Blythe The Age of Illusion

England in the Twenties and Thirties, 1919-1940
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30948-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 316 Seiten

In this brilliant reconstruction of life in England between the two world wars, Ronald Blythe highlights a number of key episodes and personalities which typify the flavour of those two extraordinary decades. He begins with the burial in Westminster Abbey of the Unknown Soldier. This was nearly two years after the last shot had been fired in battle and the near-delirium of 1919 - a boom year though few families were out of mourning - was giving way to the uneasy realization that the world was still far from being a place fit for heroes to live in. The period abounded with colourful figures whose idiosyncrasies Ronald Blythe relishes. The absurd Joynson-Hicks cleaning up London's morals while defending General Dyer shooting down nearly 400 Indians at Amritsar; Mrs Meyrick, the night-club queen of London, being regularly raided at the famous '43'; John Reith putting the B. B.C. on its feet and the public in its place; and headline stealers such as Amy Johnson and T. E. Lawrence. Behind this garish facade, the author shows the new writers emerging at the turn of the decade from their embarrassingly middle-class backgrounds and traces the birth of Britain's first radical intelligentsia. The popular front, the cartoonist David Low's Colonel Blimp and the Left Book Club characterise the much-changed political climate of the 1930s. There, dealing with Jarrow, the Spanish Civil War and Munich, Ronald Blythe show his capacity for writing with an urgency no less effective for its restraint. Coupled with the delightful astringency he brings to such rather less weighty matters as the Brighton trunk murders and the Rector of Stiffkey's remarkable capers, Ronald Blythe demonstrated in this early book his impressive gifts as a social historian.

In a long and distinguished career Ronald Blythe's work includes Akenfield, his classic study of English village life, poetry, fiction, essays, short stories, history and literary criticism. His work has been filmed, widely translated, awarded literary prizes and his 'voice' recognised as one of special originality. Blythe is President of the John Clare Society and has always taken part in the cultural life of his native countryside. He lives in the Stour Valley in the farmhouse which was once the home of his friend John Nash.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Blythe, Ronald

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

IT HAS become the custom to say that the old world died when the shots were fired in Sarajevo, but a world doesn’t die as easily as all that. Certainly it doesn’t collapse and vanish with the neat poignancy of a murdered archduke. All that is certain is that the bullet which entered Franz Ferdinand’s throat ricocheted on for thirty-seven days like a comet to announce the end of the cosmos. Engineering the actual destruction of the cosmos, however, was a very different matter. It required the apprentice virtues of perseverance and blind devotion, and it got them. The lights went out all over Europe and in the fifty-one months of darkness which followed the heirs of the West were marched, like the Tollund man, to a vast quagmire on the Belgian border and suffocated. Altogether, eight and a half millions were slaughtered and twenty-one millions were hurt. It was a world which ended with a bang and without a whimper. In what Wilfred Owen called ‘carnage incomparable and human squander’ encumbered with a morality which no longer worked but which, like Christian’s load, couldn’t be jettisoned, and with a fine naïve patriotism, an immense company of the young was immolated in the dark arterial trenches. No more innocent generation was ever destroyed so ignorantly or so thoroughly. The particulars of its destruction were disgusting and were bowdlerized by the official obituarists. They had to be; the truth was obscene. A popular print which found its way into thousands of British homes showed a handsome Tommy sprawling at the foot of the Cross. It was called ‘The Great Sacrifice’ and it invited comparison. Neither body of God nor man exhibited outrage or indecency, and so it was with all the official written and spoken references to what was happening. Sons and lovers simply ‘fell’ like cut flowers and the tireless scything of young life went on.

The trench system of the 1914–1918 War was based on certain primitive military ideas stretched out on a vast scale. Besides trapping the armies of the Allies and their opponents in a complex muddy grid which made them virtually immovable, the trenches defiled the spirit as well as the flesh of the ordinary civilian-soldier. The main trench line stretched from Switzerland to the Channel coast just above Ypres in a great double artery which was so close together in certain places that friend and foe could hear each other’s conversation. From the main trenches there reached back an enormous network of ramified capillaries which veined off to the supply depots and troop trains. The prizes, stark, ruined and coveted by both sides to an insane degree, were between the two fronts. No price was deemed too great for the smallest advance. In the spring of 1915 the shattered hamlets round Neuve Chapelle were captured by the Allies at a cost of a quarter of a million lives. These agonizing losses were received in both Britain and Germany with a noble stoicism which convinced their Governments that they had a moral mandate to prosecute the war in every way possible. After 1915 there is little evidence on either side to show that consideration for human expenditure, or thought for human misery, was to influence military experiments or military ambition. The front had become a rite, a mystery to which all young male Europe was committed. Recruiting offices were besieged. Jobs, families and personal identity were discarded. Kitchener’s manic gaze and pointing finger solicited the youth of England from every hoarding, and soon the rich, heady fatalism of the age reached out and took command above that of the rival politicians and generals. A few voices were raised to check the death-rush but they could not be heard above the ritual music-hall singing and uproarious patriotic cheerfulness which deafened reason. By the end of 1915 the vast trench system was choked and thrombotic with new blood and early in 1916 Falkenhayn, the German Chief-of-Staff, began to put into practice his belief in military attrition. This was simply to inflict more casualties than one suffers oneself and the spread of this doctrine to the Allied Command marked a new phase of moral recklessness. It justified the deaths of ten men for the deaths of twelve. Je les grignote, as Joffre used to say.

Falkenhayn’s first application of his attrition tactics was very much more than a nibble, however. He lured great masses of French troops to Verdun, where they were massacred over a period of six months and in this way the fate of Kitchener’s Army—perhaps the noblest fighting force ever mobilized—was sealed. Because, before Verdun, the French and the British had worked out a grand attack on the Somme. It was to be the first genuinely all-out attempt by the two touchily chauvinistic powers at military brotherhood, and much depended upon it. But the shocking Verdun losses made it impossible for the French to take up their full commitments in the Somme offensive, and the whole plan should have been halted and revised.

But the entire history of the First World War is an itinerary of compulsive fatalism. On July 1st, 1916, the Somme attack began. The Allies attempted to move forward and lost a hundred thousand men on the first day. Eventually they did move forward—for three miles. It took three months to achieve this and it was here, within sight of Crécy and Agincourt, that the old world died. British losses alone were more than half a million. They included nearly all the promise and what was best of the nation, and the wild patriotic gallimaufrey of the brave and the brainless pouring through the recruiting stations was momentarily checked. The casualty lists broke all the bounds and precedents of private and public grief, and Edith Cavell’s ‘Patriotism is not enough’ began to be vaguely comprehended.

Kitchener and Rupert Brooke, the Zeus and Adonais of the old order, were gone too. Public mourning for Kitchener did not entirely conceal the long thankful sigh of official relief at his passing. Brooke’s death evoked a wave of passionate sadness which was genuinely and perfectly attuned to the clean patriotism of his elegiacs. He was buried on St. George’s Day on the Greek island of Skyros, where Achilles once lived as a girl in order to escape the Trojan war. He died with his Anglo-Hellenism intact, his beautiful image inviolable.

Lloyd George succeeded Kitchener at the War Office and the conflict entered its second stage. The whole mood of the nation had changed. The glittering, exciting and, beyond all reckoning, extravagant party was over and an incoherent misery took its place. ‘Why are we fighting …?’ sang the troops ironically to the tune of Adeste Fideles. There was a great Press campaign to unseat Asquith. On December 4th, 1916, Lloyd George resigned from the Cabinet. Then Asquith himself resigned and the King sent for Bonar Law. Bonar Law had arranged to ‘fail to form a Cabinet’ and this being formally announced, the King sent for Lloyd George. He went to Downing Street when almost every family in the country had been bereaved and at a moment when the old civilized continuity had been severed. The hour called for a realist and a vulgarian, and in the tricky, talkative Welshman it got both. By what was little less than a miracle of persuasive oratory Lloyd George brought back, if not the one hundred per cent 1914 mood, a good working model of it.

There were difficulties, of course, and most of them were named Haig. When Lloyd George was still at the War Office he had induced Haig to place himself under the French General Nivelle. It was disastrous. Both men were arrogant and proud to a pathological degree, and neither allowed himself to be in the full confidence of the other. Nor did they believe it to be their duty to allow their immediate inferiors to know their complete plans. Nivelle’s plan was not only very bad, but it had been captured by the Germans. This, however, did not deter him from putting it into action. For three long weeks he flung wave after wave of helpless poilus against an intractable barrier of barbed wire, where they hung in brief crucifixion for just sufficient time for them to be given the coup de grâce by German machine-guns. And this in spite of the fact that he had given his word not to pursue the plan if a break-through had not been achieved in a single day. At last the poilus mutinied. They expected agony—for this had always been a recognizable ingredient of la gloire—but the sheer illogicality of what they were being asked to do was intolerable. Nivelle was dismissed and Pétain succeeded him.

Though on the face of it to give Pétain a breathing space in which to soothe and tidy up his army after this carnage, Haig, as though not to be outdone in recalcitrance and in spite of all warnings about field drains and autumn rain, decided to attack in Flanders. What followed was three months of such extreme horror that nothing which either preceded them or came afterwards was comparable. This was Passchendaele.

The Haig-Lloyd George relationship was based less on mutual distrust than on total incomprehension of each other’s natures. After Passchendaele the Prime Minister began to withhold the reserves, fearing that if they crossed the Channel they would be wasted by Haig. There was a noticeable decline in the recruiting figures and an obvious reticence among males to march singing into the insatiable Flanders bog. This...