The Preshutian: These were entirely based on the Marlborough College newspaper from 1913-1919. I tried to get across the atmosphere of the paper, but I also lifted directly in places.
The debate in the first paper, “This House declines to believe in the existence of ghosts”, was taken from the April 1914 edition of the Marlburian.
Ellwood’s poem in the first paper is a close paraphrase of ‘Evening at Marlborough College’, by W. P., in the March 1914 edition of the Marlburian.
Cuthbert-Smith’s In Memoriam was a combination of a few different In Memoriams:
T. G. Meautys, in the November 1914 edition, who was shot in the stomach and died in a cave that was being used in a hospital: “….He died a soldier’s death on the field of honour. He was a very gallant fellow…. They had never seen such bravery— it was marvellous!”
Captain E. K. Bradbury’s In Memoriam, in the October 1914 edition:
….He first had a hip and one leg shot away, and still managed to fire off a round or two more, until the other leg was taken off just above the knee. The doctor who told me about it afterwards said that all he asked for was heaps of morphia, so that the men should not hear him screaming, and that he might be taken quickly to the rear. The whole story is that ‘Brad’ died as one felt he would do.
Harold Roseveare’s In Memoriam, from the November 1914 edition:
Marlborough has suffered many blows since the outbreak of the war, but perhaps the hardest is the news of the death of one who left us only at the close of last term, who but two months before had been an essential part of the College….In all our sorrow, we cannot but envy him. All too short though it was, his life, if any can, can truthfully be said to have touched perfection… A happier boy one cannot imagine — happier still in realising his ambition, in dying as he did a true soldier’s death.
Clarence Roseveare’s In Memoriam was a combination of a few different In Memoriams:
H. G. Morris’ In Memoriam, in the May 1915 edition:
He came past me with a very cheerful face, and laughing, under a very hearty cross-fire from machine guns, and sang out to me, ‘Shall I push on?’ and I answered, ‘Go on, laddie, as hard as you can.’ Poor lad, I did not see him again, but heard he was shot in the head, but he would not let anyone stay with him. He was such a good boy, always cheerful and always ready to do anything that was wanted. He was very popular with everyone—officers and men.”
Bryant McClenaghan’s In Memoriam, in the July 1915 edition:
I regret to say that Bryant was killed yesterday in an attack we made on the German trenches…. he was rallying some men at the time, when he was shot through the heart. I placed him in a trench, hoping that the wound would not be fatal. The only words to me were, ‘Don’t mind me.’… When I saw him a quarter of an hour later he had died a very gallant death at the head of his Company, and the men are very sad to have lost him, as he was extremely popular among the men. I need hardly say how sorry the officers are. He was the cheeriest and most popular subaltern among us and he was my best friend in the regiment.
Ellwood, Gaunt and Maud were partly inspired by certain characteristics in Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Vera Brittain respectively, although they are wholly fictional, and quite different in personality from the historical figures mentioned.
I named Cyril and his brothers the Roseveares, but in fact they are based on the Woodroffe brothers (Sidney, Leslie and Kenneth) who were all three Marlborough Senior Prefects, and all three killed in the war, one by one. (Sidney Woodroffe won a V.C.) Harold Roseveare (In Memoriam seen above) was a contemporary/friend of the three Woodroffe brothers, and their names appear constantly in the papers while they were at school, in cricket matches etc.
I lowered the ages of the dead in the newspapers. I wanted to get across the sensation evoked by writers like Robert Graves and Vera Brittain of a whole generation of young men wiped out. In the Marlburian, while many/most of the dead are in their twenties, there are also plenty in their thirties and a few in their forties.
Almost all names of Preshute boys in the novel were taken from editions of the Marlburian, although I tended to avoid lists of the dead and chose instead from cricket teams, etc.
Lists of the dead in the Preshutian are scrambled versions of lists of the dead from the Marlburian. This is particularly notable in the newspaper following the Battle of the Somme. For this, I went through four editions and counted up every man who died on the 1st July, 1916. In reality, the news of the dead was spread across several months as reports trickled in. I put them all into one edition for effect.
In the novel, I give the impression that the school newspaper is how most boys find out about the dead. In reality, those close to the deceased would likely receive a telegram, and the Times would report casualties faster than a school newspaper.
In one of Ellwood’s letters he quotes the glorious In Memoriam of Lieut. Dods. This was in fact lifted from a letter from the front in the October 1914 edition of the Marlburian, recounting the deeds of M. J. W. O’Donovan, who survived the war—although his younger brother was killed in 1916, at the age of twenty.
To ensure that the In Memoriams of previously un-introduced characters after the Battle of the Somme felt real and poignant, I wrote them about my friends. I had planned to write as many In Memoriams as there were dead, but found the exercise too disturbing to continue.
Lawrence Archibald Long’s In Memoriam included a quotation from the November 1915 edition of the Marlburian, from the In Memoriam of Norman Douglas Stewart Bruce Lockhart:
He died instantaneously; he got a bullet in his throat, and as he fell he shouted, ‘Go on boys.’ He was one of the best subalterns I ever had…I particularly noticed him leading his men in what was really a storm of shot and shell, and the wonder was how any of them came out of it alive.’ As a matter of fact every officer in the regiment was hit.
Richard Alexander Yule’s In Memoriam included a quotation from the November 1915 edition of the Marlburian, from the In Memoriam of C. W. M. White:
…There was a man ten yards behind him, wounded in the stomach, and your son turned round and shouted, ‘For God’s sake, man, don’t drink that water!’ and, as he turned his head forward again, he was shot in the middle of the forehead. He lived for eighteen hours and was never conscious again.
______________
The war announcement on the second page of the novel is a reformatted version of the real announcement as it was made in the London Gazette, Tuesday 4th August, 1914.
In one of Ellwood’s letters he mentions a teacher saying Britain will be galvanised into a 20th century Renaissance by the war. This is an allusion to the moment in Alec Waugh’s The Loom of Youth (1917) when war is declared, and the protagonist’s teacher exclaims:
“Glorious! Glorious!" said Ferrers, as they staggered out into the cool night air. “A war is what we want. It will wake us up from sleeping; stir us into life; inflame our literature. There's a real chance now of sweeping away the old outworn traditions. In a great fire they will all be burnt. Then we can build afresh. I wish I could go and fight. […] This war is going to save England and everything! Glorious!”
Caruthers and Sandys: This plot line was inspired by two sources: Waugh’s The Loom of Youth and the death of Vera Brittain’s brother, Edward. In The Loom of Youth, a schoolboy friend of the protagonist is expelled for his homosexual relationship with another boy: “that was the one unforgivable sin—to be found out,” writes Waugh. I named Caruthers after the protagonist of Waugh’s novel. Vera Brittain’s brother was the inspiration for Caruthers’ death. Army censors intercepted Edward Brittain’s letters and discovered he was homosexual. Brittain was killed in action shortly afterwards, and it was his commanding officer’s opinion that Brittain deliberately got himself killed rather than bring shame upon his family with a court martial.
Thornycroft: I named Ellwood’s family home after Siegfried Sassoon’s mother’s family, who were notable for producing many artists, sculptors and engineers.
Maurice Lantham: I named Lantham after the eponymous hero of E. M. Forster’s Maurice (1971).
In one of Gaunt’s letters, he describes a man’s face floating like a mask of skin in a muddy trench. This I took from Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930): “Floating on the surface of the flooded trench was the mask of a human face which had detached itself from the skull.” I allude to Sassoon again when Sandys describes his feelings about Caruthers’ death, drawing on Sassoon’s description of George Sherston receiving a telegram informing him of the death of a friend in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928):
I showed Dick the telegram when I returned. I had seen Stephen when he was on leave in the spring, and he had written to me only a week ago. Reading the Roll of Honour in the daily paper wasn’t the same thing as this. Looking at Dick’s blank face I became aware that he would never see Stephen now, and the meaning of the telegram became clear to me.
John Maitland describes how it is difficult to want to kill someone once you have heard them laugh. I was indebted throughout the novel to Charles Edward Montague’s excellent book of essays, Disenchantment (1922), for instance where he writes:
The deadliest solvent of your exalted hatreds is laughter. And you can never wholly suppress laughter between two crowds of millions of men standing within earshot of each other along a line of hundreds of miles.
Montague is also the origin of the old soldier Ellwood sees who dyed his white hair black in order to enlist. Montague was forty-seven in 1914. Despite disapproving of the war, he felt a moral obligation to enlist.
In one of Sandys’ letters, he feels horror at the sight of a worm. In Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933), she recalls recoiling in horror at the sight of a worm shortly after learning of the death of her fiancé, Roland Leighton: “I remember that, after our death, worms destroy this body—however lovely, however beloved—and I run from the obscene thing in horror.” Later in the same letter, Sandys writes “What does it matter, now, that he had memorised half of Paradise Lost?”—this is an allusion to one of the most devastating lines in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929): “Was nützt es ihm nun, daß er in der Schule ein so guter Mathematiker war.” (“What use was it to him now that he had been so good at mathematics in school.”)
The description of the Algerians at the Battle of Ypres comes from a primary source used in Dan
Carlin’s Blueprints for Armageddon podcast, as does the description of the private shaking the
arm in the trench. Blueprints provides a useful overview of the war, although it is inaccurate in
places.
Several sources refer to the trenches bursting with buried bodies. Edmund Blunden provides
perhaps the most poetic description in Undertones of War (1928): “At some points in the
trench, bones pierced through their shallow burial, and skulls appeared like mushrooms.”
The tone of the section in which Ellwood first joins Gaunt at the front, as well as the scene in which Gaunt and Ellwood are sent to capture a German after the Battle of Loos, are both indebted to R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End (1929).
The condolence letters were based on/inspired by the many condolence letters I found online. It is astonishing to think how many of these letters officers wrote. The common theme is that the deceased was beloved by all, and died “instantly & painlessly”. Sassoon controversially mocked this tendency to glorify the dead in his pitiless 1917 poem, ‘The Hero’.
It should be noted that there is no evidence that Tennyson’s relationship with Arthur Hallam was homosexual. I do, however, think it likely that someone like Ellwood would have speculated about it.
The men fishing with explosives comes from Ernst Jünger’s invaluable Storm of Steel (1920). Jünger also provided: the bulk of the deaths and injuries of the novel, the enemy attaching a bell on a string to your wire to drive you mad, the strange and thrilling arousal of machine gun fire, and sudden, unexpected squeamishness at the sight of blood outside of the line.
Gaunt at one point references a soldier’s views on Bertrand Russell. The view of the soldier in question is taken from David Jones’ In Parenthesis (1937), in which a man wants to “garrotte Mr. Bertrand-bloody-Russell with the Union flag”.
C. E. Montague and Edward Liveing both describe the urge among the men to see No Man’s Land in the light, and how this lent an odd note of anticipation to imminent attacks.
Billy Selton’s death draws on a description in Henri Barbusse’s Le feu (1916) of a dying sergeant: “…il meurt en remuant la tête de droite et de gauche, comme s’il essayait très doucement de dire non.” (“…he dies shaking his head from right to left, as if trying very gently to say no.”)
When Ellwood says “Christ” in the shell hole after Gaunt’s death and it sounds less like swearing than prayer, it is an echo of Wilfred Owen, who wrote in a letter to his mother on the 18th February, 1918, “There is a point where prayer is indistinguishable from blasphemy. There is also a point when blasphemy is indistinguishable from prayer.” David Jones also remarks on this phenomenon in In Parenthesis: “I say more: the ‘Bugger! Bugger!’ of a man detailed, had often about it the ‘Fiat! Fiat!’ of the Saints.”
Vera Brittain describes having a code for a coming attack with her brother in Testament of Youth. It was of course forbidden to provide civilians with military information, so soldiers developed private language to inform those back home when they were entering into a period of heightened risk.
In the section in which countless officers are killed or injured in Ellwood’s company, I reference the writer Saki’s infamous last words in 1916, which allegedly were “Put that damned cigarette out!” moments before he was killed by a German sniper.
Crawley’s death by suicide drew on Sassoon’s poem ‘Suicide in the Trenches’ (1918).
The conversation between Ellwood and the bloodthirsty Lansing is a paraphrase of one of Sassoon’s most savage poems in its pre-published form (it was defanged in publication), ‘Atrocities’ (1919):
You bragged how once in a savage mood
Your men butchered some Saxon prisoners, that was good.
I trust you felt no pity as they stood
Patient and cowed and scared as prisoners should.
How did you kill them? Speak now, don’t be shy,
You know I love to hear how Germans die
Downstairs in dug-outs, ‘Camerad!’ they cry;
And squeal like stoats when bombs begin to fly.
I’m proud of you; perhaps you’ll feel as brave
Alone in no-man’s land when no one can shield you from the horror of the night.
There’s blood upon your hands
Now go out and fight.
I hope those Huns will haunt you with their screams
And make you gulp their blood in ghoulish dreams.
You’re great at murder; tell me, can you fight?
The descriptions of scouting in No Man’s Land were inspired by A. P. Herbert’s under-read novel, The Secret Battle (1919), which tells the story of an officer slowly crumbling into shell-shock until he is executed for cowardice. This was also very useful in researching Hayes’ terror of madness, and the generalised fear many men had of becoming cowards and “bottling” it.
Gaunt comparing the war to the Hundred Years War is a reference to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), where the protagonist muses, “Perhaps wars weren’t won any more. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years’ War.”
Gideon Devi was inspired by Erroll Chunder Sen, a key figure in the Holzminden prison escape. He was an Indian RAF pilot, and was in the Holzminden tunnel when it collapsed.
There is a fleeting reference in the prisoner-of-war section to O. G. S. Crawford, a prisoner at Holzminden who was “far less unhappy” in prison than he had been at Marlborough College, which he called a “detestable house of torture”.
The tunnelling affair is heavily based on the Holzminden prison escape (a detailed account of which can be found in H. G. Durnford’s The Tunnellers of Holzminden, 1920), but general life in the prison, other escape attempts, and the train escape are all based on A. J. Evans’ wonderful The Escaping Club (1921). This book was such a huge influence on the prisoner-of-war section that I named a character after the author—Evans. Almost all specifics are lifted directly from or inspired by the account Evans gives in this fantastic book. (To temper this recommendation I will also note that Evans is racist towards the Turks, and generally xenophobic.)
A note on the representation of the French—I know it is not a charitable depiction, and in fact does not match up with my own opinions. However, I was writing from the perspective of British soldiers, and it was notable across my reading how prejudiced the British were against the French, even to the extent of wondering whether Britain had picked the wrong side of the war. In The Escaping Club, Evans describes the French in his galloping, stereotyping prose as a bunch of good-natured thieves who’d much rather stay in prison than get back to the front. Whether this reflected reality I can’t say, although the French mutinies of 1917 certainly suggest a higher level of discontent among French soldiers. The 1937 film La Grande Illusion depicts French officers as determined to escape, and the British as effeminate cross-dressers (a stereotype that may also have been founded in truth: the British officers do seem to have spent a lot of time in drag in the prison camps). In short, there was animosity between the French and the English, and In Memoriam reflects that.
Maud’s headmistress’s speech is taken from a speech given by the Senior Mistress of Bournemouth High School for Girls in 1917:
I have come to tell you a terrible fact. Only one out of ten of you girls can ever hope to marry. This is not a guess of mine. It is a statistical fact. Nearly all the men who might have married you have been killed. You will have to make your way in the world as best you can. The war has made more openings for women than there were before. But there will still be a lot of prejudice. You will have to fight. You will have to struggle.
It is something of an anachronism to insert this before the Battle of the Somme, which is when people began to understand the scale of the attrition. The war left over a million “Surplus Women” who never married. Virginia Nicholson explores this phenomenon in her fascinating book, Singled Out: How Two Million British Women Survived Without Men after the First World War (2008).
Hayes’ dreams about motor accidents come from a letter from Wilfred Owen to his mother on the 2nd September, 1917. He was being treated at Craiglockhart for shell-shock at the time. He describes his nightmares: “I still have disastrous dreams, but they are taking on a more civilian character, motor accidents and so on.” Owen’s letters to his mother are candid, charming, and stop abruptly a little over a week before the end of the war. She received the telegram with news of his death as the church bells rang out in celebration of the Armistice. He was twenty-five.
Sassoon spent the days before the Battle of the Somme desperately cutting at the wire with wire cutters he had bought himself from the Army and Navy stores:
Any fool could foresee what happened when troops got bunched up as they left their trench for a daylight attack; and I knew that, in spite of obstinate indentations to the source of supplies, we hadn’t got a decent pair of wire-cutters in the Battalion. (Memoirs of an Infantry Officer)
A company of the East Surrey Regiment were given several footballs to kick across No Man’s Land on the 1st July, 1916 at the Battle of the Somme by their captain, Wilfred Nevill. Nevill was killed, but one football did reach the German trench. The story became so famous that it was perhaps a bit much to use the anecdote for Ellwood and the fictional Royal Kennet Fusiliers.
I allude obliquely to Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur (1485) when Ellwood notices “bowels falling out of bodies”—I wanted to evoke the terror and violence of Arthur’s final battle, specifically the moment when Sir Lucan ruptures his intestines lifting King Arthur’s wounded body: “…and in the lyfftynge sir Lucan felle in a sowne, that parte of hys guttis felle o[u]te of hys body…” (“…and in lifting [the king], Sir Lucan fell into a swoon, that part of his guts fell out of his body…”). The connection between Arthurian legend and WWI is perhaps best exemplified by David Jones’ In Parenthesis, but can also be seen in contemporary propaganda posters and C. E. Montague’s Disenchantment.
When Gaunt and Pritchard are in Amsterdam, I allude to Canto VII of Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. with the line “A grey dawn broke, and the noise of life began again.” This is the same canto that Ellwood quotes from on the last night of Divisional Rest.
Archie Pritchard’s reaction to his brother’s death alludes to Sassoon’s ‘To Any Dead Officer’ (1918):
…Are you there? . . .
Yes . . . and the War won't end for at least two years;
But we've got stacks of men. . . . I'm blind with tears,
Staring into the dark. Cheero!
I wish they'd killed you in a decent show.
Maud gives Ellwood Marlborough and Other Poems (1916) by Charles Sorley, who was killed at the age of twenty in 1915. I later put Sorley’s words in Ellwood’s mouth when he speaks scathingly of Tennyson. In his letters, Sorley negatively compares Tennyson to John Masefield, “who does not, like Tennyson, shut off the world he has to write about, attempting to imagine shipwrecks from the sofa, or battles in his bed.” Masefield was a great favourite among the war poets.
Consistent across my research was the theme of men wishing they could return to the front, where people understood the war. The feeling of isolation described by returning soldiers was so great as to almost supersede the fear of death. The general spirit of isolated resentment depicted in almost all my sources played a large role in Ellwood’s misanthropy after the Battle of the Somme.
The Armistice announcement is a reformatted version of the November 11th, 1918 Evening Standard.
The conversation Gaunt and Ellwood have at the end of the novel about the war having improved Gaunt stems from Robert Nichols’ introduction to Sassoon’s Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918):
[Sassoon said] ‘War has made me. I think I am a man now as well as a poet. You have said the things well enough. Now let us nevermore say another word of whatever little may be good in war for the individual who has a heart to be steeled.’
I remember I nodded, for further acquaintance with war inclines me to his opinion.
‘Let no one ever,’ he continued, ‘from henceforth say a word in any way countenancing war. It is dangerous even to speak of how here and there the individual may gain some hardship of soul by it. For war is hell and those who institute it are criminals. Were there anything to say for it, it should not be said for its spiritual disasters far outweigh any of its advantages.’
It is worth noting that German activists in the 1920s made considerable progress in the realm of trans and gay rights before the Nazis came to power. Maud’s letter at the end of the novel touches on some of the exciting developments of the time. I recommend Bruno Vogel’s Alf (1929), a queer wartime epistolary love story that hints at the rising tide of gay activism in the 1920s. The novel was suppressed during the Nazi regime and never found the audience I think it deserved.
Historical license:
It is perhaps unlikely that Cuthbert-Smith would have been killed at the front in October 1914 given that he had been at school the year before, and the army was still a professional operation at the beginning of the war. However, as Harold Roseveare’s November 1914 In Memoriam in the Marlburian shows us, there were young men who were killed straight out of school in the early days of the war, even if this was less likely to happen than later.
In Sherriff’s Journey’s End, Raleigh uses a connection to get himself into the same company as Captain Stanhope. I used this same mechanism to get Ellwood and Gaunt together at the front. However, the chances of West and Gosset also ending up in the same company are slim. (I don’t think it unlikely that a group of friends from one school could end up billeting in the same village before the Somme, nor does it strike me as unlikely that Devi and Gaunt end up in the same prisoner of war camp, as firsthand accounts emphasise the small-world feeling that many of the officers had gone to the same two dozen schools.)
It is difficult to ascertain how frequent homosexual exploration was in boarding schools, but certain sources (Waugh, Forster, Graves) would suggest it was a fairly standard element of school life. Because of this, I took the liberty of providing Gaunt and Ellwood with surprisingly tolerant friends. I think this is conceivable, but unlikely.
Ernest Hemingway, Robert Graves and David Jones all talk at length about the filthy language of the front. To Hemingway and Jones, it was an irksome aspect of publishing that they were unable to represent it in their published works: “I have been hampered by the convention of not using impious and impolite words, because the whole shape of our discourse was conditioned by the use of such words,” writes Jones in the Preface to In Parenthesis. The result of this historical tendency to omit swear words from print is that I did not attempt to recreate the true linguistic cadence of trench life.
It is not impossible that Gaunt would be falsely marked as dead for so long, but it is improbable. I was inspired by Robert Graves, who was reported dead and showed up on his doorstep after his memorial service, but the fact is that the Germans generally kept good records. Also, although there are reports of camps refusing to let their prisoners send letters, this was rare.
In Rose Allantini’s Despised and Rejected (1918), a one-eyed man is sent back to the front. It’s possible that Ellwood’s injury would not have been enough to prevent him being sent back in the line.
While homosexuality was indeed decriminalised in the first half of the 19th century in Brazil, it is very doubtful whether that would make it the refuge it appears to be at the end of the novel. There would still be a degree of discretion required—a servant bringing them breakfast in bed is a stretch. I wrote it that way because I felt Gaunt and Ellwood deserved it. If it is unrealistic, I hope it falls within a tradition of optimistic fantasy, in the spirit of E. M. Forster’s Maurice, in which the protagonists disappear into the greenwood for their well-earned happy ending.