War literature

“ In the mean time, there is a remarkable and very significant tendency to praise all war songs, war stories, and war literature generally, in proportion to the discomfort and horror they excite, in proportion to their inartistic and unjustifiable realism. ”

“ To us, happy in our insular position, we have, within existing memory, known chiefly of war, its pomp and circumstance alone; the gay parade, the glancing arms, the bright colours, the inspiring music—these are what we see of war in its outset;—glory, and praise, and badges of honour, these are what appear to us as its result. ”

“ The literature of the last six years should be regarded as contemporary documents to illuminate the psychology of a war in progress rather than as the considered and definite contribution made by the creative artists of a generation which had been shaken by war from the seating of tradition. ”

“ It is some such high cause as this, such principles and emotions as these that give war nearly all the poetry and the glory that can ever be found in it. There is nothing of either in the mere exhibition of military might, the boast of conquest, the raw carnage, the hecatombs of slain. ”

“ No man now living will be able to say definitely what effects the war will have upon literature, [179] but one thing is certain: nothing will remain the same. We have already learned to view each other with different eyes. ”

“ These personal narratives reveal the psychology of war in all its horrible reality—modern warfare on its gigantic scale—the genius of invention and organization applied to destruction. They reveal, moreover, the psychology of human nature and human emotions in all their moods and passions. ”

“ Those upon the other side will be magnanimous enough to tolerate him, at least in silence. Histories, romances, poems, and plays relating to the war, are produced in greater numbers as the gap between the days of battle and the days of peace widens ”

“ Why does the stately Muse of History, that delights in describing the valor of heroes and the grandeur of conquest, leave out these scenes, so brutal, and degrading, that yet form by far the greater part of the drama of war? ”

“ As such a unification of interest in a strong and uninhibited movement, as a coördinated expression of deep desires, a multiplicity of action with a unity of purpose, so to speak, war is aesthetic in form although to mention such very general qualities does not go very far toward characterizing an object.
In its meaning as tragedy war contains and exerts a strong aesthetic appeal. With all its horrors, war fascinates the mind. As fate, death, history it inspires awe, and creates a sense of the inevitableness of events and of the play of transcendental and inexorable forces in human life. ”

“ There is something in warfare, in its story and in its paraphernalia, which profoundly stirs the emotions and sends the blood tingling through the veins of the most peaceable of us, and appeals to I know not what remote instincts, to say nothing of our natural admiration for courage, our love of adventure, of intense movement and action. But this romantic fascination resides to no small extent in that very spectacular quality of which modern conditions are depriving war. ”

“ All wars present a series of contrasts. Is not war itself the greatest of all contrasts of life? The antithesis of Man at Peace and Man at War is one with which the poets and artists have familiarized mankind all through the ages. And so, though we are in the thirteenth month of the overwhelming change which this, the greatest of all wars, has wrought in our lives, I find, on sitting down to record my impressions of the life and work of the British Army in the field, that I am continually reverting to the perpetual, the confounding contrast between the world at peace and the world at war. ”

“ One and all, we see the same sights. War is not the fine and splendid thing some of us at home believe it to be. There is dirt and cruelty and injustice in France, as well as glory and heroism. I have seen the good and the evil of the battlefields, just as I have seen the good and the evil of peace, and I have learned that the romance of war depends as much upon the thickness of the atmosphere as upon the square miles of the distance. It is pretty prosaic at close range; yet at the very worst of it, I have seen flashes of an almost inconceivable beauty. ”

“ Made strong by this, he endures the ordeal, the hazard of death, in the full splendour of the war, or at its sullen, dragging close, or in the battle's onset, or on patrol, the test of the dauntless, surrendering the sight of the sun, the coming of spring, and all that the arts and various wisdom of the centuries have added of charm or depth to nature's day. ”

“ The language is direct and unaffected, soul-stirring, and free from exaggeration; every page, nay, every line, compels attention and evokes the most sympathetic interest. The book is alike authentic and restrained in tone, but what most strikes the reader is its extraordinary sincerity. No war book has yet appeared that gives so strong an impression of reality, or which, on its own sheer merits, is more worthy to survive the rage and tumult of battle. ”

“ But if the war has brought our poets face to face with intense kinds of real experience, which they have fearlessly grasped and rendered, its grim obsession has not made them cynical, or clogged the wings of their faith and their hope. I will not ask how the war has affected the idealism of others, whether it has left the nationalism of our press or the religion of our pulpits purer or more gross than it found them. But of our poetry at least the latter cannot be said. ”

“ The main thing about them is just that they are extraordinary poems; by means of their psychology, no less and no more than by means of their metre, their rhyme, their intellectual form and their concrete imagery, they pierce us with flashing understanding of what the war is and means--not merely what it is to these individual pieces of ordinary human nature who are injured by it and who yet dominate it, but, by evident implication, what the war is in itself, as a grisly multitudinous whole. ”

“ I was not disturbed by any inkling of the shadow of a possibility that one could think of war’s not being in the world at all. As well might one think of leaves not being on the trees, or waves on the sea. Why, war is the form in which human history accomplishes itself: the founding of empires, the settlement of controversies, are seen to by war. ”

“ We know, or if any do not they may know it from what has been written by our soldiers themselves, that there is no glory and little romance in war except for those who can play with the thought of it from far off, or after the years have healed its wounds and hidden the hideous ruin it wrought, and the agony of it has dwindled to the glamorous sorrow of a tale that is told. ”

“ At other points the vein is quiet and philosophical, and the reader is held by the soothing charm that is in complete contrast with the action and energy of battle.”—Observer, Utica, N.Y.
“War and Peace is a historical novel and is extremely interesting, not only in its description of the times of the great invasion eighty years ago, but in its vivid pictures of life and character in Russia.”—Journal of Commerce, New York.
“On general principles the historical novel is neither valuable as fact nor entertaining as fiction. But ‘War and Peace’ is a striking exception to this rule. ”

“ The brilliant, but vague, excitement and glory of war, in its more stirring phases, touches readily the popular imagination, as does intense action of every description. It has all the charm of the dramatic, heightened by the splendor of the heroic. ”

“ The scene after the battle smoke cleared away, and our men sat down to rest, was of a kind to thoroughly satisfy those “who look on war as a pastime.” It was one from which humanity loves to avert her gaze. ”

“ Then will war stand forth before their view in all its hideousness, its features distorted by rage, and its garments dripping with blood,—a mournful and a fearful spectacle. Oh! when shall the time come, that the true character of War—its horrors, its vices, its crimes, unredeemed by a single trait properly its own,—shall be understood. ”

“ In this book I have written about some aspects of the war which, I believe, the world must know and remember, not only as a memorial of men's courage in tragic years, but as a warning of what will happen again—surely—if a heritage of evil and of folly is not cut out of the hearts of peoples. Here it is the reality of modern warfare not only as it appears to British soldiers, of whom I can tell, but to soldiers on all the fronts where conditions were the same. ”

“ It is a strange synthesis, this war: it is a synthesis of adventure, dulness, good spirits, and tragedy; but none of these things are new to human experience; nor is human nature altered by war. It is at war as a whole that we must look in order to appreciate its quality. ”

“ The impression, the deep impression, made upon the human heart by four years of unexampled slaughter will disappear with the hearts upon which it has been marked by the terrible sword of the Great War. ”

“ That all base dreams thrust out at door,
We may in loftier aims excel
And, like men waking from a spell,
Grow stronger, nobler, than before,
When there is Peace.
Austin Dobson
A PRAYER IN TIME OF WAR [ The war will change many things in art and life, and among them, it is to be hoped, many of our own ideas as to what is, and what is not, "intellectual."]
Thou, whose deep ways are in the sea,
Whose footsteps are not known,
To-night a world that turned from Thee
Is waiting—at Thy Throne. ”

“ So far from that, all the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war; no great art ever yet rose on earth, but among a nation of soldiers. There is no art among a shepherd people, if it remains [Pg 67] at peace. ”

“ As I have tried to write down exactly what I witnessed, they may help to afford some idea of what war really means,—war as a hard practical fact—stripped of all the glamour, and poetry, and pride of conquest, that are so attractive when seen in history. ”

“ But, on the other hand, I know certainly that the most beautiful characters yet developed among men have been formed in war;—that all great nations have been warrior nations, and that the only kinds of peace which we are likely to get in the present age are ruinous alike to the intellect, and the heart. ”

“ It is the fact that war is a great ecstasy of the social life, that it holds a high place in art, that history—our selective way of reacting upon human experience—is in a large measure the story of war, that its representations in dramatic forms are almost endless in variety; it is such facts that give us our clew to the nature of the problems of war, and also to the practical questions of its future. ”

“ The hope departed with the Peace of 1815, and pamphleteering, pragmatic writing, theological investigation, historical research, followed the period of creative genius, whose flowers did not wither while the fields ran red.
A war must be the last resort of truly noble and popular ideas, if it would do more than stimulate the intelligence of a few men, who write best with draughts of glory and success. ”

“ When the Great War shall be only a faded memory, when the sufferings of millions of men and women shall be condensed into matter for handbooks, and their sacrifices shall be expressed only in arithmetical figures, certain incidents and names, because they caught the popular imagination, will still be narrated and repeated. ”

“ From the pictorial and sensational point of view continuous peace is a drawback for the biographer no less than for the historian. What would history be without war?—almost inconceivable; since wars, not peace, are the principal materials with which it deals and supply it with most of its vitality and interest—must it also be admitted, its charm? ”

“ Let the general possibility of war be left open, in Heaven's name, for the imagination to dally with. Let the soldiers dream of killing, as the old maids dream of marrying. But organize in every conceivable way the practical machinery for making each successive chance of war abortive. ”

“ He painted war as war has ever been, and as war will ever be—a horrible and ghastly scene, where men, drunk with blind frenzy which rulers say is patriotic pride, and made mad by drums and fifes and smoke and shot and shell and flowing blood, seek to maim and wound and kill, because a ruler gives the word. He paints a battle field, a field of life and death; a field of carnage and of blood; and who are these that fight like fiends and devils driven to despair? What cause is this that makes these men forget that they are men, and vie with beasts to show their cruel thirst for blood? ”

“ Without that spirit nations decay and fail, for war does not form character: war only expresses the character formed in peace.
Every volunteer and draft private, every would-be officer, realized his ignorance, as a neophyte about to be initiated into professional mystery. ”

“ About twenty-four years ago there went forth from our homes hundreds of thousands of men to do battle for their country. All the poetry of war soon vanished, and left them nothing but the terrible prose. ”

“ The news of every day was thrilling, and one often saw terrible scenes of war. It was like being a spectator of a vast tragedy, and the Parisians viewed it as such. Their strong dramatic sentiment was excited and almost amused, at first, by the spectacle of war at their very gates. ”

“ Into the stuff of his thought and utterance, whether he be on active service or not, the poet-interpreter of war weaves these intentions, and coöperates with his fellows in building up a little higher and better, from time to time, that edifice of truth for whose completion can be spared no human experience, no human hope. ”

“ Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit To his full height. On, on, you noble English, Whose blood is fet from fathers of War-proof!... Be copy now to men of grosser blood, And teach them how to war. ”