‘And when they ask us how dangerous it was
Oh, we’ll never tell them . . .’
Oh, What A Lovely War!
1Siegfried Sassoon’s service in the British Army lasted from the first day of the war to August 1919, albeit much interrupted by periods of hospitalisation and convalescence, and during this time Sassoon saw vigorous action, notably on the Somme and at Arras. The War appears in a number of his works, made at very different spatial and temporal distances from the events and in different forms. The immediate, private material consists of diaries kept at the Front and letters to friends in Britain written during the War. There are also three groups of material intended for publication. These are poems written both on active service, on sick leave in Britain in 1916–17 and after Sassoon’s return to duty, the three volumes (The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston or the Sherston Trilogy) of what Sassoon describes as ‘fictionalized reality’, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston’s Progress, published respectively in 1928, 1930 and 1936 and the three volumes of autobiography, The Old Century and Seven Years More, The Weald of Youth and Siegfried’s Journey published between 1938 and 1944.
2The Diaries were, by definition, contemporary with events. They include poems, also contemporary with events, intended for publication and written from an anti-war standpoint for Home Front readers. The Sherston Trilogy (and, indeed, the autobiography), on the other hand, were written for later audiences, familiar with Sassoon, the post-War public figure and familiar with Great War life-writing and fiction.
3The purpose of this paper is to examine and compare accounts of the War related in the Diaries (and annotated in the poems included in them), and the second volume of the Sherston Trilogy, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.
- 1 See Paul Fussell, The Great War in Modern Memory, Oxford: OUP, 1975.
- 2 Paul Ricœur, La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Paris: Seuil, 2000.
4Sassoon’s war work, like that of his contemporaries, raises issues about the writing of history and the way in which individual accounts of catastrophe and crisis are simultaneously products and producers of a wider collective narrative that is constructed from generation to generation.1 The choices of subject and treatment which are apparent in the necessarily immediate and fragmented accounts of the Diaries and in the poems they contain differ from those of the recast fictional and autobiographical narratives. Sassoon’s long-term retrospective writing of the War, or what Paul Ricoeur would describe as the archiving process, displays a process of selection and then foregrounding or elimination of material present in the Diaries and poems.2 There are also cases of invention, that is to say of the inclusion of material that does not exist in the contemporary accounts, and these cases are interesting in that they also tend to appear in the work of other authors of Great War fictional and non-fictional life-writing. The first and second volumes of the Sherston Trilogy are contemporary or almost contemporary with many of the great European accounts of World War I—including Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928), Graves’ Goodbye to All That (1929), Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Junger’s Storm of Steel (1929), Mottram’s The Spanish Farm Trilogy (1927), Manning’s Her Privates We (1930) and Sherriff’s Journey’s End (1928)—and it is striking that all these accounts, which are necessarily both the products and the producers of the recently-formed and continually forming memory and narrative of the event, contain substantially the same representations of the same figures and events. The narrative of the Great War, fictional or autobiographical, some ten years after the Armistice establishes the inter-textual cast of characters, of props and of situations that will choreograph the War for succeeding generations. They include, for example, the futile raid, the idiotic orders sent from behind the lines, the ignorant or profiteering public at home, the reliable NCO, the comic Private soldier—already found in Shakespeare and Kipling—the whisky officer and the brave one, the awful food, the murdered landscape, the absence of women and children, the cold and rain, the noise. There is, in other words, in both this fictional and non- fictional writing of memory at a significant temporal distance from events certainly a tendency to reassign individuals and events into ordered situations and categories. In the case of Sassoon, the fragmented observations of the eye-witness, writing in the place and near-present of the event, are re-organized in the Sherston Trilogy into a more panoramic, consensual view of events in which the objective is not necessarily to comment upon, and certainly not to know the end of the story, but to structure it.
5Indeed, much of the retrospective life-writing or testimony of the twenties and early thirties about the First World War, both fiction and non-fiction, appears to be the product of a desire to map and make sense collectively of an unprecedented phenomenon. Pre-twentieth century experience of catastrophe and crisis was limited in space and effect, if not in time or diluted in the nasty, brutish and short nature of ordinary existence for the majority. The disaster of the Great War, as understood in Europe, at least, was unmanageable both in its geographical extent and in its effects. The fact that the War occurred in a world which had otherwise been generally safe exacerbated its incomprehensible, unmanageable nature. So did the fact that, for most protagonists, the literal perception of events was necessarily limited. The First World War, by its very size, was a war of fragmentation and the fragments, as experienced by individuals, were very small indeed. They could hardly be otherwise. The experience of the first World War trench soldier at the Front was physically limited by earth walls and a patch of sky, excursions outside this space limited, in turn, by the need to move only at night or under cover of smoke and then over land that no longer looked like its pre-war or cartographic incarnation. The same trench soldier, because he would be rotated every week or so with the same battalion, from the front line into reserve trenches, then to rest behind the lines, then back to the front line, and because he would be moved from front to front to repeat the same rotations, saw the War not only from space confined and defined by the army, but also from within a restricted social context and in terms of repeated actions. What he also saw, inevitably, were sights that were inconceivable to the civilian and that, in any case, were not to be communicated, either in private (letters were censored) or in public (so was the press). Inevitably, all the belligerent nations constructed a Home Front narrative of the Great War for their civilians. The British narrative, made by the press and the official propaganda departments, placed a premium on the good nature, fair-play attitude and cheerful courage of the Tommy. It implied constant military success or, at the very least, preparation for military success and, as the War continued, placed an increasingly high value on the efforts of those working at home. The creation of the Home Front Somme narrative is an interesting case in point. The photographic accounts presented in the press—daily and weekly—of the Somme theatre in 1916 are highly selective and characterized by the reprinting from paper to paper of a relatively small number of the hundreds of photographs sent back to Britain. An editing process was therefore visibly constructing and confirming by repetition a narrative of the War at the Front for the civilian public. All the accounts of all the papers—from the gutter press to the expensive Sphere and Illustrated War News—participated in this consensual invention of the War, editorial differences being apparent not in the choice of images but in the complexity of the captions and the sophistication of the page lay-out. The intention is to ‘explain’ the War; thus the reassuring captions that give meaning to photographs that may be obscure to civilians. Details of the workings of a Howitzer, for example, accompany the image of a gun and information on the strategy of an assault explains an otherwise unintelligible landscape dotted with figures and so on. Portrait captions embellish and explain the self-evident. Thus a smiling Private is described as a cheery Cockney, a laughing boy in a slouch hat, his arm in a sling is a wounded ANZAC eager to get back to the scrap and so on.
6The illustrated papers were, of course, read at the Front as well as in Britain and were seen, therefore, by those in a position to compare practice and representation! Sassoon observes in his Diaries that these press accounts of the War were doing their work at home. His first 1916 war poems drafted in his Diaries and made on the Somme are elements of a completely different narrative. Yet, in general Sassoon’s focus is the same as that of the press. Soldiers are involved somewhere in the vast majority of the contemporary published images of the War and Sassoon’s objective is also to highlight the man in what he calls ‘versified’ experience. The diary entry for April 22nd 1916 illustrates the transfer of experience selected for the diary to the poem in a re-edited and enhanced version: ‘I was on duty from 2 to 4; it rained and the trenches were knee-deep and falling in badly—at early dawn the sky was misty, grey, clouded, ashen, but the larks were singing, singing, discordant sharps and quavers—dauntless as our spirit should be. I stood in 75 Street listening to them, then sploshed through the dismal water and down to the dug-out den to call the others for stand-to.’
7(Vide ‘Stand-To: Good Friday Morning’, versified from this at the time.)
I’d been on duty from two till four
I went and stared at the dug-out door.
Down in the frowst I heard them snore.
‘Stand to!’ Somebody grunted and swore.
Dawn was misty; the skies were still;
Larks were singing, discordant, shrill;
They seemed happy; but I fell ill.
Deep in water I splashed my way
Up the trench to our bogged front line.
Rain had fallen the whole damned night.
Oh Jesus, send me a wound today,
And I’ll believe in Your bread and wine,
And get my bloody old sins washed white. (Sassoon 1983, 56–7)
- 3 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and Hi (...)
- 4 Certainly of a limited nature—Sassoon’s first war poems were published with pre-war verse in The Ol (...)
8Both the diary entry and the poem are the product of very short-term memory, the latter noted, apparently, also in real time. The point here, as in Sassoon’s later war poems, is to respond to what Shoshana Feldman calls a ‘crisis of truth’ (here the press accounts of the Somme) by testimony.3 It was Sassoon’s choice to be a witness, to testify to his experience and his reading of that experience before an audience4 and the choice was certainly made in response to other contemporary, freely available representations of the trench soldier’s reality. By virtue of his position as a witness, Sassoon the narrator is necessarily the provider of truths which are unavailable to the papers and even to the war correspondents and photographers who are only near the Front but not on it and certainly not combatants. In ‘joining events to language, the narrator as eye-witness is the testimonial bridge which, mediating between narrative and history, guarantees their correspondence and adherence to each other. This bridging between narrative and history is possible since the narrator is both an informal and honest witness . . . Once endowed with language through the medium of the witness, history speaks for itself.’ (Felman and Laub, 101)
- 5 The first part-work histories of the War appeared in 1914.
- 6 Those of Pat Barker, Sebastian Faulks, Timothy Findlay, Sébastien Japrisot and Tardi, for example.
9The difficulty here is that the honesty of the witness must necessarily be corrupted by the passage of time and by exposure to other evidence. The weakness of the initial testimony lies in its restricted nature as an individual experience and perception which is not contextualised and necessarily the product of limited time and space. The weakness of later testimony lies in the fact that it will be changed by time and charged with other accounts of similar events. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer is, as we have seen, contemporary with a large quantity of European Great War life-writing. It is also contemporary or near-contemporary with the completion of the most monumental sites of memory. For the British, these include the Menin Gate at Ypres (unveiled 1927) and the Thiepval Memorial (well under way in 1930 and unveiled in1932) on the Somme, the architectural and symbolic culmination of years of commemorative practice which had begun well before the end of the War itself. The First World War, the first to become a ‘legend in its lifetime’, as it were, was the subject of a narrative from its first days5 and the object of commemoration from 1916. It was and is a story to be told while it was still going on and long after its ending! Sassoon’s war poems, his Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and the work of the other European writers are all contributions to the narratives of the Great War. Each of these accounts has an agenda—propaganda, justification, valorisation of the actions of contemporaries, valorisation of personal experience, financial gain for example, and they all, to some extent, cross-pollinate each other. The same narrative building bricks of the Great War are used by all the narrators, during and after the event, whatever their point of view. The result is a sum of fictional and non-fictional narratives using substantially the same tropes in the construction of both a contemporary and retrospective view of the War. It is interesting that the tropes of modern accounts of the Great War are exactly the same as those of the writer- eyewitnesses. Representations of the Western Front that cannot possibly rely on memory6 borrow from the selective expression of medium-term memory of the writers of the late twenties who, in turn, have already made a written selection from their own short-term memory in their diaries and poems which are themselves full of figures taken from life but also from (or made in reaction to) other invented narratives of the War created piecemeal by London editors and the civil servants of the Ministry of Information.
- 7 Quoted in Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon, The Journey From the Trenches—Biography 1918–67(...)
10The Diaries and Letters indicate that Sassoon had been planning to write a novel for some years and it is reasonable to suppose that the particularly intensive commemorative environment of the late 1920s played some part in his decision to introduce the War into his account of the life of George Sherston, starting from the two last parts of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. There was also a concern with recording the ‘truth’—both Blunden and Sassoon had found Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front sensational and Sassoon’s objective, certainly in the case of Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, was to write as unemotionally as possible, to stress the contrast between war and ordinary peaceable conditions and to provide a ‘warning to a generation which has no idea what the war was like for sensitive people.’7
11The Sherston Trilogy is not fictional autobiography (in the sense of Great Expectations, say), it is in Sassoon’s own words, ‘fictionalized reality’ and the hard, bed-rock material for Sherston’s story is to be found in the Diaries. The narrator, George Sherston, is ‘only me with a lot left out’ (Sassoon 1942, 70), and what the Memoirs of an Infantry Officer offer is, to all intents and purposes, simply another variation on the contemporary popular theme of a subaltern’s account of the Great War.
- 8 Archived in the Imperial War Museum, London.
12The incidents and the characters of the Memoirs are indeed closely related to those of Sassoon’s subaltern’s diary. There is, however, a clear process of editing and transformation of the account made from short-term memory that accompanies a process of creation. The manuscript of the Memoirs8 is not a transcription of the Diaries and the final published version shows considerable cutting and rewriting.
13An entry from the Diaries made on April 26th 1916 relates Sassoon’s journey from the Front to his training course at the Fourth Army School at Flixécourt. A fictionalised version of the same events is given in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (Sassoon 1980, 285-86). The first-person narrator in both cases is the same—a serving junior officer and trench soldier. The Diaries account of events is twice as long as the fictional version. What is eliminated in the fictional version is Sassoon’s meditation on the recent shooting of a friend, on the mental stress of trench life and on the sense of relief afforded by the prospect of a month in training behind the lines. The preoccupations of the writer of the Diaries are utterly egocentric—the entry for April 23rd dwells entirely on the temporal and spatial shock of being away from the Front. The emphasis here is on the extraordinary normality of the world beyond the trenches which is scarcely two hours and twenty five miles away but completely different. The shock of leaving the trenches, of a return to normality, is thoroughly documented in Great War life writing and it is logical that this should be the case. The trench environment, although at a very short physical distance from the non-trench world, reverses anything that could be described as normal. There are no certainties of time (soldiers rest in the day, work at night, can make no forecasts about their activities or the continuation of their very existence), visual references are limited and social references distorted (the community is one of men of a certain age living under army discipline in dirt and enforced proximity), sounds have no relation to those heard in civilian life (shouts of orders, the whine of shells, the crack of rifle bullets) and so on.
14The physical aspects of this return to normality are preserved in the fictional version and often copied of a piece from the Diaries. Sassoon notes ‘apple blossom’, ‘lakes and pools’, ‘one or two men fishing’, ‘white tents at a Red Cross camp’, “a miller’s wagon and four horses’, Amiens cathedral ‘lording it beyond the gleaming roofs’, ‘soldiers contented and at rest’, ‘a train moving out of a station when we halted at the crossing-gates with a rumble and a clank of wheels on the rails’ and ‘children in the streets of towns and villages—I saw a tiny one fall, to be gathered up and dusted, soothed, comforted’. Sherston observes ‘fruit trees . . . in blossom’, ‘reedy pools and creeks along the Somme’, ‘a peaceful fisherman [who] forgot he was a soldier on active service’, ‘a miller’s wagon with four horses’, ‘the dirty white tents of a Red Cross camp’, the spire of ‘Amiens cathedral rising above the congregated roofs of an undamaged city’, ‘troops going placidly to their billets’, ‘a train moving out of a station with a rumble and a clank of wheels while we waited at the crossing gates’ and ‘children in the village street—I saw a little one fall to be gathered, dusted, cuffed and cherished’.
- 9 ‘what you see conditions feeling, not what is…’ Anthony Powell, The Military Philosophers, London: (...)
15What Sassoon—and Sherston—see, and what is of capital importance, is landscape observed through the prism of a Georgian education and practice. This is apparent also in other British War work—the writing of Rupert Brooke and Charles Hamilton Sorley, the drawing of Paul Nash, for example. Sassoon’s ‘ordinary’ landscape is a received one of disciplined nature, visually that of Constable and of Samuel Palmer—immutable, an expression of harmony, inspiration and echo of the finer feelings and instincts of the human. There is, in Sassoon’s work, both in the Diaries and the Memoirs, a clear inscription of habits of writing and perception taken from a relatively recent English past and what he sees is mediated through a profoundly assimilated literary tradition. In other words, and to reverse Anthony Powell’s observation that perception conditions feeling, here feeling conditions perception and neither perception nor form are in any sense modern.9
16What strikes the reader of both texts, then, is Sassoon/Sherston’s individual preoccupation with a return to a normality defined by British educated middle-class standards. Now, a diary is usually made in real-time, written from the perspective available on the day of the entry. There is no audience because it is, theoretically, for private consumption and, as such, a space for introspection and for the narration of events uniquely in relation to the ‘I’ of the text. It is no more the repository of objective truth than any other sort of narrative, but it does indicate the concerns of an individual writing at close temporal proximity to events that can be related to a past but that have, as yet, no very certain future.
17Sherston’s version of the same events, as I have suggested, abandons a good deal of Sassoon’s introspection while preserving the same attention to details of ‘normal’ life. But Sherston’s fictional journey to Flixécourt essentially provides a context for some of the cast of the Memoirs. There is the good-natured fellow-subaltern, Barton, the red-faced soldier-servant with the faintly comic name, Flook (‘fluke’), and Sherston himself. The departure for Flixécourt provides the occasion for the sort of comic scene, the nick-naming and officer/private banter that are constants in retrospective First World War writing. ‘My servant Flook hoisted up my bulging valise, wiped his red face with his sleeve, and followed me to the roof. ‘Mind and keep Mr Sherston well polished up and punctual on parade, Flook!’ said Barton. Flook grinned, and away we went. Looking back, I saw Barton’s good-natured face with the early sun shining on his glasses.’ (Sassoon 1980, 285)
18What matters here is event and character, with the event isolated, described and put into dialogue. There is no room for analysis of effect except in the long term, and here is another difference between the Diaries and the Memoirs. Sassoon’s present melts into the immediate past (‘yesterday’, ‘yesterday evening’, ‘today’) and its consequences (‘I have’, ‘They have been’). Sherston’s present is more than ten years after the Armistice and the narrative voice shifts between a simple account of the past (‘I watched’, ‘he grinned’, ‘there were’ . . .) and the lessons learned in retrospect. ‘One has to find things out as one goes along’ (Sassoon 1929, unpaginated) is a thought neither expressed nor implied in the Diaries which are remote from such long-term considerations. Such thoughts are, though, an integral part of the Memoirs in which the older and wiser Sassoon/Sherston narrates a re-focused account of the material of the Diaries and adds the voice of 14 years on which is not only older and wiser but possessed of a power of contextualisation that is simply not available to the diarist. This is particularly clear in the entry for April 25th and its Memoirs version. Sassoon and his group attend a lecture on bayonet work. The Diary version is brief and essentially about the dissonance between the voice of the ‘great brawny Highland Major’ enthusing about the bayonet and the sounds of the church bells, the birds, the midges in the wood; the sight of the ‘foot of steel’ of the bayonet ‘between the eyes, in the throat, in the chest, round the thighs and the spectacle of the ‘fresh green . . . mist of leaves . . . against the white and orange sky’. The Memoirs version makes the same point but briefly. (Sassoon 1980, 289) The focus here is on the ‘massive sandy-haired Highland Major’ seconded by a Sergeant whose function is to illustrate the officer’s lecture with demonstrations! Once again, Sassoon seeks to highlight the event, constructing a cast of characters and supplying them with action and dialogue. Again, the set piece is contextualised by a narrator/writer standing beyond the event—this time in a clearly ironic voice (‘he was afterwards awarded the D.S.O. for lecturing’) which is even more clearly heard in the manuscript version: ‘It is reassuring to remember that bayonet fighting very seldom occurred in well-conducted warfare. Exactly how often it happened is one of the unsolved mysteries of the War. On the Western Front, at any rate, the troops found bomb-throwing much more to their taste. In High Quarters the bomb-throwing habit was regarded as a menace to efficiency with the rifle. Indeed, the Major, I am sure, considered it an effeminate weapon.’
19Memory here is thoroughly cross-pollinated by shared experience: Sassoon himself spent most of the War attached to the first or second battalion of one regiment, the Royal Welsh, and was therefore in no position to generalize about infantry habits, nor was he on the Western Front long enough to make a reliable temporal witness—his comments on bombing and bayoneting are, therefore, at least partially extrapolation from the accounts of others. The memory of the Memoirs is also transformed as the individual narrative of the Diaries becomes an account of a sort of flattened, ubiquitous experience that will have been shared by most of Sassoon/Sherston’s generation. Emblematic figures (the ‘massive Highland Major’, good-natured Barton, the ‘tall sinewy machine’ that is the Sergeant) take part in emblematic scenes that are edited or embellished into the set pieces of Great War life writing—fictional or not. The Memoirs version of the arrival and the class at Flixécourt is an edition of the Diaries version with much left out and much made, in the later work, of the sight and speech of the two stock characters (the Major and Sergeant) with memory commented upon by the narrator.
- 10 The trench dug-out meal is a set piece in virtually all Great War narrative. Food, eaten under nece (...)
- 11 Another set piece—most subalterns have ‘brothers’ of their own age and an ‘uncle’, not necessarily (...)
- 12 The failed raid, as I have indicated, is a frequent theme in Great War life writing and is almost s (...)
- 13 In Sassoon’s case through the publication of his trench poems and in his Statement against the War, (...)
20The Memoirs version of the event following Flixécourt, on the other hand, the raid during which Sassoon won his M.C., is an expansion of the Diaries version, from 1500 words to over 6000 in the Memoirs manuscript.(Sassoon 1929). This account of a failed raid is one of any number of accounts, fictional and non-fictional, of catastrophic attacks—for the Royal Welch alone concerning spring 1916 there are such narratives in Graves’ Goodbye to All That (chapter 15, published in 1929, chapter 15), Frank Richards’ Old Soldiers Never Die (chapter 15, ‘The Red Dragon Mine and A Raid’, published in 1933) and the anonymous The War the Infantry Knew (chapter 8, April 1916 published in 1938). Sassoon’s Diaries account of the raid is almost austere, written in the present tense, in the manner of a military report with precise temporal and spatial information and it is exclusively about the action. Sherston prepares the event at length with the raid foreshadowed in his first billet dinner.10 It is then evoked in a discussion with a wise and elderly N.C.O.11 who perceives the raid plan as being another extremely dangerous and gratuitous example of Head Quarters imbecility.12 None of this is in the Diaries, but it is all in other contemporary narratives of identical events. The consensual nature of post-war writing, the emblematic figures and scenes, the energising of these figures and scenes with a theatrical writing of events that makes much of the individual incident and rests on the exaggeration of quirks of personality, physique, language and institutional eccentricities does not mean that it is dishonest or in any sense untrue to memory and disrespectful of it. More than a decade after the events, reporting is impossible and, in any case, the simple truth is, as always, that having been an eye- witness is no guarantee at all of accuracy. The temporal, spatial and social limitations of the on-site, real-time observer and his/her preoccupations when dealing with the immediate situation preclude any hope of objective, complete reporting and this was particularly true in the fragmented, upside-down world of the trench soldier. By extension, what is narrated in diaries and journals—as long as they are, indeed, meant for private consumption—is extremely limited, eminently subjective and egocentric. This said, even these narratives are influenced to some degree by public narratives in that they re-use or inverse its figures. Sassoon, writing poems in his diaries, albeit certainly with a view to publication some day, precisely chooses to reverse the cheery figures of the press and propaganda services—if only to resurrect a number of them a dozen years later in the Memoirs! Accounts of public events written by participants in retrospect are necessarily even more subject to the influence of other representations of the same events, and this is particularly the case when the events in question are such that they require commemoration and comment because the world requires their memory to be kept alive. The expression of individual experience both feeds and feeds upon the grand narrative of the catastrophic event. There is demonstrably a propaganda account of the Great War from its early days. There is also a counter-propaganda account structured, in part and from 1916 by many of the soldier-poets and Official War Artists. The basic elements of the two accounts are the same, framing and focalisation are different. By the end of the War the grand narrative is thoroughly under construction. It is being built within a consensual discourse about physical commemoration (monuments, cemeteries, halls of memory . . .) but also within the framework of increasingly popular and numerous accounts of the War that may be written from very different points of view and in very different forms but that all identify similar events and individual types as being of significance and use the same strategies (dialogue, situation comedy, pathos, irony) to foreground them. The expression of Great War short-term memory by serving trench soldiers is founded on the willingness of these witness-narrators to evoke matters deodorized out of official narratives and, certainly in the case of Sassoon, to do this to political ends.13 Even this short-term anti-war narrative is remarkably consensual—just as the pro-war propaganda discourse is coherent—and this is logical because the accounts of shared experience are made by men from the same social and educational background. Long-term memory provides a version of an historical event and the nature of the narrative changes. Every text based on long-term memory, whether fiction, autobiography or fictional autobiography, is necessarily archival and its only incidence on the present lies in its commemorative function. The Great War writing of the twenties and after is a literary Cenotaph or Menin Gate that fixes the experience in a grand narrative with sequences and patterns that have little to do with memory as such and persist into the fiction of the twenty-first century.