routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

432 The twentieth century: 1900–45
time. His essay Time and Western Man (1927) is a challenging view of
the intellectual collapse of the modern world; like his novels, it was
not designed to win the author many friends, but it is an important
counterbalance to the intellectual currents of the time.
Several novels were written about the First World War. Unlike the
great poetry, which was written in the trenches during the fighting,
the novels were mostly composed long after the events they describe.
The title of Robert Graves’s autobiography, Goodbye to All That,
published in 1928, indicates the extent to which the author felt that
the war marked the end of an era. Graves later became one of the
more important lyric poets of the century, and he also wrote the
historical tales of Ancient Rome, I, Claudius and Claudius the God
(both 1934), which confirmed his status as a popular historical novelist.
Her Privates We (1929) by Frederic Manning is a good example of
how the colloquial language of the common soldier can be used to
write a documentary novel exploring the futility of war that Owen
described in his poetry.
‘Them poor, bloody Jocks,’ he said in a slow, pitiful whisper.
What the casualties were they did not know, though various
rumours gave precise, and different, details; one shell did all the
damage, the others exploding in an empty field. The sympathy
they felt with the Scotsmen was very real; the same thing might
so easily have happened to themselves; and as they talked about
it, the feeling turned gradually into resentment against an
authority, which regulated, so strictly, every detail of their daily
lives. The shell falling where it did, at that particular time, would
probably have caused a certain number of casualties; even if the
men had been moving about freely; but this kind of discipline,
excusable enough when men have to be kept under control, as
with a carrying party lined up at a dump, was unnecessary on
this moment; and, for that reason alone, it was wiser to avoid
assembling a large number of men at any one point. They
remembered their own experience at Philosophe.
C.E. Montague’s Disenchantment, published in that seminal literary
year 1922, gives in its title a key to the attitudes which characterised
the whole generation of writers who experienced the war at first hand.