January 2023 in Books: What I'm Reading

In January my programme is tinged by research for a World War I story.

All Quiet on the Western Front is deservedly famous: deeply humane, descriptive, truthful-feeling, and philosophical. I believe it gained in mellowness from the fact that Erich Maria Remarque published it a decade after the war. It is also hard to understand its offensiveness to Fascist readers if one contrasts the truly bitter poetry and prose that was written by other veterans.

Diary of a nursing sister on the western front, 1914-1915 (1915) represents the perspective of an American nurse with the Red Cross who was already a graduate of the Boer War, embodying in its grim details the message in Remarque's trenchant verdict, "Erst das Lazarett zeigt, was Krieg ist" (roughly translated: The field hospital is the first thing that shows what war is.). It can be read at Archive.org.

Lindsey Fitzharris's Facemaker: One Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I (Google Books) goes deeper by exploring the revolutionary skin grafting and cosmetic surgeries that were performed by Harold Gillies. Highly readable except insofar as the details of how the wounds were given and how the wounds were mitigated are equally gruesome, it explains the time before penicillin was used in battlefield surgery and before modern plastic surgery and its tools existed. (It is also important to note that the term 'disfigured' reflects the judgment of society, not the patients.) "Only the dead have seen the end of war," George Santayana writes, in one of the epigraphs that she inserts at the beginning of the book.

James Norman Hall's books Kitchener's Mob (1916) and High Adventure: A Narrative of Air Fighting in France (Project Gutenberg) (1918) would however probably never fall afoul of a censor. He, like the Red Cross nurse, is an American who volunteered to be involved in the bloodshed.

I especially liked his prose, lyrical and highly detailed, and his philosophical views about both sides of the conflict.

Then we learned the biscuit-tin-finder trick for locating snipers. It's only approximate, of course, but it gives a pretty good hint at the direction from which the shots come. It doesn't work in the daytime, for a sniper is too clever to fire at it. But a biscuit tin, set on the parapet at night in a badly sniped position, is almost certain to be hit. The angle from which the shots come is shown by the jagged edges of tin around the bullet holes. — Kitchener's Mob 

Fritz Kreisler also wrote a slender memoir, Four Weeks in the Trenches: The War Story of a Violinist (Archive.org) (1915), of his time in the Austrian army. He was an officer, fighting Russians near eastern Austria at the outbreak of World War I. The book was printed in English in the United States, which was not yet aligned against Austria and Germany. The well-meaning naïveté of the emperor-worship and patriotism that the violinist faithfully describes in Vienna and in himself are striking, not dissimilar from the atmosphere in parts of the English population and for example Canada, and I think sad.

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"French succoring wounded German"
Bain News Service, 1914
Library of Congress

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World War I also inspired gripping poetry, of course. Siegfried Sassoon's "A Working Party" (1919),is  all dogged rhythm and onomatopoeia. But aside from this poem, a Rupert Brooke classic and another two from Wilfred Owens, and a little Edmund Blunden, I have not read much in the genre yet.

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Cover of The Splendid and the Vile
via Penguin Random House

But one historical book I'm reading, a massive work on World War II from the perspective of Sir Winston Churchill's environment, is set later. In The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz, Erik Larson demystifies how popular the war actually was. Churchill found himself in the perverse situation not of being a five-year-old child clapping his hands in a Peter Pan theatre performance to show he believes in fairies, but of demonstrating how much he believed in declaring war on Germany in spite of a reluctant public, reluctant politicians like Sir Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, a reluctant American government, and even a reluctant King who preferred his predecessor.

Reading about World War I through the biography of an insider like John Maynard Keynes, through the lens of a half-sympathetic, half-skeptical biographer, gave the similar impression of an elite with bizarre priorities, unmoored from reality. (e.g. Keynes's interest in cadging art from continental Europe, presumably so the war wouldn't benefit nobody.)

Larson sprinkles in epistolary passages and diary entries from a British elite that was at times tremendously catty, or gushing, or silly. He lends more human details, too, to Churchill:

Often generals, ministers, and staff members would find themselves meeting with Churchill while he was in his bathtub, one of his favorite places to work. He also liked working in bed, and spent hours there each morning going through dispatches and reports, with a typist seated nearby.

Regardless of whether the topic is political, historical, or social, Larson's prose is equally readable.

I only noticed one or two factual errors that might be due to the ebook edition I read: for example, München-Gladbach should be München Gladbach.*

*Note: this is a very pedantic criticism: In 1950 this German city, which appears in the book because the Royal Air Force bombarded it early in the war, acquired the hyphen; and in 1960 it became Mönchengladbach.

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Passage to Power, one of the American presidential biographer Robert A. Caro's magisterial works, is about Lyndon B. Johnson. But, at the spot where I'm in the audiobook recording now, he also delves into the war service of President John F. Kennedy, specifically the wreck of the future President's patrol torpedo boat during World War II.

Even living through the original explosion of the boat was a feat, of luck perhaps. In Caro's hands the tale of how Kennedy then rescues his wounded men and tries to make sure a ship picks them up, swimming many kilometres under adverse conditions, is nail-bitingly suspenseful. (The Wikipedia article about Patrol torpedo boat PT-109 and its fate is less dramatically paced than Caro's prose, but its epilogue about Kennedy's reconciliation with the commander of the Japanese ship that had sunk the patrol boat is touching.)

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In more cheerful reading, Michelle Obama's Becoming and Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom are ongoing. I am also beginning to read New York Times food writer Melissa Clark's fusion cookbook, Dinner in French, and hope to try out a recipe once my work life settles down.