for instance, who, after publishing a totally neglected book called A Volunteer Poilu, went on to become the best nature writer in America), the ones written by writers who should have been better known (like Mildred Aldrich, who spent four years living and writing just behind the front lines), and the books written during the war by authors, famous then, who are now totally forgotten (like the novelist Winston Churchill, the American Winston Churchill), and you have an entire literature of World War I that hardly anyone has paid attention to in the 100 years since it was produced.

This neglect is almost total. A recent bestselling history of the war cites 216 separate books in the “Notes” section at the end, and yet only nine of these books were published during the war itself, and none were written by the great writers listed above; in an earlier history, this one by the renowned John Keegan, 193 books are cited, but only six that were published 1914–18, and none by the above writers. In The Penguin Book of First World War Prose, published in 1990, the emphasis is almost entirely on books written after the war, and the same is true of Paul Fussell’s landmark study, The Great War and Modern Memory, which concentrates on the postwar canon written by ex-soldiers. Hardly any mention is made of the literary giants who wrote while the war was still going on.

You need to read individual biographies of the authors to find any information about their World War I writings, and even here the record is skimpy. One otherwise excellent biography of Ring Lardner devotes no more than five or six sentences to his writings on the war, though Lardner devoted three books to the subject, managing to do the seemingly impossible—make the war humorous in a way that can still be appreciated 100 years later.

Why critics and historians have neglected these books is hard to fathom; why the general reading public forgot them is perfectly understandable. When the war ended, the very last thing anyone wanted to read about was the horror they had just experienced, especially when so much of the war writing—the mood having shifted—now seemed shrilly propagandistic. When war books did come back into fashion, it was the 1920s, and the mood was somber, repentant, disenchanted, so the books written back while the war was in progress, even the ones that went far beyond propaganda, now seemed hopelessly idealistic. Hemingway’s heroes distrusted “big” words and abstractions—and there were lots of big words in these earlier books.

But the main reason they became forgotten was that another, even greater war came along, producing so many books on its own that the literature from the earlier war was literally pushed from the shelves. Who wanted to read about Kaiser Wilhelm when Hitler was coming to power? Who cared about Sarajevo when Pearl Harbor was under attack? Twenty years after the Armistice, World War I was now ancient history, at least to the reading public, and sympathy for poor gallant Belgium, which had moved so many readers in 1914, now seemed, in the face of fresher horrors, little more than quaint.

And something else was happening—the visual world was taking over from the world of print. When you think of World War I, no iconic photographs spring to mind; when you think of World War II, you picture a whole gallery, from the Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi to Mussolini hanging like cold meat at that gas station in Milan to the face of Dachau survivors as they’re liberated to the sailor sweeping the girl off her feet on V-E Day in New York. People now wanted their wars photographed or newsreeled, and the few grainy black-and-white illustrations found in the World War I books, added to them as after-thoughts, hardly measured up to the dramatic images they became used to seeing in The March of Time or British Pathe.

Even without these special cultural circumstances, most of these books would have faded from view, dying the natural death almost every book eventually suffers. Cyril Connolly, writing in 1938, said that the overriding goal for an author is to write a book that will still be read ten years after it’s published—and that if a book accomplishes this, then it deserves to be termed “immortal.” (Shelf life being what it is today, ten weeks is the new immortal.) To survive that long, Connolly said, a book must have some “quality that improves with time.”

The forgotten literature of World War I has this quality, at least the best of it. It’s precisely because it was written on the other side of a great divide—before the visual age, before the digital age—that it has become so evocative when we try to look back. The writers who produced it were, at least potentially, the men and women whose minds were best equipped to understand what the world was going through, the ones whose hearts could most deeply feel the enormous human tragedy. “War is the most deadly earnest thing,” Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, a generalization there is still no arguing with. “This war is the most tragic thing that has ever happened to mankind,” added H. G. Wells, speaking more specifically—and at the time there was no question but that he was right, too.

What writers like these had to say about the war not only gives us a clearer idea of what their era was like, but speaks in terms that we can still read with profit; a hundred years is a long time, but not that long, not when the war ushered in a modern era that isn’t done with us yet. And if the war does indeed mark the divide between what seems, on the far side, the almost ancient, and, on this side, the all-too-painfully modern, then it’s in the books written from 1914 to 1918 where we can see the change happening.

(A novelist I know tells me he finds it relatively easy to imagine and write about any event from 1914 onwards, including the Great War, but impossible to contemplate a novel set in 1913 or earlier, since it would be like writing about men in armor or ladies in hooped skirts; he couldn’t possibly understand them.)

“In 1914,” the Bloomsbury writer Leonard Woolf wrote, “in the background of one’s life and one’s mind there was light and hope; by 1918, one had accepted a perpetual public menace and darkness, and had admitted into the privacy of one’s soul an acquiescence in insecurity and barbarism.”

Writer after writer testifies to this change. “Like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours,” is the way Barbara Tuchman sums up the war. “In pre-war days,” L. P. Hartley adds, “hope took for granted what in post-war days fear takes for granted.” “A vast age of transition,” Vera Brittain calls it, looking back on a war that saw the death of her brother, her fiancé, her best friend, “which carried the nineteenth century into the twentieth; the changes were apocalyptic and fundamental, and mankind was never the same again.” “Much that was then taken to be fairly noble now looks pretty mean,” C. F. Montague says; “Much that seemed reassuringly stable is now seen to be shaky. Civilization itself wears a strange new air of precariousness.” And the American essayist Agnes Repplier worries that “The standard of evil has been forever changed.”

The writers anthologized here came to maturity in that prewar world; they were a generation that believed in reason, in civilization, in art, in progress, in a human destiny that was full of hope. These were the qualities that made them the great artists they were, but it did not equip them to deal with the tragic experience of the modern, postwar world—or did it? One of the surprises in reading their work is the amount of cynicism, irony, and “modernism” that you find, even in 1914, so maybe the change wasn’t quite as dramatic as later studies like to claim.

Still, the task of interpreting the war was soon given over to a younger generation of writers, particularly those who had served in the trenches and seen the obscenities of war—and thus the modern age—up close. They saw a lot, these writers, but by the same token there was much they didn’t understand or care to understand; they were, as most were quick to admit, primarily focused on the little patch of No Man’s Land they could see through their trench periscopes, never mind what was happening in the larger world. But it was their writings that became the war’s canonical literature, their novels and memoirs that still color our view of the war, while the civilian literary response is largely ignored.

To state the obvious, middle-aged writers like Hardy, Yeats, Rolland, Mann, and Conrad never served in the trenches. They escaped the filth, the carnage, the mud, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t alive to it, weren’t struggling to take in what was going on. Writers like Wharton understood the soldiers’ agony, but also understood the pain of the refugees, the widowed, the bereaved, and the tragic implications of what was being destroyed.

These writers had an importance that wasn’t confined to the world of ideas. Poets, novelists, and dramatists enjoyed a status and influence in 1914 that writers of today can only dream of; they weren’t just ivory-tower intellectuals read by a harmless coterie, but celebrities, opinion makers, movers and shakers, forces for good and sometimes for evil; it’s no exaggeration to say that the words of Doyle, Kipling, and Toynbee sent young men to their deaths.

The writer Russell Miller emphasizes this point. “This was an age, before radio, movies and television, when writers wielded huge social as well as literary influence, were quoted as authorities on a whole range of subjects, and were looked upon to provide a moral view of the world.”

(Many of the books I find were widely read when first published. Mildred Aldrich’s accounts of her life near the trenches were bestsellers in America; John Buchan’s novels were the ones soldiers carried with them in the trenches; Edgar Guest’s flag-and-motherhood poems appeared in most American newspapers and were read out loud at the supper table.)

And while a modern-day writer, op-editing on the latest war half a world away, will almost certainly not have a friend or relative involved in the fighting, nor gone anywhere near it him- or herself, many of these writers managed to find their way to Flanders to see for themselves what was going on. Many allowed themselves to be taken on well-organized, smoothly-run “trench tours,” with a little dollop of danger at the end to make it all seem authentic, but others served in the ambulance corps, worked as nurses, or cared for refugees.

And while jingoistic, bellicose writers like Doyle and Kipling may have influenced young boys to enlist, their own sons were killed in the war, so they can’t be accused of blatant hypocrisy. Other writers suffered personally as well. Conrad’s son was gassed; Katherine Mansfield’s brother was killed; Russell was thrown into prison; Shaw’s reputation was destroyed; James, nursing the wounded, died of a broken heart.

One more point to keep in mind when it comes to these books. The authors were working in 1914, when books as physical objects were at the peak of their influence and power, but by 1918 had begun their long slow decline, to the point where, in our own day, books as objects have an increasingly tenuous existence, as covers, binding, flaps all disappear and words go electronic … and so it’s a miracle that books from a hundred years ago even survive at all, let alone the great insights that, if we search them out in old bookstores, still live within those nostalgically familiar cardboard covers.

It is not sufficiently recognized that 100 years after it officially ended, with the last surviving combatants all having died, the Great War is still very much a living memory. People continue to be impacted by its pain, though it’s muted now, buffered, but not yet erased. The usual simile is to a boulder being dropped into a still pond, with an explosion, then a wave, then a ripple—and more ripples, each one wider than the next, but softer, spreading a lot farther, if you study the pond carefully, than anyone would expect.

Havelock Ellis understood this as far back as 1916.

“All these bald estimates of the number of direct victims to war give no clue to the moral and material damage done by the sudden destruction of so large a proportion of the young manhood of the world, the ever widening circles of anguish and misery and destitution which every fatal bullet imposes on humanity, for it is probably true that for every ten million soldiers who fall on the field, fifty million other persons at home are plunged into grief or poverty or some form of life-diminishing trouble.”

This is well said—and Ellis could have multiplied his fifty million by a factor of ten if he drew his “ever widening circles” out across the next century.

A few examples.

After writing a novel set in Flanders in 1918, I was interviewed on public radio. The host of the program, a man named John, asked me why I had mentioned, just in passing, the “Bois de Fere” as the place where a minor character’s husband has been killed.

“No particular reason,” I said. “I found it footnoted in a book. The Americans fought there, a small action, not really a battle.”

“Small?” He shook his head. “My grandfather was killed there. Shot through the shoulder and bled to death three hours later.”

He said this matter-of-factly, but still, it hit home. It’s not that John was actively grieving over his grandfather—a man my age, he had been born long after his grandfather’s death—but he had a gap in his life that memories of his grandfather should have filled. I had wonderful experiences with my own grandfather (exempted from the war as a New York City fireman), he taught me many valuable things—but John had never had this, and so it’s right to say he suffered from “some form of life-diminishing trouble.”

Just recently, visiting a dear friend who is about to turn ninety-six, she asked me what I was working on, and I told her about this book.

“My father was in that awful war. Served with the French. My mother was terribly cross with him, going off when he didn’t have to, and she was alone when I was born in 1918.”

Jane told me the story—not so much about the war, which of course she doesn’t remember, but a trip eight years afterward, when her father took the family over to France to see where he had fought. They went to Verdun first, and Jane described the powerful impression all the spiky, broken trees made on her little girl imagination; they then went on to Chateau-Thierry, where they visited the grave of her father’s best friend, killed in the battle there.

“That’s why I go to Veterans Day service in town every November,” she said. “To remember Norman Williams, my father’s best friend.”

My wife, daughter, and I made our own pilgrimage to the Flanders battlefields a few years ago. Our guide, Annette, was a self-taught expert on the war—she lived in one of the few houses in Ypres that survived four years of fighting. On our first day, she got us up early, loaded us in her van, and off we drove toward the Somme. Along with us were a couple from Australia, a man and woman in their fifties.

Later, after touring the battlefield proper, we stopped somewhat south of it on a country lane running through the middle of rolling farmland.

“Right here,” Annette announced. She got out, held the door open for the Australian woman, took her hand and led her to a grassy knoll.

The woman’s great-uncle had died here in 1918, fighting with the Australians in the battle for Villers-Bretonneux. Annette, as part of her guide service, will research where your ancestor was stationed, where his unit was engaged, where he was wounded or killed. The Australian woman had never known her great-uncle, of course, but she had always been very close to her grandmother, her great-uncle’s sister. Her grandmother had never been able to afford to come to France to visit her brother’s grave, but, before dying, she begged her granddaughter to go visit it for her. And so, a little later, when we came to the cemetery and found the grave with his name on it, the moment—ninety-six years after he had been buried there—was almost unbearably poignant … and not just for the great-niece.

If you visit the Flanders battlefields or the ones along the Somme, walk the rows in the well-kept cemeteries managed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, stare up at the plaques to the missing and their endless names, visit Ypres, go that night to the Last Post ceremony at the Menin Gate (“We will remember them,” intone the onlookers as the ceremony ends)—if you do these things, do them solemnly, you will end up thinking that one of the central purposes of the world is to remember World War I. This is Remembrance with a capital R, with many people, even now, earning their livelihood from it; thousands of pilgrims still come to the fields of the western front to see where their ancestors died.

But if you visit Kobarid in Slovenia as I have, on a very different front of the Great War, you will come to the exact opposite conclusion. Here, the war is almost totally forgotten by the larger world, though this is the epicenter of its most infamous battle. It’s not Remembrance that is capitalized here, but Forgetting.

Before Kobarid was a Slovenian market town, before it was a Yugoslavian market town, before it was, briefly, an American market town (in the zone of occupation in 1945), before it was a German market town, before it was an Austrian market town, it was an Italian market town, not “Kobarid” but “Caporetto.”

Caporetto was the scene of the catastrophic Italian defeat of 1917, when hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers, poorly led, cold and weary, homesick, fled before the Austrian-German attack in the nightmarish retreat described in A Farewell to Arms; it’s Caporetto where the Italian army got the reputation for cowardice it’s never shed since.

The Italians don’t want to remember Caporetto, despite Mussolini having erected, on a hill above the town, a “Charnel House” for the dead. The Austrians, victors in the battle, went on to lose the war, so they don’t visit either. A few military buffs, West Point or Sandhurst types, come with their maps, and they can hire mountaineering guides to take them to where the fighting raged on improbably high Alpine peaks, but other than that, the Great War is forgotten—at least until you go for a walk in the woods.

Walk almost anywhere, especially above the beautiful Soca River (called the “Isonzo” in 1917, scene of a dozen named battles), and you’ll soon come upon old dugouts, trenches, pillboxes, latrines, tunnels which the falling autumn leaves, the erosive hand of time, have blended with ruins dating from the Roman era, so sometimes—with no signage to help explain—you don’t know which earthwork was raised in 1917 by Italian Alpini and which in 217 by Roman legionnaires. And yet, looking at these remains, climbing up the hidden stairways, knowing a little something of what happened here in 1916–17, the tragedy comes alive in an even stronger way than it does in Flanders, just because the memory isn’t served to you all prettied up, but raw, so to grasp it you have to reach.

Flanders with its commemorative sites on one side of Remembrance; Caporetto and its hidden ruins on the other. It’s exactly this difference that divides the familiar literary canon of World War I and the forgotten literature included here.

In the years leading up to the ninety-fifth anniversary of the war, the media kept an eye on the last known surviving veterans, and noted with sadness when each died. One of the liveliest, right to the end, was 111-year-old Harry Patch, the last known survivor of trench warfare, having been wounded in the groin at Passchendaele while serving with the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry in 1917. You can go online and watch an interview with Private Patch recorded shortly before his death in 2009, and it’s fascinating—not just his stories of the trenches, but the wobbly yet strong voice he tells them in. It could be the voice of the Great War itself, the inflection, the tone, coming out of the mouth of the only man left who could speak to what it was like.

Now they’re all gone, not only the soldiers, sailors, and nurses, but anyone who can tell us what that pre-1914 world was like. In their place, we have grainy black-and-white photographs, newspapers rotting away in museum attics, a few jumpy newsreels, and—strongest witnesses—the books written and published during the war, the ones I so assiduously seek out. Old veterans, as compelling as their stories were, tended to have their reflections shaded by everything that happened in the world since, or the expectations of the people interviewing them. The surviving books are immune to this shading. When you read them, you’re getting 1914–18 pure.

On our tour of the Somme battlefield, Annette drove us to a place that is usually off-limits to most visitors. Mouquet Farm, on a slight rise behind Thiepval, was the scene of some of the heaviest fighting during the battle, the German trench line there holding out long after every other position around it had been captured; there can’t have been many spots on the western front that received such concentrated shelling, nor had so many young men killed trying to take it. “Moo Cow Farm,” they called it, or sometimes “Mucky Farm.”

Annette had made friends with the farmer who lives there now, thanks to a gift of fine Belgian chocolates delivered every Christmas. He was on his tractor spreading manure over his fields when we got there (the fields that still show chalk white stripes where the old trenches were), but he climbed down and came over to greet us. He spoke only French, so I didn’t catch all that he said, but at the end, stooping, he picked something up from the ground and handed to me as a souvenir.

It was shrapnel—three rusted, marble-sized balls of it, plus a little pretzel-like twist of rusty barbed wire. He didn’t have to search hard for this—his fields are composed of scraps of old metal. It staggered me, holding these; I had enough time to wonder if it was “good” shrapnel, having exploded and gone flying directly into the earth, or whether it was “bad” shrapnel, having been intercepted by a young man’s arm, leg, or heart on its way. I carefully wrapped the metal up when we got back to Annette’s house and carried it with me across the Atlantic; it’s been on my shelf ever since.

It brings much back, when I take it out to hold it again; it gets me thinking. But when I hold these books, the ones manufactured during the war like shrapnel was manufactured, I feel it even stronger—the last faint pulse of the past, with no rust, no tarnish, no diminution.

In almost every instance, the books from which the excerpts are drawn are ones I found through the process described above—by searching as many used bookstores as I could, near home and on my travels. Almost every book cost less than a dollar—further proof that this literature is forgotten, even by collectors.

Once, in an old bookstore in Chicago, in a locked, glassed-in case, I came across a volume that Edith Wharton put together to raise money for Belgian refugees. Published by Scribner’s in 1916, it’s called The Book of the Homeless (Les Livres des San-Foyer). Wharton recruited her friends in the art world to contribute, so not only are there essays by Joseph Conrad and Henry James, poems by W. B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, and Jean Cocteau; not only are there little exhortative paragraphs by Teddy Roosevelt, General Joffre, and Sarah Bernhardt; not only are there musical score excerpts from Vincent d’Indy and Igor Stravinsky (Souvenir d’une marche boche) … not only are there all these, but plates drawn by, among others, John Singer Sargent, Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet, Charles Dana Gibson, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Great geniuses pitting their art against the horrors of war. Who wouldn’t want to bring a book like that home? My hands were trembling when I turned to the price. $7,500. I almost cried.

But, as with every other aspect of life now, dusty old bookstores have gone online, so you can search the world with your computer for an affordable copy of a book you’re longing to have. A bookstore in Pittsburgh listed a 1916 first edition of The Book of the Homeless for $65; some of the plates have been pilfered, but other than that it’s perfect—and so one of the most interesting survivors is now mine.

While probably no one cares about the distinction but me, this is not an “anthology,” not in the old sense, where writings are dumped higgledy-piggledy into a book like old clothes into a trunk, with little sorting. A “compilation” might be a better word, or, in 1914 phrasing, a “reader,” a transformative reader, where the compiler shares a personal selection, with lots of comments along the way, trying to give the sense of reading and exploring together. It’s also a book of literary criticism and comparison, a historical record, and not least of all a personal narrative by someone who, just when the world seems to be abandoning them, is still in love with printed books.

As much as I’ve learned from reading the books in their entireties, almost all of them benefit from being shortened and abridged, so there will be no shortage of editorial ellipses. As for the whys and wherefores of the passages selected, I had several considerations in mind.

Excerpts that vividly reflect the mood of the time caught my eye, as did, conversely, writings that speak to our era across the years. Some passages were chosen primarily because of who wrote them. Henry James, writing of visiting the wounded in London hospitals, uses his most impenetrable late-Jamesian style—but Henry James is, well, Henry James. Other excerpts were chosen because they contribute to telling a story, or rather two stories—one about the larger tragedy of a civilization in the process of destroying itself, the other about the individual tragedies of the souls caught up in it. (The older writers tend to be better on the first, the younger writers on the second.) Empathy is important—I was always looking for writers who rose above their nationality and remembered their humanity. Several were chosen because they are outstandingly bad, but revealing in their wretchedness, giving us insight into what people of the time, ordinary people, were reading.

It’s hard to generalize about the overall mood of these writings when you have, on one hand, the radical originality of Randolph Bourne and, on the other, the cheery rhythms of the (then) world’s most popular poet, Robert W. Service. But decades after the war ended, Philip Larkin, looking back on the assumptions and beliefs of the prewar era, wrote his famous line about “never such innocence again.”

Innocence? Yes, perhaps—but writers like Shaw, Wells, Conrad, Mann, and Rolland, whatever else they were, were certainly not innocents.

Or were they? There was little in human nature that would have surprised fifty-year-old Nobel Prize–winning novelists, but the organized, mechanical butchery of the first truly “total” war—yes, this would have surprised them, shaken them, staggered them … and it’s this response of brutalized innocence that colors many of the passages quoted here.

To stress a point made earlier—one of the surprises I had in compiling this book was how so many of the attitudes characteristic of what we now term the “modern” age were on display even while the war was in progress. No historian, looking back on the Great War from the cynical vantage point of the 1960s, managed more irony than George Bernard Shaw did writing in 1914; no one, writing today, had a larger, broader sense of war’s human tragedy than the classicist Gilbert Murray writing in 1917. Chauvinism, jingoism, hate—there’s plenty of these in the writers’ responses, but there is also objectivity, generosity, forgiveness.

Murray, who understood war’s awfulness better than most, still thought it was worth fighting.

“I desperately desire to hear of German dreadnoughts sunk in the North Sea,” he wrote, marveling at his own bloodthirstiness. “Mines are treacherous engines of death, but I should be only too glad to help lay one of them. When I see that 20,000 Germans have been killed in such-and-such an engagement, and next day that it was only 2,000, I am sorry.”

Almost all the writers included here shared this opinion, and the courage of the ones who didn’t, writers like Bertrand Russell, Jane Addams, and the all-but-forgotten G. F. Nicolai, still compels our admiration 100 years later.

If I were to choose one word to describe the characteristic quality in all these writings, it would be not “innocence” but “wonder”—wonder in the old, prewar sense, meaning “to feel astonishment.” The British writers in particular use the word “wonderful” surprisingly often, applying it to what in our view is the exact opposite of “wonderful”—to heavy artillery barrages or the towns those barrages destroyed. This kind of astonishment, this incapacity to believe man is capable of doing what he was then in the process of doing, this “wonder” that it isn’t all a nightmare but real, colors almost every word included here. It’s a response that wouldn’t survive the war; after 1918, bloodlettings and butcheries wouldn’t surprise us again.

There’s another note that colors much of the writing: guilt. These were middle-aged or older men and women, and many of them felt ashamed and embarrassed that they were only writing about the war, not fighting it. Maurice Maeterlinck lamented, “At these moments of tragedy, none should be allowed to speak who cannot shoulder a rifle, for the written word seems so monstrously useless and so overwhelmingly trivial in the face of this mighty drama.” Even a raving jingoist like Kipling, when visiting the trenches, could write, “The soldiers stared, with justified contempt I thought, upon the civilian who scuttled through their life for a few emotional minutes in order to make words out of their blood.”

With the guilt came doubt—were their talents up to describing what they witnessed? Even the supremely confident Edith Wharton could speak of “those strange and contradictory scenes of war that bring home to the bewildered on-looker the utter impossibility of figuring out how the thing really happens.” And, assuming they could find the right words, would it even matter? H. G. Wells has his thinly disguised alter ego, Mr. Britling (in his forgotten classic, Mr. Britling Sees It Through), penning articles about the war, worry, “If he wrote such things, would they be noted or would they just vanish indistinguishably into the general tumult? Would they be audible and helpful shouts, or just waste of shouting?”

The writers worry about understanding the war, but in the end, they all give it a try. Even as Mr. Britling frets about his son in the trenches, tries to balance this with his own involvement, he realizes, “He could find no real point of contact with the war except the point of his pen. Only at his writing desk were the great presences of the conflict his.”

Most writers, while feeling those doubts, probably, in the end, consoled themselves with a reflection similar to that made by Richard Harding Davis, the great American war correspondent:

“Some men are born to fight, and others to write.”

There’s an important final point. This book will have much to say about war, but even more to say about literature. For it was a literary challenge each of these authors faced—how to write about something that (unlike love and hate, friendship and loneliness, hope and despair, and all the “normal” human emotions) they had never experienced before: the end of the world. For this is what they honestly thought they were faced with—the destruction of the civilization of which they were among the primary creators, and the loss of everything they held dear.

What kind of moral, ethical, and imaginative forces do you find in yourself to pit against this? In total war, writers would be expected to “enlist” like everyone else; writers in 1914 were more influential than they ever were before or ever would be afterwards; print remained the dominant means of communication. How writers used print, how they responded to the catastrophe, tells us much about the power—and lack of power—literature had at its height. The writers included here argued about the war, moralized about it, witnessed it, prevaricated and lied about it, pitied those caught up in it, mourned the dead, sought—some of them—to amuse and entertain, and, in the end, exhausted, reflected on what it all meant—and the chapters will be organized accordingly.

The books excerpted here were written with passion, sincerity, and belief, and they deserve to be read one last time, to see what’s worth remembering in them and worth preserving. Taken as a whole, they should help widen and deepen the narrow literary canon of the war that has ossified into place.

So. It’s the summer of 1914—to outward appearances, a time of peace and unprecedented prosperity right across the European continent. The heir to the tottering Austrian-Hungarian throne makes a foolish, ill-advised trip to the city of Sarajevo and is shot along with his wife by an amateurish Bosnian-Serbian assassin. Ordinary people hardly notice, so caught up are they in their peaceful lives, until, without warning, the thing happens, the long-dreaded thing, and these same people, with no quarrel against each other or conceivable interest in the fate of the silly archduke, are joining armies in their millions as if, demented, they have caught a common, lemming-like impulse of mutual extermination, an evil death wish that will all too soon come true.

The nations look to their great novelists, poets, and dramatists as they look to their statesmen and generals, desperate for guidance. A telegram arrives, the maid brings it into the parlor. It’s an editor asking for a quick 1,500 words on the developing struggle, and already talking about a visit to the war zone and a possible book. (A book? Well, that’s some good news at any rate; our writer, like other breadwinners, worries about the war robbing him of his livelihood.) The author scans it again, nods—he or she has been expecting just this—and immediately goes up to the study and starts work, determined to prove, in the unfolding crisis, that writers can do their part.