NEWCASTLE
UNIVERSITY
BEYOND SHELL SHOCK
“1st N. G. Hospital, Armstrong College, Ward C1 [Hatton Gallery]”
From Robinson Library Special Collections, Newcastle University
Care, Trauma and the First World War in British Fiction |
Dr Anne Whitehead & Marie Cecilie Stern-Peltz
Contents
Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 2
Reading Notes: Trauma, Care, and World War I ............................................................................. 6
Reading Guides .............................................................................................................................. 15
Rudyard Kipling, ‘Mary Postgate’ ............................................................................................. 17
Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier................................................................................... 20
Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Fly’.................................................................................................. 24
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway .................................................................................................. 27
Dorothy L Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club ..................................................... 30
Mary Borden, The Forbidden Zone ........................................................................................... 33
Margery Allingham, The Tiger in the Smoke ............................................................................. 37
Susan Hill, Strange Meeting ...................................................................................................... 40
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried..................................................................................... 43
Pat Barker, Another World ......................................................................................................... 46
Theresa Breslin, Remembrance .................................................................................................. 49
Louisa Young, My Dear, I Wanted To Tell You ........................................................................ 52
Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds................................................................................................ 56
Helen Dunmore, The Lie ............................................................................................................ 58
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Introduction
Central to the British remembrance of the First World War is the concept of ‘shell shock’. The
word originated in the First World War, and was contested almost as soon as it came into being.
However, despite – or perhaps because of - the controversy surrounding the name, shell shock
has caught the cultural imagination. The image of the shell shocked soldier and the
accompanying idea of the First World War as the cause of permanent and irreparable damage
remain potent in contemporary imaginings of the First World War – and live on in subsequent
wars, haunting more recent debates about Gulf War syndrome and posttraumatic stress disorder.
This Reader considers the notion of shell shock in relation to the broader term of trauma.
In doing so, it thinks about the relation between the mental health problems associated with shell
shock and more physical forms of injury and harm, such as the wounds suffered by the soldiers
nursed by Mary Borden and recounted in Forbidden Zone. We also question whether an emphasis
on the shell-shocked soldier might overlook the modes of resilience and strategies for coping that
enabled many combatants to negotiate the war without breakdown or collapse. Shell shock
suggests a prioritisation of the combatant’s perspective; it situates the effects of war primarily on
the Front. Yet one of the most interesting aspects of shell shock is precisely the fact that it has
been portrayed as uncontainable by the Front; it returns home with the soldier, and persists
beyond the end of the war. In addition to thinking about the communities of care that existed at
the Front, whether between the men, at hospitals in the ‘forbidden zone’ behind the front lines, or
between soldiers and their families through the postal service, this Reader therefore also extends
to thinking about the role of diverse carers away from the front lines: nurses, doctors, families,
and others who were affected by shell shock or other traumas through their contact with the
soldiers. Including carers within the scope of this Reader allows us to take a more complete view
of the war’s reach. The focus on carers also raises questions about the provision of care in war
and its aftermath, asking us to think about who bears responsibility for offering care (the state, the
voluntary sector, the family), and about the delivery of care services in times of austerity and
economic recession.
This Reader focuses on the themes of trauma and care primarily in representations of the
First World War, but we also connect these themes to subsequent conflicts, through looking at
novels about the Second World War, the Vietnam War and the Iraq conflict. We have included
these novels in order to invite debate about how the key ideas of the Reader have shifted over
time and in relation to different conflicts. The Reader also includes novels published in the past
twenty years about the First World War, which seek to question our current relationship to war
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and to the historical moment of the First World War in particular. Our purpose in creating this
Reader has been to create a collection of texts which can be read comparatively, but also
individually; either way, we believe these texts ask questions about our current relationship to
war, the First World War’s place in British culture, the possibility of narrative representation of
trauma, and the constructed nature of texts.
The Reader is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of prose about the war, nor
does it include all possible interpretations of the war. We have tried to include texts which are
readily available, but this has in turn meant that many of them reproduce familiar images of the
First World War. As you use this Reader, you may want to think about what is not included, both
in this project and in our broader cultural narratives of the war. The Reader ties into the
exhibition Screaming Steel: Art, Poetry and Trauma 1914-1918, which takes place at the Hatton
Gallery, Newcastle University, from September 2014-February 2015, and is curated by Amy
Barker of Tyne and Wear Museums. The focus of the exhibition is on shell shock, its treatment,
and its representation in art and poetry. The Reader therefore expands the scope of the exhibition
by providing an alternative focus on prose - the novel and the short story - and asking how this
literary form has responded to and represented the intersection between war and trauma.
Although we might be aware of the wide and ever increasing range of contemporary fiction that
addresses the First World War, we have perhaps been less attuned until recently to the variety of
wartime and interwar novels and stories that took the First World War as their subject. Recent
anthologies, and studies such as Ann-Marie Einhaus’s excellent The Short Story and the First
World War (2013), have helped to redress this imbalance and to highlight the rich body of fiction
that was published both during and in the immediate aftermath of the conflict. This project builds
on such work, highlighting the importance of prose writers past and present to the representation
of the First World War. The writers in our own Reader include canonical names such as Rudyard
Kipling and Pat Barker but also names less conventionally associated with war literature, for
example the detective fiction and crime writers Dorothy L. Sayers and Marjory Allingham.
In addition to connecting with the exhibition at the Hatton Gallery, this project also seeks
to make use of material from local archives. The Reader was made possible through a grant from
the Catherine Cookson Foundation, which supports projects that have a regional emphasis. We
are grateful for the support of local archives, including the Newcastle University Special
Collections, and Tyne and Wear Archives. The sections of the Reader entitled ‘From the
Archives’ have been included to emphasise the war’s local links and the role of geographical
place in interpreting and understanding the past; the war was not simply in France or Belgium,
but also affected and shaped the local area. In Newcastle this is evident, for example, through
Lord William Armstrong’s munitions factory on the Tyne, which forms a central presence in Pat
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Barker’s Another World. Equally, the archive can open up the little known contributions to the
war of people from the region, such as Newcastle zoologist Captain David Alexander Peacock,
who played a central role in lice control in the trenches of the Western Front – a medical
contribution less celebrated than that of pioneering shell-shock doctor W. H. R. Rivers,
protagonist of Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, but which nevertheless had significant and
important effects.
The Reader aims to provide a basis for the shared reading of fictions of the First World
War in reading group discussion. In the course of the project we will be using the Reader as a
basis for a number of shared reading events, with reader communities as diverse as local sixth
form students, medical undergraduates, and local reading groups at the Newcastle City Library.
As we enter the centenary year of the outbreak of the First World War, we are interested in
thinking about the value of shared reading to provoke discussion and debate about the war and
what it means for us today. To support reading group activity, we have started the Reader with a
summary of some current theories relating to shell shock, trauma and care; where a particular
idea relates to one of the fictional works, this will be highlighted in the notes relating to that text.
Each text then has its own reading guide, which begins with a brief introduction offering key
background information, then moves on to questions that focus on aspects of the text, before
opening out to broader questions for discussion. We have also included, where relevant, archival
stories that relate to or illuminate the text in some way, and suggested further reading and web
resources that you might want to access.
The Reader is intended to be a starting point for your discussions – we encourage you to
follow your own interests when reading, and to bring to your reading groups the questions that
the texts raise for you. As part of this, you might also want to consider your position as a reader:
what do you get out of reading about the war? What expectations about the war do you bring to
the text? What assumptions might you make about the different genres included in the Reader,
which spans short stories, young adult fiction, and detective stories, as well as ranging in time
from the period of the First World War to contemporary representations? We do not seek to
suggest that there is a single interpretation or ‘meaning’ of any of these texts; rather we hope that,
through discussion, the Reader will enable you to find many, and perhaps contradictory,
meanings in these fictions. Above all, we hope that this Reader will encourage you to explore the
rich and diverse body of fiction relating to war, its effects, and the modes of care that were either
offered to those who were affected by it or that were devised by them. Although the main focus
for exploring these issues in the Reader is the First World War, we anticipate that many of the
questions raised will continue to be relevant today – indeed, this is why the First World War, and
its re-telling, retains such a powerful hold over our cultural imagination.
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1st N. G. Hospital, Armstrong College
Ward A1 [King's Hall] From Robinson
Library Special Collections, Newcastle
University
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Reading Notes: Trauma, Care, and World War I
There has been a recent outpouring of books looking at the connection between trauma and
World War I. This section seeks to guide you through the most prominent studies, with a
particular focus on the idea of care that is emerging as a significant strand of interest in current
work. We will use these ideas to frame our readings of the texts in this guide, asking how reading
literature can prompt us to think about the issues that First World War trauma might raise for us
today.
The studies discussed in this section are connected by moving away from a sense of the First
World War as a futile conflict that was so terrible in nature that it inevitably caused breakdown in
those who experienced the worst of its horrors on the frontline. Although this idea has come to
dominate our perceptions of the war after the fact, many of those who participated, whether as
soldier, nurse, or munitions worker, thought that they did so for a reason. Some of the works
discussed below ask how the idea of the First World War as mindless sacrifice became so
powerful in the public mind. Others try to uncover alternative voices that have been silenced by
this notion. Together, they frame a series of questions through which we might productively
reassess the dominance of the figure of the traumatised soldier in literature and in our collective
imagination.
Dan Todman’s The Great War: Myth and Memory is central to the current re-evaluation of
dominant narratives of the First World War. At the core of Todman’s project is a refutation of the
idea that the First World War traumatised all of those who fought in it; although this characterises
our own remembrance, Todman demonstrates that it was only one strand of thought at the time,
and that wartime and interwar memories were more complex and conflicted than our own
consensus on the war’s meaning and significance. Todman’s study is organised around six key
tropes of remembrance, each of which he contests: (1) he argues that although the trenches have
come to stand as a symbol of the horror of modern warfare, much of the war experience was
away from the front line and comprised of boredom as much as anything else, while the response
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to trench fighting was varied and could be a source of pride or excitement as much as trauma; (2)
he exposes the idea of universal bereavement as a myth, pointing out that only a minority of
Britons lost an immediate relative or close friend, while responses to death were again varied,
with many demonstrating resilience, although some relatives broke down; (3) Todman revises the
common perception of the incompetence of the military command, arguing that this is a post-war
caricature rather than a prevailing view of the time; (4) he argues that a sense of the war as futile
depends on how it is viewed: a focus on industrialised slaughter and poison gas rather than
antiseptics or plastic surgery produces a narrative of the war as the beginning of an era of
catastrophe; (5) Todman contextualises the war poets as one voice amongst many, indicating the
range and popularity of popular fictions that continued to support the war and to utilise
conventional literary techniques; and (6) he connects the increasing post-war attention to the
veteran’s voice with a standardisation of the war narrative, with alternative views marginalised.
Overall, Todman contends that our view of the First World War today is a reduction or
simplification, with those elements preserved which are most useful in/to the present.
Peter Leese’s Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War
follows a similar line of argument to Todman but focuses more particularly on the history of shell
shock. Leese examines how shell shock emerged, how it was experienced and negotiated, and
how it is recalled in British culture. He stresses that shell shock is historically specific: it is a
condition of industrial warfare, of institutional treatment, and of the preconceptions and
experiences of those who were diagnosed with it. His study begins by examining modern
industrialised labour: the emergence of traumatic neuroses in the workplace, and the political and
medical negotiations around compensation that resulted. These, he argues, represent the context
in which cultural perceptions and responses were established. In wartime, the existing pre-war
patterns continued: although Leese recognises medical advances, he argues that they were limited
in impact and did not result in better care or treatment for the majority: most afflicted soldiers
encountered the same suspicions of malingering that had prevailed in the pre-war industrial
context. Leese represents shell shock as a site of contestation during the war, shaped by and
through competing views on causation and treatment, political controversy and propaganda, and
the encounters between doctor and patient. Of the latter, Leese emphasises the dramatic variation
in nature, but calls particular attention to the difference in treatment between officers and the
other ranks. If the officer voice is the one with which we are most familiar, it does not, he points
out, represent the majority – a theme that will be developed further by Peter Barham and Fiona
Reid (see below). Leese devotes the final section of his study to the cultural remembrance of the
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war, arguing that already in the 1920s shell shock was universalised in British culture to become
the symbol of the war’s suffering and futility. Although he notes that contemporary remembrance
of the war is filtered through an interest in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), he considers the
key tropes of remembrance to have remained largely the same.
A key question in relation to shell shock is how it should be positioned in the history of military
psychiatry, especially with reference to the contemporary diagnosis of PTSD. This issue has been
taken up by Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely in Shell Shock to PTSD: Military Psychiatry from
1900 to the Gulf War. Their study opens by contesting the origins of shell shock in the First
World War: if Leese turned to civilian industrial accidents for a precedent, Jones and Wessely
argue that the syndrome was recognised in a range of previous wars using modern weaponry - the
Crimean War, the Boer War, the American Civil War – and was described in particularly similar
terms during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. In World War One, it was thus the scale rather than
the nature of the condition that caught medical services by surprise. While Jones and Wessely
acknowledge the medical advances achieved in psychiatry during the First World War, they
concur with Leese’s sense that these were limited in impact, with psychologically minded doctors
often an isolated minority, and that they did not result in significant post-war changes, with key
figures moving into other areas of interest. While the notion of shell shock receded during the
Second World War, it came back into view with the emergence of the medical category of PTSD;
here, then, we are confronted with the vexed question of shell shock’s relation to contemporary
war trauma. For Jones and Wessely, cultural perceptions inevitably influence the diagnostic
decisions of military doctors, as well as affecting how patients interpret their own symptoms and
disabilities. War neuroses, by their very nature, take the form of a range of common but nonspecific symptoms, and the authors argue that general patterns of association between symptom
clusters and particular wars can be discerned. Shell shock is not, therefore, a straightforward
ancestor of PTSD, nor is it the same condition described by a different name; rather, it is one of a
variety of recognisable war syndromes – including, for example, irritable heart and Gulf War
Syndrome - each of which reflects its own culture, treatments, diagnosis, and warfare in its
distinctive patterning of symptoms.
The medical treatment of the ordinary soldier is the focus of Peter Barham’s Forgotten Lunatics
of the Great War. The figure of the shell-shocked soldier, dating back to the First World War
poets, is characteristically represented as an officer; Barham therefore asks what happened to the
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ordinary soldier who suffered a psychiatric condition. During the war, public pressure that the
ordinary soldier should not be confined to a lunatic asylum led to the creation of a network of
War Mental Hospitals across the country – including the Northumberland War Hospital in
Newcastle with 100 beds. Priorities shifted after the war, however. On return home, many men
experienced difficulty in adjusting and families were faced with the choice either of taking on the
burden of care themselves or of committing their loved ones to a public asylum. More than this,
the Ministry of Pensions required that men provide evidence that their mental health condition
was linked to their war service, making claims difficult and protracted. Faced with the resulting
financial pressure, some families who initially chose to care for their relatives ran out of money
and were forced to resort to institutional care. Barham tracks the gradual disappearance of the
shell-shocked ordinary soldier from public view, as he becomes excluded from Remembrance
Day commemorations. Although he documents individual cases of support by MPs or of lengthy
- and ultimately successful – personal battles to gain pensions, Barham’s overall narrative is a
moving recovery of stories that have been neglected and forgotten, mirroring the fate of the
soldiers in lying buried within institutions – in this case, in asylum records and pension archives.
Fiona Reid’s Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914-1930 adds to
Barham’s account stories of those men who were able to recover, to a greater or lesser degree,
from their experiences of war. She also modifies Barham’s emphasis on the ‘forgotten’ by
attending to the work of the Ex-Services’ Welfare Society (ESWS), founded in 1919 specifically
to provide care for those suffering from mental-health conditions and their families. Her history
of the ESWS reveals an organisation that initially took an activist role in trying to gain public
support for lunacy reform and for removing men from the public asylums. It established homes
that could provide an alternative to the asylum system. High profile publicity campaigns sought
to promote sympathy for those suffering from shell shock by figuring the returning soldier as a
boy and therefore as innocent and unthreatening – an image that has remained powerful to this
day. By the mid 1920s the ESWS had shifted its focus to helping those most likely to recover,
developing more homes and also work opportunities. Publicity also changed to depict the men as
employable and able to make a positive contribution to society: this image of resilience has had a
less lasting hold in the public imagination. Although Reid depicts a movement that loses its
radicalism, she recovers an important story not only of post-war solidarity with men suffering
from shell shock but also of the soldier who was mended – a figure significantly absent from
present-day representations which focus on the still traumatised veteran.
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In Healing the Nation, medical historian Jeffrey Reznick expands the question of care in relation
to the ordinary soldier beyond shell shock to encompass physical healing, as well as paying
particular attention to the spaces in which caregiving took place. He maps a network of
overlapping and interrelated sites of care behind the lines: the rest hut, the general military
hospital, and the hospital specifically set aside for the rehabilitation of disabled men. These
spaces were not only concerned, Reznick argues, with the recovery of soldiers, but also acted as
sites of negotiation for the meaning accorded to the war by soldiers, caregivers, and the public
alike. Reznick traces the ways in which the wartime culture of caregiving drew on pre-war
practices and assumptions. He also questions the role of care-giving spaces in the context of the
larger ‘war machine’. For those who ran them, he suggests, there was a prevalent concern with
questions of efficiency, economy and productivity; for the public, they acted as spaces in and
through which support for the war could be demonstrated; while for the soldier, the experience
was often ambivalent, combining relief to be away from the front-line action with a sense of
remaining within the larger, disciplining war machine (for example, through the hospital uniform
of convalescent blue which was mandatory for the ordinary soldier although not for the officer).
Reznick also charts the spaces of care-giving as sites of community for the ordinary soldier,
mapping a comradeship of healing that emerges from these sites and that provides an alternative
model of community to the comradeship of the trenches.
Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady is primarily concerned with the treatment of hysteria in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its intersections with gender and the constrictions
placed on women in particular. However, in a chapter titled ‘Male Hysteria’, she discusses shell
shock in the context of a gendered history of mental illness. Noting that shell shock is a very
masculine term, linking suffering inextricably to war, she argues that shell shock can be read as
“a crisis of masculinity” and “the long-term repression of signs of fear that led to shell shock was
only an exaggeration of the male sex-role expectations of civilian life.” Showalter’s analysis is
very concerned with gender and the construction of shell shock as a feminised position; however,
she also maps out the way class was read onto the symptoms of shell shock, differentiating
between the trauma suffered by the rank and file, and the officers. She also critiques care during
the war; particularly she singles out electro-shock for criticism, but also makes the point that no
matter what, the job of medical officers was to restore soldiers to society’s ideal of masculinity.
Showalter links her analysis to fictional representations of shell shock by Virginia Woolf,
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Dorothy L Sayers and Rebecca West. As opposed to most of the analyses in this reader,
Showalter’s chapter is specifically concerned with the cultural and social associations and
constructions of trauma.
Christine Hallett’s Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War shifts attention to
an alternative aspect of medical care: the experience of nurses in the First World War. In contrast
to Reznick (see above), Hallett sets out to counter an image of the military hospital which
represents it as a part of the war machine. In place of this narrative, Hallett suggests that nurses
understood and enacted their role as one of containing trauma. Her book uses the word trauma to
refer to both the physical and the emotional effects of war. In the face of physical trauma Hallett
traces the developing role of nurses, so that they not only dressed wounds, maintained the ward
and fed the soldiers, but also played a key role in the surgical teams, sometimes even performing
minor operations. She pays close attention to the different theatres of war, identifying a key task
in the Eastern Mediterranean, India and Africa as the containment of infectious disease and its
causes. In relation to shell shock, Hallett focuses on the important role of the nurses in providing
emotional containment by offering an environment in which the soldier might feel safe, as well as
containing the trauma for families by stabilising the patient as much as possible before he was
sent home to convalesce. Hallett reminds us that shell shock was only one aspect of the care work
performed by nurses and other medical staff, and that it was often combined with other health
problems. In terms of literature, we might then ask whether the nurse is a visible figure within
representations of the First World War and, if so, whether s/he is depicted as providing the
various forms of containment that Hallett describes. We might also question whether literary
treatments of the First World War prioritise shell shock over physical trauma, and if so, what
implications that has for our understanding of the First World War.
The concept of containment is also central to Michael Roper’s The Secret Battle: Emotional
Survival in the Great War, although the focus of this study is the figure of the mother rather than
that of the nurse. Taking as his starting point the emotional resilience of the majority of men who
saw active service on the Western Front, Roper seeks to account for this phenomenon by
emphasising the importance of familial relationships (particularly with the mother) and of
emotional ties to fellow soldiers. Both of these forms of relationship were, Roper argues,
intimately connected: both revolved around the provision of such basic physical needs as food,
warmth, rest, and shelter. Roper begins by documenting the extent of practical and emotional
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support provided by mothers during the war in the form of letters and parcels, positioning the
postal service and the connections it facilitated and maintained as central to wartime resilience.
He then draws out the maternal aspects of military comradeship, which was tied to very practical
acts of care - whether between men in the ranks, from officer to men, or between officer and
batman. Comrades often took on themselves the duty of informing the relatives of those who had
died, and here Roper examines the various writing strategies by which they contain the worst
aspects of the news. Like Barham, Roper also emphasises the heavy cost for mothers and other
female relatives on the soldier’s return; the task of containing the response to war could be
difficult and extended, and the study echoes others in wanting this story of the ongoing female
burden of war to be recognised.
The final study in this survey, Ana Carden-Coyne’s Reconstructing the Body, is centrally
focused on the questions of resilience and reconstruction. Taking the traumatised body as its
subject, the study examines how, in the aftermath of the First World War, classical imagery was
allied to modernism to provide a cultural language for the project of rebuilding. Far from being
hidden from the public gaze, then, Carden-Coyne stresses that in the immediate post-war years,
wounded bodies, and the medical innovations used to treat them, were widespread in exhibitions
and propaganda – including the pioneering facial reconstructive surgery of Harold Gillies at
Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup. The men with broken faces were imagined as antique sculptures, and
Gillies himself referred to his patients as classical warriors. Although this provided a powerful
rhetoric for cultural rehabilitation, Carden-Coyne points out that it could be painfully at odds with
the patient’s own, more painful experience. Classical imagery also predominated in the
memorials erected after the war (for example, Lutyens’ Cenotaph or his memorial at Thiepval),
and again this emphasis on a monumental wholeness and symmetry concealed the more troubling
legacies of the conflict. Lingering concerns about the emasculated male body were addressed
through the rise of the physical culture of exercise, fitness and bodybuilding, which also
promoted the classical physique as ideal. At the same time, women’s bodies were the focus of a
rapidly growing beauty industry which marketed an array of cosmetics, aids and surgical
procedures through which a classical perfection might be attained. Again, this performance of
bodily reconstruction was seen not only in commercial terms but also as an aspiration towards the
renewal of post-war culture. Carden-Coyne’s study thus provides a persuasive account of the
ways in which the shattered body, and its recovery, helped people to frame the possibility of
moving forward as well as creating a pleasure culture in art, cinema and literature. In spite of the
suffering of war, people found through their bodies a means of resilience and of recovery.
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We can take forward from this overview or survey of current research on trauma and the First
World War a set of key ideas with which we can frame our readings of the literary texts in the
following pages. Where a particular study is of relevance to a text, we will indicate this in the
reading guide, so that you can refer back to the issues and questions that it raised. Here, then, is a
summary list of the main points addressed so far:











The ‘myth’ of the First World War as causing trauma to all those who participated within
it;
Shell shock in the history of military psychiatry;
Class and the figure of the shell-shocked soldier;
Mental health provision especially in times of financial recession;
The carer: family, public asylum, nurse, the state, other soldiers;
Trauma and resilience;
The infantilisation of the shell-shocked soldier;
The relation between physical and mental trauma in World War I;
The tension between the military and the medical;
Care as a mode of containing trauma;
Trauma, the body, and physical reconstruction
Works cited
Barham, Peter, Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2004).
Carden-Coyne, Ana, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism, and the First World War
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Hallett, Christine E., Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2009).
Jones, Edgar and Simon Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD: Military Psychiatry from 1900 to the
Gulf War (Hove, East Sussex: Psychiatry Press, 2005)
Leese, Peter, Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).
Fiona Reid, Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914-30 (London and
New York: Continuum, 2010).
Jeffrey Reznick, Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the
Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
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Roper, Michael, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester and New
York: Manchester University Press, 2009).
Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady (London: Virago, 1987)
Todman, Dan, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 2005)
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http://www.gilliesarchives.org.uk/hospcards/content
/pc_15_st_hosp_egypt_large.html
© Dr Andrew Bamji
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Reading Guides
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Rudyard Kipling, ‘Mary Postgate’
Introduction:
Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘Mary Postgate’ was written during the First World War. It was
started in March 1915, soon after the first German air raids on British cities had taken place. It
was first published in a magazine in September 1915, and was then re-published as the final story
in Kipling’s collection of war stories, A Diversity of Creatures, in 1917. Kipling took
considerable care over the ordering of stories in his works, and critics have linked the text’s focus
on the grief for a soldier lost in war to Kipling’s own grief for his beloved only son John (known
as Jack), who was reported missing in action on 2 November 1915 and later presumed dead. After
an extended inquiry into the circumstances of his son’s death, Jack was eventually found to have
died at the Battle of Loos, aged eighteen. It is important in reading the story, however, to bear in
mind that this is a work of fiction; at the time of publication, many readers interpreted Mary
Postgate’s attitude towards the German soldier as an expression of Kipling’s own views, rather
than as part of an imaginative work. The story represents one of the most powerful works of short
fiction to emerge during the war, and it is included in this reader as a vivid, if unsettling,
exploration of the trauma of losing loved ones in the conflict.
Reading Questions:
1. Early in the story we learn of Miss Fowler’s household arrangements during the war.
What view of Miss Fowler do we gain from hearing of her treatment of her servants and
her response to the news that Wynn has signed up?
2. Look closely at the opening description of Mary Postgate. What kind of character does
Kipling establish for us, and why is this important in terms of what happens later in the
story? Why does Kipling highlight at the outset that Mary does not think about
unpleasantness and takes pride in her disciplined mind?
3. How does Kipling portray Wynn and his relationship with Mary? What effect might this
have on Mary’s subsequent response to the German airman?
4. Pick out all of the references in the story to children. In your group, discuss why this
might be such an important theme in the story, and what effect this imagery has.
5. Read closely the description of Mary’s reaction to the news of Wynn’s death. How does it
compare to the response of Miss Fowler? Why does Kipling highlight that Mary is unable
to cry?
6. Look at Kipling’s account of Edna Gerritt’s death. How is it described and with what
effects? Discuss in your group what caused the death of Edna: the collapse of the barn or
a bomb? Why does Kipling create ambiguity on this issue?
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7. What effect does the character of Dr Hennis have on your response to question 6? Is it
important that he is also a special constable? How does your group interpret his change of
tone when Mary mentions the aeroplane?
8. The second death in the story is that of the German airman, who is only seen by Mary.
She first notices him as she is burning Wynn’s possessions. In your group, find evidence
in the story to suggest that the airman exists and evidence to imply that he is a figment of
Mary’s imagination. Can we decide on one or the other reading? What is the effect of the
hesitation that Kipling introduces here?
9. How is the German airman described, and with what effect? Why does Kipling pair him
first with Wynn (through his uniform) and then with Edna Gerritt (through his smile)?
10. How does your group interpret the ending of the story? Is Mary’s revitalised appearance
solely to be interpreted as vengeance for the deaths of Wynn and Edna, or might there be
other readings of her motivations in allowing the soldier to die?
Discussion Questions:
1. What do you think of the representation of women in Kipling’s story? What is their
relation to war, and does it conform to or reject stereotypes of women in wartime?
2. Dan Todman has pointed out that the war poets were only one voice among many and
that there were a range of popular fictions that supported the war and that used
conventional literary techniques. We might view Kipling as one of these alternative, more
conservative voices (he was a supporter of the war even after the death of his son); what,
then, is the value of reading his story today?
Reading References:
Kipling’s ‘Mary Postgate’ can be found in an excellent collection of short stories representing the
First World War: Rudyard Kipling, ‘Mary Postgate’, The Penguin Book of First World War
Stories, ed. by Barbara Korte and Ann-Marie Einhaus (London: Penguin, 2007), pp. 179-194.
Kipling’s poem ‘The Children’ was also published in A Diversity of Creatures and can be read in
light of the emphasis on children in ‘Mary Postgate’. The poem can be read here:
http://www.kipling.org.uk/kip_fra.htm
Two of Kipling’s most famous poems about the death of his son can be found in the following
anthology: George Walter, ed. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (London: Penguin,
2006). ‘My Boy Jack’ is on p. 164; ‘Epitaphs: A Son’ is on p. 194.
The death of John, and Kipling’s response to it, has been the focus of a number of recent texts.
The Kiplings’ extended quest to find out what had happened to John is traced in: Tonie and
Valmai Holt, My Boy Jack?: The Search for the Kiplings’ Only Son (Barnsley: Leo Cooper,
1998). The story is fictionalised in: David Haig, My Boy Jack (London: Nick Hern Books, 1997),
which was adapted into a film of the same name starring Daniel Radcliffe as Jack.
From the Archives:
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In ‘Mary Postgate’, there is brief reference to the ‘announcement in an official envelope’ that
conveys to Mary and Miss Fowler the news of Wynn’s death. The Special Collections of the
Robinson Library at Newcastle University hold a letter (Ref: Hart 45920) written by Rudyard
Kipling that shows his particular interest in this matter. Written from his home, Batemans, in
Sussex on 8 December 1917, the letter is addressed to Lord Derby, the Secretary of State for War,
and requests a change of wording to the ‘announcement’ that was received by families who had
lost their loved ones in war. Kipling’s request was granted. On the official letter, families were
now informed: ‘His Country will be ever grateful to him for the sacrifice he has made for
Freedom and Justice.’ The original wording was ‘The’ instead of ‘His’, which Kipling felt to be
too impersonal. The letter provides an example of the role that the writer could play in wartime.
After the war, Kipling became involved in the Imperial War Graves Commission and he chose
the Biblical quotation ‘Their Name Liveth For Evermore’ (Ecclesiastes 44.14) for the
Commonwealth war graves, the words ‘Known unto God’ for the graves of unidentified
servicemen, and the inscription ‘The Glorious Dead’ for the Cenotaph in London.
Related Websites
The website of the Kipling Society, which has a range of resources, can be found here:
http://www.kipling.org.uk/index.htm
A response to Kipling’s poem ‘The Children’, which also discusses the importance of parental
grief in his work more broadly, can be found here:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/jul/29/poemoftheweekthechildren
An interesting essay that discusses the ways in which recent fictional accounts of the death of
John Kipling conform to what Todman has defined as the ‘myth’ of the First World War can be
accessed here: http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_kent_flothow.htm
A discussion of Kipling’s involvement with war propaganda, and its relation to his literary work,
can be found here: http://www.wlajournal.com/12_1/Bilsing.pdf
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Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier
Introduction:
The Return of the Soldier was Rebecca West’s first novel. It was published in 1918, during the
war, to mostly positive reviews, particularly citing her ‘sensitive’ depiction of the war’s impact
on those left behind on the home front. Narrated by Jenny Baldry, it is the story of her cousin,
Chris’, war trauma. After suffering an injury, Chris suffers from amnesia, forgetting the past
fifteen years of his life, including the war, his marriage and the death of his son. Instead, he
remembers the romantic summer he spent with a working class woman, Margaret Grey. The story
is focused on Margaret and Jenny as they try to cure Chris, eventually beginning to doubt
whether such an action is desirable.
During the twentieth century, The Return of the Soldier was overshadowed by West’s later
novels; it wasn’t until the end of the century, when critics such as Elaine Showalter began to
write about it, that it regained some of its former status. Showalter’s analysis links the novel and
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, arguing that the two novels represent a specifically female take
on shell shock which links it to hysteria and calls into question the masculinising effects of the
war. Both novels also feature significant female characters who recognise the traumatic impact of
the war, and are moved by the tragedy of the returning soldiers. The Return of the Soldier has
been chosen for the reader because it is a classic treatment of shell shock, and uses the illness as a
way of exploring the moral implications of the war. We might want to think about it particularly
in the context of Peter Leese’s overview of the cultural after-life of shell shock from the 1920s to
the present.
Reading Questions:
1. The novel moves primarily between memories of the outdoor of Monkey Island and the
present of the interior of the Baldry home. What is the effect of these two settings?
2. The Front is never directly presented in the novel; it is only through Jenny’s dream that
we see it. Consider the imagery of this dream. What is the significance of Jenny dreaming
about the Front? What does this tell us about the relationship between home and the
Front?
3. Jenny and Margaret are united in their desire to do what is best for Chris, but they are
unsure about what that might be. Towards the end, Margaret delivers a passionate
argument in favour of letting Chris stay as he is. Are you convinced by this? Why/why
not? What are the implications of staying in his traumatised state?
4. One of the reasons for Margaret’s desire to leave Chris without his memory is that he is
happy. Jenny also observes that he seems happier in his amnesiac state, reflecting that he
has forgotten the war and the death of his child. To what extent is happiness associated
with innocence and childhood in the novel? How is this figured – what images are
associated with Chris’ pre-war world?
5. Margaret is initially described by Jenny as coarse and rough, a reflection of her working
class background. What do you think of the treatment of class in the novel? How is class
implicated in Chris’ happiness?
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6. Kitty and Margaret are presented almost entirely as opposites; what is the effect of their
contrast? Are they both sympathetic characters? What do we learn about their
relationships to Chris?
7. At the start of the novel, Kitty and Jenny are in the nursery of Kitty and Chris’ recently
deceased child. At the end, it is the reminder of his dead son which restores Chris’
memory. Discuss the novel’s treatment of the loss of a child.
8. One of the central themes of the novel is responsibility; Chris has responsibilities towards
his house, as a soldier and as a husband. All of these are disrupted by his trauma. How are
they represented? What pressure do they put on Chris – and Jenny and Kitty?
9. The title The Return of the Soldier refers both to Chris coming back from the war and the
end of the novel, when Chris returns with his memory. Compare these two returns and the
effect they have on Jenny.
10. Towards the end, Margaret and Jenny consult Dr Anderson, who provides a possible cure.
How is Dr Anderson represented? Is he a sympathetic character?
11. Is the ending happy? Why, or why not?
Discussion Questions:
1. Chris’ trauma is never explicitly called shell shock in the novel. What does it mean to
think about it in the context of shell shock? What does it mean to give his trauma a name
or diagnosis? What might we learn about our contemporary understanding of shell shock
and the war by considering this a shell shock text?
2. The majority of the characters in this novel are female, and it is their understanding of the
war and Chris which is presented in the novel. How might the novel be different if it were
from Chris’ perspective, or the doctor’s? What is the value of this sort of female
perspective on the war? Does it challenge what you expect from a war novel – if we can
define The Return of the Soldier as a war novel. You might want to compare this novel to
Susan Hill’s Strange Meeting, which presents an overwhelmingly male perspective on the
war.
Reading References:
West, Rebecca. The Return of the Soldier (London: Virago, 2010 [1918])
Related Websites:
Rebecca West Society homepage: http://www.rebeccawestsociety.com/
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Summary and comment on some of the stylistic elements of the novel:
http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/The_Return_of_the_Soldier
To see more about the symptoms and treatment of shell shock, you might want to look on the
Wellcome Society’s website, which has recovered film of soldiers from hospitals in Southampton
and Newton Abbot: http://catalogue.wellcome.ac.uk/record=b1667864~S8
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Study for ‘Stand To’ before
Dawn, John Nash. Imperial War
Museum Collection, Art. IWM
ART 3920
Page 23 of 60
Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Fly’
Introduction:
Katherine Mansfield’s celebrated short story ‘The Fly’ was written in 1922 and published later in
the same year in the collection The Garden Party and Other Stories. Written in the aftermath of
the war, the story was described by her husband John Middleton Murry as a testament to its
lasting effect on her: ‘The profound and ineradicable impression made upon her by the War …
found perfect utterance in the last year of her life in the story “The Fly”’. As Murry’s quote
attests, the story was also written as Mansfield was dying from TB, and many critics have also
interpreted the struggles of the fly as symbolic of the author’s own battle with her illness.
‘The Fly’, like Kipling’s ‘Mary Postgate’, is an unsettling representation of grief at the loss of a
loved one, and the two stories can productively be read in relation to each other. In Mansfield,
however, the grief is not immediate but for the death of a son that happened five years previously,
raising the question of whether time brings healing or even forgetting. If Kipling’s story is set in
the predominantly female sphere of Miss Fowler and her female companion, Mansfield’s tale
shifts the setting to the exclusively male world of the boss. Nevertheless, both stories end with the
bereaved parental figure implicated in a further death (of the airman and the fly respectively) and
with their response to the death that they have (deliberately or inadvertently) caused.
Dan Todman has indicated the range of responses to bereavement that were experienced during
and after the war, suggesting that not everyone was traumatised by grief. Like Kipling’s story,
Mansfield’s narrative is powerful because it unsettles and surprises us; again, it can stand as a
reminder of the variety of literary voices during the war and in the interwar years; voices which
have tended to be forgotten with the rise to prominence of the war poets.
Reading Questions:
1. What impression do we gain of the boss at the opening of the story through the
description of him in relation to Mr Woodifield, through the depiction of his office, and
through the reference to the photograph of his son?
2. Although no women appear in the story, Mr Woodifield’s wife and girls are mentioned at
the beginning of the story with reference to them not allowing him to drink whisky at
home after his stroke. What light does this shed on the boss’s ‘generous finger’?
3. What effect does Mansfield create by only referring to the main character as the boss, and
by not naming either him or his son in the story?
4. Look through the boss’s description of his son and his feelings about his death. How
would your group describe his relationship to him? What is the effect of the line: ‘He
wanted, he intended, he had arranged to weep …’
5. The critic F. W. Bateson, in a now classic reading of ‘The Fly’, has argued that the story
can be read as a three act drama: Act I is the Woodifield episode, Act II is the reenactment of the son’s death, and Act III is the murder of the fly. If you divide the story in
this way, what does it reveal about the narrative’s progress and development?
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6. The boss’s toying with the fly has been linked by critics to the following famous
quotation from William Shakespeare’s King Lear: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the
gods, they kill us for their sport’. Does this quotation illuminate your reading of this
passage? What associations does it suggest?
7. How would your group read the symbolism of the fly? What different meanings might it
hold in the story?
8. The boss feels strong empathy for the fly as it struggles. Can he be seen as comparable to
the fly in any way?
9. There are two instances of forgetting in the passage: the first is Mr Woodifield’s, and the
second is that of the boss. Mansfield closely parallels them through echoes of wording.
What might be the effect of pairing the boss and Woodifield in this way?
10. How would your group interpret the boss’s response to the death of the fly? Why might he
feel ‘wretched’ and ‘frightened’ by the incident?
Discussion Questions:
1. Mansfield’s story provides a powerful counter to the idea of the memory of those lost
lasting ‘For Evermore’, as engraved on First World War memorial stones (see Rudyard
Kipling, ‘Mary Postgate’, From the Archives). In 1922 this constituted a critical
intervention into the discourse of mourning that predominated in the aftermath of the war.
What might be the value of reading the story today?
2. Michael Roper has drawn attention to the cost of war for mothers, also a focus in literary
texts in this reader such as Kipling’s ‘Mary Postgate’ and Powers’ The Yellow Birds. To
what extent though does this render invisible the effect of war on fathers, such as Kipling
himself after the death of his son? Are fathers present in war representations, and if so
how are they portrayed? Why do you think this might be?
Reading References:
Like Kipling’s ‘Mary Postgate’, Mansfield’s ‘The Fly’ can also be found in the anthology of First
World War stories, making it easy to read the two in relation to each other. See Katherine
Mansfield, ‘The Fly’, The Penguin Book of First World War Stories, ed. by Barbara Korte and
Ann-Marie Einhaus (London: Penguin, 2007), pp. 297-302.
This anthology also contains another famous short story by Mansfield that looks at World War I,
this time from the woman’s perspective. See: Katherine Mansfield, ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, The
Penguin Book of First World War Stories, ed. by Barbara Korte and Ann-Marie Einhaus
(London: Penguin, 2007), pp. 77-92.
Related Websites:
The website of the Katherine Mansfield Society can be accessed here:
http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/
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A website of resources on Mansfield’s life and work can be found here:
http://www.katherinemansfield.net/
A webpage that gives a detailed summary of Mansfield’s life and work, including the
biographical background to her story ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ and the loss of her brother Leslie in
the war, killed as he demonstrated to his men how to use a hand grenade:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/katherine-mansfield
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Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
Introduction:
Mrs Dalloway was published in 1925; seen as a modernist classic, it weaves between multiple
perspectives and its narrative flows between characters. Set during one day, the novel explores
the everyday, but also gives an impression of a London still very much recovering from the war.
Central to this are Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, who provide the main perspectives in
the novel. Clarissa is an upperclass wife of an MP, recovering from an unnamed (mental)
disorder; Septimus is a veteran of the Great War suffering from shell shock. Woolf herself
suffered with mental health problems; this led to an interest in shell shock, also brought out by
her friendship with Siegfried Sassoon. The war also affected her greatly; it features in a number
of her other novels, and influenced her views on violence and pacifism.
Mrs Dalloway has been included in this guide in part due to its status as a classic modernist novel
about the war; it also provides a representation of the after-effects of the war. Woolf’s
interlinking of the domestic, the national and the communal, through her narrative technique,
provides a contrast to single-narrator texts such as West’s The Return of the Soldier and Sayers’s
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. Finally, Woolf’s interest in psychology adds depth to
her representation of the suffering of both Clarissa and Septimus.
Elaine Showalter compares Mrs Dalloway with The Return of the Soldier, arguing that both
novels see shell shock through a female (and implicitly feminist) perspective, locating shell shock
in part in the domestic and – particularly in the case of Mrs Dalloway – linking it to female
hysteria. It might, then, be interesting to think about Mrs Dalloway in the context of the
gendering of trauma, hysteria and PTSD. Showalter also draws attention to the roles of the two
doctors in Mrs Dalloway: Dr Holmes and Dr Bradshaw.
Reading Questions:
1. Consider the narrative techniques Woolf employs: stream of consciousness, the lack of a
single narrator, for example. What is the effect of these techniques?
2. What impression are we given of Septimus from outsiders? Rezia’s perspective might
provide an interesting point of departure for your group discussion.
3. What are the differences between the representations of Septimus before, during and after
the war? From whose perspective do we see the different views of Septimus? What is the
effect of this?
4. Are there any similarities between Clarissa and Septimus? What is the effect of having
both of their narrative points of view? It might be particularly productive to think about
this in the context of the ending.
5. To what extent can Septimus’ trauma be seen in the style of his narration? Does his
narration differ from other characters? Are there any signs of Clarissa’s mental illness in
the novel?
6. Mrs Dalloway is a novel of outsiders and insiders – for example, Clarissa or Richard are
positioned in some ways as essentially English and bourgeois as opposed to Rezia, Miss
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Kilman and Peter, who to varying degrees and with varying amounts of choice, are
positioned as outsiders. Does Woolf contrast these characters? How does the narrative
structure of the novel unite these characters, and yet also hold them separate?
7. How does Woolf represent Dr Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw? What imagery is
associated with them? What is their position in the narrative? What is the effect of their
perspective? How does the care suggested by Holmes and Bradshaw compare with the
recommendations given to Clarissa about her health. What differences are there? What
similarities?
8. Movement is central to the novel, as is the notion of time. How are these two themes
evident in the text? What is their relationship to the narration and the action? How might
we connect these themes to the war?
9. Throughout the novel, there are traces of the war. Find one or two examples, and discuss
the effect of these traces in the novel – how does the war still affect characters? To what
extent is pre-war London still visible in the novel? You might want to compare this with
the representation of post-war London in Sayers’ The Unpleasantness at the Bellona
Club.
10. Read the park scene carefully, particularly the sections which are from Septimus’
perspective. How does the narrative technique pull you into the scene? Septimus moves
between joy and despair in this scene – what is the effect of presenting happiness in the
context of shell shock? What is the significance of Evans in this scene?
11. Towards the end of the novel, Septimus and Rezia share a moment of closeness as they
make a hat together. Clarissa is also shown as finding a particular satisfaction in acts of
domestic creativity. How does domestic art connect to ideas of trauma and mental health?
What are the gender implications of this?
12. Showalter links The Return of the Soldier and Mrs Dalloway in her chapter on ‘Male
Hysteria’. Consider the differences in the representations of care in the two novels.
Discussion Questions:
1. Mrs Dalloway circles around the discussion of normality; both Clarissa and Septimus
struggle with fitting in and behaving in a manner that society deems appropriate. Consider
this notion of social acceptability and its relation to mental health. You might also want to
discuss in your group Septimus’ view that he is guilty of a crime against humanity in this
context; what is the cause of his breakdown versus Clarissa’s?
2. Showalter argues that shell shock is a male version of hysteria; associated primarily with
women, she argues that shell shock can be read as a challenge to ideas of gender, pointing
particularly to Mrs Dalloway as a novel which draws out the tensions of gender, mental
health and the war. Discuss the representation of gender in the novel; what role does
gender have in your approach to questions of war and of mental health.
Reading References:
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Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway (London: Collector’s Library, 2003 [1925])
Woolf’s views on gender and war were most forcefully expressed in the interwar years,
particularly in Three Guineas (1937). A facsimile edition of the original publication is available:
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: Martino Fine Books, 2013).
From the Archives:
At Newcastle University Robinson Library’s Special Collections, you can read a pamphlet on
treatment methods for neurasthenia: The Modern Treatment of Mental and Nervous Disorders
[Pybus, Add.59]. The pamphlet is an extended version of a lecture given by Doctor Bernard Hart
in 1918, and distinguishes between ‘mental’ and ‘nervous’ disorders. ‘Nervous’ disorders, which
include shell shock, have psychological causes, as opposed to physiological. In the pamphlet, he
argues that shell shock should not be seen as unique to the war, but rather put into the context of
nervous disorders more broadly; furthermore, treatments from the war should be applied more
broadly to nervous disorders. Hart favours ‘the talking cure’, suggesting that the patient ‘must
learn to regard [traumatic] memories as part of the furniture of his mind, and as mere traces of
events which are past’. The pamphlet provides an interesting perspective on the treatment of
nerves after the war, and the way in which the war influenced treatment, providing a complement
to Woolf’s criticism of treatments and practitioners.
Related Websites:
The British Library’s Online Edition of Woolf’s First Draft can be found here:
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/englit/woolf/
This is an interesting article on the 88th Anniversary of the publication of Mrs Dalloway:
http://www.theawl.com/2013/05/mrs-dalloway-at-88
Follow this link for Mapping Mrs Dalloway, an innovative project that maps and analyses Mrs
Dalloway, featuring various maps of London: http://mrsdallowaymappingproject.weebly.com/
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Dorothy L Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
Introduction:
Written in 1928, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club is the fourth of Dorothy L. Sayers’
Lord Peter Wimsey novels. Beginning on Armistice Day in the 1920s when the elderly General
Fentiman is found dead, the novel follows Wimsey’s mission to solve the mystery of the
General’s death and the inheritance bequeathed to him by his sister, who may have died a few
hours before the General. Among the other characters are the General’s two sons: Major Robert
Fentiman and Captain George Fentiman. The latter of these is still suffering from shell shock,
some years after the end of the war. Famously, Wimsey’s backstory includes his own
participation in the war and he too deals with the aftermath of the trauma suffered during the war,
including a dependency on his former batman, Bunter, now his valet. Sayers’ writing is always
engaged with contemporary social issues, from the ethics of advertising, to feminist educational
theory and, particularly in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, the difficulties faced by
veterans of the Great War.
This novel has been chosen for the Reader because it presents a picture of the aftermath of the
war. This novel reflects some of the themes picked up by Fiona Reid in Broken Men, which
describes the treatment of ex-servicemen after the war. Looking at Sayers’ representation of
George Fentiman in the context of Reid’s book raises questions about the notion of a ‘finished’
war. George Fentiman struggles to adjust to civilian life after the war, and becomes dependent on
his wife for financial and emotional support; thus we might also think about notions of care after
the war and the role of the family in its provision.
Reading Questions:
1. The novel begins on Armistice Day, and the poppy ritual plays a significant part in
solving the mystery of the General’s death. Are there other traces of the war in the novel?
What is the place of the war in the society Sayers depicts?
2. George Fentiman complains of various mistreatments as a result of his shell shock, saying
to Wimsey that he feels forgotten and left behind after the war. What are his complaints?
Is Wimsey presented as sympathetic to his views? Why, or why not?
3. George is contrasted with his brother, Robert, the natural soldier. Compare the two
characters. Is there any evidence that Robert was affected by the war? Which character
appears more sympathetic to you? Why?
4. Another key contrast in the novel is between the old order – General Fentiman, Colonel
Marchbank – and the new veterans of the Great War. What is your understanding of the
relationship between the two groups? How does the older generation view the younger?
5. After General Fentiman is discovered dead, George has a nervous episode and Wimsey
observes that it was “doubtful which occurrence was more disagreeable to the senior
members of the Bellona Club – the grotesque death of General Fentiman in their midst or
the indecent neurasthenia of his grandson.” How does Sayers present people reacting to
the memory of the war and to the veterans?
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6. In chapter 18, there is a brief description of George’s shell shock symptoms, given by
Sheila Fentiman, George’s wife. Read this description carefully. What do you find
significant about it? How does it compare to other representations of shell shock that you
have encountered?
7. Given that George cannot work due to his shell shock, Sheila provides for the family; she
also functions as George’s carer during his worst periods. Consider the representation of
their relationship in light of Sheila’s position as carer. You might find it helpful in
thinking about this to return to Barham’s depiction of post-war care.
8. As he admits to Ann Dorland, Wimsey also suffers from shell shock. Are there any signs
of this in the narrative? Does it come as a surprise to you (if you are new to Wimsey) and
does it add to your understanding of his emotional engagement in the mystery?
9. Different kinds of illness are present throughout the novel; it also features Doctor
Penberthy as a central character, and depicts a conference on new breakthroughs in health
care. Discuss these different types of care – how do they relate to the position of veterans?
How does Sayers represent Doctor Penberthy as a practitioner?
10. Colonel Marchbanks observes towards the end of the novel that the war seems to have
had an adverse effect on Wimsey’s generation. Discuss the representation of masculinity
in the novel – is there any sign of change? Are those who served presented as significantly
different?
11. Is this a war novel? Why, or why not?
Discussion Questions:
1. At the beginning of the novel, Wimsey states that “most of us would only be too pleased
to chuck these community hysterics if the beastly newspapers didn’t run it for all it’s
worth. However, it won’t do to say so.” Discuss in your group the way that the memory of
the war permeates the novel. Does Armistice Day serve a point in that sort of atmosphere?
What purpose does it have today, how do members of your group relate to it, and is it still
a useful way of remembering the past?
2. Barham and Reid both discuss the figure of the soldier after the war, citing examples of
successful re-integrations into society and those who never managed to recover from the
war. In this novel, George points out various problems faced by veterans of the war. What
kind of care was needed after the Great War? What responsibilities might we have as a
society towards soldiers and those traumatised by war?
Reading References:
Sayers, Dorothy L. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (London: Hodder Paperback, 2010
[1928])
Sayers also addressed the First World War in other novels. If you want to read further, you could
look at the first novel in the Wimsey series, Whose Body? (1923), where the detective’s shell
shock is first introduced. See: Dorothy L. Sayers, Whose Body? (London: Dover, 2010). You
might also want to read Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), where Wimsey has married and his wife
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cares for him during a shell shock episode – you might want to compare how Harriet Vane
negotiates Wimsey’s shell shock with how the Fentimans cope.
Related Websites:
This is the link to the Dorothy L Sayers’ Society homepage: http://www.sayers.org.uk/
If you would like to learn more about Remembrance/Armistice Day, follow this link:
http://www.historyextra.com/remembrance
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Mary Borden, The Forbidden Zone
Introduction:
Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone, published in 1929, was based in her experiences of nursing
on the Western Front. A wealthy American, Borden volunteered to serve with the Red Cross in
1914, and was shocked by the condition of the hospitals that she found in France. She therefore
offered to fund and manage her own hospital, which was located in several different places
during the course of the war. During the Second World War, Borden was again mobilised into
action, and formed a mobile field hospital unit, which was active in different regions of France in
the course of the conflict. Her literary response to the Second World War was published in
Journey Down a Blind Alley (1946).
Borden’s The Forbidden Zone has been chosen for this Reader because it represents a powerful
literary voice from the nursing perspective. It relates back to Christine Hallett’s Containing
Trauma, and we might think as we read the book about the different kinds of trauma (including,
perhaps, her own) that the narrator is asked to contain in the course of the narrative, as well as
asking whether at times this strategy might also be seen to falter or to fail.
Reading Questions:
1. How would your group categorise Borden’s text? Is it testimony, memoir, fiction, short
story collection, or novel? Why have you chosen the category or categories that you have?
2. What is the effect of the narrative being told in fragments? What effect does this have on
your reading experience?
3. Borden’s narrative style is one of producing strange, and at time bizarre, images. In your
group, find some examples that you find particularly striking or effective, and say why
you have found them to be so.
4. What impression do you gain of the ‘forbidden zone’?
5. The narrative is split into two parts, with the first part titled ‘The North’ and the second
‘The Somme – Hospital Sketches’. What is the relation between Part I and Part II?
6. In ‘Rosa’, we see the military and the medical in conflict, as the nurses are asked to heal a
soldier who tried to take his own life, only for him to be executed by firing squad. How
does your group view the narrator’s order not to replace the soldier’s dressings?
7. How does Borden represent the war in the section ‘Conspiracy’? What is medicine’s
relation to the conflict?
8. ‘In the Operating Room’ is written in the form of a dialogue that closely resembles a
playscript. Why do think that Borden has chosen this form for the section?
9. The narrator refers to medical cases not by name but either by type of wound, number, or
role in war. What is the effect of this?
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10. The narrator also describes herself in terms of body parts, especially the hands. How are
her hands represented in different parts of the narrative?
Discussion Questions:
1. What value might we find in reading war narratives from the nurses’ perspective? What,
if anything, can they add to the soldiers’ voices?
2. Borden is interested in the idea of courage, and closes by contrasting the different types of
bravery displayed by the French and British soldiers. What different kinds of courage are
examined in the narrative?
Reading References:
The full reference for this text is: Mary Borden, The Forbidden Zone, ed. by Hazel Hutchinson
(London: Hesperus, 2008).
If you wish to read another nursing memoir from the First World War, you could look at Vera
Brittain’s classic account of her experiences: Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth: An
Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (London: Virago, 2004).
A famous literary representation of a nurse in the First World War can be found in: Ernest
Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (London: Arrow, 2004).
For a very different view of the ‘forbidden zone’, based on Katherine Mansfield’s experiences
there when she went to see her lover, see: Katherine Mansfield, ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, The
Penguin Book of First World War Stories, ed. Barbara Korte and Ann-Marie Einhaus (London:
Penguin, 2007), pp. 77-92. Mansfield’s story is reworked in Pat Barker’s representation of Elinor
Brookes’ journey to the ‘forbidden zone’ to see her lover Paul Tarrant in: Pat Barker, Life Class
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007).
From the Archives:
In the holdings of the Tyne and Wear Archive, there is the diary of an R.E Lumsden who served
as a nurse during the First World War (DX101/1-34/1). Her diary, dating from 1915, describes
her everyday life as a nurse in Salonika; it emphasises the boredom and routine of her service,
while also giving a sense of the enjoyment that Lumsden felt at being abroad and at getting a
chance to see parts of the world that she otherwise might not. This presents a rather different view
of nursing to the one put forward by Borden; it suggests that nursing offered a variety of
experiences, beyond the harrowing daily encounter with death and injury. The diary might also be
a useful starting point for thinking about Borden’s stylistic choices; Lumsden’s diary is
straightforward, a record of her immediate life, whereas The Forbidden Zone represents a
working through and transformation of experience into literary production.
Related websites:
You can find a fuller biography of Mary Borden here:
http://www.maryborden.com/Biography/biog.html
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For a broader account of women’s experiences at the Front in World War I, see:
http://www.firstworldwar.com/features/womenww1_one.htm
You can read here about the experiences of Ellen N. La Motte, another American nurse in the
First World War: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5326/
Page 35 of 60
Patients and nurses in a ward at
Basra, 1917. Imperial War
Museum Collection, Q 25698
Page 36 of 60
Margery Allingham, The Tiger in the Smoke
Introduction:
Written in 1952, Margery Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke is a part of her Albert Campion
series, crime novels focused on Campion, a private detective who consults with the police. This
novel, set in 1949, begins with a case of blackmail hinging on the disappearance of Meg
Elginbrodde’s husband, Martin, during the Second World War, and leads to the trail of the killer,
Jack Havoc, on a mad treasure hunt along with a crew of veterans. The novel hinges on the
aftermath of war, and war itself appears as a site of disappearance and potential mystery. The war
also features as a potential source of trauma, for Havoc and most particularly for Tom, a veteran
who ‘had never been the same’ after the war, and is part of the criminal veterans. Tom is depicted
as completely childlike in the novel, with no potential for recovery.
The Tiger in the Smoke has been included in this Reader because it provides an interesting link
between the representations of the First World War and the rise of PTSD. As Edgar Jones and
Simon Wessely discuss in Shell Shock to PTSD: Military Psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War,
the Second World War saw a change in military screening procedures and a redefinition of war
trauma as battle fatigue. Battle fatigue carries far fewer historical associations; unlike shell shock
with the First World War, it is not specifically tied to World War II. Battle fatigue also lacks the
cultural dimension of shell shock; it is a mental disorder brought on by extreme conditions, and
does not have the same association with home front problems that shell shock does. New
screening methods brought in after the First World War also meant that fewer men were
diagnosed. The Tiger in the Smoke provides a perspective on battle fatigue and representations of
violence and war after the Second World War; it also explicitly contrasts the forties’ postwar
experience with that of the twenties.
Reading Questions:
1. At the beginning of The Tiger in the Smoke, Charlie Luke and Campion encounter a group
of begging veterans. How are the veterans presented? Luke dismisses them as beggars and
implicitly criminal. Read through his reasons. Does the narrative support his view?
2. In the same passage, Luke and Campion discuss an old marching song. Three versions are
presented in the text. Why are all three included? What are the differences between the
three, and what do these differences tell us about the perspective on the war in this novel?
3. Jack Havoc, the main criminal of the text, has served in the war. What impact, if any, is
this presented as having on him? To what extent is the war used to justify or explain his
behaviour?
4. One of the men Havoc murders is a doctor who was trying to treat Havoc’s perceived
illness. Consider Havoc’s own perception of his health and his reasons for murdering the
doctor. How are illness and care perceived by Havoc? What effect does his perceived
illness have on your view of Havoc?
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5. London functions as a character in its own right in the novel; it is the ‘smoke’ referred to
in the title. What impression is given of London in the novel? In what ways is London
presented as marked by the war and how does this affect the atmosphere of the novel?
You might want to compare it to the impression of London given in Woolf’s Mrs
Dalloway.
6. Roly reveals that Tom was the one to see Martin Elginbrodde die during the war, in the
same blast which traumatised Tom. How is Tom presented? You might want to think in
particular about his symptoms and the cause given for his mental injury.
7. What glimpses are given in the novel of Tom before the war, and how do these compare
to the representation of his postwar self? Does the novel present his trauma as entirely
based in the war, or are there signs before the war? How does this affect ideas of health
and illness in the novel?
8. Martin and Geoffrey are perceived as doubles by Tom. Consider the way they are both
described in the novel, particularly the letter Martin sends to Geoffrey. What do these
characters represent in the novel?
9. What is the significance of Tom recognising the similarities between Martin and
Geoffrey?
10. Towards the beginning of the novel, Luke observes that the plight of veterans after the
Second World War is significantly different to that of veterans of the First World War.
What significance does this have for the representation of care and the state in the novel?
You might also want to discuss in your group Canon Avril and Mrs Cash, and their
interpretations of care.
11. How are class and gender positioned in the novel?
12. The Tiger in the Smoke repeatedly returns to ideas of ‘the modern’ versus that which came
before. What characterises the modern in the novel?
Discussion questions:
1. What struck your group as different about The Tiger in the Smoke compared with
representations of the aftermath of World War I (in Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the
Bellona Club, for example)? You might want to think about questions of mental health,
the relationship of the protagonists to the war, the representation of violence, and the war
as a ‘site’ in the novel.
2. The Tiger in the Smoke presumes that the state will care for those who need it; Charlie
Luke makes reference to the NHS and points out that the majority of the population were
involved in the Second World War. Consider your assumptions about the Second World
War and the First World War – to what extent does the Second World War feel more like
a unified experience? How does the state relate to our assumptions about each war, and in
particular to the provision of care?
Reading references:
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Allingham, Margery. The Tiger in the Smoke (St Ives: Vintage, 2005 [1952])
If your group is interested in exploring further the representation of the Second World War and
trauma, Nicholas Blake’s Minute for Murder (1947) also deals with a murder immediately after
the Second World War and deals both with the psychology of returning from the war and the
potential danger of war trauma without treatment.
Related Websites:
The Margery Allingham Society website can be found here:
http://www.margeryallingham.org.uk/news.htm
A.S. Byatt makes the case for why Margery Allingham is underrated as a writer:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3669799/A-S-Byatt-Why-I-love-MargeryAllingham.html
Here, you can watch a video on trauma from WWII until Afghanistan:
http://www.frontlineclub.com/soldiers-traumas-from-world-war-two-to-afghanistan/
Page 39 of 60
Susan Hill, Strange Meeting
Introduction:
Susan Hill’s novel Strange Meeting was published in 1971. She has said in interviews that she
was inspired to write it after hearing Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1961-2), which was
written for the re-consecration of the bombed Coventry Cathedral. Britten sets the poems of
Wilfred Owen against a reworked requiem mass – the poems include ‘Strange Meeting’, from
which Hill took the title of her novel. The War Requiem is part of what Dan Todman calls the
sixties boom; a sense of renewed interest in the war reflected in a series of new history books on
the conflict, the republication of the key war poets, and the creation of plays such as Oh What a
Lovely War (1963). Strange Meeting can be seen in this context as a reflection of the new trends
in representation of the war. Todman argues that it is in the sixties that the war becomes primarily
seen as a tragic and futile conflict. This is reflected in Hill’s novel. Strange Meeting focuses on
John Hilliard, an officer who feels alienated from the home front and who simultaneously fears
and desires to go back to the front lines. Once he returns, however, he meets David Barton, and it
is their developing friendship as well as Barton’s growing horror at the war, which takes up most
of the novel.
The novel is particularly focused on the relationships between Hilliard, Barton and their
respective families. It is worth considering the work in the context of Michael Roper’s The
Secret Battle, thinking about the way emotional support is presented, both between Hilliard and
Barton, but also between Barton and Hilliard at the front and Barton’s family back in England.
While not explicitly about trauma, this is a novel intimately concerned with questions of
emotional support and caring.
Reading Questions:
1. The beginning of this novel establishes Hilliard as alienated from his family. What
impression do we get of Hilliard’s family? What does the description of them tell us about
the home front?
2. In chapter 1, Hilliard is trying not to sleep; instead he remembers his stay in hospital.
What impression do you get from this scene? What is the significance of Hilliard
encountering an old acquaintance in the hospital?
3. The hospital is one of the few scenes of medical care in the novel. What support do we
see provided in these scenes? How is the medical staff described in the novel?
4. When Hilliard first meets Barton, he is attracted to his good mood and his innocence of
the horror of the war. Several times he thinks that the platoon needs that kind of innocent
good humour. What does this emphasis on not knowing tell us about the representation of
war in the novel? How does it affect the mood of the first section of the book?
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5. Barton’s innocence about the war is appealing, whereas Hilliard finds his family’s
response to the war alienating. What is the difference between the two? What does the
difference between the two modes of not knowing mean in the text?
6. In the novel, we are presented with two perspectives from the home front – Hilliard’s
family and Barton’s family. Which of these perspectives do you find more sympathetic?
How do we gain access to these perspectives, for example through viewpoint and
language? Your group might also wish to discuss how these perspectives on the home
front relate to its representation in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier.
7. Barton worries about his responsibility towards the men. How is this portrayed? What
does it tell us about Barton’s understanding of the relationship between an officer and his
men?
8. In one scene Barton comforts a soldier who has ‘gone windy’. Read this representation
carefully and consider what words are used to describe this soldier. What are Barton and
Hilliard’s responses? What is the effect of including this passage?
9. When Barton and Hilliard meet, it is in a relatively peaceful setting behind the frontlines.
Discuss this setting in your group. What mood is established by placing the beginning of
their friendship in this setting, as opposed to in the trenches?
10. While there are scenes of combat, most of Strange Meeting takes place in the trenches,
showing the reader scenes of life between the battles, and the men’s interaction. What do
you think of this representation of the war? To what extent are these scenes about care and
support also domestic, and what gender implications does this have?
11. The emotional toil of the war is one of the central themes of the novel. One of the
characters altered by the war is Colonel Garrett, who eventually gives up his commission.
How is Garrett portrayed? What is Garrett’s relationship to Hilliard?
12. The ending of the novel sees Hilliard going to meet Barton’s family. What is the
significance of this ending? Does it end on an optimistic note?
Discussion Questions:
1. What do you think of the representation of emotional care in this novel? Does Hill’s
representation of the domesticity of the trenches and the affection between the men
conform to your expectations of life in the trenches and the relationships between the
men?
2. Given its relationship to the anti-war mood of the sixties, as well as the inspiration from
the War Requiem, Strange Meeting is often understood as an anti-war novel. Do you think
this is true? How would you define an anti-war novel? Is there anything in the novel
which suggests that war might be appealing?
Reading References:
Hill, Susan. Strange Meeting (London: Penguin, 2010 [1971])
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For another take on intense male friendship at the front, and the notion of care in soldiering
relationships, your group might read Jennifer Johnston’s How Many Miles to Babylon? (London:
Penguin, 2010 [1974]). Johnston’s novel focuses on two Irish soldiers; it explores how notions of
care and loyalty are complicated by the relationship to the home front, particularly a home front
which is itself conflicted.
Related Websites:
Susan Hill’s website is here: http://www.susanhill.org.uk/
Susan Hill has said she was inspired by Britten’s War Requiem. You can listen to a full recording
of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHNgfF19CTY
Page 42 of 60
http://www.gilliesarchives.org.uk/
hospcards/content/pc_arrival_car
d_01a_large.html
© Dr Andrew Bamji
Page 43 of 60
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Introduction:
Tim O’Brien’s writing has become synonymous with the war in Vietnam; his novels powerfully
capture his experiences serving as an infantryman during the war. The Things They Carried,
published in 1990, is a series of interlinked stories about the war, in which certain incidents and
characters repeat across the narratives. O’Brien also explores the borderline between fact and
fiction, asking where the truth of war lies and how it might be articulated.
In reading The Things They Carried, we might reflect on the relation between shell shock and
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), discussed by Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely in Shell
Shock to PTSD. PTSD was officially recognised by the American Psychiatric Association in
1980, following extensive lobbying by Vietnam veterans, and O’Brien’s writing can be closely
associated with many of the key symptoms it describes: flashbacks, intense visualisation, the
unexpected triggering of memories. At the same time, O’Brien’s narrative, in its emphasis on
storytelling, can also be linked to the veterans’ ‘rap groups’, in which they shared with each other
stories of the war, which gives a more resilient and activist vision of the war veteran.
Reading Questions:
1. The opening story of O’Brien’s narrative lists the variety of things carried by men in war.
What does your group think of the different things listed, and what is the effect of opening
the text in this way?
2. The book is dedicated to ‘the men of the Alpha Company’. How does O’Brien create the
unit, rather than the individuals within it, as the protagonist in his narrative?
3. What sense of war in given by O’Brien in the section ‘Spin’?
4. In ‘Rainy River’, O’Brien connects cowardice to an episode before he even arrives in
Vietnam. What is the importance of this story in the overall narrative? What is the
significance of cowardice and embarrassment in the narrator’s war experience?
5. Many of the stories that are told in The Things They Carried are addressed by a speaker to
a particular person or are retold from another source. Choose one or two examples of this,
and discuss the effect of these embedded narratives.
6. Discuss in your group the representation of either women or letters in The Things They
Carried.
7. Why does the narrator tell certain stories, such as the death of Curt Lemon, more than
once? How do the versions of the story differ? What is the effect on you of reading the
different tellings?
8. O’Brien links the war story to the love story. In what ways might we see The Things They
Carried as an example of a love story?
9. What impression is given of the soldier’s homecoming in The Things They Carried? You
might look, for example, at the story of Norman Bowker in ‘Speaking of Courage’.
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10. Rat Kiley is the medic in The Things They Carried. How is he portrayed?
Discussion Questions:
1. To what extent does your group see this as a war fiction and to what extent as a Vietnam
fiction? Why?
2. O’Brien is explicit that the soldier is a killer. How does your group respond to the
descriptions of killing in The Things They Carried and what is their effect?
Reading References:
The full reference to O’Brien’s novel is: Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (London:
Flamingo, 1991).
If you would like to read more of Tim O’Brien’s writing, he has also written powerfully about
Vietnam in the following works: Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone (London: Flamingo,
1995); Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato (London: Flamingo, 1988).
O’Brien’s writing on Vietnam is often compared to that of Michael Herr; see Michael Herr,
Dispatches (London: Picador, 1979).
Related websites:
A recording of a lecture by O’Brien on ‘Writing Vietnam’ can be accessed here:
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/WritingVietnam/obrienpreface.html
This is a link to an article published by O’Brien in The New York Times in 1994, which discusses
his later visit to Vietnam: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/20/specials/obrien-vietnam.html
Note that in The Things They Carried he is described as visiting Vietnam with his daughter,
whereas in ‘The Vietnam in Me’ he is with his wife. What difference does this make?
For a discussion of The Things They Carried in relation to O’Brien’s other writing, follow this
link: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf/obrien.html
Page 45 of 60
Pat Barker, Another World
Introduction:
Pat Barker’s Another World (1998) may be seen as an unofficial sequel or bookend to the
Regeneration Trilogy (1991-5), which portrays a mix of historical figures – Siegfried Sassoon,
Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, and W.H.R. Rivers, amongst others – and invented characters, and
which opens at Craiglockhart Military Hospital, a wartime facility for the treatment of shellshocked officers. In the trilogy, Barker explores the tensions which surrounded the war, including
the issue of medical treatment for shell shock during the war; as Rivers comes to acknowledge,
there is something inherently disturbing about curing people only to send them back into the
environment which caused the initial injury. In Another World, Barker shifts focus from the war
itself to the consequences of the war at the end of the twentieth century. She places the slow
death of Geordie, who served in the war, alongside the uncanny repetition of a Victorian childmurder case. As violence plays out in the third generation of the family, Geordie’s son Nick
gradually uncovers a dark secret in Geordie’s wartime history. The theme of ghosts and haunting
that prevail in Another World can be linked to the last novel that we look at in this Reader, Helen
Dunmore’s The Lie (2014).
Another World is concerned with the ways in which the First World War is remembered: from
Geordie’s traumatic memories of the war, to Helen, the Oxford academic trying to record the
veterans’ memories for the future, as well as references to museums and computer games which
feature the war. We might think about Another World in relation to Daniel Todman’s The Great
War: Myth and Memory and his analysis of the myth of the war at the end of the twentieth
century – Another World is as much about the uses of the war in the present as it is about the war
itself. It might also be useful to read it alongside Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely’s Shell Shock
to PTSD, thinking about the shifting way in which trauma has been described and conceptualised
since 1918.
Reading Questions:
1. Although Another World incorporates multiple perspectives, it begins and ends with
Nick’s narrative viewpoint. What do the multiple perspectives add to the narrative? What
is the effect of opening and closing the novel with the perspective of the same character?
Who, if anyone, would you see as the protagonist of the text? Why?
2. Geordie believes he has a bayonet wound which will not stop bleeding. What is the
significance of this wound? Consider the imagery which surrounds this wound, and the
associations that it creates.
3. One of the recurring images in Another World is that of mirrors, both literal and
metaphorical, including Geordie’s wartime mirror, (in the middle of chapter 4) and the
portrait of the Fanshawes which mirrors Nick’s family (chapter 3). What is the function of
each of these mirrorings? Are they comparable?
4. The novel describes a trip Geordie and Nick took to Thiepval when Geordie was still well
enough to travel. Read this passage carefully (towards the end of chapter 6). What strikes
you as particularly important in this passage? What is its impact on Nick? On Geordie?
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5. There are three plots which intertwine in Another World: the Fanshawe murder, Geordie’s
death, and the domestic tension between Nick and Fran, and their children from respective
marriages. How do these narratives intersect? Are there any recurring themes or images
between the narratives? What is the effect of having multiple narratives?
6. Speaking and silences are at the centre of Another World, particularly the contrast
between Geordie’s long silence, and his sudden willingness to speak at the end of his life.
Try to find other instances of silence and speaking in the text. Do you think
communication is successful in this novel? Why, or why not?
7. Decay and the threat of violence are ever-present in Another World, particularly in its
references to the James Bulger murder, as well as to Fred West. Why do you think Barker
brings these references into the narrative? What is the effect of this? How does this form
of violence link to Geordie’s experiences in the war?
8. The novel features several examples of urban decay, as Nick drives around Newcastle and
reflects on the changes he can see in the landscape. What role does Newcastle play in the
narrative? Does linking the story to such a specific location affect your reading of the
war? Is there a connection between the breakdown of Newcastle and the decline in
Geordie’s health? You might also want to think here about the emphasis on London in
other novels in the Reader, for example Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Sayers’ The
Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.
9. Two of Nick’s key moments of understanding Geordie are mediated by Helen and her
recordings of Geordie. What do you think of Helen as a character? Why are these
moments of revelation given to Helen to reveal, rather than Geordie telling Nick directly?
10. A central concern of the novel is the idea of remembering and transmitting the past – it is
why Geordie starts to speak about the war, it is part of the motivation behind Helen’s
recordings of veterans, and it is the aim of the war memorial at Thiepval, which Nick and
Geordie visit. Yet there is no attempt to include Miranda and Gareth in this consideration
of the past. Discuss with your group Miranda and Gareth’s relationship to the past in the
novel.
11. Geordie is cared for by a range of different people, from doctors, to Nick, to Geordie’s
wife. None of these carers knew Geordie during the war. Pick an example of caring in the
text. To what extent is Nick’s allusion to being implicated in the war through his caring
for Geordie true? Are the carers also part of the war, even after it has ended?
12. Another World ends on Nick’s observation about history and his hope that the past can be
laid to rest. Is this conclusion supported by the text?
Discussion Questions:
1. Consider Jones and Wessely’s argument that shell shock and PTSD differ due to cultural
changes and associations. Another World is written as a reflection on shell shock from a
moment when PTSD is the dominant cultural understanding of war disorders. How might
this affect the novel’s representation? What does it mean for the possibility of
understanding the war at this historical distance? You might also want to consider the
representation of the war in Powers’ The Yellow Birds and O’Brien’s The Things They
Carried.
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2. Another World features several examples of history surfacing in the present, from the
portrait of the Fanshawes, to Geordie’s nightmares, suggesting that time can be disrupted
and disturbed. What is the relationship between time, shell shock and PTSD? How does
this notion of disturbing time relate to historical novels of the war?
Reading References:
Barker, Pat. Another World (London: Quality Paperbacks, 1999 [1998])
Barker has also explored the First World War in several other novels; you might be interested in
comparing Another World with the Regeneration Trilogy (Regeneration (London: Penguin,
1991), The Eye in the Door (London: Penguin, 1993), The Ghost Road (London: Penguin, 1995)).
For a different take on the relationship between the war and the present, Alan Hollinghurst’s The
Stranger’s Child also deals with shell shock and the memory of war (London: Picador, 2011).
From the Archives:
The Tyne and Wear Archives have material relating to the Armstrong-Vickers factory during the
First World War (D.VA/49), which indicates the rise in productivity during the war. In Another
World, Geordie’s decline is mirrored by Newcastle’s industrial decline, symbolised by the empty
houses which used to house the workers at the Armstrong-Vickers munition works.
Mechanisation and the war are bound together in a lot of different ways, but Another World
suggests a positive connection, as opposed to the usual negative association of men transformed
into cogs – the war also meant jobs and regeneration of the area. If you want to explore further
the relationship between the war and industrialisation, you can find more information on the loss
of industrial work in Newcastle and a map of the Armstrong-Vickers workers’ villages referenced
in the text here: http://www.timarchive2.freeuk.com/Elsw_Map_1919.gif
Related Websites:
You can find a short biography and overview of the themes of Pat Barker’s work here:
http://literature.britishcouncil.org/pat-barker
This is a link to an interview with Pat Barker on the publication of Toby’s Room (2012):
http://www.foyles.co.uk/pat-barker
Follow this link to find a short video of workers at the Armstrong factories in 1900:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwKK0UzJpq8
For more information on the war memorial at Thiepval, follow this link:
http://www.firstworldwar.com/today/thiepval.htm
Page 48 of 60
Theresa Breslin, Remembrance
Introduction:
Theresa Breslin’s Remembrance (2002) is a young adult novel, inspired by Breslin’s visit to the
battlefields of the First World War. Here she saw students responding to the graves of young
soldiers, and began to think about the war in terms of adolescent experience. The novel’s main
characters are: Francis and Charlotte, siblings who belong to the ‘big house’ in their Scottish
village; and Maggie, John Malcolm and Alex, the children of the local grocers. Francis, the
oldest, is university age – the youngest, Alex, is thirteen at the opening of the novel. Breslin
sends her characters into a series of different situations, from munitions factories to military
hospitals to the front itself, which is where all the characters eventually end up. We might think
about this novel in relation to Mary Borden’s representation of nursing in The Forbidden Zone
and also to other representations of medical practice at the front.
Remembrance has been chosen for this Reader because it provides an interesting perspective on
contemporary understandings of shell shock and nursing. It is worth comparing the
representations of nursing in this novel to Christine Hallett’s Containing Trauma. In Maggie
and Charlotte, Breslin presents two nurses with very different attitudes towards care and
treatment, raising questions about the profession of nursing in war time. It is also interesting to
think about the representation of shell shock in this novel in relation to Fiona Reid’s Broken
Men, particularly when thinking about Francis and his breakdown.
Reading Questions
1. Justifying her decision to become a nurse, Charlotte argues that she “is being useful.”
John Malcolm expresses similar sentiments about joining the army. Think about the
notions of service and serving represented in the first section of the novel. Is usefulness
the only reason for serving for these characters?
2. Charlotte desires to be useful while Francis states that “Being ‘helpful’ to the army is not
my prime concern.” What is the difference between usefulness and helpfulness. What do
you think of the character of Francis? Is his anti-war stance convincing?
3. Maggie initially starts out working in a munitions factory; it is only through reading one
of Charlotte’s book about wounds that she feels that she has to become a nurse. Read the
passage where this happens carefully (Chapter 20). What is it that has such a great effect
on Maggie? What does your group think of the descriptions?
4. After John Malcolm’s death, we read several examples of grieving – from Maggie,
Charlotte, Alex and Maggie’s parents. Choose one example and discuss its representation:
how is grief presented? What comfort is offered? How is grief spoken about?
5. A good deal of the middle section of the novel features letters between Francis and
Maggie, which show the war from the home front and from the frontline. What
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impression do these letters give of each front? You might want to pay particular attention
to the images conveyed of each of the fronts.
6. Breslin parallels Charlotte’s discovery of her talent for nursing, and Maggie’s discovery
of poetry and art, positioning both as ways of looking more deeply at the world. What is
the function of these discoveries? What do they tell us about the characters?
7. Francis is an artist and writer; Maggie becomes an avid reader through the novel.
Consider this in light of the ending and Maggie and Francis’ goal to help warn about the
war. You might also want to consider Daniel Todman’s description of the literary
emphasis in our contemporary understanding of the war, in which the war poets act as a
key reference point for us.
8. Francis’ eventual nervous breakdown is prefigured by the crying of a man, Verall, in his
company. What do you think of Francis’ response to Verall? How does Verall fit with the
novel’s depiction of the war’s effect on the soldiers?
9. Both Maggie and Charlotte treat a range of different illnesses and injuries; Maggie also
takes an interest in the practical organisation of the field hospital. Discuss the different
types of nursing and care we see the girls perform. What is the position of nursing in the
novel?
10. The novel presents us with Maggie and Charlotte as conventional examples of caring in
war time; however, Breslin also includes a subplot in which Alex, the youngest character,
cares for a German, Kurt, after they have both escaped from the trenches. What
differences are there between the care bestowed by Maggie/Charlotte and that provided by
Alex? What is the significance of the inclusion of Alex’s act of care?
11. Gender is a major concern of this novel. To what extent is nursing presented as a feminist
act? Is caring primarily represented as a feminine action in the novel, and if so, is it also a
political act? You might want to think about the novel’s status as a young adult novel;
who is the expected reader?
12. The novel begins with Breslin’s reflections on students at First World War gravesites and
ends with Francis deciding to write and warn future generations about the war. What is
the effect of the novel as a war novel and as a historical novel? What is the relationship
between past and present in the novel?
Discussion Questions:
1. In Remembrance, all of the characters participate in the war, even Francis the selfdeclared pacifist. Why do you think Breslin chose to do this, rather than have Francis as a
conscientious objector, or have Maggie staying in the munitions factory? Do you think
there is a place for novels set in wartime in which characters are not on the Front? To
what extent is our understanding of 1914-1918 based around the Western Front and the
action there?
2. Remembrance represents a lot of different types of caring and medical work. Looking at
Captain Alexander Peacock’s studies (see below) and Christine Hallett’s description of
containment and care, discuss the novel’s understanding of care, medical support and
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nursing. To what extent can we talk about the war as improving medical care? How might
the war be understood in the context of care and service?
Reading References:
Breslin, Theresa. Remembrance (London: Doubleday, 2002)
For a different take on the war for young adults, you might want to read Linda Newbury’s Some
Other War (London: Barn Owl Books, 2002 [1990]). As in Remembrance, this novel follows a
brother and sister at war, but its nursing is located primarily on the home front.
From the Archives:
In Remembrance, Maggie discovers a talent for organisational work, helping to make front line
services more efficient. This aspect of the novel suggests the innovation that necessarily had to be
part of a mobile army, but it also indicates the possibility of experimenting with care in the
trenches. In the Tyne and Wear Archives at the Discovery Museum, they have a collection of the
diaries, letters and lectures of Captain Alexander Peacock (DX250), who experimented on the
effects of lice and the treatment of trench fever while in the trenches. Of particular interest are a
series of diary entries (DX250/13/3) suggesting the duties of a medical officer on any given day;
these entries indicate the blurring between medical service and army regulations. Peacock also
notes down his emotional responses to various duties, cataloguing the way in which, like Maggie,
he found a sense of purpose in his medical duties. Peacock’s diaries and letters also emphasise
that the front could be a place of work, as well as of trauma; his notes suggest that he cares
deeply about the well-being of the men, but he is also interested in the medical knowledge that he
gains from the war and its conditions.
Related Websites:
Theresa Breslin’s website can be found here: http://www.theresabreslin.co.uk/
Theresa Breslin’s research notes for Remembrance: are posted online here
http://www.theresabreslin.co.uk/remembranceresearch.php
To learn more about the history of boy soldiers in the First World War, follow this link:
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/boy_soldiers.htm
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Louisa Young, My Dear, I Wanted To Tell You
Introduction:
Louisa Young’s My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You, published in 2011, focuses on the war story of
Riley Purefoy, who suffers a serious facial injury and receives treatment from the pioneering
reconstructive facial surgeon Harold Gillies at Queen’s Hospital in Sidcup. The novel was
inspired by an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London, where a portrait by Henry Tonks
of a young man under treatment by Gillies was displayed alongside the pre-printed, multiplechoice postcard sent home by soldiers suffering from wounds. Young explores Purefoy’s
decision, faced with telling his girlfriend Nadine Waveney of his injuries, not to do so,
powerfully imagining what it would mean to send or to receive a postcard with such news. We
might compare this with Rudyard Kipling’s letter requesting a change to the wording of the
official communication of the news of a soldier’s death, discussed under the section on Kipling’s
‘Mary Postgate’. My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You also arises out of a familial connection to the
facial surgery at Sidcup: Young’s grandmother Kathleen Scott, wife of Captain Scott, was a
sculptress who took plaster casts of the injured faces, which were used by Gillies to work out
surgical technique.
The novel can be compared to Ana Carden-Coyne’s Reconstructing the Body. The depiction of
Purefoy raises questions concerning the nature and possibility of rebuilding and recovery in the
face of war. Young’s representation of Julia Locke, who experiments with the newly burgeoning
industry of cosmetic treatments, also probes the relation between Gillies’s work and cosmetic
surgery (which Gillies practised after the First World War), as well as examining the connection
between gender and beauty. We might also think back to Christine Hallett’s Containing
Trauma: Nursing and the First World War, in relation to Young’s depiction of wartime nursing
through the characters of Rose Locke and Nadine Waveney.
Reading Questions:
1. My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You opens with overwhelming noise and closes with silence.
Compare the beginning and the ending of the novel and discuss in your group what is
conveyed by this contrast.
2. In Young’s novel a number of letters and notes are embedded in the narrative. Choose
some examples that you find particularly effective. What do they communicate, or fail to
do so? What might they tell us about the relationship between the sender and the intended
recipient?
3. Young also draws attention to how letters are delivered and received, for example the
censorship in Nadine’s letter to Rose (pp. 294-5) or Rose handing Riley’s break-up letter
to Nadine (pp. 277-8). What might we learn from how letters are transported, circulated
and delivered in the novel?
4. There are a number of references to masks in My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You. What do the
masks conceal and how effectively do they do so? What is the relation between masks and
beauty?
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5. Julia Locke’s imperfect nose enhances her beauty, while the first minor facial scar that
Riley receives gives him, in the eyes of Nadine’s mother, enhanced sex appeal. What is
the relation between beauty and imperfection?
6. Numerous artists and works of art are referred to in the course of the novel. How do these
artists, photographers and artworks relate to the war? How might we connect music and
war?
7. Nursing is practised in the novel by Rose and Nadine, and it is experienced by Riley.
Does the depiction of nursing in the novel conform to Hallett’s description of containing
trauma? How do the nurses respond to the trauma that they witness?
8. Riley’s story is one of upward class mobility. What do you think of Young’s treatment of
class?
9. Shell shock is depicted through the character of Peter Locke. How does Young portray
this condition? What is the relation between mental and physical trauma in the novel?
10. Does your group think that Riley was justified in his decision to conceal the truth from
Nadine? What other acts of deception or concealment are there, and what is their
motivation?
11. Young parallels Gillies’ reconstructive surgery on the soldiers with the beginnings of the
beauty industry. With what effects does she do so?
12. Gillies is seen in the novel through the eyes of Riley and of Rose. How does each
character perceive him, and what impression do we form of him in the course of the
novel?
Discussion Questions:
1. Henry Tonks’ pastel portraits of the men with facial injuries treated by Gillies were
created as surgical drawings. They have recently been restored and have been loaned for
exhibition by the Royal College of Surgeons, although Tonks was not in favour of them
being publicly exhibited during his lifetime. Does your group agree that such images
should be exhibited publicly? What might we gain from looking at them?
2. Young’s depiction of Riley is based on a portrait by Tonks of Corporal Riley. What does
it mean to write a novel that imagines the lives behind the drawings? How are we to read
the mingling of fact and fiction in Young’s novel?
Reading References:
The full publication details of Young’s novel are: Louisa Young, My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You
(London: Harper Collins, 2011).
The subject of Gillies’s surgery has also been explored in Pat Barker’s recent fiction, with the
focus on Henry Tonks. See: Pat Barker, Life Class (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007); Pat
Barker, Toby’s Room (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012).
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Related Websites:
Louisa Young’s website can be accessed here: http://www.louisayoung.co.uk/
A review of the novel can be found here:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/24/wanted-tell-you-louisa-young-review
The Gillies archive, which includes Tonks’s pastel drawings of the men with facial injuries, can
be accessed here: http://www.gilliesarchives.org.uk
This is a very informative site on the relation of artists to facial surgery during the First World
War: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/mask.html
This article brings Young’s material up to date by discussing facial surgery in the context of the
Iraq war: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/mask_sidebar.html
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Blown Up, William Orpen, 1917,
Imperial War Museum: Art.IWM
ART 2376
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Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds
Introduction:
Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds brings our reading of war trauma up to date through the fiction
of a soldier’s experience in Iraq. Powers served as a machine gunner with the US Army in Iraq
and his novel focuses on the impact of war not only on soldiers but also on their families.
Powers’ novel can be compared to Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (particularly the
opening section, in its tracing of the war through the seasons) and also to Tim O’Brien’s The
Things They Carried. Powers has written a powerful war novel for the twenty-first century, and it
therefore seems fitting to include this text within the Reader.
Powers’ novel and the questions that it raises are particularly resonant with Michael Roper’s The
Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War, discussed in the overview of current
scholarship at the beginning of this guide. Your group might like to think in particular about
Roper’s sense of the maternal aspects of care between men on the frontline, the difficulty for
mothers of the soldier’s homecoming, and the desire of the men to write to the mothers of those
who had been killed, as well as their strategies for containing the trauma of the death.
Reading Questions:
1. Powers alternates his chapters between the time of the war and afterwards, and between
Iraq and the US. What does this say about the experience of war, and about the war
novel?
2. We learn of the death of Murphy on p. 14, although the details of his death are not
described in full until near the end of the novel. What is the effect of the reader being told
this information from the outset?
3. How would your group categorise this novel: a war novel, a love story, an elegy? Why
might you put it under each of these categories?
4. ‘[T]here was a sharp distinction between what was remembered, what was told, and what
was true’ (p. 60). What importance is given to the categories of memory, narration, and
truth in the novel?
5. ‘[E]ighteen had never seemed so young’ (p. 38). To what extent does Powers portray the
soldiers as boys, and with what effects? Where is the youth of the men particularly
highlighted?
6. How does the novel portray the relationships between the soldiers? What is the
relationship between Bartle and Murphy, or between Sterling and the men under his
command?
7. How does Powers portray mothers in the novel? How are they affected by war? How do
the soldiers relate to them? What kind of relationship does your group think is represented
in Bartle’s letter to Murphy’s mother?
8. Discuss Powers’ representation of Bartle’s homecoming. What might it tell us about the
experience of war?
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9. At key moments in the novel, we see the medical services represented. How does Powers
position the medics in relation to war?
10. What do the soldiers carry and put down at different points in the novel? What
significance might we give to these objects?
11. Bartle perceives various moments of beauty in the novel. What does he consider to be
beautiful and what is the significance of this?
12. Do the following terms have any resonance with Powers’ depiction of war: care,
containment, resilience?
Discussion Questions:
1. The Yellow Birds portrays the war in Iraq. We have been thinking about the novel as a war
fiction, but how important to your reading is the particular war portrayed? Does your
group find a difference between reading of such a recent war, as opposed to reading about
the trauma of World War I?
2. Although The Yellow Birds is a novel, it derives much of its force from a sense that it tells
a true account of what it is like to fight in Iraq from a veteran who has returned. Are there
any difficulties with the perception of authenticity that surrounds this novel, and war
literature more broadly?
Reading References:
The full publication details for Powers’ novel are: Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds (London:
Hodder and Stoughton, 2012).
If your group would like to read a similar text, you could look at the following poetry collection
which was written by an infantry team leader in the Iraq war: Brian Turner, Here, Bullet
(Farmington, Maine: Alice James Books, 2005).
Related websites:
Kevin Powers’ personal website can be found here: http://www.kevincpowers.com/bio.htm
Follow this link for an interview with Kevin Powers:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/23/kevin-powers-interview-yellow-birds
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Helen Dunmore, The Lie
Introduction:
We have chosen to close the Reader with Helen Dunmore’s novel because it is a fiction of the
First World War published in the centenary year of 2014. Although only one among many World
War I fictions that will be published between 2014 and 2018, this work nevertheless enables us to
ask how one contemporary writer is engaging at the centenary with the task of remembering and
evaluating the conflict. In her previous novel The Greatcoat (2012), Dunmore wrote a ghost story
in which a dead soldier of the Second World War returned to haunt the living; The Lie (2014)
continues this interest in the persistence of the past in relation to the First World War. Set in
1920, the novel speaks of the difficulties of the soldier’s homecoming through the first-person
perspective of shell-shocked soldier Daniel, who returns to the Cornish village in which he was
brought up. The novel’s interest in haunting links it to Pat Barker’s Another World, which also
draws on the genre of the ghost story, while its preoccupation with the effects of betrayal connect
it to Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds, which also centres on a promise broken.
Reading Questions:
1. What is the effect of the quotation from Rudyard Kipling that stands as the epigraph to the
novel?
2. The majority of epigraphs to the chapters in The Lie are taken from officers’ training
manuals; Dunmore details her sources in her ‘Acknowledgements’. Why does Dunmore
use these quotations, and with what effects?
3. One of the first acts of care that we see in the novel is Daniel’s care for the land, in his
tending of the earth around Mary Pascoe’s cottage. Why does your group think that
Dunmore emphasises this aspect of care at the outset of the novel?
4. Through Daniel’s memories, we gain a clear picture of his childhood before the war.
What impression is given to the reader of pre-war life and society?
5. How does Dunmore use the Cornish landscape and setting in the novel?
6. What issues of class and gender are opened up through Daniel’s relationships with
Frederick and Felicia?
7. The Ancient Mariner is used as a key symbolic figure in the novel. What resonances does
Dunmore draw from Coleridge’s poem?
8. How does your group read the significance of poetry in the novel more broadly, either
through other poems that are cited, through Daniel’s relationship to remembered poems,
or through Dunmore’s poetic prose style?
9. What impression does Dunmore portray of the treatment of soldiers who have returned
home, either through the village community’s response to Daniel or through Daniel’s
reflections on soldiers who have returned to London?
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10. What are the different lies that Daniel tells in the novel? To what extent could we describe
these lies as acts of care?
11. What significances are given to the act of burial in the novel?
12. How would your group read the ending of the novel?
Questions for Discussion:
1. The Lie opens with the mud-encrusted ghost of Frederick appearing to Daniel. Given
Daniel Todman’s criticism that the memory of the First World War has become too
closely fixated on the themes of trauma and the trenches, does your group think that
Dunmore is merely repeating the iconic images of World War I or creating them anew?
2. The Lie is a novel that is closely engaged with the tension between remembering and
forgetting. Is there any sense by the end of the novel that the history of World War I is
one that we might lay to rest?
Reading References:
The full publication details for Dunmore’s novel are: Helen Dunmore, The Lie (London:
Hutchinson, 2014).
If your group would like to read a similar text, you could look at Dunmore’s previous novel, a
ghost story of the Second World War: Helen Dunmore, The Greatcoat (London: Random House,
2012)
Related websites:
A Guardian review of The Lie can be found here:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/11/lie-helen-dunmore-review
Dunmore has written a First World War poem ‘The Duration’, which is set on a Cornish beach
and has clear parallels with her treatment of the First World War in The Lie. The poem can be
found at the following link: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/26/helen-dunmorecynthia-asquith-war-poem
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Licensing:
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0
International License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.
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