Humour in British First World War Literature: Taming the Great War 3031340507, 9783031340505

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Humour in British First World War Literature Taming the Great War Emily Anderson

Humour in British First World War Literature

Emily Anderson

Humour in British First World War Literature Taming the Great War

Emily Anderson Sheffield, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-34050-5    ISBN 978-3-031-34051-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34051-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book is dedicated to Margaret. I am extremely grateful to my family—especially my parents, Steve and Anne—for their love, support, and for everything else too. Thanks are also very much due to Yorkshire friends, Cambridge friends, Edinburgh friends, Newcastle friends, and Sheffield friends, especially Amy Barker, Grace Shaw, and Hannah Č apek. I am ludicrously fortunate to (still) have the joy of the Greenheaders and Booty to draw on: thank you Iain Duncan, Tori Dunford, Andy Hindle, David McLeod, Maddy and Mike Leighton-Yates, Helen Libby, Alys and Liam Proctor, Alex Rennick, Owen and Louise Renley, Jess and Alex Robinson, Ilsa and Ste Saunders, and all the Green Beans. Thank you also to the Hall Men: Tom Bushnell, Daniel O’Donoghue, Niall Finnegan, Joe Harris, and Luke Mason. Thank you too to Graham Oakes, for his comedian’s perspective. I would like to express my gratitude to the many colleagues and friends who have provided me with advice, expertise, and friendship, in particular Ann-Marie Einhaus, Mandana Ghoyonloo, Calum White, and William Norledge. Deep thanks are due to Professor Anne Whitehead and Professor Martin Dubois for their patience, kindness, and inspiration.

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Contents

1 Introduction:  ‘[A]s in most war fiction, humour predominates’  1 2 Humour  and Britishness During the Great War: ‘If a man brings us a joke, we require to be satisfied of its durability’ 21 3 The Domestication of Death: ‘There are lots of jokes’ 47 4 Class and Social Structure: ‘It is not taken seriously’ 73 5 War  and the Depiction of Gender: ‘Let us hope for the best and assume that he is dead’101 6 The  War and the Domestic Sphere: ‘That perpetual sense of the ridiculous’131 7 Parody  and Pop Culture in Trench Newspapers: ‘Let’s whistle ragtime ditties while we’re bashing out Hun brains’159 8 Short  Fiction and Service-Author Heroes: ‘You can’t expect glory and accuracy for a half-penny’197

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Contents

9 Conclusions225 Index229

List of Figures

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

Palmer Cox. 1888. A Letter to the Rats. Atalanta, 1 June, p. 527147 Anon. 1917. Gas And—Clothes. Mudhook, 1 September © The British Library Board 170 C. O. Wade. 1915. Cover. Growler, October © The British Library Board 183

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: ‘[A]s in most war fiction, humour predominates’ Anon 1917. Fiction, rev. of No Man’s Land by Sapper. Spectator, 18 August

Explaining that this monograph is about humorous First World War literature generally prompts one of two responses, both of which are in themselves humorous. One response—‘is there any?’—is premised on the ingrained assumption that there is nothing funny about the Great War, and certainly nothing funny written about it at the time that it took place. The second response, ‘do you get to write about Blackadder?’ highlights that the most well-loved portrayal of the Great War in Britain is in fact a comedy. From one perspective, the war is far removed from humour. From the other, humour is the first thing that comes to mind when the war is mentioned. Despite seemingly being opposed in what they suggest about the relationship between humour and the conflict, though, these two reactions are not as difficult to reconcile as they might initially appear. The humour in Blackadder plays up to the beliefs about the war—the terrible conditions, the worse generals, the absurdity of it all—that also lie behind the assumption that nothing amusing about the conflict could possibly have been written. It is not difficult to empathise with this view,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Anderson, Humour in British First World War Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34051-2_1

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especially at a moment in time when it is painfully evident that humanity has not yet managed to rid itself of war. Joseph Heller famously wrote in Catch-22 that Yossarian’s experience of fighting in the Second World War ‘wasn’t funny at all. And if that wasn’t funny, there were lots of things that weren’t even funnier’, and in many ways this applies to the First World War and to its literary representation.1 Yet many people did use humour in their depictions of the First World War from its outbreak until its end. They did so when addressing a plethora of subjects from the mundane to the kind of extreme experience of shelling and gunfire that Yossarian found to be so relentlessly un-funny. In August 1915 the Fifth Gloucester Gazette published a limerick that refers to the bodies of deceased servicemen: There was a C. Company swell, Who said “What a h– of a smell. But whether from drains Or human remains I am really unable to tell”’.2 In October 1917 another soldiers’ newspaper, Ye Gas Shell, printed a parody of Alice in Wonderland that ended with the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon ‘waltz[ing]’ off ‘singing the refrain, “Gas, Gas, glorious Gas”’.3 In 1916, one of the stories included in Ian Hay’s The First Hundred Thousand described living in a town under constant shellfire: We get no rest. There is a distant boom, followed by a crash overhead. Cries are heard—the cries of women and children. They are running frantically— running to observe the explosion, and if possible pick up a piece of the shell as a souvenir. Sometimes there are not enough souvenirs to go round, and then the clamour increases.4

 Joseph Heller. 1962. Catch-22. London: Vintage. 1994, p. 19.  Anon. 1915. Battalion Limerick. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, August. 3  F. S. B. 1917. Alice in Membland. Ye Gas Shell, October, pp. 27–28 (p. 28). 4  Ian Hay. 1916. In the Trenches—An Off-Day. In The First Hundred Thousand, Being the Unofficial Chronicle of a Unit of ‘K (1)’, 200–13. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, pp. 200–01. 1 2

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On the less uneasy end of the spectrum are the huge number and variety of brief comic sketches and articles on lighter subjects than bombardment and death. ‘A Cat of War’, to give just one example typical of these, appeared in Punch in 1915 and offered the perspective of a ship’s cat: ‘I don’t say that the men and the guns and the ships didn’t all do their work as well as it could be done, and I was never one to boast, [but] I was really responsible for that victory’.5 Equally, those in the forces often made day-­ to-­day conditions the source of their humour rather than the fighting itself, as in the many comic definitions that circulated between servicemen: ‘BUSSES.  Notable for their non-appearance. They will deposit you at your camp (or somewhere on the road to it) next day with pleasing regularity’.6 The purpose of this book is, first, to uncover, bring together, and draw attention to the huge number and variety of texts that employ humour in their depictions of the Great War. It is intended partly for use as a reference point on which academics and other readers can expand when undertaking their own research. Having such a reference point available will facilitate the inclusion of humorous First World War literature in other studies, enriching the variety of texts that are routinely included in discussion of the conflict. This is a matter of adjusting the emotions and the literary styles with which the writing of the Great War is often associated, making room for the light-hearted and the amusing in an area of literary studies which has been dominated by solemnity. Second, this book is intended to convey some of the effects that humour has on the depiction of First World War experiences. This is a matter of asking what impact the inclusion of humour has on the pictures of the conflict that different authors created. The answers to this question are as diverse as the many different examples and styles of humour that appear in literature of the Great War. One recurring effect, however, is that humour gives an impression of war and war experience as being tame, familiar, and un-extraordinary. There are three primary elements to the creation of this impression. First is tameness of emotion; second, the continuation of literary genres that were well-known before the conflict; and third, the use of familiar and often domestic reference points.

 F. S. Thomas [A Respectable H.M. Cat.] A Cat of War. Punch, 10 March, p. 186.  Anon. 1916. Military Definitions. The Red Feather: The Regimental Magazine of the 6th (Service) Battalion of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. 1 March, 134–36 (p. 134). 5 6

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The latter of these elements of tameness is seen in a tendency for humorous representations of the conflict to focus on settings and aspects of war experience that belong to the ordinary or the everyday, relatively speaking. Authors are far more likely to create humorous perspectives on the war when depicting more low-stakes aspects of life on the home front, and life in the domestic sphere especially, than they are when depicting death, injury, and destruction. This tendency for example manifests itself in humorous narratives about minor disruptions to domestic routines and preferences, such as shortages of jam or eggs or the comic mishaps that occur in domestic spaces in which servicemen are billeted. When experiences of the military are portrayed with humour, furthermore, they are regularly framed with a focus on ‘domestic’ themes. These are often concerns with food or the comfort of living conditions, rather than a focus on the war’s greatest destructions. The effect of this is to shrink or belittle the conflict, to squeeze its worst aspects out of the literary lens. It is presented and understood within perspectives that are more quotidian or familiar than might be expected in the context of a war that has come to be viewed as having an extraordinary and extreme impact across British society, culture, and politics. The familiarity of the settings, concerns, and reference points that appear in humorous First World War literature is mirrored in the familiarity of the genres and styles in which they appear. This book traces how, repeatedly and across different genres, authors portraying conflict experiences did so using literary styles and tropes that had been popular before 1914. Humorous writing about war experiences gives the impression that these experiences are not sufficiently removed from ordinary life to require new forms of representation. This book adds to previous studies that have shown how First World War literature did not necessarily involve or bring about a dramatic cultural rift. The most prominent of these is Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995). With the most famous war poets as his literary reference points, Winter demonstrates that the ‘rupture’ of the 1914–1918 years was not as extreme as has frequently been supposed, that overlap between the ‘old and the new, the “traditional” and the “modern”, the conservative and the iconoclastic, was apparent both during and after the war’.7 In 7  Jay Winter. 1995. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, p.  3. Trudi Tate makes a similar point: Tate. 1998. Modernism, History and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester UP, p. 4.

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humorous writing of the Great War, too, techniques and beliefs that might be deemed ‘old’ and ‘traditional’ not only persist, but contribute to the creation of vivid and frequently moving portrayals of life during the conflict. This reading stands in contrast to some understandings of the most celebrated First World War writing. The famous war poets have often been cited as having suggested the inadequacy of techniques established before the conflict for capturing the enormity of modern war. (This view has been applied specifically with reference to Georgian poetry). Modernist authors, meanwhile, are regularly understood to have developed new perspectives on representation in part to reflect a sense that the Great War demanded such a shift. Humour in literature of the Great War is in addition associated with and facilitates tameness of emotion. The texts represent feelings and attitudes that are ‘small’, or not extreme—amusement, insouciance—as well as encouraging audiences towards similarly ‘small’ emotional responses. Sianne Ngai’s theory of ‘minor feelings’ helps to explain this. Ngai discusses different categories of aesthetic emotions, which are feelings produced by ‘our encounters with artworks’.8 Noting that the aesthetic emotions that have received the most attention are those such as anger, fear, sympathy, and shame, Ngai’s work ‘expand[s] and transform[s]’ understandings of the feelings that should be explored among aesthetic emotions’. Her analysis adds a group of feelings that she describes as ‘ugly’ or ‘minor’.9 As examples of minor feelings, she chooses ‘envy, anxiety, paranoia, irritation, a racialized affect [she] call[s] “animatedness,” and a strange amalgamation of shock and boredom [she] call[s] “stuplimity”’.10 Such minor feelings are ‘generally unprestigious’ in comparison to ‘grander passions like anger and fear’. They are ‘explicitly amoral’ and ‘non-­ cathartic, offering no satisfactions of virtue, however oblique, nor any therapeutic or purifying release’.11 Indeed, these minor feelings tend to interfere with the outpouring of other emotions’, appearing in texts that ‘foreground the absence of a strong emotion where we are led to expect one’.12 Minor feelings are in addition ‘unsuitab[le]’ for ‘forceful or unambiguous action’. Because of this, they have an ‘amplifie[d] […]  Sianne Ngai. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 2007, p. 6.  Ngai, p. 6. 10  Ngai, pp. 2–3. 11  Ngai, p. 6. 12  Ngai, pp. 7, 10. 8 9

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power to diagnose situations, and situations marked by blocked or thwarted action in particular’.13 If her work is ‘a bestiary of affects’, Ngai writes, it is ‘one filled with rats and possums rather than lions’.14 The nature and function of humour in First World War literature does not map exactly onto Ngai’s theorisation of minor feelings. Yet there are strong and instructive parallels between the feelings she describes and the amusement invited by humorous texts of the Great War. Put simply, these texts invite amusement where other, stronger feelings might be expected and otherwise experienced. When asked to think about what emotions are prompted by First World War literature, the majority of people are likely to answer, at least with their first instinct, by naming feelings such as horror, terror, anger, and disillusionment. These are the feelings that are strongly associated with the representations of war experiences by the celebrated group of men who have become known as the war poets, foremost among them Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. The humour in Great War literature contradicts this expectation, asking readers to feel amusement rather than more extreme, expected (or ‘canonical’) emotions. To use Ngai’s phrasing, humorous Great War literature ‘foreground[s] the absence of a strong emotion where we are led to expect one’.15 The presence of amusement as an aesthetic emotion over larger, grander, more intense feelings equally reflects the ‘thwarting’ effect to which minor feelings give rise. The amusement offered by humorous Great War literature is, in contrast to larger emotions, removed from ‘forceful or unambiguous action’. If a soldier is engaged with the amusement involved in writing or reading a trench newspaper (the humorous magazines that servicemen created for themselves), he is not experiencing the strength of horror, anger, or fear that would be more likely to provoke serious dissent. The experience of amusement may make that soldier more likely to endure and persist without seeking to change his circumstances. Amusement, as with other minor feelings, helps to ‘diagnose’ a circumstance in which action in the form of political dissent is blocked.16 Examining humorous Great War literature and the discourse surrounding humour at the time of the conflict reveals that humour was privileged in British propaganda as a means of enduring and of winning the conflict.  Ngai, p. 27  Ngai, p. 7. 15  Ngai, p. 10. 16  Ngai, p. 27. 13 14

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While the law and social pressure discouraged dissent, humorous literature and indulgence in the amusement it provided reduced the likelihood that people would want to dissent in the first place. ‘Tame’ is not a descriptor for minor feelings that Ngai uses, but it is particularly suited to the context of humorous First World War literature given how these texts depict and encourage the kind of minor feelings described above. ‘Tame’ captures the small, understated, compliant, and quotidian quality to these feelings. It also reflects how the amusement invited emerges from and contributes to the war’s positioning within familiar, domestic frameworks and within familiar, well-known, genres. Humour that has such a taming, familiarising effect was one of many styles of literary humour present during the conflict. Some texts include humour that is more about highlighting absurdity, with a defamiliarising effect, while works of satire about the war use humour to criticise and draw attention to the darker, disturbing aspects of the conflict. In other cases amusement and laughter are presented as signs of hysteria or trauma. These are not intended to amuse readers but instead to depict the horrifying psychological effects that the conflict had on some who experienced it. Owen’s ‘Apologia Pro Poemate Meo’ (1917) describes the war zone as a place ‘where death becomes absurd and life absurder’, as well as describing soldiers for whom war ‘gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child’.17 The speaker of Anna Gordon Keown’s ‘Reported Missing’ (1919), recording her reaction to having lost a loved one, declares ‘I laugh! I laugh!— For you will come again—| This heart would never beat if you were dead’. Wilfred W. Gibson’s ‘Mud’ (1914) describes a serviceman ‘Neck-deep in mud’ who ‘Yelled “April fool” | And laughed like mad’.18 While this monograph does touch upon the darker, more disturbing, less amusing end of the spectrum of humorous writing, the focus is on manifestations of humour that are milder, that encourage moderate amusement, and that did not challenge the political status quo. The quantity of this style of humour, as well as the contribution it made to public discussions of national identity in Britain, suggest that it is a culturally and literarily significant aspect of how writers responded to the conflict. Yet perhaps because First World War studies have historically favoured texts 17  Wilfred Owen. 1917. Apologia Pro Poemate Meo. In Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology, ed. Tim Kendall, 160–61. Oxford, Oxford UP. 2013. 18  Anna Gordon Keown. 1919. Reported Missing. In War Verse, 245. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company; Wilfrid W. Gibson. 1916. Mad. In Battle, 16. London: Elkin Mathews.

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more critical of the war, works offering mild amusement are less prominent in existing scholarship.

Defining Humour There have been many attempts to define and theorise humour and amusement, most prominently in the fields of philosophy and psychology. Theories of humour are conventionally grouped into a few well-worn categories, which centre on explaining why we experience the pleasurable sensation of mirth (or amusement), and/or on why we laugh. These categories are relief, incongruity, superiority, and play.19 Relief theories of humour are the most well-known, the general principle behind these having become lodged in popular understanding. They suggest that amusement functions as a form of emotional release, as a vent for emotional tension or for assuaging feelings such as anxiety, and/or as a means of avoiding literal or psychological censorship. Sigmund Freud’s work on joking and humour is the most famous example of a relief theory, though there were earlier proponents.20Freud identifies different types of humour that he argues afford different kinds of pleasure. The most relevant to First World War literature are jokes that offer pleasure by saving expenditure on inhibition, and pleasure in humour that comes from saving expenditure on feelings other than amusement.21 Humour is ‘extraordinarily variegated according to the nature of the emotion which is economized in favour of the humour: pity, anger, pain, tenderness, and so on’. Humour is ‘enlarged whenever an artist or writer succeeds in submitting some hitherto unconquered emotions’ to its ‘control’.22 As with other of Freud’s theories, his work on humour does not always sit easily with modern psychology and is in parts outdated, for example many of the jokes he uses  For an especially useful example of the many works that explain them, see: John Morreall. 2009. Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humour. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 20  See for example: Anthony, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. 1709. Sensus Communis; an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour. In Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 37–94. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. 2001; Herbert Spencer. 1860. On the Physiology of Laughter. Macmillan’s Magazine March: 395–402. 21  Sigmund Freud. 1905. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. Strachey, James. London: Hogarth Press. 1960, p. 236. 22  Freud, pp. 231–32. 19

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to illustrate his ideas are based on sexist stereotypes.23 Yet a broad version of his ideas—that humour can function as a means of releasing emotional tension—is relevant to the value humour could have during the Great War. The few studies of the conflict that address humour have focussed on its psychological benefits, particularly for those closest to the enormity of the battlefields, and particularly as a means for understanding wartime morale and social history. This is one way in which the amusement offered by humorous Great War literature diverges from minor feelings as Ngai describes them. While minor feelings do not offer a sense of catharsis, humour in depictions of the war may at least in part have functioned in this way. At the same time, humorous First World War literature does not so much encourage catharsis as endurance. The amusement it offers is related closely to living with the emotional tensions the conflict provokes, rather than necessarily offering a way of releasing and moving on from such tensions. This removal from catharsis is reflected in the subject matter of humour in First World War literature. An important element of Freud’s theory is that humour often relates to taboo subjects (because humour saves energy that would otherwise have been spent on repression). This is at points reflected in humorous depictions of the Great War, such as humorous depictions of death. Were Freud’s theory entirely or solely relevant to humorous Great War literature, though, we might expect there to be far more humorous treatment of death, or other taboo subjects. In reality, humour appears less frequently in writing about these elements than it does in writing on subjects with lower stakes. More relevant to illustrating how the use of humour affects the portrayal of conflict experiences are incongruity theories. With early proponents including Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Søren Kierkegaard, the principle behind incongruity theories is that we experience amusement in response to perceived oddness, mismatch, or absurdity. In Kant’s version, this means that ‘In everything that is to provoke a lively, uproarious laughter, there must be something nonsensical (in which, therefore, the  For examples of modern psychological studies that focus on the psychological benefits of humour, see: K. A. Parkhill et al. 2011. Laughing It off? Humour, Affect and Emotion Work in Communities Living with Nuclear Risk. The British Journal of Sociology 62: 324–46; Madelijn Strick et  al. 2009. Finding Comfort in a Joke: Consolatory Effects of Humor Through Cognitive Distraction. Emotion 9: 574–78; Lisa Kugler and Christof Kuhbandner. 2015. That’s Not Funny!—But It Should Be: Effects of Humorous Emotion Regulation on Emotional Experience and Memory. Frontiers in Psychology 6; Fay Geisler and Hannelore Weber. 2010. Harm That Does Not Hurt: Humour in Coping with Self-Threat. Motivation and Emotion 34: 446–56. 23

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understanding in itself can take no satisfaction)’. In Schopenhauer’s view amusement arises from recognising differences between our perceptions of how the world really is (what we observe the world to be) and our abstract conceptions of it (the way in which we think of the world).24 There are points where incongruity is helpful in elucidating how humour is created in First World War texts, as well as the impression of war experiences that such humour generates. For example, the limericks explored in Chap. 3 rely upon the absurd for their humour, while several of the texts analysed in Chap. 6 invite amusement by juxtaposing the front line with the domestic. Play theories suggest that humour can be understood as a particular kind of play, and/or that being in a ‘play mode’ is necessary to experience amusement. These theories help to explain how certain literary contexts prepare readers to feel amused. Comic periodicals or performances for example may encourage a play mode. When soldiers opened the comic newspapers they wrote for themselves, they would expect at least a large proportion of the contents to be disengaged from seriousness. John Morreall’s model of amusement combines elements of several humour theories, but provides a good insight into how play could work in this way. Morreall suggests there are several stages to feeling amusement: we ‘experience a cognitive shift, a rapid change in our perceptions or thoughts’, an experience similar to that described in incongruity theories, but we are in addition ‘in a play mode rather than a serious mode, disengaged from conceptual and practical concerns’. As a result, we do not respond ‘to the cognitive shift with shock, confusion, puzzlement, fear, anger, or other negative emotions, we enjoy it’. Finally, we express this pleasure in laughter, ‘which signals to others that they can relax and play too’.25 Humour in British First World War Literature makes reference to different theories of humour where relevant, rather than adhering to a single explanation of a multi-faceted phenomenon. Superiority theories, for example, which hold that we feel amused when we recognise that we are better than the object of mirth, would be more applicable to satirical takes on the conflict than they are to the objects of this study, which in the main include less pointed humour. No single theory can elucidate the diverse examples of humorous literature in which the conflict is represented 24  Immanuel Kant. 1790. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. Guyer, Paul, and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 2000, p.  209; Arthur Schopenhauer. 1818/19, 1844. The World as Will and Representation: Volume II. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications. 1966, p. 91. 25  Morreall, p. 50.

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without being reductive. With this in mind, the term humour is used in this monograph in one of its most intuitive senses. Humour is treated as being an element of a text that internal and/or external evidence suggests functions to invite amusement—but a humorous tone can also in part be created from representations of characters’ feelings. Again, Ngai’s work is useful here: tone ‘cannot be reduced’ either to ‘representations of feeling within the artwork, or to the emotional responses the artwork solicits’ from audiences. It is a ‘global or organizing affect, its general disposition or orientation toward its audience and the world’.26 In addition to prompting debates about how humour is defined, examining humorous literature can beg the question of if and how it is possible to tell whether attempts to amuse were successful. There is limited evidence available to answer this in a historical context, and it seems reasonable to assume that not all readers would have found the texts included in this book funny. Equally, it seems reasonable that those engaged in commercial writing, such as theatre producers and editors of popular periodicals, would not have repeatedly produced humorous works if they did not at least for some have the intended effect. And, indeed, humorous writing and performance proved to be immensely popular during the war years. It also seems unlikely that those engaged in non-commercial writing, such as servicemen who wrote their own periodicals, would have created humorous perspectives on their experiences if these did not give rise to amusement for themselves and their comrades. In any case, even failed attempts to provoke amusement should not necessarily be discounted from the category of humour. Judgements that certain invitations to mirth are ‘bad or unfunny’ are ‘preferences’ rather than inarguable verdicts on what is and is not humorous.27 While the texts analysed invite amusement, moreover,  Ngai, pp. 28–29.  Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai. 2017. Comedy Has Issues. Critical Inquiry 43: 233–49 (p. 241). Berlant and Ngai in addition observe that ‘subjective feelings are as defining and central to horror and melodrama as the feeling of the funny is to comedy’, but that ‘debates about whether tragedies are tragedies or westerns westerns don’t usually produce the same affective intensity, fierceness, or sense of urgency to determine correct identification of their borders’. This may be because humour ‘suffuses so many genres that are not comedy it is hard to draw lines’, and because ‘there is something internal to comedy—maybe its capacity to hold together’ a ‘variety of manifestly clashing or ambiguous affects’ that gives it ‘uniquely ambiguous’ boundaries (pp.  242, 239). To apply this to the field of Great War literature, it tends to be accepted that solemn works by the famous war poets could produce feelings such as sadness or anger, but whether or not humorous works about the war actually prompt (or prompted) amusement seems more controversial. 26 27

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in some cases they also encourage other feelings too. Representations of young men joking while at war can be poignant as well as funny for example, and focussing too closely on the question of whether audiences were or were not amused risks overlooking this kind of nuance.

Humour in the Field of Great War Studies The study of First World War literature is no longer dominated by the famous war poets. Widespread, influential critical efforts have increased the range of works classified under the label ‘First World War literature’. Notably there have been movements to pay greater attention to genres other than poetry—as in Ann-Marie Einhaus’ The Short Story and the First World War (2013) and Mark Rawlinson’s First World War Plays (2014)— as well as a move towards non-combatant and civilian writers.28 Ann-Marie Einhaus and Katherine Baxter’s Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts (2017) is especially strong in its breadth, interpreting ‘the arts’ in ‘the broadest possible sense’ to include fine art, literature, film, life writing, publishing practice, music, letters, photography, radio, and television.29 Angela Smith and Krista Cowman take a similar approach in Landscapes and Voices of the Great War (2017), covering revue, music, postcards, letters, Rose Macaulay’s work, and poetry.30 A similar 28  Ann-Marie Einhaus. 2013. The Short Story and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 3, 4, 16–17; Mark Rawlinson, ed. 2014. First World War Plays. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama; Catherine Reilly, ed. 1981. Scars Upon my Heart. London: Virago. Santanu Das, writing about Great War poetry, points towards a ‘quiet but powerful expansion of the canon over the last three decades’, which has led to the recovery of poetry by ‘women, civilians, dissenters, working-class and non-English’ writers. See: Santanu Das. 2013. Reframing First World War Poetry: An Introduction. In The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War, ed. Santanu Das, 3–34. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 4–6. James Campbell and Randall Stevenson make similar observations, noting how the focus on trench lyricists such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon established in the 1960s has been challenged by attention to lesser-known writers. See: James Campbell. 2005. Interpreting the War. In The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War, ed. Vincent Sherry, 261–79. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2005; Randall Stevenson. 2013. Literature and the Great War 1914–1918. Oxford: Oxford UP, pp. 182–83. 29  Ann-Marie Einhaus and Katherine Baxter. 2017. Introduction. In The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts, ed. Ann-Marie Einhaus and Katherine Baxter, 1–12. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, p. 1. 30  Angela Smith and Krista Cowman, eds. 2017. Landscapes and Voices of the Great War. New York: Routledge.

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diversification in attention to the aesthetic emotions of Great War literature has been slower. Inclusion of amusing literature is still relatively limited in critical studies and anthologies. The notable exception is Vivien Noakes Voices of Silence: The Alternative Book of First World War Poetry (2006), though many anthologies do now offer glimpses into the large body of humorous works produced in response to the conflict.31 Where scholarship does address humour in the war, there is a tendency to link it to suffering, as though a connection with strong negative emotion is necessary to justify analytical attention. ‘Something about the cultural canon itself seems to prefer higher passions and emotions’, as if minor feelings ‘were not only incapable of producing “major” works, but somehow disabled the works they do drive from acquiring canonical distinction’.32 Even so, there are now multiple studies of the role of humour during the Great War. Clémentine Tholas-Disset and Karen A.  Ritzenhoff’s edited volume Humor, Entertainment, and Popular Culture during World War I (2015) frames humour as a ‘coping mechanism to deal with loss and trauma’. It includes chapters with some valuable insights into specific aspects of wartime entertainment, such as John Mullen’s explanation of how existing music-hall traditions were adapted to the wartime situation, Felicia Hardison Londré’s history of the ‘Over There Theatre League’ performing for U.S. troops, and Jenna Kubly’s recognition that 31  The majority of texts in prose anthologies are solemn, with each of the following volumes containing works with some humour: Mark Rawlinson, ed. 2014. First World War Plays. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama; Trudi Tate, ed. 1995. Women, Men and the Great War: An Anthology of Stories. Manchester: Manchester UP; Barbara Korte and AnnMarie Einhaus, eds. 2007. Penguin Book of First World War Short Stories. London: Penguin; Andrew Maunder, ed. 2011. British Literature of World War I: The Short Story and the Novella. London: Pickering & Chatto. Of the huge number of First World War poetry anthologies in existence, the following are examples which contain humorous works (though the general focus is on solemn poetry): Brian Gardner, ed. 1964. Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914–1918. London: Methuen; Andrew Motion, ed. 2003. First World War Poems. London: Faber & Faber; George Walter, ed. 2006. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. London: Penguin; Tim Kendall, ed. 2013. Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford UP.  Martin Stephen, ed. 1988. Poems of the First World War: Never Such Innocence. London: Everyman. Vivien Noakes’ Voices of Silence: The Alternative Book of First World War Poetry (2006, Stroud: Sutton Publishing) affords an unusual amount of space to humorous poetry. She builds her collection from texts originally printed in, for example, trench newspapers, hospital journals, scrapbooks, albums, magazines, and postcards and, because of this eclectic approach, the volume is an exceptionally useful source of amusing war poems. 32  Ngai, p. 11.

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J. M. Barrie’s wartime plays had ‘critical merit’ and addressed a variety of wartime experiences.33 Work on trench newspapers includes J. G. Fuller’s historical study of the publications’ role in maintaining morale, and Graham Seal’s literary-focussed investigation of how the papers helped men to endure the conflict.34 In recognising the significance of humour and entertainment during the conflict, these kinds of works correct a tradition according to which, in Dan Todman’s words, the celebrated poets that previously dominated First World War studies were seen as ‘communicat[ing] “the truth” about war’, with alternative points of view being dismissed or overlooked.35

The Scope of Humour in British First World War Literature Humour in British First World War Literature brings together humorous texts from a variety of genres to present a wide-ranging and literarily focussed analysis of the effect humour has on the representation of conflict experiences. The book covers poetry, prose, theatre, professionally 33  Clémentine Tholas-Disset and Karen Ritzenhoff. 2015. Introduction. In Humor, Entertainment, and Popular Culture during World War I, 1–22. London: Palgrave Macmillan, p.  3; John Mullen. 2015. ‘You Can’t Help Laughing, Can You?’ Humor and Symbolic Empowerment in British Music Hall Song during the Great War. In Tholas-Disset and Ritzenhoff, 181–96; Felicia Hardison Londré. The Range of Laughter: First Person Reports from Entertainers of the Over There Theatre League. In Tholas-Disset and Ritzenhoff, 169–79; Jenna Kubly. J.  M. Barrie and World War I.  In Tholas-Disset and Ritzenhoff, 197–208 (p. 198). 34  J.  G. Fuller. 1990. Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies 1914–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 175; Graham Seal. 2013. The Soldiers’ Press: Trench Journals in the First World War. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. xi. Several articles dedicated the First World War also appear in a 2001 special issue of the Journal of European Studies on ‘War in the Twentieth Century: the Functioning of Humour in Cultural Representation’. These again cover the importance of humour for ‘coping with life in difficult and stressful situations’, for reducing anxiety by facilitating the public voicing of concerns, and for being ‘mobilised’ in support of the war and to dissipate fear and anguish. See: Valerie Holman and Debra Kelly. 2001. Introduction. War in the Twentieth Century: The Functioning of Humour in Cultural Representation. Journal of European Studies 31: 247–63 (pp. 247–49); Pierre Purseigle. 2001. Mirroring Societies at War: Pictorial Humour in the British and French Popular Press during the First World War. Journal of European Studies 31: 289–328; Jean-Yves Le Naour. 2001. Laughter and Tears in the Great War: The Need for Laughter/the Guilt of Humour. Journal of European Studies 31: 265–75. 35  Dan Todman, 2005. The Great War, Myth and Memory. London: Bloomsbury, p. 172.

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produced periodicals, and servicemen’s magazines. It includes works that represent experiences of the military and the front line, but also many works that represent the domestic sphere, and even texts that imagine what life in a post-war world could look like. The scope is not exhaustive. This would not be possible given the large number of portrayals of the conflict and the large number of examples of humour within these. To give an idea of scale, Catherine Reilly consulted ‘several thousand volumes of poetry and verse’ when compiling her celebrated bibliography of First World War poetry, noting, as many other researchers have too, the impossibility of comprehensive analysis.36 Beyond poetry, short stories were highly popular during the conflict and the years leading up to it, with large audiences consuming the many short narratives that were printed in magazines and newspapers.37 They appeared regularly in publications such as Blackwood’s Magazine, the Strand Magazine, and Punch. In the theatre there were 7912 dramas submitted for licensing from 1912 to 1921 (and more performed without licence in private clubs).38 This book addresses only British literature partly in order to maintain a practical scope. In addition, though, public discourse about humour in Britain during the conflict played a role in shaping national identity that makes the British context especially significant. A sense that humour is central to Britishness is in fact an element of national identity (or stereotype) that persists. Presenting research into humorous literature of the Great War regularly prompts the suggestion that the use of humour in war literature may be a characteristically British phenomenon. Writers in other nations did of course produce humorous perspectives on the conflict, for example combatants from many nations created trench newspapers, including French, German, Australian and New Zealander servicemen.39 Future studies could valuably compare the role of humour in different cultural contexts during the war, and how public discourse in different nations did or did not relate humour to senses of national identity.

36  Reilly. 1978. English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography. London: George Prior Publishers, p. xviii. 37  Maunder, p. xxxvii; Adrian Hunter. 2007. The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, p. 6. 38   John Johnston. 1990. The Lord Chamberlain’s Blue Pencil. London: Hodder & Stoughton, p. 278; L. J. Collins. 1994. The Function of Theatre Entertainment in the First World War, 1914–1918. Royal Holloway, University of London, pp. 508–13. 39  Fuller, pp. 11, 19–20, 175; Seal, p. ix.

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Chapter 2 of this monograph, ‘Humour and Britishness during the Great War’, details how humour was represented in the British press before and during the conflict as being a praiseworthy British trait, and one that in the wartime context would help to defeat enemy nations. These claims, particularly as they relate to the idea that humour aids endurance, often refer to or chime with a style of humour very much like that outlined above. Namely, humour that encouraged amusement as a minor feeling where a larger, stronger emotion might be expected. Public discourse about a particular kind of ‘British humour’ during the war and the actual humorous representations of conflict experience that were published thus reflected and mutually reinforced each other. The term ‘British humour’ as it appears in this monograph is used in a way that reflects understandings of humour and national identity at the time of the conflict, with the caveat that these understandings were particular and often propagandistic. Chapter 3, ‘The Domestication of Death’, explores some relatively rare examples of death in the conflict being addressed in humorous works. The texts discussed, published in contrasting contexts and belonging to distinct genres, are Barrie’s A Well-Remembered Voice (first performed June 1918), and limericks and nonsense rhymes about death and injury that servicemen printed in trench newspapers. Both Barrie’s play and the soldiers’ poems render death in the war in ways that make it appear less extraordinary and less extreme, bringing it into familiar or more quotidian contexts. Chapter 4, ‘Class and Social Structure’, explains how different humorous texts examine how the war could alter the roles of and interactions between members of different classes, in some instances with alterations to class structure themselves turned into sources for the creation of humour. Evidence from censorship reports suggests that more serious treatment of changes to power may not have been permissible. In this sense humour made potentially controversial areas safe enough to be aired publicly. The key texts are John Galsworthy’s The Foundations (1917), George Bernard Shaw’s The Inca of Perusalem (1915) and Augustus Does His Bit (1917), and Gertrude Jennings’ Poached Eggs and Pearls (1916) and No Servants (1917). Chapter 5, ‘War and the Depiction of Gender’ describes how, similarly to the effect of humour on the depiction of social class, the humorous treatment of gender roles during the conflict regularly creates a sense of reassurance. By inviting amusement, the texts mitigate anxieties surrounding adjustments to gendered behaviour, encouraging the calm acceptance of change. The war’s impact comes across as a comic disruption rather than

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being seriously challenging. The focal texts are Sewell Collins’ The Conscienceless Objector (1916), A.  A. Milne’s The Boy Comes Home: A Comedy in One Act (1918), Barrie’s The New Word (1915), and Fryniwyd (Winifred) Tennyson Jesse and Harold Marsh Harwood’s Billeted: A Comedy in Three Acts (1917). Evelyn Sharp’s short story ‘The Patriot’s Day’ (1916), with its portrayal of panic about the war as a male trait, is also included as a partial exception to the pattern of reassurance, though even here the story’s humour has a tempering effect on Sharp’s critical lens. Chapter 6, ‘The War in the Domestic Sphere’, demonstrates how authors’ humorous treatment of domesticity has the effect of creating pictures of the conflict in which it appears diminished in scale, or belittled. This takes place, first, through a comic focus on small aspects of everyday life—as in stories such as Richard Dark’s ‘Poultry and the War’ (1915), May Edginton’s ‘War-Workers’ (1917), and Winifred Graham’s ‘The Ballunatics’ (1918). Second, a belittling effect emerges from the comic framing of the life in the war zone within domestic contexts, as in the poems ‘Rats’ (published anonymously in the B.E.F. Times in 1916) and Joseph Lee’s ‘Macfarlane’s Dug-Out’ (1916). Chapter 7, ‘Parody and Pop Culture in Trench Newspapers’, elucidates how familiarity was central to the humour in trench newspapers, particularly in the form of parody. The authors of these periodicals relied on humour that filtered war experiences through well-known, well-loved texts and characters, framing the conflict in highly familiar cultural contexts. In doing so they present a version of the war that could be assimilated into and understood within existing reference points, generating a sense of it being manageable rather than extraordinary or extreme. Chapter 8, ‘Short-Fiction and Service-Author Heroes’, centres on narratives by servicemen that were based on their own experiences, and that were published in both professionally produced periodicals and trench newspapers. In these narratives, an amused attitude in response to any and all circumstances of war is portrayed as being in itself heroic. Within the texts this takes the form of privileging amused insouciance above other attitudes or other expressions of feeling. In adopting these perspectives, service-authors display the epitome of the kind of stoical ‘British’ humour that was privileged during the conflict. The chapters are divided by theme and subject, but there are regularly areas of crossover between them. Humorous representations of servicemen, for example, regularly imply that the ability to maintain a sense of humour was one answer to the question of what constitutes laudable

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masculinity—and this implication is present even when masculinity is not the ostensible focus of the text at hand. The theme of domesticity is similarly ubiquitous. That these two subjects—domesticity and humour as a desirable attitude—are prominent and recurring is telling. In a large body of First World War literature, amusement is privileged over stronger, negative emotions, and familiar domestic reference points frame the depiction of the conflict rather than blasted alien landscapes.

References Anon. 1915. Battalion Limerick. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, August. ———. 1916. Military definitions. The red feather: The regimental magazine of the 6th (Service) Battalion of the Duke of Cornwall’s light infantry. 1 March, pp. 134–136. ———. 1917. Fiction, rev. of No Man’s Land by Sapper. Spectator, 18 August. Berlant, Lauren, and Sianne Ngai. 2017. Comedy has issues. Critical Inquiry 43: 233–249. Campbell, James. 2005. Interpreting the war. In The Cambridge companion to the literature of the first world war, ed. Vincent Sherry, 261–279. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Collins, L.  J. 1994. The function of theatre entertainment in the first world war, 1914–1918. Royal Holloway, University of London. Das, Santanu. 2013. Reframing first world war poetry: An introduction. In The Cambridge companion to the poetry of the first world war, ed. Santanu Das, 3–34. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Einhaus, Ann-Marie. 2013. The short story and the first world war. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Einhaus, Ann-Marie, and Katherine Baxter. 2017. Introduction. In The Edinburgh companion to the first world war and the arts, ed. Ann-Marie Einhaus and Katherine Baxter, 1–12. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. F. S. B. 1917. Alice in Membland. Ye Gas Shell, October, 27–28. Freud, Sigmund. 1905. Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. Trans. Strachey, James. London: Hogarth Press. 1960. Fuller, J. G. 1990. Troop morale and popular culture in the British and dominion armies 1914–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gardner, Brian, ed. 1964. Up the line to death: The war poets 1914–1918. London: Methuen. Geisler, Fay, and Hannelore Weber. 2010. Harm that does not hurt: Humour in coping with self-threat. Motivation and Emotion 34: 446–456. Gibson, Wilfrid W. 1916. Mad. In Battle, 16. London: Elkin Mathews.

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Gordon Keown, Anna. 1919. Reported missing. In War Verse, 245. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company. Hay, Ian. 1916. In the trenches—an off-day. In The First Hundred Thousand: Being the unofficial chronicle of a unit of ‘K (1)’, 200–213. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Heller, Joseph. 1962. Catch-22, 1994. London: Vintage. Hunter, Adrian. 2007. The Cambridge introduction to the short story in English. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Johnston, John. 1990. The Lord Chamberlain’s blue pencil. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Kant, Immanuel. 1790. Critique of the power of judgment. Trans. Guyer, Paul, and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 2000. Kendall, Tim. 2013. Poetry of the first world war: An anthology. Oxford: Oxford UP. Korte, Barbara, and Ann-Marie Einhaus, eds. 2007. Penguin book of first world war short stories. London: Penguin. Kubly, Jenna. J. M. Barrie and world war I. In Humor, entertainment, and popular culture during world war I, ed. Clémentine Tholas-Disset and Karen Ritzenhoff, 197–208. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kugler, Lisa, and Christof Kuhbandner. 2015. That’s not funny!—but it should be: Effects of humorous emotion regulation on emotional experience and memory. Frontiers in Psychology 6. Le Naour, Jean-Yves. 2001. Laughter and tears in the great war: The need for laughter/the guilt of humour. Journal of European Studies 31: 265–275. Londré, Hardison. Felicia. The range of laughter: First person reports from entertainers of the over there theatre league. In Humor, entertainment, and popular culture during world war I, ed. Clémentine Tholas-Disset and Karen Ritzenhoff, 169–179. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Maunder, Andrew, ed. 2011. British literature of world war I: The short story and the novella. London: Pickering & Chatto. Morreall, John. 2009. Comic relief: A comprehensive philosophy of humour. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Motion, Andrew, ed. 2003. First world war poems. London: Faber & Faber. Mullen, John. 2015. ‘You Can’t help laughing, can you?’ Humor and symbolic empowerment in British music hall song during the great war. In Humor, entertainment, and popular culture during world war I, ed. Clémentine Tholas-­ Disset and Karen Ritzenhoff, 181–196. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly feelings, 2007. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Noakes, Vivien, ed. 2006. Voices of silence: The alternative book of first world war poetry. Stroud: Sutton Publishing. Owen, Wilfred. 1917. Apologia pro Poemate Meo. In Poetry of the first world war: An anthology, ed. Tim Kendall, 160–161. Oxford: Oxford UP. 2013.

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Parkhill, K.A., et al. 2011. Laughing it off? Humour, affect and emotion work in communities living with nuclear risk. The British Journal of Sociology 62: 324–346. Purseigle, Pierre. 2001. Mirroring societies at war: Pictorial humour in the British and French popular press during the first world war. Journal of European Studies 31: 289–328. Rawlinson, Mark, ed. 2014. First world war plays. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Reilly, Catherine, ed. 1978. English poetry of the first world war: A bibliography. London: George Prior Publishers. ———, ed. 1981. Scars upon my heart. London: Virago. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1818/19, 1844. The world as will and representation: Volume II. Trans. Payne, E. F. J. New York: Dover Publications. 1966. Seal, Graham. 2013. The soldiers’ press: Trench journals in the first world war. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shaftesbury, Anthony, Third Earl of. 1709. Sensus Communis; an essay on the freedom of wit and humour. In Characteristicks of men, manners, opinions, times, 37–94. Liberty Fund: Indianapolis. 2001. Smith, Angela, and Krista Cowman, eds. 2017. Landscapes and voices of the great war. New York: Routledge. Spencer, Herbert. 1860. On the physiology of laughter. Macmillan’s Magazine, pp. 395–402. Stephen, Martin, ed. 1988. Poems of the first world war: Never such innocence. London: Everyman. Stevenson, Randall. 2013. Literature and the great war 1914–1918. Oxford: Oxford UP. Strick, Madelijn, et  al. 2009. Finding comfort in a joke: Consolatory effects of humor through cognitive distraction. Emotion 9: 574–578. Tate, Trudi, ed. 1995. Women, men and the great war: An anthology of stories. Manchester: Manchester UP. ———, ed. 1998. Modernism, history and the first world war. Manchester: Manchester UP. Tholas-Disset, Clémentine, and Karen Ritzenhoff. 2015. Introduction. In Humor, entertainment, and popular culture during world war I, 1–22. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Thomas, F. S. [A Respectable H.M. Cat.] A Cat of War. Punch, 10 March, p. 186. Todman, Dan. 2005. The great war, myth and memory. London: Bloomsbury. Valerie, Holman, and Debra Kelly. 2001. Introduction. War in the twentieth century: The functioning of humour in cultural representation. Journal of European Studies 31: 247–263. Walter, George, ed. 2006. The penguin book of first world war poetry. London: Penguin. Winter, Jay. 1995. Sites of memory, sites of mourning: The great war in European cultural history. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

CHAPTER 2

Humour and Britishness During the Great War: ‘If a man brings us a joke, we require to be satisfied of its durability’ Walter Emanuel. 1901. A Note on British Wit and Humour. The Pall Mall Magazine

An advertisement printed in Punch in 1915 provides a stark example of quite how markedly humour could serve the ends of nationalism, propaganda, and marketing during the Great War. Entitled ‘Our soldiers love a laugh’, the advert states that ‘“Punch” enshrines the spirit of national humour’; that ‘A man who laughs well fights well’; and that ‘Everyone who makes a solider laugh—whether at the Front or at home—is helping to win his country’s battles’. With an anxious attempt to smooth over class difference, readers are urged to send the magazine ‘not only to your Officer friends but to the men as well. For “Punch” is not a class journal, but a national journal’.1 Though this presentation of soldiery humour for marketing purposes is particularly blunt, Punch was not alone in such discussion of British ­servicemen’s senses of humour. A piece in the Academy and Literature makes the claim that there is cause for British optimism regarding the outcome of the conflict because British soldiers are possessed of a sense of

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 Anon. 1915. Our Soldiers Love a Laugh. Punch, 27 January, p. x.

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humour and cheerfulness. The German military, the article claims, ‘may have strength, but may never have faith or humour’, with ‘the Prussian’ lack of humour contributing to ‘the menace of militarism’. Letters from British ‘Tommies’ are said to offer glimpses of France’s ‘agony’, but these glimpses are followed by ‘some escapade full of light-hearted fun, or some happy jest’.2 The claim is that ‘our irreverent Tommies’ treat the ‘German machine’ as ‘a figure of fun’. The enemy had assumed that, for example, ‘the famous howitzers’ would not only be physically destructive but would ‘put terror into the hearts of all against whom they were used’, and the writer acknowledges that such machines might be expected to be ‘the objects of the supremest awe’. Yet, ‘unfortunately for Germany, the British army is not easily awed’ and instead of writing of howitzers ‘with fear and with wonder, our soldiers refer to them flippantly as “Black Marias”, as “Jack Johnsons”, and even as “coal-boxes”’.3 The press in fact regularly iterated the idea that humour could be a war-­ winning, or at least militarily useful, quality. In 1916 the Strand Magazine made the claim that the British prefer ‘to laugh at our enemies rather than to hate them’, and the work of Alfred Leete, is said to be ‘so essentially English’ because of his ‘unruffled good humour’. Where ‘the Frenchman stabs, or the German would clumsily belabour, the Englishman merely derides’.4 Leete was a graphic artist for a number of periodicals and designed the famous recruitment advertisement featuring Lord Kitchener, so was a good choice for this kind of propaganda. The following year saw the publication of a feature on the sketchbook of a Walter Kirby, a serving lieutenant, which emphasises the psychological benefits of peculiarly British ‘humorous proclivities’ and the ‘“incurable levity” of the British’— qualities that are said to ‘astonish’ Britain’s allies.5 There is a claim that soldiers’ ‘grim’ humour is ‘a synonym for a sense of proportion’, and that the armies of Mons, Ypres, and the Somme ‘jested their way through every obstacle’ (original emphasis). Kirby is quoted confirming that ‘if troubles were taken seriously’ at the front, then ‘one would very quickly go under’.6 G. L. Stampa, meanwhile, an artist and illustrator who was a long-­standing 2  F. A. Clement. 1914. Humour in the Trenches. The Academy and Literature, 24 October, pp. 395–96. 3  Clement, p. 396. 4  Anon. 1916. The Artist with the Funny Ideas. Strand 51: 96–102. 5  F.  W. Martindale. 1917. A Sketch-Book from the Trenches: The Work of Lieutenant Walter Kirby. Strand 53: 222–27 (p. 222). 6  Martindale, pp. 222–23.

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contributor to Punch is described in a 1917 article as creating work that would ‘perplex’ ‘foreigner[s]’.7 Similarly, the Manchester Guardian in January 1916 printed the claim that ‘No better evidence can be found of our army’s unquenchable spirit’ than the ‘clay-stained fl ­ imsies’ that constituted the largely humorous trench press.8 The stereotype that British servicemen in particular had an amused, light-hearted attitude does in fact appear to have been one that at least some soldiers could themselves embrace.9 The March 1917 editorial in the Very Light, the trench newspaper of the 19th Battalion, Manchester Regiment, reminded readers that ‘you have a wonderful advantage over Fritz. He hasn’t any sense of humour. You have’. Likewise, the March 1916 edition of the Whizz-Bang, the paper of the 6th (Territorial) Battalion, Durham Light Infantry, urged readers to ‘keep smiling’, since ‘it is a smile that bodes no good to the Hun. It is the smile that is more terrifying than wrath, more deadly than rebuke’.10 Variations on such ideas were common, such as a suggestion that the war had actually helped to expose a national sense of humour. An article about the work of the well-known cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather that appeared in the Strand in 1916 stated that his work captured the ‘phlegm and his high spirits’, the ‘imperturbable good humour’ of ‘Tommy Atkins’. The artist’s ‘unique capacity for humour would have remained unknown’, the Strand’s commenter claims, had it not been for the conflict. The war had prompted the ‘revelation of the supposedly glum and stolid British as brimful of invincible gaiety’, and it would require long-acquaintance with the ‘British temperament’, to ‘reconcile our incorrigible surface levity with that tenacity of purpose which lies beneath’. Bairnsfather’s drawings are paid the ‘high compliment’ of being ‘almost meaningless’ to ‘foreign  Anon. 1917. The Humorous Urchin. Strand 53: 276–80 (p. 278).  Anon. 1916. Trench Papers. The Manchester Guardian, 28 January, p. 12. 9  Trench newspapers often, in contrast, ridiculed other accounts of the military that featured in home-front papers. The Whizz-Bang, for instance, asked whether the Daily Mail staff ‘would not be doing more good filling sandbags in France than emptying windbags in Fleet Street’. See: Anon. 1916. Things We Want to Know. Whizz-Bang, January, p.  4. However, editors were also delighted when their publications were acknowledged in professionally run periodicals. See: Graham Seal. 2013. The Soldiers’ Press: Trench Journals in the First World War. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 123–29. All trench newspapers cited are accessed from the database ‘Trench Journals and Unit Magazines of the First World War’, unless otherwise stated. See: http://www.proquest.com/products-services/trench.html. 10  Anon. 1917. Editorial. Very Light, March, p.  2; Anon. 1916. Keep Smiling. WhizzBang, March. 7 8

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eyes’. The claim is that ‘only the British mind, and more particularly the English (though Captain Bairnsfather is a Scot)’ can ‘relish’ his humour fully. Bairnsfather’s drawings capture ‘the inherent humour of the situation’ and ‘breathe the very spirit of Tommy in the trenches’, appealing to ‘us’ for this reason and remaining ‘unintelligible’ to ‘foreigner[s]’.11 The hasty and parenthetical elision of Britishness, Englishness, and Scottishness here almost recognises that the line drawn between ‘us’ and ‘foreigner[s]’ may not be entirely straight—with the author of the article fluently ignoring the possibility of differences between Scottishness and Englishness and merging them together. In the version of national identity articulated through discourse about humour during the war, it was assumed that people in the UK could be brought together under a single, Anglocentric and war-supporting umbrella. The move made in this discourse, which is not frictionless, is to present humorousness as a praiseworthy national characteristic in which those not at the front could engage in order to connect with those who were.12 Different identities within the UK, whether national, local, or class based, are breezily swept away and readers are invited to join soldiers in a homogenous national community of laughers. They are encouraged to see themselves and servicemen as belonging to a single, amused group. Such appeals to or creation of a sense of shared belonging is strikingly apparent on the surface of discussions about humour. Editors seem to have been highly conscious of constructing an identity around humour and of being able to present their publications as patriotic in doing so. The Punch advert above is a good example, but similarly explicit framing of humour as national glue appeared elsewhere, such as a 1916 Strand article about Leonard Raven-Hill. Raven-Hill was an artist and contributor to the Strand itself, to Punch, and to multiple other publications. He is said to specialize in ‘the humours of life in the Services’, such that ‘a million or two’ citizens might fully appreciate his humour after signing-up, but at the same time, ‘humour is to be found in the drawing-room and slum not less than in barracks or on board His Majesty’s ships’.13

 Anon. 1916. A Great Humorist of the Trenches. Strand 51: 317–32 (pp. 317, 318, 319).  The Era in fact suggested that embracing comic performance was a way to mimic servicemen’s cheerfulness: Anon. 1914. The Playgoer’s Duty. The Era, 14 October, p. 9. 13  Anon. 1916. Raven-Hill: Humorist. Strand 52: 679–83 (pp. 680–83). 11 12

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The Roots of British Wartime Humour In contrast to wartime discussions of humour, there are instances before the conflict of less nationalistic and propagandistic accounts of Britishness and humour. The writer and humourist Walter Emanuel, for example, in a 1901 piece entitled ‘British Wit and Humour’ (the Pall Mall Magazine) uses a joke made at the expense of a British sentry by an enemy soldier in the Boer War as an example of military humour. ‘On the 1 January of this year, a British sentry was taken prisoner and a notice in Dutch was left behind, “Wishing you a Happy New Sentry”’. Emanuel comments that ‘the flash of humour must have done good to all except the sentry’.14 It was thus possible before the outbreak of the Great War for British commentators to acknowledge a sense of humour among members of other nations—even when those nations were considered enemies. These kinds of observations seemingly disappeared with the outbreak of the conflict. The discourse on Britishness and humour that was present during the war did however have roots in views expressed before 1914. The wartime discourse extended and gave a more explicitly propagandistic and patriotic slant to existing beliefs about humorousness as a national characteristic. Discourse that suggested humour could function as a national adhesive was thus especially prominent during the conflict, but it was not new. The Strand had previously couched humour in national terms, for example in 1901 printing an article on the premise that different styles of humour exist in different nations. A selection of American artists were given the opportunity to illustrate the same comic situation as a group of British artists and to reflect on differences between British and American humour.15 Similar was an article entitled ‘Are We Funnier Than Our Grandfathers?’ (1906), which responded to an allegation by a ‘famous American humorist’ that ‘the English’ had ‘far less and a slower perception of a joke than they had fifty years ago’. (The accusation was made with references to ‘the mechanical flippancies of Punch’ and to musical comedy). Keen to defend British periodicals as well as the nation’s sense of humour, the editors reacted ‘to this sweeping denunciation’ by asking ‘England’s leading mirth-makers’ for their views on the matter. Such

14  Walter Emanuel. 1901. A Note on British Wit and Humour. Pall Mall Magazine 24: 421–23 (p. 421). 15  Anon. 1909. Style in American Comic Art. Strand 38: 445–50.

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figures as Jerome K. Jerome, George Bernard Shaw, and Punch editor Owen Seaman all testified that British humour was not waning.16 A flurry of descriptions of British humour was in addition prompted by the publication in 1911 of an English translation of Henri Bergson’s theory of humour.17 Several reviewers judged that Bergson’s work was shaped by a specifically French outlook and did not account for a unique kind of British humour—a kind of humour that reviewers implied was more nuanced than the humour enjoyed by other nations. Bringing together Britain’s constituent nations, the Athenaeum’s commentator argued that Bergson did not address the kinds of comedy central to ‘English, Irish, and Scotch psychology’, nations in which the ‘laugh boisterous’, ‘humorous and akin to tears’, and ‘internal’, s/he claimed were central. The British, according to this model, laugh at themselves—at ‘our own superabundant energy’—rather than at those who are weaker. There is ‘a lightness’ in ‘laughter of the purer kind’.18 John Palmer of the Saturday Review, meanwhile, proposed that ‘French laughter is criticism […] with none of the half-tones of sentiment and sympathy which are in English laughter’. Palmer asserts that in French literature tragedy and comedy are separate, whilst Shakespeare, for example, ‘filled his tragedies with clowns’.19 The view that British humour could be distinguished as superior because it left space for other, less pleasurable feelings alongside amusement also appears in Emanuel’s Pall Mall Magazine article. Emanuel comments ‘There was a time when a man could avoid wit and humour […] when they were confined to the comic papers’, but ‘nowadays one is never quite safe’, with wit and humour present even on the battlefield. He comments that there is a ‘vogue’ for giving ‘humorous accounts of tragic occurrences’, such as events ‘revealed in the police courts’. Humour appears ‘side by side with a column giving an account of the burial of some great statesman’.20 Such 16  Anon. 1906. Are We Funnier Than Our Grandfathers? Strand 32: 740–44 (pp.  740, 740–44). The author’s use of ‘England’ and ‘English’ seems to be an example of using these terms to mean ‘Britain’ and ‘British’, a common usage at the time. 17  Unsurprisingly given the wartime context, Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious was also met with criticism when it was translated in English in 1916. Norman Kiell. 1988. Freud Without Hindsight: Reviews of His Work, 1893–1939. Madison: International Universities Press, p. 341. 18  Anon. 1912. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Athenaeum, 6 January, p. 5. 19  John Palmer. 1912. The Laughter of the French. The Saturday Review, 23 March, 362–63 (p. 362). 20  Emanuel, p. 421.

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comments anticipate the ways in which British humour during the war was associated with hardship, as in several of the examples already quoted. What these discussions indicate is that before the Great War began, the notion of the existence of ‘British humour’ was a means of circling and contributing to the propagation of a particular sense of Britishness. More than that, in fact, it was an opportunity to imagine Britishness as superior, as the identity of a desirable, privileged club. The endeavour to attribute specific qualities to an imagined national characteristic or literary trope says less about the reality of a homogenous ‘British humour’ than it does about a desire for such an entity to exist. The role of the press in shaping a sense of national identity was famously identified in Benedict Anderson’s 1983 work, and the ideas of national humour that were articulated before and during the conflict were part of the identity that was fostered in nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers.21 George Newnes in particular, founder of many popular titles including the Strand, has been credited with constructing a perception of ‘a reading community brought together by a shared national identity and the enjoyment of culturally and morally healthy literature’.22 Several theories indicate that humour has a role in establishing or cementing in-groups and out-groups, so it is not surprising that discourse on humour contributed so prominently to the nation-building of the press in the early twentieth century. Thomas Hobbes is known for his influential superiority theory of laughter, in particular his suggestion that laughter arises ‘by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof [one] suddenly applaud[s]’ oneself’. He also however identified a kind of laughter that is ‘without offence’. This is mirth ‘at absurdities and infirmities  As an example of the press’ relationship with national identity from the time, W. T. Stead, a key figure in New Journalism, claimed in 1886 that the ‘telegraph and the printing-press have converted Great Britain into one vast agora, or assembly of the whole community’. Qtd. in Andrew Griffiths. 2015. The New Journalism, the New Imperialism and the Fiction of Empire, 1870–1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p.  2. Benedict Anderson’s work (1983. Imagined Communities. London: New Left Books) has been corrected by other scholars since its publication. For instance Anderson’s concept of national identity ‘assumes that no one is purposefully or even accidentally excluded from the emerging cohesion’ (Anthony Marx. 2002. The Nation-State and Its Exclusions. Political Science Quarterly 117: 103–126 [p. 105]). 22  Beth Palmer. 2016. Prose. In The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, ed. King, Andrew, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, 138–50. London: Routledge, p. 143. 21

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abstracted from persons’, which takes place ‘where all the company may laugh together’.23 Here, feelings of inclusion and belonging are important to the generation of mirth. In this respect Hobbes touches on an idea supported in modern psychological studies of humour. People are more likely to laugh when in a group, while one study even found that, when played recordings of strangers laughing together and of friends laughing together, ‘people reliably distinguished friends from strangers with an accuracy of 53–67%’. Shared laughter may constitute a ‘means of signalling cooperative relationships’.24 The authors of these studies are concerned with shared, face-to-face laughter, as is Hobbes. The strong association between amusement and group bonds that they identify is nevertheless relevant to the discussions of national humour that appeared before and during the Great War. The interest in national humour during the nineteenth and early twentieth century has behind it an awareness, conscious or otherwise, of humour’s link to social cohesion. One of the most unambiguous manifestations of this in much of the discourse on humour outlined above is a strong and repeated association between British humour and the in-­ joke. Commentators are at pains to convey that those who are not British do not ‘get’ the joke. The capacity of humour to signal a group bond was thus taken up and magnified to encompass, in the abstract, a bond that applied to the nation. This raises the question of who was included and excluded from such humour. The version of ‘British’ humour discussed in the press before and during the Great War is exclusive. The privileged group of laughers that articulations of British humour creates does not take account of members of other nations, as well as skimming over the variety of identities that existed within Britain. The outgroup in the articles is at points explicitly imagined to consist of Britain’s antagonists in war—specifically the German nation, imagined to be homogenous—and at points explicitly to consist of the French nation, again imagined as homogenous. In cases where a particular outgroup is not named, the implied outgroup is ‘anyone not 23  Thomas Hobbes. 1651. Leviathan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996, p. 38; Hobbes. 1650. Human Nature. In The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin, 21–108. Oxford: Oxford UP. 1994, p. 55. 24  Robert Provine and Kenneth Fischer. 1989. Laughing, Smiling, and Talking: Relation to Sleeping and Social Context in Humans. Ethology 83: 295–305; Gregory Bryant et al. 2016. Detecting affiliation in Colaughter Across 24 Societies. PNAS 113: 4682–87 (p. 4682).

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British’, with Britishness implicitly defined as including those who are willing to accept the kind of patriotism espoused. Kate Macdonald explains that professionally produced wartime periodicals as a whole contributed to cultural mobilisation, which included didactic suggestions of how readers ‘could conduct themselves’.25 It would be ‘impossible to find a popular wartime periodical whose fiction or features encouraged soldiers to desert, workers to strike, or those serving in war industries to refuse to contribute any more to the war effort killing their friends and relatives’.26 Such Britishness does not take account of variations in regional or class identity, different senses of national identity within Britain, or indeed any other characteristic with which British citizens may identify. ‘English’ and ‘England’ are at points used to mean ‘British’ and ‘Britain’, a common usage at the time, but one that reveals a failure to recognise potential differences between the nation’s constituent countries and regions. This is particularly striking given the relationship between Britain and Ireland during the war. There is a large degree of Anglocentricism here. As in the article on Bairnsfather, the sense is regularly that the humour articulated belongs to ‘only the British mind, and more particularly the English’.27 Many of the examples of humorous literature included in this monograph, in their treatment for instance of how the conflict affected senses of class or gender identity, go slightly against the grain of homogenising discourse on British humour. While these texts acknowledge some differences that existed between British people, however, their humour tends to work in the direction of ironing such differences out. The humorous treatment of diversity and disruption during the conflict generally results in narrative resolutions in which harmony is privileged. Societal and political norms are at points challenged, but without taking on any serious damage. Reflecting the propagandistic elements of the descriptions of British humour outlined above, moreover, humorous depictions of war experiences also regularly act as a corrective, encouraging views and behaviour that supported the war effort.

25  Kate Macdonald. 2017. Popular Periodicals: Wartime Newspapers, Magazines and Journals. In The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts, ed. Baxter, Catherine, and Ann-Marie Einhaus, 245–60. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, p. 257. 26  Macdonald, p. 257. 27  Anon. 1916. A Great Humorist, pp. 317, 318, 319.

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‘Jokes Should Be Taxed in England like Opium in China’: The Britishness of Humour as a Minor Feeling28 It was this context—with ‘British’ humour functioning in public discourse as an exclusive, patriotic, and homogenising national characteristic—in which Wyndham Lewis ‘blasted’ a certain kind of ‘English’ humour in his famous 1914 polemic. This was humour that he categorised as a ‘Quack English drug for stupidity and sleepiness. | Arch enemy of the REAL, conventionalizing’.29 Likewise, the 1915 ‘War Number’ of Blast saw Lewis proclaim that ‘Jokes’ should be ‘taxed in England like opium in China’.30 Describing ‘the famous English “sense of Humour”’ as a worse enemy than Germany, he promotes instead another, more critical kind of humour that it required bravery to adopt. If the ‘Englishman’ had ‘sufficient moral courage’ to ‘make use of his Grin’, he would ‘find life much more difficult’, but also be a ‘finer fellow’.31 It is the former kind of humour that Lewis discusses—the ‘conventionalizing’, soporific kind—that more closely resembles the humour found in the majority of the texts discussed in this monograph. Humour in these texts can be understood as having similar characteristics to the minor feelings that Sianne Ngai identifies. As with texts that encourage other minor feelings, the amusement proffered by the humorous Great War literature that is discussed exists where other, stronger, and more politically-orientated feelings might be expected. The ‘British humour’ described in the national press and identified in Lewis’ comments as the ‘English “sense of humour”’ encourages resilience during and endurance of the conflict (with this imagined as being especially true among servicemen). It is not something that would give rise to a change in political circumstance. The style of humour described as British in the national periodicals of the time invites and promotes an emotional and political tameness. This is manifested in much of the large body of  Wyndham Lewis. 1915. Constantinople Our Star. Blast 2: 11.  Lewis. 1914. Manifesto. Blast 1: 11–45 (pp. 17, 26). 30  Lewis. 1915. Constantinople, p. 11. 31  Lewis. 1915. Constantinople, p. 11. Lewis in fact developed his own perspective on shell shock according to which he conflated shell shock with emotional repression itself. Lewis in addition saw such repression as being reflected in servicemen’s humorous approaches to the Great War—see the final section of this chapter. Emily Anderson. 2022. An ‘unseemly joke’: Service-author Stories and Wyndham Lewis’s Blasting and Bombardiering (1937). Journal of Modern Literature 45: 34–51 (pp. 43–44). 28 29

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First World War literature that invited amusement rather than ‘grander’ feelings, in doing so thwarting the kind of dissatisfaction and dissent that such grander feelings could provoke. Britain during the First World War is a context in which humour and amusement were particularly significant and particularly loaded, as Lewis’ comments and the other commentaries on British humour suggest. The point here is not to claim that all of the authors discussed consciously made use of humour to placate Britain’s wartime populace. Nor is the intention to judge authors who may have deliberately used humour to boost morale or to create propagandistic pictures of war experiences. Rather, the point is to shed light on the culture of literary humour that developed at a specific, geographical and historical moment: to trace the roots of this culture, to examine how it encouraged amusement, and to uncover how humour contributed to the representation of war experiences.

The Boundaries of British Humour There is no exact way to judge when something is funny, and when something—a book, a verbal joke, a television programme—might give rise to feelings other than or as well as amusement. Similarly, there is often no clear line in the literary humour of the Great War between the ‘opiating’ version of British humour to which Lewis alludes and humorous perspectives on the conflict that are more critical or that evoke experiences such as sadness or pathos. The case studies below illuminate the nature of British, taming humour in representations of the conflict by exploring where the boundaries of such humour may be. These texts push at the tonal tipping point of humour, testing the limits of attempts to maintain a humorous, sardonic outlook when representing experiences of the war. They ask how disturbing a portrayal of war experience can be before it may no longer invite amusement. Acting as foils to the majority of the texts explored in this book, the case studies illustrate by contrast how extensively humour was used across other literary contexts to create patriotic, war-supporting, politically and emotionally tame pictures of the conflict. The texts include two works by Saki—the pen name of Hector Hugo Munro, whose dark humour and satire is still read today. These are ‘Birds on the Western Front’ (1915) and ‘The Square Egg’ (1915). They are read alongside two of Lewis’ stories entitled ‘Cantleman’s Spring-Mate’

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(1917) and ‘The French Poodle’ (1916, written 1915).32 Both authors were servicemen. The Saki stories appeared in the Westminster Gazette, which was owned by Newnes but was aimed at a narrower and more exclusive audience than the Strand.33 Lewis’ stories were published in the radical Little Review and the Egoist, both of which adopted some features of the popular, commercialised press, but which had fairly small readerships.34 Estimates for the circulation of the Little Review vary between 1500 and 3000, and the Egoist’s readership of approximately 750 in 1915 had reduced to about 400 by 1919.35 Lewis was born in Canada to an English mother and American father, and the Little Review was an American publication. However, Lewis wrote the story in the U.K., and it was published while he was serving in the British army, though fragments of the tale were begun in 1915, before he enlisted. Saki joined the forces shortly after the declaration of war, despite being officially overage to enlist. While serving he continued to write for the Bystander, Morning Post, Outlook, and Westminster Gazette, as well as contributing to the Fortnightly Gazette of the 22nd Battalion Royal Fusiliers.36 He was killed by a sniper in 1916 at Battle of the Ancre. Elements of Saki’s and Lewis’ narratives reflect the tame British humour that characterises other service-author stories. These are stories by servicemen, many of which were propagandistic and which often depict soldiers as heroically nonchalant in upholding humorous perspective on war 32  The spelling of ‘Cantleman’ varies. I use ‘Cantleman’ for consistency. See: Richard Cork. 2011. Lewis, [Percy] Wyndham [1882–1957]. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34517. Accessed 17 March 2017; Ann-Marie Einhaus. 2015. Lewis and War. In Wyndham Lewis: A Critical Guide, ed. Ga ̨siorek, Andrzej, and Nathan Waddell, 49–63. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, p. 52. 33  A. J. A. Morris. 2015. Reporting the First World War: Charles Repington, The Times and the Great War. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, p. 17. The editor of the Westminster Gazette, J. A. Spender in fact complained in 1925 about New Journalism for its supposed exploitation of low taste. See: Jean Chalaby. 1998. The Invention of Journalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 187. 34  Mark Morrisson. 2001. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905–1920. Madison: Uni of Wisconsin Press, p. 85. 35  Andrew Thacker. 2012. General Introduction: ‘Magazines, Magazines, Magazines!’. In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II, North America 1894–1960, ed. Brooker, Peter, and Andrew Thacker, 1–27. Oxford: Oxford UP, p.  17; Morrisson, pp. 149, 104; Paul Edwards. 2004. Futurism, Literature and the Market. In The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, ed. Marcus, Laura, and Peter Nicholls, 132–51. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, p. 145. 36  Sandie Byrne. 2007. The Unbearable Saki. Oxford: Oxford UP.

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experiences. The attitude that stories in this genre privilege is one according to which the war may involve horrific experiences, but this should not affect the sense of humour of gallant British soldiers. Lewis’ and Saki’s borrowings from the service-author genre give the impression that they are negotiating with the idealised version of military emotional aloofness, that they are attempting with varying degrees of discomfort to square the insouciance of the genre with actual military experience. Overall, the humour in each of the texts helps to create discomforting pictures of war experience, emphasising the conflict’s strangeness rather than its tameness.37 This is more evident in Lewis’ stories than in Saki’s. There is a more even balance between amusement and pathos in Saki’s works, whereas Lewis’ tone is more squarely centred on the disturbing. Even so, as well as extending his earlier association with patriotic senses of Britishness, Saki’s war stories at points see his typically dark humour becoming unsettling. In Lewis’ war stories, the use of drastically black, misanthropic satire reflects his condemnation of gentle, reassuring humour in his ‘Blasts’ and ‘Blesses’ of 1914 and 1915. The narrator of Saki’s ‘Birds on the Western Front’ gives a lengthy description of his wartime environment via reference to the birdlife of the war zone.38 He begins with the claim that despite the ‘enormous economic dislocation which the war operations have caused’, there is ‘little corresponding disturbance in the bird life of the same districts’. He goes on to detail the behaviour of specific birds with the manner of an amateur ornithologist.39 In this respect the story shares a theme with jokes in the trench press about spotting birdlife while at the front. The Wipers Times for instance features comic disputes between correspondents over who

37  ‘Cantleman’s Spring Mate’ in fact caused the issue of the Little Review in which it appeared to be ‘seized by the U.S. Post Office’ due to its ‘salacious’ character. Geoff Gilbert. 1998. Shellshock, Anti-Semitism, and the Agency of the Avant-Garde. In Wyndham Lewis and the Art of Modern War, ed. David Peters Corbett, 78–98. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, p. 86. 38  For details of how Saki’s work relates to uses of comic anthropomorphism and dehumanisation in trench newspapers, see: Emily Anderson. 2022. ‘There are Many Strange Animals that will Repay […] study’: Humour and Identity in Trench Newspaper Natural Histories. Literature and History 31: 55–56. 39  Saki. 1915. Birds on the Western Front. The Westminster Gazette. In The Complete Works of Saki, 545–48. London: Bodley Head. 1987, p. 545.

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heard the first cuckoo of spring.40 Saki also includes the information that ‘Rats and mice have mobilised and swarmed into the fighting line, and there has been a partial mobilization of owls’ who ‘thin out their numbers’. There are, however, ‘always sufficient mice left over to populate one’s dug-out and make a parade-ground […] of one’s face at night’.41 Two magpies have built their nest ‘in the battered remnants of a poplar’. The ‘effect’ suggested ‘an archiepiscopal enthronement taking place in the ruined remains of Melrose Abbey’.42 There are not as many rooks, crows, and ravens as ‘might be expected in a war zone’, but those present are not disturbed by the noise of the guns. They ‘might have been in some peaceful English meadow’, and ‘future generations of small boys, employed in scaring rooks away […] will have to invent something in the way of super-­ frightfulness to achieve their purpose’.43 The skylark also remains undiscouraged: ‘when nothing seemed alive except a few wary waterlogged sentries and many scuttling rats’, the lark would ‘dash skyward and pour forth a song of ecstatic jubilation that sounded horribly forced and insincere’.44 The text becomes unreservedly solemn in a description of a ‘stricken wood’, in which there is a ‘wee hen-chaffinch’ that is ‘too scared to feed’ its young but ‘too loyal to desert’. The narrator imagines the wounded wondering ‘why anything having wings and no pressing reason for remaining should have chosen to stay in such a place’.45 The subject of game birds nevertheless gains a more wry note at the piece’s close. The narrator comments that English gamekeepers have ‘evolved a sort of religion as to the nervous debility of even the hardiest game birds’, and that the birds of the war zone prove the idea wrong. The narrator notes that, ‘Gamekeepers who are serving with the colours might seize the opportunity to indulge in a little useful nature study’.46 ‘The Square Egg’ opens with a similar account of the war environment, before the narrator describes an encounter with a ‘purse-sapper’—a man who wants a loan. Saki begins with the assertion that ‘Assuredly a badger 40  See, for example: Anon. 1916. Correspondence. Wipers Times, 20 March. In Christopher Westhorp, ed. The Wipers Times: The Famous First World War Trench Newspaper, 45. London: Bloomsbury. 2013. 41  Saki. Birds, p. 545. 42  Saki. Birds, p. 546. 43  Saki. Birds, p. 546. 44  Saki. Birds, p. 547. 45  Saki. Birds, p. 547. 46  Saki. Birds, p. 548.

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is the animal that one most resembles in this trench warfare, that drab-­ coated creature of the twilight’. He adds that it is ‘a pity’ that ‘we shall never know’ what ‘the badger thinks about life’, but that ‘it is difficult enough to know what one thinks about, oneself, in the trenches’. Such things as ‘Parliament, taxes, social gatherings, economies, and expenditure, and all the […] horrors of civilization seem immeasurably remote, and the war itself seems almost as distant and unreal’.47 Not least strange is soldiers’ lack of interest in the enemy. Saki writes that while ‘It would not be advisable to forget […] that they are there’, ‘one speculates little as to whether they are drinking warm soup and eating sausage’.48 Much more pressing a concern is ‘the mud that at times engulfs you as cheese engulfs a cheesemite [sic]’. Again, this passage uses animals as a reference point. Saki’s speaker notes ‘In Zoological Gardens one has gazed at an elk or bison loitering at its pleasure more than knee-deep in a quagmire of greasy mud, and one has wondered what it would feel like’, adding dryly, ‘One knows now’.49 He goes on to describe estaminets (cafés that provided food and alcohol), and to recount a chance meeting in one such establishment. A stranger tells him a tale of having selectively bred hens to lay square eggs, and of how the war forced him to leave the business to an aunt who refuses to send him any profits. He asks for a loan, to which request the narrator responds by saying he will go and find the farm and, should the tale prove to be true, marry the aunt.50 Saki’s personas in these two stories are presented as amateur soldiers, as civilians in uniform, with much of the humour emerging from the description of wartime life via the incongruous use of civilian reference points. ‘Birds on the Western Front’ invites amusement from the speaker’s interpretation of his surroundings via reference to what seems to be a hobby from civilian life—ornithology—contrasting the images of desolation and barrenness that are so often associated with the landscape of the First World War. (Though there is a large degree of pathos created too). ‘The Square Egg’ also plays on contrasts between the war zone and civilian frames of reference. Saki incorporates zoos, chicken houses, taverns, rules for children, and the trappings of civil and social life such as government 47  Saki. 1915. The Square Egg. The Westminster Gazette. In Complete Works, 539–44 (p. 539). 48  Saki. Egg, p. 540. 49  Saki. Egg, p. 540. 50  Saki. Egg, pp. 542–44.

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and parties.51 The adoption of amused outlooks on bleak surroundings in Saki’s stories—the persona of an amateur ornithologist, the whimsical, ‘badger’s eye’ take on mud—produce narrators who keep their distance from military life, maintaining the outlook they would have in peacetime rather than immersing themselves in a military identity. The stories in this respect reflect the British, taming, familiarising, and war-supporting style of humour described above. In ‘Birds on the Western Front’, the narrator’s partially humorous commitment to bird watching suggests a wry, near-heroic steadfastness. The self-assured flippancy of the speaker in ‘The Square Egg’ indicates a similar refusal to allow war experience to have a negative emotional impact. These narrators have much in common with the attitude of amused detachment that service-author stories present as the ideal masculine emotional response to military experience. Saki’s use of this ideal reflects the kind of patriotism found in his wider oeuvre. In Sandie Byrne’s words, his writing revolves around ‘England, in an idealized form; the British Empire, as a symbol of an idealized code of behaviour and beliefs; and the feral ephebe, the sleek young male killer in his several forms’.52 His wartime stories are no exception. The advice to ‘English gamekeepers’ in ‘Birds on the Western Front’ especially merges detached humorousness with national idealisation. It links the landscape of the front with the kind of romanticised, rural English setting in which gamekeepers might be found. Saki’s wartime stories give some insight into what it would look like for his pre-war, youthful, and mischievous protagonists to enlist: they are critical of the effect of war on the natural world, but do not question its necessity, and crucially maintain some sardonicism. A. A. Milne, comparing his and other Edwardian writers’ humour to that of Saki, wondered if Saki’s ‘strange boyish insensitiveness’ gave him ‘an unfair start in the pursuit of laughter’, and this is certainly present in remarks such as the reference to gamekeepers.53 Saki’s response to the war has been criticised as conservative in its patriotism, as moving away from the mischievous subversion seen in his earlier writing. His wartime narrators do, though, have elements of the rebellious humour associated with his pre-war protagonists. (Equally, the earlier characters anticipate Saki’s support for the British war effort). Brian Gibson suggests that the invasion novel When William Came (1913) is  Saki. Egg, pp. 541, 539.  Byrne, p. 15. 53  Byrne, p. 138. 51 52

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‘much less funny’ than Saki’s previous work, introducing a new seriousness to Saki’s writing. He associates the novel with Munro (in his view the conservative, ‘jingoistic’ author) ‘disavowing’ the ‘dissident’ character types prominent in earlier stories (which characters Gibson aligns with the rebellious persona Saki).54 The two wartime narratives discussed do have a patriotic slant, but this does not entirely obscure the insouciance both narrators also exhibit. They show reflections of the mischievous, dandy-like characters for which Saki was popular in advance of 1914—this is true of the narrator in ‘The Square Egg’ especially. Saki’s wartime stories also however encompass darker subjects and tones than those found in many texts that make use of taming, British humour in portraying the war. This includes the service-author stories that Saki’s works resemble. As has been seen, the concluding advice in ‘Birds on the Western Front’ that gamekeepers should learn from their war experience is full of wry facetiousness—Milne was right when he characterised Saki’s humour as a whole as having boyish insensitivity. Yet the wartime story is also imbued with pathos and with sensitivity as well. There is an impression of the speaker clinging to his gentle, entirely un-warlike peacetime hobby. He seems to be more suited to bird watching than he is to warfare. His intense interest in birds suggests great sensitivity to, and love of, nature that is at odds with his status as a soldier who is required to enact and endure violence. The description of the birds attempting to continue with their lives serves as a metaphor for the narrator’s situation. He is a civilian in the midst of war just as the birds are in a war zone that has transformed their usual environment. There is an element of (in) famous Fussellian irony here. Paul Fussell writes that ‘Recourse to the pastoral’ is a means of ‘fully gauging the calamities of the Great War and imaginatively protecting oneself against them’. Pastoral reference ‘is a way of invoking a code to hint by antithesis at the indescribable’.55 Edmund Blunden’s poem ‘The Guard’s Mistake’ (included in Undertones of War, 1928) in fact parallels Saki’s reference to gamekeepers in its description of a sentry who is ‘gamekeeper-like, | The cowman now turned warrior’.56 Likewise, the description of the mud in ‘The Square Egg’ involves a 54  Brian Gibson. 2014. Reading Saki: The Fiction of H. H. Munro. Jefferson: McFarland & Co., pp. 8–9, 19. 55  Paul Fussell. 1975. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford UP, p. 235. 56  Edmund Blunden. 1928. The Guard’s Mistake. Undertones of War, 196. London: Penguin.

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humorous, but also unsettling, incongruity between the narrator’s light, whimsical tenor and the object of description. When ‘bit[ing] muddy biscuits with muddy teeth, then at least you are in a position to understand thoroughly what it feels like to wallow—on the other hand the bison’s idea of pleasure becomes more and more incomprehensible’.57 The pictures created are of speakers who are insouciant and resilient but also pathetic and bemused, surrounded by circumstances that are absurd, strange, distorted versions of normal life. Saki’s wartime depiction of the relationship between man and nature in particular creates a mixture of amusement and disquiet, with zoomorphised servicemen having a blackly comical aspect. Saki’s descriptions often involve playfulness with the lines between human and animal. In ‘Birds on the Western Front’ there is a ‘mobilization’ of owls, a ‘pair of crows’ engage ‘in hot combat with a pair of sparrow hawks’ directly underneath ‘two Allied planes’ fighting enemy aircraft, and ‘waterlogged sentries’ are placed in the same category as ‘scuttling rats’.58 In ‘The Square Egg’, the narrator explicitly likens himself to a badger, a ‘cheesemite’, and an ‘elk or bison’. Servicemen make ‘trench-to-billet migration[s]’, and become in the ‘khaki-clad, be-putteed throng’ of their ‘own kind’ as ‘unobtrusive as a green caterpillar on a green cabbage leaf’. The ‘purse-­ sapper’ has ‘the aspect of a foraging crow’.59 The intrusion of the animal world on the human here in part resembles Saki’s darkly comic depiction of animals in his pre-1914 stories. ‘Gabriel Ernest’ (1909) is a good example. The homoerotic, eponymous hero, who is a werewolf, eventually eats several children as part of the story’s final, black joke. In ‘Sredni Vashtar’ (1911), meanwhile, a young boy’s polecat-ferret kills (or is imagined to kill) his owner’s overbearing guardian. ‘Dogged’ (1899), ‘Tobermory’ (1909), and ‘The Music on the Hill’ (1911) all also involve reminders that humans would do well to be respectful of nature and animals in particular.60 The representation of the relationships between humans and animals in Saki’s war stories do however take on a different slant. Whereas many of the pre-war narratives see human characters becoming the victims of a  Saki. Egg, p. 540.  Saki. Birds, pp. 545–47. 59  Saki. Egg, p. 541. 60  Saki. 1909. Gabriel Ernest. Westminster Gazette, 29 May. In Complete Works, 63–69; Saki. 1911. Sredni Vashtar. In Complete Works, 136–40; Saki. 1899. Dogged. St. Paul’s Magazine, 18 February; Saki. 1909. Tobermory. Westminster Gazette, 27 November. In Complete Works, 108–15; Saki. 1911. The Music on the Hill. In Complete Works, pp. 161–66. 57 58

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powerful natural world, the wartime stories depict elements of dehumanisation, as well as humans laying waste to what would otherwise be a thriving natural landscape. Saki’s stories thus mix darker, more disturbing and even critical perspectives with the kind of humorous tropes—the amused, insouciant serviceman-­narrator—that are a staple of tame, war-supporting British humour. In presenting this mixture of tones, the narratives push at the boundaries both of what might be considered amusing and of what might be included under the category of the tame strand of British humour. Readers are invited to empathise with and emulate the narrators’ wry points of view, with these invitations to amusement taking on the emotional and political tameness of minor feelings—endurance is emphasised over resistance. And yet at the same time, the darker aspects of the stories introduce aesthetic emotions that go beyond the entirely tame. In invoking a sense of sadness or pathos the narratives sit a little outside the emotional invitations made in the majority of texts based in tame British humour. Far away from such humour are Lewis’ ‘Cantleman’s Spring Mate’ and ‘The French Poodle’. These present incredibly dark perspectives on war experience. Again drawing parallels between humans and animals, these stories attribute a much greater degree of dehumanisation to the war than is found in Saki’s works. In doing so they create a grotesque satire that invites disquiet or disgust more than it does amusement. The former is the tale of an officer, Cantleman. Away from the front at the start of the narrative, he notes the effects of springtime: ‘The horses considered the mares immensely appetising masses of quivering flesh’, and the ‘sow […] gave a sharp grunt of sex-hunger’. This behaviour is presented with dark comedy, since this ‘mutual admiration society’ showed ‘their fondness for their neighbour in an embarrassing way’—they ‘killed and ate them’.61 Cantleman is reminded of a ‘girl’, Stella, whom he has seen in the village: ‘the animal fullness of the child-bearing hips’, an ‘eye as innocent as the bird or the beast’, the ‘way in which Stella’s hips stood out […] had the amplitude and flatness of a mare’.62 He presents her with a ring and then ‘devour[s]’ his ‘mate’. After he has returned to the front, he ignores a letter informing him that she is pregnant.63

 Lewis. 1917. Cantleman’s Spring-Mate. The Little Review 4: 8–14 (p. 8).  Lewis. Cantleman, pp. 9, 12. 63  Lewis. Cantleman, pp. 13–14. 61 62

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‘The French Poodle’ centres on a servicemen, Rob Cairn, recounting events that took place while he was on ‘a long sick-leave’ between ‘July and October 1915’.64 The speaker takes on an airy, near-insouciant tone in narrating Cairn’s story. There is a reflection here of the aloof, stiff-upper-­ lip attitude that characterises other service-author stories. Cairn was ‘full of anxiety, the result of his ill-health and the shock he had received at finding himself blown into the air’. When ‘the shell came he had not bounded gracefully and coldly up, but with a clumsy dismay’. Neither his ‘spirit’ nor his ‘body’ could ‘disport [themselves] genially in independence of surrounding objects and ideas’. This was despite him being ‘a big red-­headed chap that those who measure men by redness and by size would have considered fairly imposing as a physical specimen’.65 Cairn reads a lot of natural history, finding that the ‘lives of animals seemed to have a great fascination’.66 One of ‘the principal notions to which he became attached at this time was that human beings suffered in every way from the absence of animal life around them’.67 Cairn buys a French poodle from a lady in Guildford. He was ‘very shy with it at first […] conscious of not being its first love’. Eventually it became ‘excessively fond of it’ and even ‘abused a man in the street who insulted it’.68 When the time comes for Cairn to prepare to return to the front, he is asked as a joke whether he will take the poodle with him: ‘“No, he might get shot there”, Cairn replied, screwing up his nose, and recovering his good humour, apparently. “I must give him away”’.69 The detachment in the style of narration reveals something of the different, complex facets of how Lewis thought about the connections between the war, emotion, Britishness, and humour. Overall the narrative is deeply critical in its satire, though Lewis’ slight echoing of service-authors’ stiff-upper lip foreshadows a kind of admiration or pride that he would later show for this attitude in his war memoir Blasting and Bombardiering (1937). (Parts of the memoir mimic the service-author style in a way that is both satirical and appreciative.)70 Despite creating elements of emotional detachment, Lewis overall does not restrain himself from embracing some disturbing imagery in his war  Lewis. 1916. The French Poodle. The Egoist 3: 39–41 (p. 39).  Lewis. Poodle, p. 39. 66  Lewis. Poodle, p. 40. 67  Lewis. Poodle, p. 40. 68  Lewis. Poodle, p. 40. 69  Lewis. Poodle, p. 41. 70  See Anderson, Unseemly joke. 64 65

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stories. The stories have a strong satirical element in the Juvenalian sense, with his depictions bringing out beast-like qualities in his characters. Cantleman, Stella, and Cairn all resemble animals in ways that are potentially disquieting. When Cairn’s illness relapses for example, and it emerges that he has himself shot his dog, he ‘lurched round, face downwards, […] and sobbed in a deep howling way’.71 The texts participate in a long-­ standing literary tradition of putting human-animal reversals to satirical purposes. Interested in how humour can stem from ‘the inversion of the animal-human coupling’, Simon Critchley suggests that such comic reversals sit on a spectrum from ‘Horatian urbanity’ to ‘Juvenalian disgust’, with humour of the latter kind suggesting the ‘disturbing animality of the human’.72 Critchley cites as examples the work of Jonathan Swift, George Orwell, Franz Kafka, and Will Self.73 Lewis’ work lies at the bleakest end of this spectrum. Cairn in ‘The French Poodle’ believes that separation from animals makes humans become more bestial themselves: ‘When there are no patient backs of beasts to receive their blows men turn them more towards their fellows’. Cairn wonders ‘whether the savagery we arrive at were better than the savagery we come from’.74 The way in which he becomes dog-like after shooting his pet is a comment on the dehumanising effects of war, and in particular on the impact that shell shock could have. Cantleman, meanwhile, as Einhaus identifies, is ‘part of the animal kingdom, in which war constitutes not an aberration, but merely a parallel to the merciless natural environment that he observes in the English countryside’.75 Stella is ‘a sort of Whizzbang. With a treachery worthy of a Hun, Nature tempted him towards her’. Cantleman decides to ‘throw [her] back […] where she was discharged from’—as soldiers did bombs— since ‘all women were contaminated with Nature’s hostile power and might be treated as spies or enemies’.76 When Cantleman ‘beat[s] a German’s brains out’, he does so ‘with the same impartial malignity’ with which he treated ‘his Spring-mate’. He is said to have ‘no adequate realization of the extent to which, evidently, the death of a Hun was to the advantage of the animal world’.77  Lewis. Poodle, p. 41.  Simon Critchley. 2002. On Humour. London: Routledge, pp. 34, 36. 73  Critchley, pp. 30–31. 74  Lewis. Poodle, p. 40. 75  Einhaus. Lewis and War, p. 53. 76  Lewis. Cantleman, p. 13. 77  Lewis. Cantleman, p. 14. 71 72

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Laughter in ‘Cantleman’s Spring Mate’ is explicitly linked to the animal. It becomes associated with a fluidity between human and beast which comes about as a result of the war. Cantleman laughs when contemplating his animalistic attraction to Stella. When he described her hips as having ‘animal fullness’ and her eyes as those of a ‘bird or beast’, he ‘laughed without shame or pleasure’. He also laughs when feeling ‘miserable’ at the thought of his own death, which he sees as a desire to stay amongst animals: ‘he again laughed, a similar sound to that that the girl had caused.= For what was he unhappy about? He wanted to remain amongst his fellow insects and beasts’. Elsewhere, he compares his own laugh to ‘the pig’s grunt and the bird’s cough’ and, meeting Stella for the last time, ‘grinned’ in the direction of a nightingale, and ‘once more turned to the devouring of his mate’.78 The association between Cantleman’s laughter and animality reflects ideas about the nature of laughter and warfare that Lewis developed elsewhere. He saw shell shock as an effect of emotional repression, and suggested that such repression resulted in a kind of dehumanised physicality. For him, it brought out the animality or ‘thing-like’ nature of humans—a thing-like quality which is also found at the heart of his theorisation of humour. Lewis proposes in The Meaning of the Wild Body (1927) that amusement arises from ‘observations of a thing behaving like a person’. He wrote that all ‘men are necessarily comic’, because ‘they are all things, or physical bodies, behaving as persons’.79 The interrelations Lewis made between shell shock, emotional repression, and physicality is expressed in the manic grins—or as Lewis says of English humour, the ‘fixed’ grins—of those depicted in his artwork. This includes ‘Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro’ (1921), in which Lewis appears with a caricatured, teeth-­ baring smile.80 Cantleman’s laughter resembles these grins. His laughter occurs at moments in the story when he is most dehumanised as a result of his war experience, as expressed through the connection of his laughter with animals. Lewis’ representations of the war in ‘Cantleman’ and ‘French Poodle’ contrast, as do Saki’s two stories to a lesser degree, the patriotic, optimistic, tame humour found in the majority of humorous war literature discussed in this book. Lewis’ satire is sufficiently bleak that it has something  Lewis. Cantleman, pp. 9, 10, 13.  Lewis. 1927. The Meaning of the Wild Body. In The Wild Body, 156–62. London: Penguin. 2004, pp. 156, 158. 80  Anderson. Unseemly joke, pp. 43–44. 78 79

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in common with what Lisa Colletta describes as ‘Modernist dark humor’. This is a style ‘haunted by a sense of anxiety and powerlessness, marked by feelings of loss and uncertainty and shot through with the trauma of violence’, and while her interest is in the works of British novelists between the wars, Lewis’ earlier narratives overlap with the quality of satire that Colletta identifies. It ‘offers none of the optimism of convention social satire that suggests correction of vice will lead to the reintegration of the individual into society’.81 Lewis’ works suggest that the effects of the conflict are sufficiently dramatic that they sit outside what it was possible for pre-existing conventions of satire to capture or correct. These are texts that do frame the war as an event that precipitates a deep shift. The works are thus part of a cultural strand that correlated two impacts of the war. The first of these impacts is a sense that the war’s effects were so extensive that a satirical depiction cannot give the impression of redemption being possible—since the damage was too deep. The second is a sense, which is associated with modernist productions, that the conflict was sufficiently impactful that it demanded movement away from pre-war forms of art and literature. The kind of tame literary humour that forms the basis of this book is far removed especially from the ‘high’ modernism associated with formally experimental writers and artists of the period. Indeed, part of what makes these humorous works tame is their familiarity: the fact that they continue in the literary traditions that had been established before the outbreak of the conflict. The emotional provocations in Lewis’ work also act as a foil to tamer forms of wartime humour—and this is true of Saki’s work as well, though to a lesser degree. As has been seen, Lewis’ stories foster disturbance and disquiet: they do not sit at a point on the spectrum of satire where audiences are invited to take amusement at the folly presented. Saki’s narratives do in contrast have significant overlaps with tamer humorous representations of war experiences. In particular, Saki’s narrators channel the cool sangfroid displayed by many of the heroes in the humorous, propagandistic service-author stories that were published in the British national press. Even so, a large degree of pathos complicates and tempers Saki’s humour, particularly in his treatment of servicemen’s interactions with animals and the natural world. These stories are difficult to interpolate into a picture of the war as simply requiring a mixture of an amused 81  Lisa Colletta. 2003. Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–2.

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outlook and an inner grit. The stories by Saki and Lewis considered thus present alternative manifestations of British wartime humour from those that form the centre of this monograph. The specific kind of ‘British’ literary humour on which this monograph focuses was popular, appearing across multiple genres and in multiple texts. It was war-supporting, and it continued in the same vein as strands of literary humour that had also been popular before the start of the war. It also invited a kind of amusement which overlaps with the nature and effects of what Ngai terms minor feelings. This humour appears where other, stronger emotions might be expected; it is canonically minor; and it associated with endurance rather than definitive action. It is this style of humour that was represented in the British press before and during the conflict as being a praiseworthy national characteristic that would help to win the war. Whether or not taking such an amused outlook can be identified as a British trait that existed in reality, this outlook was propagandistically represented as such, making British literature of the Great War an especially important context in which to explore the significance of humour.

References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined communities. London: New Left Books. Anderson, Emily. 2022a. ‘There are many strange animals that will repay […] study’: Humour and identity in trench newspaper natural histories. Literature and History 31: 55–56. ———. 2022b. An ‘unseemly joke’: Service-author stories and Wyndham Lewis’s Blasting and Bombardiering (1937). Journal of Modern Literature 45: 34–51. Anon. 1906. Are We Funnier Than Our Grandfathers? Strand 32: 740–744. ———. 1909. Style in American comic art. Strand 38: 445–450. ———. 1912. Laughter: An essay on the meaning of the comic. Athenaeum, 6 January, p. 5. ———. 1914. The Playgoer’s duty. The Era, 14 October, p. 9. ———. 1915. Our soldiers love a laugh. Punch, 27 January, p. x. ———. 1916a. The artist with the funny ideas. Strand 51: 96–102. ———. 1916b. Keep smiling. Whizz-Bang, March. ———. 1916c. Correspondence. Wipers times, 20 March. In The wipers times: The famous first world war trench newspaper, ed. Christopher Westhorp, vol. 45, 2013. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 1916d. Raven-Hill: Humorist. Strand 52: 679–683. ———. 1916e. Things we want to know. Whizz-Bang, January, p. 4. ———. 1916f. Trench papers. The Manchester Guardian, 28 January, p. 12.

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———. 1916g. A great humorist of the trenches. Strand 51: 317–332. ———. 1917a. Editorial. Very Light, March, p. 2. ———. 1917b. The humorous urchin. Strand 53: 276–280. Blunden, Edmund. 1928. The Guard’s mistake. In Undertones of war, 196. London: Penguin. Bryant, Gregory, et al. 2016. Detecting affiliation in Colaughter across 24 societies. PNAS 113: 4682–4687. Byrne, Sandie. 2007. The unbearable Saki. Oxford: Oxford UP. Chalaby, Jean. 1998. The invention of journalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Clement, F.A. 1914. Humour in the trenches. The Academy and Literature, 24 October, pp. 395–396. Colletta, Lisa. 2003. Dark humor and social satire in the modern British novel. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cork, Richard. 2011. Lewis, [Percy] Wyndham [1882–1957]. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34517. Accessed 17 March 2017. Critchley, Simon. 2002. On humour. London: Routledge. Edwards, Paul. 2004. Futurism, literature and the market. In The Cambridge history of twentieth-century English literature, ed. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls, 132–151. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Einhaus, Ann-Marie. 2015. Lewis and war. In Wyndham Lewis: A critical guide, ed. Andrzej Ga ̨siorek and Nathan Waddell, 49–63. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Emanuel, Walter. 1901. A note on British wit and humour. Pall Mall Magazine 24: 421–423. Fussell, Paul. 1975. The great war and modern memory. Oxford: Oxford UP. Gibson, Brian. 2014. Reading Saki: The fiction of H.  H. Munro. Jefferson: McFarland & Co. Gilbert, Geoff. 1998. Shellshock, anti-Semitism, and the Agency of the Avant-­ Garde. In Wyndham Lewis and the art of modern war, ed. David Peters Corbett, 78–98. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Griffiths, Andrew. 2015. The new journalism, the new imperialism and the fiction of empire, 1870–1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hobbes, Thomas. 1650. Human nature. In The elements of law natural and politic, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin, 21–108. Oxford: Oxford UP. 1994. ———. 1651. Leviathan. Oxford: Oxford UP. 1996. Kiell, Norman. 1988. Freud without hindsight: Reviews of his work, 1893–1939. Madison: International Universities Press. Lewis, Wyndham. 1914. Manifesto. Blast 1: 11–45. ———. 1915. Constantinople our star. Blast 2: 11. ———. 1916. The French poodle. The Egoist 3: 39–41. ———. 1917. Cantleman’s spring-mate. The Little Review 4: 8–14. ———. 1927. The meaning of the wild body. In The wild body, 156–162. London: Penguin. 2004.

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Macdonald, Kate. 2017. Popular periodicals: Wartime newspapers, magazines and journals. In The Edinburgh companion to the first world war and the arts, ed. Catherine Baxter and Ann-Marie Einhaus, 245–260. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Martindale, F. W. 1917. A sketch-book from the trenches: The work of lieutenant Walter Kirby. Strand 53: 222–227. Marx, Anthony. 2002. The nation-state and its exclusions. Political Science Quarterly 117: 103–126. Morris, A. J. A. 2015. Reporting the first world war: Charles Repington, the times and the great war. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Morrisson, Mark. 2001. The public face of modernism: Little magazines, audiences, and reception 1905–1920. Madison: Uni of Wisconsin Press. Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly feelings, 2007. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Palmer, John. 1912. The laughter of the French. The Saturday Review, 23 March, pp. 362–363. Palmer, Beth. 2016. Prose. In The Routledge handbook to nineteenth-century British periodicals and newspapers, ed. Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, 138–150. London: Routledge. Provine, Robert, and Kenneth Fischer. 1989. Laughing, smiling, and talking: Relation to sleeping and social context in humans. Ethology 83: 295–305. Saki. 1899. Dogged. St. Paul’s Magazine. 18 February. ———. 1909a. Gabriel Ernest. Westminster Gazette, 29 May. In The complete works of Saki, 63–69. London: Bodley Head. ———. 1909b. Tobermory. Westminster Gazette, 27 November. In The complete works of Saki, 108–115. London: Bodley Head. ———. 1911a. The music on the hill. In The complete works of Saki, 161–166. London: Bodley Head. ———. 1911b. Sredni Vashtar. In The complete works of Saki, 136–140. London: Bodley Head. ———. 1915a. Birds on the western front. In The complete works of Saki, 545–548. London: Bodley Head. 1987. ———. 1915b. The square egg. In Complete works, 539–544. Seal, Graham. 2013. The soldiers’ press: Trench journals in the first world war. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Thacker, Andrew. 2012. General introduction: ‘Magazines, Magazines, Magazines!’. In The Oxford critical and cultural history of modernist magazines: Volume II, North America 1894–1960, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 1–27. Oxford: Oxford UP.

CHAPTER 3

The Domestication of Death: ‘There are lots of jokes’ J. M. Barrie, A Well-Remembered Voice (1918)

It is relatively rare to encounter humorous depictions or discussions of death published at the time of the Great War. The majority of popular wartime humour uses a large range of other subjects—disturbances to domestic life, disruption to class and gender identities in various forms— to invite readers’ amusement. In this sense, they continue from the kinds of topics that were treated humorously in a variety of genres before the outbreak of the war. However saturated with humour wartime literature was, death in the conflict for the most part remained too sensitive a subject to be depicted humorously. There were however exceptions, remarkable because they go against the grain, and these are the focus of this chapter. J. M. Barrie’s play A Well-Remembered Voice (Well-Remembered) was first performed at Wyndham’s Theatre, London, in June 1918.1 The play is a moving reflection on a father’s grief and loneliness following the death of his young son at the front. It is made more remarkable for having been performed at a moment towards the end of the conflict when casualties

1  J. M. Barrie. 1918. A Well-Remembered Voice. In Echoes of the War, 143–88. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1920.

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were many and grief was widespread. Estimates of casualty figures vary, but approximately 12 per cent of those who served in the British forces were killed during the Great War, with over 700,000 fatalities in total by the conflict’s end.2 In Well-Remembered, amusement becomes a non-­ verbal means of mourning the dead and of staying connected to them. Barrie not only reassures audiences that it was still acceptable to take pleasure in humour despite the enormity of the conflict, but also that the young men who had died would actively encourage the living to laugh and to be cheerful. The play recommends an emotional tameness that develops over the course of the dialogue. At the opening of the drama, the father’s grief is manifested as a kind of extreme melancholy or depression, but when he receives a visit from his son’s ghost, their conversation brings him to a less extreme emotional position. With his son’s persuasion, which includes reminding his father how it feels to laugh, he agrees by the end of the play that he will at least attempt to remain cheerful. Entangled with this development of emotional tameness, and helping to bring it about, is a process through which death is domesticated. Barrie’s attention to the domestic setting and to civilian experiences takes death away from the overseas space of the front line and into a familiar, cosy, safe setting. Deceased servicemen were not repatriated, but in the drama a dead son is able to return to his family home, in the process refamiliarising his father with well-loved domestic objects, roles, and behaviour from which the father his become estranged as a result of his loss. The play reads as a sincere offer of comfort to those who, like Barrie himself, had been bereaved because of the war. Equally, though, the suggestion that the dead wanted the living to carry on with their lives, and to do so smilingly, has a quietist edge. This latter reading may be particularly apparent to modern audiences more used to the idea that distressing feelings should be examined rather than pushed aside. The form of mourning that the play recommends—stoical continuance with life as cheerfully as possible—precludes the kinds of larger feelings such as anger or disillusion which may be more likely to accompany serious protest about the loss of loved ones. This preference for endurance over 2  Jay Winter. 1977. Britain’s ‘Lost Generation’ of the First World War. Population Studies 31: 449–66 (p. 450); Antoine Prost. 2014. War Losses. In. 1914–1918–online: International Encyclopaedia of the First World War, ed. Daniel, Ute, et al. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15463/ ie1418.10271. Accessed 15 June 2022.

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subversion is reflected in the censor’s reception of the drama. Plays intended for public performance had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office so they could be assessed by censors (or ‘readers’) before receiving a licence to be staged. In his report on Barrie’s play, the censor expresses unease with the premise of showing a soldier’s ghost on stage, but is convinced that the treatment of the subject makes the play a safe, and even desirable, candidate for performance.3 The subjectmatter of Barrie’s play is perhaps the most remarkable and close to the bone of all wartime dramas, but he was also one of the era’s most popular playwrights at a moment when the appetite was for light and nonprovocative drama. The soothingly humorous approach he takes to death in Well-Remembered reflects this. The texts discussed in the second part of this chapter in many ways present a sharp contrast to Barrie’s play—they differ in tone, audience, and publishing and literary context. They too are nevertheless exceptions to the wartime tendency to avoid humorous treatment of death. The texts are limericks and parodies of nursery rhymes that were printed in trench newspapers, and they regularly depicted violent death and injury. These short poems were printed in trench newspapers that were produced by a variety of different units, including the Lead-Swinger, the newspaper of the Third West Riding Field Ambulance; the Wipers Times (12th Battalion, The Sherwood Foresters); the Gambardier, the newspaper of the Royal Garrison Artillery at Landguard Fort; the Helm, produced by the crew of H.M.S. Britannia; Fag Ends, the publication of a Royal Navy Signals Unit; the Dump (23rd Division of the British Army); the Hangar Herald (produced by a logistics unit of the Army Service Corps); and the Gehenna Gazette (Inns of Court Officer Training Corps). The poems ‘get away with’ their humorous treatment of violent death and injury in the war zone because they are written by and predominantly 3  Steve Nicholson. 2003. The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Volume One: 1900–1932. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, pp. 3–4. The licensing system may actually have facilitated alternative dramas being staged. See: Richard Findlater. 1967. Banned: A Review of Theatrical Censorship in Britain. London: Macgibbon & Kee, p. 130. The reader G. S. Street was at times progressive in his views. See: Nicholson. 2004. Getting Away With It: Strategies and Practice, 1902–1944. In The Lord Chamberlain Regrets … A History of British Theatre Censorship, ed. Shellard, Dominic, Steve Nicholson, and Miriam Handley, 57–130. London: British Library, p. 65. Nevertheless, plays would not be licensed if they were ‘indecent’, encouraged crime, impaired foreign relations, or would cause ‘a breach of the peace’. See: Nicholson. Getting Away, p. 63.

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for those in the military. As the range of units mentioned above indicates, trench newspapers were not written only by those who served in the trenches, and indeed some of these publications or editions of them were produced while men were still in training. Nevertheless, these are texts that were authored and produced by individuals who belonged to military society, who had enlisted on the understanding that being part of this society involved risks of injury and death. Because of this, they had the social licence necessary to make jokes about such risks. The proximity of the authors and primary readers of the poems to death means that they do not face the same sensitivities as would a civilian writing humorously about violence in war.4 As with many potentially sensitive, offensive, or traumatic subjects, it matters who tells the joke and who receives it. There is an etiquette according to which jokes should not be made about difficult or upsetting experiences, or about a certain identity, unless the joker has been through them personally or belongs to the identity in question. (This is an etiquette that, if broken, tends to be broken for shock effect, as in some performances by professional comedians). The overlap with Barrie’s play is that the poems take amusement as a legitimate aesthetic emotion in the representation of death and, in their own way, frame death to make it appear tamer. This is partly a result of the familiarity of the genre and the popularity of the literary tradition and publishing context to which the poems belong. Limericks and parodies of nursery rhymes were common in the popular comic periodicals of the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries and were often used to satirical effect. By continuing in this tradition, servicemen bring the subject of death into a context that was a familiar, established element of pre-war culture. Part of the joke of the poems is that violent death and injury on the battlefield stand in contrast to the playful, light world that is stereotypically associated with children’s literature. Though, equally, servicemen were perhaps picking up on the dark undertones in nursery rhymes and 4  Acceptance that those who experience violence may respond with humour continues in attitudes today. A good example is one of the more recent comedies to be set in wartime: Bluestone 42, a BBC sitcom about a bomb disposal squad serving in Afghanistan, which was written by Richard Hurst and James Cary and was shown between 2013 and 2015. Hurst explained in interview that when making the programme he defended certain humorous incidents depicted from accusations of insensitivity by pointing out that the military adviser to the series could confirm these had actually happened. See: Emily Anderson. 2021. unfinishing with Richard Hurst. Bomb disposal, sunglasses, and Miranda Hart. unfinishing. https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/ICfv2XQzusb. Accessed 14 August 2022.

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limericks that also make them strangely suitable for wartime adaptation. In any case, placing death into a familiar literary context, especially one associated with well-loved forms of children’s literature, deprives death of something of its awe. The second element of the poems’ emotional tameness is, similarly to Barrie’s play, brought about by humour itself. They are sufficiently dark to push the line between what is funny and what is not, yet they do not seek to provoke the grander emotions that the most famous poetry of the conflict tends to encourage. Any discomfort they do solicit in the darkness of their humour is ambiguous and non-cathartic, resistant to labelling. The truncated nature of their form contributes to this. The poems do not leave room for expansive, large emotion. As with Barrie’s drama, there is a socio-political question raised by their incitement of amusement over anger or fear. The poems are part of a genre that played a role in maintaining morale, actively contributing to servicemen’s ability to endure their circumstances. Servicemen’s limericks and nursery rhymes are not uncritical of death in the war zone, presenting it in a way that suggests its randomness and senselessness, and in their comic treatment of death answer back to solemn texts in which death is either glorified or lamented. Yet trench newspapers were permitted by military authorities, albeit subject to varying levels of censorship, suggesting that they were not sufficiently rebellious in content to alert suspicion. The benefits they had for morale, and hence the continuance of order, meant that any subversion was deemed negligible or overlooked.

‘What Did I Say About That Face?’ Death Comes Home in A Well-Remembered Voice5 The opening of Barrie’s Well-Remembered brings to the forefront the need of a bereaved parent to bring her deceased child home. It begins with a mother, Mrs. Don, in her home, attempting to contact her son, Dick, through a séance, reflecting the popularity that spiritualism had gained.6 The ending of the drama hints that Mrs. Don’s method of connecting with her son may have been more effective than it initially appears when all she receives from the séance is a cryptic message (‘Love bade me  Barrie. Well-Remembered. In Echoes, p. 143.  Jay Winter. 1995. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 54–55. 5 6

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welcome’). Mr. Don’s refusal to be involved in the séance seems however to have been validated when he is the person whom his son’s ghost chooses to visit.7 Mr. Don is confronted with his son’s spirit who, able to contact only one person, has chosen his father because Mr. Don grieves most keenly.8 The actor playing Dick does not physically appear; Mr. Don is the sole presence on stage for much of the action, emphasising his loss. He is a ‘lonely man’, and it is this that Dick’s humour counteracts.9 The play is a reflection on what both humour and good humour have to do with grief. Mr. Don asks his son to tell him ‘about the—the veil. I mean the veil that is drawn between the living and the—’, breaking off before Dick replies ‘The dead? Funny how you jib at that word’.10 Like Dick, Barrie is concerned with talking about the dead and with the ‘funniness’ (peculiarity, humorousness) of doing so. A good illustration of what is at stake here comes when Mr. Don tells his son about some mischief on the part of the family dog. Dick interjects ‘That dog will be the death of me’ and ‘His father shivers’.11 Dick’s comment, though not a linguistic mistake as such, has the quality of a Freudian slip. This is the kind of ‘slip of the tongue’ that Freud attributes to ‘interference by a half-suppressed idea that lies outside the intended context’, an ‘apparently casual utterance’ revealing thoughts that cannot ‘avoid unintentionally’ coming to light.12 Freud draws a parallel between such slips and humour, observing that they are sure to evoke ‘amusement’ and it is true that Dick’s comment has the quality of an inadvertent pun. It is a pun that is chilling for his father but potentially amusing to the audience, depending on the line’s delivery.13 The pun’s double meaning articulates a subtle aspect of mourning: Dick’s comment draws attention to a sense that, in grief, familiar, seemingly innocuous idioms could be coloured by loss. The moment adds to a broader impression in the play that unexpected reminders of death arise from that which is ostensibly commonplace and innocent, with grief endowing the apparently mundane or familiar with especial significance.  The message is a quotation from George Herbert’s ‘Love III’, published 1633.  Barrie. Well-Remembered. In Echoes, pp.  143–88. For a discussion of spiritualism, see: Winter. Sites, pp. 54–55. 9  Barrie. Well-Remembered. In Echoes, pp. 138–39. 10  Barrie. Well-Remembered. In Echoes, p. 146. 11  Barrie. Well-Remembered. In Echoes, p. 145. 12  Sigmund Freud. 1901. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Trans. Strachey, James. London: Hogarth Press. 1960, pp. 53, 83, 80. 13  Freud. Psychopathology, p. 94. 7 8

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This is seen, for example, in different characters’ responses to a set of fishing rods that belonged to Dick. Mrs. Don says to her husband, ‘I hope you don’t mind my keeping them in the studio […] They are sacred things to me’. Once alone, Mr. Don ‘stands fingering the fishing-rods tenderly’ and when Dick spots them, he enthusiastically recounts a catch he was particularly proud of, going on to confess that while at the front, he would pray ‘that [he] shouldn’t lose [his] right arm, because it would be so awkward for casting’.14 For the majority of the play, humour provides a connection between Mr. Don and his son, especially because it is presented as a specifically male aspect of mourning. When Dick reveals that ‘K.C.M.G.’, the nickname of a boy called Ockley who was a revered older schoolboy, means ‘Kindly Call Me God’, Mr. Don ‘flings back his head; so we know what Dick is doing. They are a hilarious pair’. His laughter disturbs Mrs. Don who, unable to see Dick, is ‘aggrieved’ by what she interprets as inappropriate amusement.15 The father and son’s laughter is rebellious and indecorous, uniting them against the misery more usually associated with mourning, and creating a picture of a joyous relationship that helps to explain why Mr. Don might be the parent most affected by Dick’s death.16 A commentator writing in 1932 observed that the drama ‘points to the different quality of the love of the mother from that of the father, and shows the survival of personality with affection undiminished’.17 Humour in the play suggests that there are ways of grieving that are particular to the specific relationship being mourned, especially in relation to male bonds. In this sense, the play answers Barrie’s 1915 drama The New Word, in which he asked how fathers and sons might loosen masculine emotional restraint in response to the war (see Chap. 5). Shared humour is put forward in Well-­ Remembered as a way for fathers and sons to show affection. Humour is also recommended as a means for the bereaved to respond to their loss. Dick demands that his father maintains his normal behaviour, in particular that he should keep up a cheerful demeanour. He informs his father that ‘[I]f you’re bright’, he will ‘get a good mark for it’, cheerfulness mysteriously providing a direct, beneficial link with the deceased. When Dick appears, he states ‘don’t be startled, or anything of that kind.  Barrie. Well-Remembered. In Echoes, pp. 155, 157, 164.  Barrie. Well-Remembered. In Echoes, pp. 176–77. 16  Barrie. Well-Remembered. In Echoes, p. 159. 17  G. E. S. Nice. 1932. Barrie and the Occult. The Scotsman, 28 July, p. 7. 14 15

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We don’t like that’. Asked what he wants, he responds that his father should ‘keep a bright face’.18 In the play’s published form, furthermore, though not in the Lord Chamberlain’s typescript, ‘the crafty boy’ succeeds ‘in making the father laugh’, and Dick also reminds his father ‘What did I say about that face?’, prompting a smile from the older man.19 Dick’s ‘message’—‘Pipe!’—made, in the typescript, as he departs, is his final reminder that Mr. Don should attempt to continue to take pleasure in life.20 (In the 1936 edition, Dick’s last request is ‘Face’, and in Echoes of the War [1918] it is ‘Be bright, father’).21 Such order-giving involves humorous treatment of father-son role-reversal. At one point Dick states, ‘Look here, sonny, you’ve got to go on with it. You don’t seem to know how interested I am in your future’.22 Mr. Don’s attempts to maintain normality (‘I try to paint just as before. I go to the club. Dick, I have been to a dinner-party’) are met with approval on behalf of the dead in general: ‘We like that’.23 Humour and laughter in fact become something to fall back on when words fail. Attempting to entertain his father with war stories, Dick comments, ‘There are lots of jokes, but I am such a one for forgetting them’, and ‘laughs boisterously’.24 The non-verbal signal of merriment is needed to maintain his cheerful persona, even when he cannot find anything funny to say. While Dick’s imperatives to carry on as normal and with cheerfulness may offer a comforting thought for those who, as with Mr. Don, struggle to express their grief, his insistence on cheerfulness also has a disquieting edge. The ‘face’ Dick insists on is reminiscent of the opiating culture of humour that Wyndham Lewis condemned as a ‘Quack English drug for stupidity and sleepiness. | Arch enemy of the REAL, conventionalizing’.25 Lewis’ question, ‘how can you indulge in grief with a yard wide grin painted across your face?’, could have been written as a reflection on Mr.

 Barrie. Well-Remembered. In Echoes, pp. 185, 139, 141.  Barrie. Well-Remembered. In Echoes, p. 143. 20  Barrie. 1918. A Well-Remembered Voice. British Library. LC Plays 1918/11, p. 29. 21  Barrie. 1918. A Well-Remembered Voice. In The Plays of J.  M. Barrie in One Volume. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 761–81. 1936, p.  780; Barrie, Well-Remembered. In Echoes, p. 168. 22  Barrie, Well-Remembered. In Echoes, p. 165. 23  Barrie, Well-Remembered. In Echoes, p. 160. 24  Barrie, Well-Remembered. In Echoes, p. 169. 25  Wyndham Lewis. 1914. Manifesto. Blast 1: 11–45 (pp. 17, 26). 18 19

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Don’s situation.26 The cheerfulness that Dick demands from his father precludes the expression of strong feeling.27 Barrie’s representation of humour and good humour suggests that both are desirable when bereaved. Yet the effort Mr. Don has to exert to maintain them—Dick regularly has to remind him to smile—is an effort of repression that carries both pathos and unease. Humour is not depicted as offering relief to the bereaved in any straightforward way: it is not the case that Dick’s attempts to cheer his father up with humour simply provide a release of emotional tension, though in some moments this does appear to take place. A line from Freud’s description of humour offers some insight, though relief theories of humour do not account for all aspects of Mr. Don’s experience. Freud writes that humour offers ‘a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing affects that interfere with it’.28 The varieties of humour are ‘extraordinarily variegated according to the nature of the emotion which is economized in favour of the humour: pity, anger, pain, tenderness, and so on’. Humour can be extended further, ‘whenever an artist or writer succeeds in submitting some hitherto unconquered emotions to the control of humour’.29 Mr. Don may not really be ‘obtaining pleasure’ when he follows Dick’s commands to look bright, but Freud’s insight that humour is coloured by other, non-pleasurable, emotions rings true in the moments of amusement that Mr. Don and Dick do share. Most pertinently to Mr. Don’s Lewisian grinning—to his efforts to repress his sadness—is Freud’s sense that humour can be a matter of ‘submitting’, ‘conquer[ing]’ and ‘control[ling]’ non-pleasurable feelings. In Ngai’s terms, Mr. Don is attempting to ‘thwart’ the expression of his strong negative feelings. He is urged on to do so by his dead son’s insistence that he should maintain good humour, and by the continuance of a war that demands good morale from civilians no less than soldiers. Barrie in fact confronts the difficulties of the relationship between humour and grief, reflecting on the complexities of responding to loss with humour. Dick’s attempts to cheer-up his father flounder when he 26  Qtd. in: David Peters Corbett. 1998. ‘Grief with a Yard Wide Grin’: War and Wyndham Lewis’s Tyros. In Lewis and the Art of Modern War, ed. David Peters Corbett, 99–123. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, p.113. 27  Lewis. 1914. Manifesto. Blast 1: 11–45 (p. 17); Lewis. 1915. Constantinople Our Star. Blast 2: 11. 28  Freud. 1905. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. Strachey, James. London: Hogarth Press. 1960, p. 228. 29  Freud, Jokes, pp. 231–32.

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struggles to ‘remember something funny’ to tell him, an admission that there may not be much that is mirthful about his war experience.30 When he does recall an amusing memory, its humorousness is equivocal. He reminds his father of a boy, Wantage, who was teased for being close to his mother: ‘She was very fond of him, Dick’. ‘Oh, I expect no end. Tell her he’s killed’. ‘She knows’. ‘She had got a wire. That isn’t the joke, though. You see he got into a hopeless muddle about which side of the veil he had come out on […] and just for the lark we didn’t answer’. He chuckles. ‘I expect he has become a ghost!’ With sudden consideration. ‘Best not tell his mother that’. Mr. Don rises, wincing […].31

Something that Dick sees as a jest is disquieting for his father, an ambiguity reflected in Dick’s own confusion, or anxiety, over which aspect of his tale is ‘the joke’. Dick’s comment about keeping the story from Wantage’s mother in fact provides more of a ‘punch line’ than his account of the front-line prank, extending the uncertainty over which part of the dialogue is ‘something funny’. The exchange also highlights the distance between Dick and his father. This is one moment where humour does not provide a connection between father and son. Mr. Don’s discomfort with the tale prompts an apology infused with pathos: ‘Sorry, father. We are all pretty young, you know, and we can’t help having our fun’.32 Taking amusement from Wantage’s misfortune is a privilege of the young and the dead, contributing to Barrie’s representation of Dick and his comrades as deceased schoolboys. Barrie also, for example, describes Dick being guided into the afterlife by ‘Ockley who was keeper of the fives’ at his school.33 Mr. Don, middle-aged and alive, cannot join in the laughter, separated from youthful mirth by his longer, continuing life. The prank speaks of Dick’s curtailed development—this is a wartime echo of Peter Pan—and it acknowledges that the gap between father and son will never be closed.

 Barrie. Well-Remembered. In Echoes, p. 169.  Barrie. Well-Remembered. In Echoes, pp. 169–70. 32  Barrie. Well-Remembered. In Echoes, p. 170. 33  The captain of the team in Eton Fives. Barrie. Well-Remembered. In Echoes, p. 169. 30 31

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As already noted, at the time of the war, all plays had to be given a licence before they could be performed publicly, with theatre managers submitting scripts for approval and, if necessary, censorship in advance of opening.34 The reader’s report on the play points towards a tension between the provocativeness of using humour to address such a serious, topical experience as grief, and humour’s role in creating a poignant picture of mourning. The reader, G. S. Street, who was a critic and author as well as being the Lord Chamberlain’s examiner, draws attention to the drama’s unusual subject matter: ‘nothing like’ the drama, ‘a conversation between a man and his dead son, has been seen on the stage before’.35 Indeed, the subject of young men’s deaths was so sensitive that one of the most famous lines from Peter Pan—‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’—was cut from wartime performances.36 Though he does not express a concern with the play’s humour specifically, Street raises the broad concern that it could be considered flippant or disrespectful: ‘some may find [it] irreverent’ or ‘in dubious taste’.37 At the same time, Barrie’s humour creates a father-son interaction that adds to the ‘affecting’ quality that made the play suitable for performance. Street stated that it may ‘be questioned if anything so poignant in these times is wisely put on the stage’, but the drama’s affecting nature also contributed to his decision to give it a licence, and to his apparent admiration for it. Repeating his earlier adjective, he writes ‘In these times it [the play] is especially poignant, and if it were not done with essential reverence it would be intolerable’. ‘As it is, it seems to me personally a beautiful and affecting play’. No one ‘could question the reverent and sympathetic intention’.38 Moving away from Freud’s model of humour, according to which amusement is a matter of submitting ‘hitherto unconquered emotions to the control of humour’, humour here does not avoid censorship by replacing emotion, but by heightening it.39 34  The 1737 Licensing Act gave the Lord Chamberlain wide-ranging powers of censorship and licensing. These were confirmed in an 1843 act. John Johnston. 1990. The Lord Chamberlain’s Blue Pencil. London: Hodder & Stoughton, pp. 29–30. 35  G.  S. Street. 1918. Report. A Well-Remembered Voice. British Library. LC Plays 1918/11. 36  Lisa Chaney. 2005. Hide-and-Seek With Angels: A Life of J.  M. Barrie. London: Hutchinson, p. 307. 37  Street. Well-Remembered. 38  Street. Well-Remembered. 39  Freud. Jokes, pp. 231–32.

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The blend in Well-Remembered of humour, sentimentality and pathos, combined with serious commentary, is typical of the style for which Barrie was famed before the conflict.40 He was celebrated or criticised based on the extent to which his work delivered whimsicality and charm.41 His works were judged to be ‘full of humour’, ‘sentimental, imaginative’, ‘farc[ical]’, ‘unreal, fantastic’, ‘sentimental comedy’, and ‘humorous and whimsical’; they had ‘charm’ and ‘genial humour’.42 Peter Pan was discussed as the epitome of these features: ‘a quaint mingling of pathos and fun’, a ‘panorama of whimsies’, ‘a typical production of the Barrie genius, with all the Barrie humour, the Barrie whimsicality, and the Barrie sentiment’.43 Yet at times Barrie’s work shared some of the less ‘safe’ themes and ambitions of New Drama, and he had called for reform of theatre censorship.44 He argued that playwrights should be allowed to say ‘whether sportively or seriously, what is in them to say’, including expressions of the ‘unconventional’, which ‘to the official mind […] is a thing suspect’.45 Humorous plays were likely to receive more lenient treatment from the censorship than were serious ones and Barrie used this to his advantage. When reviewers commented on his satire and social commentary, they tended to do so while placing these elements in the context of his dramas’ lighter qualities. The suggestion at times was that his humour

40  The interest in youth and age in Well-Remembered was similarly a favoured Barrie theme before 1914. Peter Pan is well known for its exploration of youth, but the theme is central to such dramas as Alice Sit-By-The-Fire (1905) and Quality Street (1901). See: Barrie. 1905. Alice Sit-By-The-Fire. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920; Barrie. 1901. Quality Street. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1920. 41  Anon. 1903. Green Room Gossip. Daily Mail, 9 May, p. 2; Anon. 1908. Duke of York’s. Athenaeum 12: September, p. 311. 42  Anon. 1896. A Scottish Tom Sawyer. Glasgow Herald, 21 October, p. 4; P. C. 1902. The Theatre: The Admirable Crichton. The Speaker: the Liberal Review, 15 November, 168–69 (p. 168); Anon. 1902. Mr. Barrie’s Way. Academy and Literature, 15 November, p. 525; P. C. 1902. The Theatre. The Speaker: the Liberal Review, 4 October, 15–16 (p. 16). 43  W.  T. S. 1905. Peter Pan. Academy and Literature, 7 January, 19–20 (p.  19); Anon. 1904. Mr. Barrie’s New Play. Manchester Courier, 28 December, p. 4. 44  Jan McDonald. 2014. Barrie and the New Dramatists. In Gateway to the Modern: Resituating J. M. Barrie, ed. Bold, Valentina, and Andrew Nash, 1–16. Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2014, pp. 2–3, 6, 9–10. 45  Qtd. in Nicholson. Censorship, p. 53.

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let him get away with presenting provocative subjects.46 Edith Sichel argued that ‘his malice is so gentle and playful’ that ‘he tricks us into taking it for grace and courtesy’; ‘Mr Barrie has discovered that fantasy is a subtle medium for satire’.47 The Speaker dubbed his writing ‘fantastic satire’, which gave ‘quaint and illuminating’ presentations of folly, ‘delightful entertainment, but clearly the work of a serious and considerable thinker’; a Times reviewer described the playwright as ‘our spoiled child’, ‘allowed to do things which would bring stern reproof on other children’. He has done ‘what no one has been allowed to do […]—bring the contemporary political situation straight on to the stage’.48 A commentary in the Fortnightly Review, similarly, stated that since ‘a well-developed sense of humour implies liberal-minded judgement’, Barrie is ‘allowed to try cases in open court, the hearing of which would in other circumstances be suppressed by that influential defendant, the British public’.49 Barrie’s work before the war had thus merged ‘amusement and spectacle with underlying commentary on […] present-day society’.50 The history of Barrie’s oeuvre and reputation may have had an influence on the censor’s treatment of Well-Remembered—the Lord Chamberlain’s readers did take into account playwrights’ reputations— and this points towards the taming effect literary contexts could have on depictions of wartime experiences. Representing a serviceman’s ghost onstage during a war is potentially distressing or contentious. Yet this material, understood as continuous with the familiar style of an author who was well-loved before 1914, has its potential for distress lessened. 46  Barrie’s association with whimsical amusement was bolstered by a public persona of endearing oddness. One journalist claimed to have been shown an ‘interview pipe’ that Barrie used to impress reporters. (Anon. 1914. Barrie at Bay: Which Was Brown? An Interview on the War From The New York Times, October 1, 1914. New York Times Current History of the European War, 12 December 1914, pp. 100–02.) Gerald du Maurier wrote that when Barrie says ‘the heroine ought to wear a moustache’, there will be reports that the play’s ‘most poignant moment […] was when Jean decided to shave’ (Gerald Du Maurier. 1920. J. M. B. The Bookman 59: 108–09 [p. 108]). 47  Edith Sichel. 1903. The Fantastic Element and Mr. Barrie. Times Literary Supplement, 17 April, p. 117. 48  P. C. The Theatre: The Admirable Crichton, p. 168; Anon. 1906. Comedy Theatre. The Times, 6 April, p. 10. 49  Edith Browne. 1906. Mr. J.  M. Barrie’s Dramatic and Social Outlook. Fortnightly Review 79: 920–29 (p. 929). 50   Jonathan Wild. 2017. Literature of the 1900s: The Great Edwardian Emporium. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, p. 139.

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Barrie was indulged before the conflict in his mixture of whimsy and societal commentary and this provided a reassuringly recognisable literary context for his startling depiction of Mr. Don and Dick.

‘There Once Was a Man in a Trench’: Death in Trench-Newspaper Limericks and Nursery Rhyme Parodies51 The comic rhymes depicting violence and death that appeared in trench newspapers during the conflict were part of a longstanding publishing tradition. The rhymes were part of trench newspapers’ reflection of the professionally produced comic press. This professional press had boomed in the mid-Victorian period and remained immensely popular into the first decades of the twentieth century.52 This was an era of high success for Punch, which had a strong line in satirical limericks and nursery rhymes, with targets ranging from politicians, to men of letters, to women in general.53 To give an indication of the popularity of consuming and creating limericks, A. A. Milne in 1907 published a humorous short story based on the difficulty of finishing the poems.54 The authors and editors of trench newspapers echoed the fashion for these humorous poems in the same way that they echoed the other contents of professionally-produced comic magazines, such as cartoons, short stories, and tongue-in-cheek articles. The trench press even held limerick competitions, as did the national press.55 Limericks were popularised with the 1861 publication of the third edition of Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense, with the publication of a

 Anon. 1916. Limericks. The Dump, December, p. 12.  Donald Gray. 1966. The Uses of Victorian Laughter. Victorian Studies 10: 145–76 (p. 151). 53  Punch Magazine Cartoon Archive. 2017. http://www.punch.co.uk/about/. Accessed 14 March 2017; E. V. Lucas. 1906. Double Limericks of the Day. Punch, 11 July, p. 20; Street. 1902. Mr. Punch’s Political Limericks. Punch, 9 April, p.  268; Street. 1902. Mr. Punch’s Literary Limericks. Punch, 19 March, p. 215; Anon. 1919. New Nursery Rhymes for Old. Punch, 2 July, p. 18. 54  A. A. Milne. 1907. The Last Line. Punch, 31 July, p. 79. 55  These contests appeared, for example, in the Sphinx, of the 6th Battalion Manchester Regiment, and the Maidstone Magazine, of the 8th Submarine Flotilla, H.M.S. Maidstone. (Anon. 1915. The Limerick Competition. Sphinx, May, p.  16; Anon. 1915. Our Puzzle Page. Maidstone Magazine, 1 November, p. 209.) 51 52

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volume of his letters in 1911 giving him further prominence.56 At this juncture connections were also made between Lear’s poetry and a sense of broad societal turmoil. An Athenaeum writer commented that ‘nonsensical frivolity is a not unnatural tendency […] in an age of social, religious, and intellectual questioning and unrest’, foreshadowing how servicemen would respond to wartime experiences three years later.57 The black humour in these short poems conveys the circumstances of death and destruction in the war zone as not making sense, the familiar illogic of nonsense providing a ready means of responding to an environment that could not be rationalised. The trench-newspaper poems also belong to a long tradition of nursery rhymes being adapted for humorous and irreverent purposes. Children have regularly altered their literature to cater for their own senses of humour. Nursery rhymes lend themselves to this process given that they often present worlds that are not characterised entirely by innocence and light. Children produce parodies of the verses created for them by adults, ‘creating new and often subversive versions’, in doing so ‘asserting their own power and agency’.58 Servicemen echo this dynamic when they adopt and adapt nursery rhymes to present their own perspectives on military life.59 For example, one children’s parody version of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ ends with the sheep ‘between two slices of bread’, and here there is an overlap with a trench-newspaper rhyme from 1915 that appeared in

56   M.  O. Grenby. 2008. Children’s Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, p.  40; R.  C. Lehmann. 1908. The King of Nonsense. Bookman, 32: 179; Anon. 1911. Queery Leary Nonsense. Academy and Literature, 9 December, p. 728; Anon. 1919. Literary Notes. Athenaeum, 26 September, p. 950; Anon. 1911. A Humorous Letter-Writer. Academy and Literature, 9 December, p. 6. For an example of the difficulties of identifying reviewers, see: Micheline Hancock-Beaulieu and Susan Holland. 1991. Indexing The Athenaeum: Aims and Difficulties. The Indexer 17: 71–72. 57  Anon. 1911. Edward Lear. Athenaeum, 2 December, p. 687. 58   Lucy Pearson and Peter Hunt. 2011. Children’s Literature. London: Pearson Education, p. 120. 59  The quality of schoolboy irreverence to limericks about the war is reflected in a short story by Eden Philpotts, in which a group of pupils are given the opportunity to enter a competition for a war poem. One boy could only write comic poems in the form of limericks, and his teacher ‘said that was not at all the spirit of a prize poem, but belonged to the gutterpress, whatever that is’. Eden Phillpotts. 1916. The Prize Poem. In The Human Boy and the War, 160–82. New York: Macmillan, p. 164.

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the Wangler, the newspaper of C Company, 101st Provisional Battalion, Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment).60 It reads: Little Bo-Peep, Has lost her sheep, And I know where she’ll find ’em, In a trench, I’ll wot, Being served red hot, With a piece of hard tack behind ’em.61

Graham Seal views the entire trench press as ‘the instrument of agency for its creators and readers. It allowed them to go beyond simply coping with what they had been dealt and to state a position of their own’.62 This dynamic is certainly at work in servicemen’s parodies of popular rhymes. More broadly, both trench-newspaper nursery rhymes and limericks imitate how which Victorian nonsense, in Roderick McGillis’ words, ‘takes aim at the high seriousness of canonized poetry’. Carroll’s writing for instance encompasses parody of William Wordsworth and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Nonsense, ‘breaks the barriers of high art’, laughing at ‘pretension’ and solemnity.63 Reflecting this tradition, not necessarily self-­ consciously, the trench journal rhymes challenge and subvert the gravity and earnestness of more mainstream war poetry. Unlike the kinds of texts in which the conflict, its dangers, and those entangled with the fighting are associated with superlatives—glory, horror, bravery, suffering, grief, honour—the rhymes do not present servicemen as heroes or victims. There is an element of shock humour to many trench-newspaper limericks and nursery rhymes. Similarly to ‘sick humour’, which includes genres such as ‘dead baby’ jokes, the humour in the poems stems partly from saying something that would not be acceptable if said in seriousness. The humour is also partly at the expense of an imagined audience of non-­ laughers—an audience who may be too strait-laced to be amused and are instead disapproving. One of a series of ‘Trench Nursery Rhymes’ that appeared in the Fifth Gloucester Gazette in 1915 describes how ‘Lieutenant  Pearson and Hunt, p. 120.  Anon. 1915. Nursery Rhymes Renewed. The Wangler, December. 62   Graham Seal. 2013. The Soldiers’ Press: Trench Journals in the First World War. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 3. 63  Roderick McGillis. 2002. Nonsense. In A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Cronin, R., A. Chapman and A. Harrison, 155–70. London: Wiley. 60 61

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Snugowt sat by his dugout | Censoring letters galore’, but ‘There came a Hun bullet and stuck in his gullet | And censored the censor still more’.64 There is a definite sense of satisfaction in the shot hitting the censor’s ‘gullet’—close enough to his mouth to offer the poetic justice of preventing speech while also rhyming with ‘bullet’. Ironically enough, the fact that this poem did make it into print suggests the extent to which criticism and jibes at authority were tolerated. Having an outlet to express dissatisfaction likely helped to dispel grievances escalating to the level of serious dissent. Seal suggests that the voice with which the trench press provided servicemen helps to answer ‘the most perplexing question’ of ‘how—and why—millions of men were induced not only to go to fight […] but, if they survived, to endure it for perhaps four years’.65 Restraints on what could and could not be expressed in the journals were sufficiently relaxed to allow large amounts of humorous ‘grousing’ (complaining) about conditions, non-combatants, and even military authorities.66 The limericks and nursery rhymes that appeared almost ubiquitously across trench newspapers covered a range of topics, stretching from food, to senior officers, to the cold.67 Most striking are the many rhymes that address violent death and injury. Sometimes these were directed towards wartime antagonists: a ‘young fellow called Chilcott’ says ‘if I see a Hun | I swear that by Jingo I will pot’. A ‘young Boche at Bazentin’ is sent ‘flat in the mud | And he found that his helmet was bent in’. Old ‘Sapper Jones’ as he ‘dug up’ the bones of an ‘old DEUTSCHER HELD’ is  Anon. 1915. Trench Nursery Rhymes. The Fifth Gloucester Gazette, August.  Seal, p. xi. 66  J.  G. Fuller. 1990. Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies 1914–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 19–20. 67  Examples include: romance (‘There was a Lce.-Corporal named Newley, | Who was fond of all girls most unduly’), food (‘This is the bully, with awful smell, | That was found in the stew that Jock made’), officers (a ‘stout Sergeant-Major’ turns ‘into a regular rager’), the cold (‘Old Kind Coal | Is under control’), and the activities of amusing characters, possibly based on real people (such as a ‘young fellow called Clutterbuck’ whose room is ‘a most awful muck’). See: The Poet Lorryite. 1918. Limericks. Standard of C Company, July, p. 10; Lyricus. 1916. A Curseory Rhyme. Lead Swinger, April, pp. 88–89; P. D. 1918. Nursery Rhymes Up to Date. IT: Gup and Gossip from the War Hospitals, November, p.  4. Opportunities for word play with Belgian place names were also embraced, for instance a ‘staff-sergeant stationed at Dickebusch’ finds ‘Dickebusch sticky bush pricky bush’. A ‘fellow who lived at Bailleul’, meanwhile, was ‘so deeply in love with his geul’ that ‘the military post| Man gave up the ghost’ and ‘now she has married an Eul’. See: Anon. 1916. Whizz-Bangs. The Whizz-Bang. July, p. 5; H. S. K. 1915. Nonsense Rhymes. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, August. 64 65

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‘distressed at the way that he smelled’. ‘Ten little Allemagnes’ are gradually reduced in number (‘Along came a “whizz-bang”—then there were nine’).68 Other victims are not involved in the fighting, such as a ‘young girl of the Somme’ who ‘sat on a number five bomb’ and ‘Her exit she made with aplomb!’ A ‘young lady of Ypres’ is ‘shot in the back by some snipers’ and ‘the tune which she played | Through the holes which they made | Astonished the Cameron pipers’.69 Little Miss Muffett, as she appears in the trench press, ‘Sat on a tuffet, | Eating her curds and whey’, a ‘Taube then espied her, | Dropped a shell right beside her’ and she ‘had a fine funeral next day’.70 More victims still are of unspecified allegiance, but might be assumed to be British given that trench newspapers were written by, about and for men in the same unit. ‘A budding young second A.M. | Came to No.8 Squadron protem [sic]’; he ‘looked, just for fun, | Down a new Lewis gun’ and ‘now he’s transferred to—ahem!’ Six ‘little soldier-boys strove to keep alive; | One took a Number Nine; then there were five’.71 These include rhymes that confront head on the physicality of death, similarly to Sapper Jones digging up German bones as described above. A ‘C. Company swell’ says ‘“What a h– of a smell’, but ‘whether from drains’ or ‘human remains | I am really unable to tell”’.72 Elsewhere, the loss of comrades is acknowledged: there once ‘was a young bombardier’ who was ‘dead nuts on fuses, I fear’; ‘One day in the mud, | His spade hit a “dud”’ and ‘We take flowers to that young fellow’s bier!’73 Other examples see servicemen who are in the same side in the war enacting violence on each other for the slightest of reasons or for no reason at all. A ‘gay little spark’ sends notes to his enviably pretty ‘girl’ that ‘Sent the other chaps mad, | So they poisoned him, just for a lark’.74 Especially stark instances of these poems appeared as a series of ‘Ruthless Rhymes’ in the July 1918 edition of The Hobocob, the 68  Poet Lorryite, p. 10; Anon. 1916. Limericks. The Dump, December, p. 12; Anon. 1917. Boche Limericks. The Dump, December, p. 19; Anon. 1915. Ten Little Allemagnes. Second Corps Annual, December. 69  Anon. 1916. Limerick. Wipers Times, 31 July. In Christopher Westhorp, ed. The Wipers Times: The Famous First World War Trench Newspaper, 116. London: Bloomsbury. 2013; Anon. 1915. Limerick. The Hangar Herald, 1 January. 70  Anon. 1915. Nursery Rhymes Renewed. The Wangler, December. 71  Ak Emma. 1915. A Tragedy in One Spasm. The Numbrate, 30 October, p. 2; Omri. 1917. Mother Bushey’s Nursery Rhymes: I. Life in General. HBOCB, 1 August, p. 20. 72  Anon. 1915. Battalion Limerick. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, August. 73  Anon. 1917. Battery Rhymes. Night Lines, February. 74  Anon. 1917. Battery Rhymes. Night Lines, February.

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newspaper of the Household Brigade, Officer Cadet Battalion, Bushey. The rhymes describe such incidents as ‘Cadet McCormick’ having ‘a plan’ to ‘scor[e] off the Bath House man’, who is found in the ‘Plunge Bath […] Almost—if not entirely—drowned’. There is also a serviceman called ‘Jasper’ who bayonets ‘Cadet Adolphus Pettigrew’ for no given reason, the speaker adding that, ‘Adolphus was a friend of mine, | He and I were going to dine’.75 The poems give an impression of death in the war zone as ubiquitous and arbitrary. Holquist identifies that absurdist literature ‘points to a discrepancy between purely human values and purely logical values’, giving as an example a computer that suggests brain tumours could be cured by amputating patients’ heads.76 Nonsense is a close relative and a precedent of absurdist literature, and the discrepancy that Holquist describes appears in the trench newspaper rhymes. One of the rhymes’ victims, Hector, when at morning drill: Could never hold his rifle still. His sergeant killed him with a Mill’s grenade, You should have seen the awful mess it made! I can’t help feeling sorry for the lad, I doubt if he was altogether bad.77

The poem presents a definite cause and effect—Hector is killed for failing to hold his gun in place—but there is a lack of logic between the two, with the effect entirely disproportionate to the cause. The poem does nothing to suggest why moving a rifle is an offence. There is also a gap in logic in the implication that not holding a rifle still could make Hector ‘altogether bad’. The speaker’s response is in itself ludicrously underwhelming. The primary reaction is to speak euphemistically of a ‘mess’, while the emotional response of ‘feeling sorry’ is absurdly mild. Layers of illogic thus combine to convey a strong impression of a senseless situation. The ‘Ruthless Rhyme’ in which a servicemen kills a comrade because he was whining is similar:

 Anon. 1918. Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Halls. The Hobocob, July, p. 39.  Michael Holquist. 1999. What Is a Boojum? Nonsense and Modernism. Yale French Studies 96: 100–17 (p. 106). 77  Anon. 1918. Ruthless Rhymes, p. 39. 75 76

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Woger heard poor Gewald wimper, So he shot him, with a simper; Murmuring as he went to dine, ‘I had to teach him not to whine’!78

The ‘So’ at the start of the second line—which should suggest a logical connection—is markedly ironic, while Woger’s attempt to justify the killing in the final line is a case of ‘protesting too much’. That he ‘Murmur[s]’ this to himself gives him a slightly deranged quality, contributing to the impression of irrationality. As with limericks, part of the joke is that these poems set up a narrative without offering a satisfying resolution, and the gaps in logic play into this.79 This applies most obviously to those limericks, of which Lear was especially fond, with last lines which echo the first, as in: There was an Old Man with a gong, Who bumped at it all the day long; But they called out, ‘Oh, law! you’re a horrid old bore!’ So they smashed that Old Man with a gong.80

Yet extreme narrative restraint, or a lack of resolution that is almost a prank on the reader, is also more generally a product of the shortness of the form. While it is possible to write a very short poem full of very large emotion, the trench-newspaper poems tend not to fall into this category. The narrative prank depends partly on the pretence that the poet cannot say any more than they do (as is the case with many limericks). The poems work on the assumption that they do not have the space to deal in consequences, and this includes narrative constriction that excludes expansive emotional responses to violence. It may not be insignificant that Gewald is killed because of a ‘wimper’—an expression of feeling. Within the military world as represented in ‘Ruthless Rhymes’ even the slightest  Anon. 1918. Ruthless Rhymes, p. 39.  Broadening this to consider expectations of meaning that nonsense sets up, Wim Tigges comments that ‘The greater the distance or tension between what is presented, the expectations that are evoked, and the frustration of these expectations, the more nonsensical the effect will be’. Wim Tigges. 1987. An Anatomy of Nonsense. In Explorations in the Field of Nonsense, ed. Wim Tigges, 23–46. Amsterdam: Rodopi, p. 27. 80  Edward Lear. 1846. There was an Old Man with a Gong. In Nonsense Books by Edward Lear. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. 1904, p. 27. 78 79

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communication of feeling has to be silenced. The larger, grander feelings found in canonical works of Great War literature, the texts seem to claim, are too big to be squeezed into four or five lines. It is this treatment of emotion (or lack of it) that to a large degree makes the poems humorous. The incongruity of the extreme sangfroid invites amusement, and were any descriptions of sadness, horror, or trauma to be included the poems would take on a starkly different tone. Yet it is also the poems’ tight emotional restriction that gives them an unsettling edge. They push at the tonal tipping point where the blackly comic and the un-funny meet. The poems addressing the decay of human remains, rare instances in which some consequence of death is recognised, are good examples. Indeed, the comic elements of the poems are in part determined by the expectations of genre. John Morreall explains that in order to experience feelings of amusement, it is necessary to be ‘in a play mode rather than a serious mode’.81 Because trench newspapers are predominantly comic, readers are prepared to find the poetry they contain amusing. (There is, for example, a difference between the expectations of a servicemen opening his own unit’s newspaper in 1914 in full awareness of what it offers and the expectations of an undergraduate in 2014 opening a collected anthology of First World War poetry). Taken in isolation the trench-newspaper poems are not far removed from the regular rhythms and rhyme of Sassoon’s famous poem ‘The General’ (1917), which ends with the ‘cheery’ general being said to have killed two soldiers on the march with ‘rifle and pack’: ‘he did for them both by his plan of attack’.82 It is the direct and explicit criticism of military authority that most obviously differentiates Sassoon’s text from the trench-newspaper limericks and nursery rhymes. Sassoon’s choice of form here (the shortness, and the emphatic metre and end rhyme) perhaps even parodies the cheerier rhymes that were published about the war. Yet the similarities between Sassoon’s poem and the trench-newspaper poems— the form, the constrained narrative, the blunt reference to death, and the lack of emotional consequence—illustrate how, in another context, the trench-paper poems may not be read as humorous. They are precariously balanced on a line between the comic and the disquieting, and it may only 81  John Morreall. 2009. Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humour. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, p. 50. 82  Siegfried Sassoon. 1917. The General. In Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology, ed. Tim Kendall, 96. Oxford: Oxford UP. 2013.

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their publishing context which invites audiences to approach them as humorous. In their discussion of Lear’s work, James Williams and Matthew Bevis ask, ‘With what degree of sangfroid can comedy contemplate violence before it ceases to be comic?’, and their question captures the nature of the trench-newspaper poems discussed.83 The trench-newspaper poets are, alongside having fun, asking how much they can restrict the emotional content of their depictions of violence and how much such depictions can be comic. Perhaps they may also have asked themselves the extent to which they could experience violence and still maintain their composure. There is an overlap here with Barrie’s play, which asks audiences to contemplate what the balance is in Mr. Don’s efforts at cheerfulness between the comic, the noble, the pathetic, the necessary, and the unnerving.

‘Let Us Be Our Ordinary Selves, Won’t You?’: Conclusions84 That servicemen depicted death in the war zone as absurd, disturbing, disconnected from logic and from an array of emotional responses does not mean that they could not see the ‘point’ of the war, or that they felt disillusioned about its aims. It is not possible to extrapolate too much from a mixture of anonymous short texts that were written by a variety of authors and published in a range of contexts. Similarly, Barrie’s touching depiction of a father bereaved by the war acknowledges the pain of Mr. Don’s circumstances, including the youth of the lost child, without condemning the war as a whole. These texts demand a nuanced perspective over one hundred years after the start of the conflict. The canon of First World War literature has developed on a path whereby it is easy to think of the conflict’s writing as being divided into two polarised camps—on the one hand texts that present death as a glorious or at least worthy duty and, on the other, texts that negate this view by presenting death as painful and pointless. Neither of these categories accommodates Barrie’s play or the trench-newspaper poems, and these works are all the more refreshing as a consequence.

83  James Williams and Matthew Bevis. 2016. Introduction. In Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry, ed. Williams, J., and M. Bevis, 1–15. Oxford: Oxford UP, p. 7. 84  Barrie. Well-Remembered. In Echoes, p. 158.

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The texts explored in this chapter place death into contexts that flatten its emotional resonance. In Well-Remembered, the warmth of the joking between father and son, the possibility that grief can include such familiar, pleasant feelings, and the setting of the family home make death in war appear less threatening, less extreme, and tamer. That the representation of a deceased serviceman’s ghost comes from a well-known and well-loved author with a reputation for whimsical comedy also pulls death away from its associations with the strange, the extreme, and the unmanageable. The literary context of the trench-newspaper poems—the expectations surrounding comic periodicals—similarly helps to place death into a more familiar space than the battlefields of modern mechanised warfare. Here, too, the blocking of larger feelings in favour of inviting amusement, or amusement mixed with unease, creates emotional tameness. This reflects the emotional tameness Mr. Don is encouraged to adopt by his son’s urging to maintain a sense of humour throughout his grief (or in fact as a means of grieving). In both Barrie’s work and in the trench-newspaper poems the effect is to invite both amusement and disquiet. The texts teeter between, on the one hand, enjoyment of humour from depicting death and, on the other, a sense that such humour may be constraining.

References Anderson, Emily. 2021. unfinishing with Richard Hurst. Bomb disposal, sunglasses, and Miranda hart. unfinishing. https://spotifyanchor-­web.app.link/e/ ICfv2XQzusb. Accessed 14 Aug 2022. Anon. 1896. A Scottish Tom Sawyer. Glasgow Herald, 21 October, p. 4. ———. 1902. Mr Barrie’s Way. Academy and Literature, 15 November, p. 525. ———. 1903. Green Room Gossip. Daily Mail, 9 May, p. 2. ———. 1904. Mr Barrie’s new play. Manchester Courier, 28 December, p. 4. ———. 1906. Comedy theatre. The Times, 6 April, p. 10. ———. 1908. Duke of York’s. Athenaeum, 12 September, p. 311. ———. 1911a. Edward Lear. Athenaeum, 2 December, p. 687. ———. 1911b. A humorous letter-writer. Academy and Literature, 9 December, p. 6. ———. 1911c. Queery Leary nonsense. Academy and Literature, 9 December, p. 728. ———. 1914. Barrie at Bay: Which Was Brown? An Interview on the War From The New York Times, October 1, 1914. New York Times Current History of the European War, 12 December, pp. 100–102. ———. 1915a. Battalion Limerick. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, August.

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———. 1915b. Limerick. The Hangar Herald, 1 January. ———. 1915c. The Limerick competition. Sphinx, May, p. 16. ———. 1915d. Nursery rhymes renewed. The Wangler, December. ———. 1915e. Our puzzle page. Maidstone Magazine, 1 November, p. 209. ———. 1915f. Ten Little Allemagnes. Second Corps Annual, December. ———. 1915g. Trench nursery rhymes. The Fifth Gloucester Gazette, August. ———. 1916a. Limerick. Wipers Times, 31 July. In The wipers times: The famous first world war trench newspaper, ed. Christopher Westhorp, vol. 116, 2013. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 1916b. Limericks. The Dump, December, p. 12. ———. 1916c. Whizz-Bangs. The Whizz-Bang, July, p. 5. ———. 1917a. Battery rhymes. Night Lines, February. ———. 1917b. Boche Limericks. The Dump, December, p. 19. ———. 1918. Ruthless rhymes for heartless halls. The Hobocob, July, p. 39. ———. 1919a. Literary notes. Athenaeum, 26 September, p. 950. ———. 1919b. New nursery rhymes for old. Punch, 2 July, p. 18. Barrie, J. M. 1901. Quality street, 1920. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ———. 1905. Alice sit-by-the-fire, 1920. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Barrie, J. M. 1918a. A well-remembered voice. British Library. LC Plays 1918/11. Barrie, J.  M. 1918b. A well-remembered voice. In Echoes of the war, 143–188. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1920. ———. 1918c. A well-remembered voice. In The plays of J. M. Barrie in one volume, 761–781. London: Hodder & Stoughton. 1936. Browne, Edith. 1906. Mr J. M. Barrie’s dramatic and social outlook. Fortnightly Review 79: 920–929. Chaney, Lisa. 2005. Hide-and-seek with angels: A life of J.  M. Barrie. London: Hutchinson. Peters Corbett, David. 1998. ‘Grief with a yard wide grin’: War and Wyndham Lewis’s tyros. In Lewis and the art of modern war, ed. David Peters Corbett, 99–123. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Du Maurier, Gerald. 1920. J. M. B. The Bookman 59:108–109. Ak Emma. 1915. A tragedy in one spasm. The Numbrate, 30 October, p. 2. Findlater, Richard. 1967. Banned: A review of theatrical censorship in Britain. London: Macgibbon & Keep. Freud, Sigmund. 1901. 1905. Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. Trans. Strachey, James. London: Hogarth Press. 1960. ———. The psychopathology of everyday life. Trans. Strachey, James. London: Hogarth Press. 1960. Fuller, J. G. 1990. Troop morale and popular culture in the British and dominion armies 1914–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gray, Donald. 1966. The uses of Victorian laughter. Victorian Studies 10: 145–176. Grenby, M. O. 2008. Children’s literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.

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H. S. K. 1915. Nonsense rhymes. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, August. Hancock-Beaulieu, Micheline, and Susan Holland. 1991. Indexing the athenaeum: Aims and difficulties. The Indexer 17: 71–72. Holquist, Michael. 1999. What is a Boojum? Nonsense and modernism. Yale French Studies 96: 100–117. Johnston, John. 1990. The Lord Chamberlain’s blue pencil. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Lear, Edward. 1846. There was an old man with a gong. In Nonsense books by Edward Lear. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. 1904. Lehmann, R.C. 1908. The king of nonsense. Bookman 32: 179. Lewis, Wyndham. 1914. Manifesto. Blast 1: 11–45. ———. 1915. Constantinople our star. Blast 2: 11. Lucas, E. V. 1906. Double limericks of the day. Punch, 11 July, p. 20. Lyricus. 1916. A Curseory rhyme. Lead Swinger, April, pp. 88–89. McDonald, Jan. 2014. Barrie and the new dramatists. In Gateway to the modern: Resituating J. M. Barrie, ed. Valentina Bold and Andrew Nash, 1–16. Glasgow: Scottish Literature International. McGillis, Roderick. 2002. Nonsense. In A companion to Victorian poetry, ed. R. Cronin, A. Chapman, and A. Harrison, 155–170. London: Wiley. Milne, A. A. 1907. The last line. Punch, 31 July, p. 79. Morreall, John. 2009. Comic relief: A comprehensive philosophy of humour. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Nice, G. E. S. 1932. Barrie and the occult. The Scotsman, 28 July, p. 7. Nicholson, Steve. 2003. The censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, volume one: 1900–1932, 3–4. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. ———. 2004. Getting away with it: Strategies and practice, 1902–1944. In The Lord chamberlain regrets… a history of British theatre censorship, ed. Dominic Shellard, Steve Nicholson, and Miriam Handley, 57–130. London: British Library. Omri. 1917. Mother Bushey’s nursery rhymes: I.  Life in General. HBOCB, 1 August, p. 20. P. C. 1902. The theatre. The speaker: The liberal review, 4 October, pp. 15–16. ———. The theatre: The admirable crichton. The speaker: The liberal review, 15 November, 168–69. P. D. 1918. Nursery rhymes up to date. IT: Gup and Gossip from the War Hospitals, November, p. 4. Pearson, Lucy, and Peter Hunt. 2011. Children’s literature. London: Pearson Education. Phillpotts, Eden. 1916. The prize poem. In The human boy and the war, 160–182. New York: Macmillan. Poet Lorryite, The. 1918. Limericks. Standard of C Company, July, p. 10.

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Prost, Antoine. 2014. War losses. In 1914–1918–online: International encyclopaedia of the first world war, ed. Ute Daniel et  al. https://doi.org/10.15463/ ie1418.10271. Accessed 15 June 2022. Punch Magazine Cartoon Archive. 2017. http://www.punch.co.uk/about/. Accessed 14 Mar 2017. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1917. The general. In Poetry of the first world war: An anthology, ed. Tim Kendall, 96. Oxford: Oxford UP. 2013. Seal, Graham. 2013. The soldiers’ press: Trench journals in the first world war. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sherry, Vincent. 2003. The great war and the language of modernism. Oxford: Oxford UP. Sichel, Edith. 1903. The fantastic element and Mr Barrie. Times Literary Supplement, 17 April, p. 117. Street, G. S. 1902a. Mr. Punch’s literary limericks. Punch, 19 March, p. 215. ———. 1902b. Mr. Punch’s Political Limericks. Punch, 9 April, p. 268. Street, G.  S. 1918. Report. A Well-Remembered Voice. British Library. LC Plays: 1918/11. Tigges, Wim. 1987. An anatomy of nonsense. In Explorations in the field of nonsense, ed. Wim Tigges, 23–46. Amsterdam: Rodopi. W. T. S. 1905. Peter Pan. Academy and Literature, 7 January, pp. 19–20. Wild, Jonathan. 2017. Literature of the 1900s: The great Edwardian emporium. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Williams, James, and Matthew Bevis. 2016. Introduction. In Edward Lear and the play of poetry, ed. J. Williams and M. Bevis, 1–15. Oxford: Oxford UP. Winter, Jay. 1977. Britain's ‘Lost Generation’ of the first world war. Population Studies 31: 449–466. ———. 1995. Sites of memory, sites of mourning: The great war in European cultural history. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

CHAPTER 4

Class and Social Structure: ‘It is not taken seriously’ G. S. Street, report, A Day in a Dug-Out, (1916)

Fears that George Bernard Shaw’s O’Flaherty V.C. (written 1915), a satirical take on the fraught subject of recruitment in Ireland, could cause unrest if debuted in Dublin meant that its first staging took place not at the Abbey Theatre as had been planned, but in Treizennes, France, in February 1917, by officers of the 40th Squadron, R.F.C.1 The production was a propagandistic display. Shaw was in the audience, having been invited to the front by Field Marshal Douglas Haig as part of a government scheme of establishing the support of prominent writers.2 Shaw was given a first-hand demonstration of how his critique could be harmless, and perhaps this absurdity accounts for a (possibly apocryphal)

1  John Ervine. 1920. ‘At the Play: The Secret History of O’Flaherty, V. C. Observer, 12 December, p. 11; Lauren Arrington. 2008. The Censorship of O’Flaherty V. C. The Annual of George Bernard Shaw Studies 28: 85–106 (pp. 89–91). For a discussion of the report of Shaw’s laughter, see: David Gunby. 1999. The First Night of O’Flaherty, V. C. Shaw and History 19: 85–98 (pp. 86–87, 89–90, 96). 2  Michael Holroyd. 1989. Bernard Shaw Volume II: 1898–1918: The Pursuit of Power. New York: Random House, p. 371; Gary Messinger. 1992. British Propaganda and the State in the First World War. Manchester: Manchester UP, p. 191.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Anderson, Humour in British First World War Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34051-2_4

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report that he laughed the whole way through.3 The Treizennes staging is illustrative of what was at stake in wartime theatre such as questions of what was considered safe for performance, how circumstances could alter or neutralise theatre’s provocativeness, and the significance of audience reaction. Performances in Britain both before and during the Great War were carefully controlled. One reason given in support of theatre licensing to the 1909 Joint Select Committee on Stage Plays was that ‘people’s behaviour and actions could be significantly changed by what they saw in the theatre’, and censors had to consider whether performances might encourage rash or violent action that powerful feelings may provoke.4 As a Times commentator proposed, certain plays produced during a ‘time of political stress’ would ‘not be dangerous’ if read alone, but the ‘effect on a crowd in a theatre might incite them to pillage, to go out and burn the city’.5 Both censors and playwrights recognised, however, that comic treatment of risqué or taboo topics, or topics that had the potential to be controversial, were less inflammatory—less likely to attract censorship or audience disapproval—than solemn treatment of similar subjects. Presented with a short play portraying servicemen with very different backgrounds being brought together in the war, the Lord Chamberlain’s reader (or censor) G. S. Street wrote that ‘I don’t think there is any harm in one of the privates being a burglar—there are several in the Army—as it is not taken seriously’.6 The question of what was taken ‘seriously’ in war plays was central to considerations of whether they were safe for performance. The censorship was, as Steve Nicholson notes, ‘more lenient towards the light and frivolous than towards the thoughtful and intelligent’.7 Lord Sandhurst (Lord Chamberlain 1912–1921) commented in 1918 that ‘well-written plays’ were ‘worse’ than ‘light’ ones,

 Gunby, pp. 89–90.  Steve Nicholson. 2003. The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Volume One: 1900–1932. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, pp. 297, 5–6, 56–7; Arrington, p. 96. 5  Qtd. in Nicholson. Censorship, pp. 56–7. 6  G. S. Street. 1916. Report. A Day in a Dug-Out. British Library. LC Plays 1916/19. 7  Nicholson. 2004. Getting Away With It: Strategies and Practice, 1902–1944. In The Lord Chamberlain Regrets… A History of British Theatre Censorship, ed. Shellard, Dominic, Steve Nicholson, and Miriam Handley, 57–130. London: British Library, p. 66. 3 4

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the jokes in the latter having a ‘passing’ impact, while the ‘effect of the more thoughtful plays may be more lasting’.8 Regardless of what may be thought of the opposition, he assumes between the ‘light’ and the ‘well-­ written’, the remark illustrates how a play’s tone or emotional provocations could affect its reception by the censorship. Unsurprisingly, debates before the war over what function the theatre should have saw those who thought it should primarily provide light entertainment and amusement more likely to be in favour of censorship, with those opposed ‘argu[ing] that theatre had a higher function than to entertain’.9 Commentators in favour of women’s suffrage, for example, pointed out that ‘low’ and ‘coarse’ jokes were regularly performed, and yet works by authors such as Henrik Ibsen were refused licences.10 Such debates continued into the wartime period as part of a wider discussion of what should be performed during the conflict. Some commentators, including Shaw himself, lamented the extensive appetite for light, comedic, accessible and, to Shaw’s mind, old-fashioned performances (see Chap. 5).11 Equally, ‘light comedy and farce were amongst the war’s most successful forms’ and while such popularity was partly due to the choices of theatre producers, audiences must have found value in these genres to continue to patronise them.12 The Era even suggested that embracing comedy at the theatre was a way to mimic servicemen’s supposed cheerfulness.13 Bruce Bairnsfather and Arthur Elliot’s The Better ‘Ole (1917) was one of the most popular works of the wartime stage and was praised for capturing what it was ‘like out there’, and for appealing to and providing a connection between servicemen and civilians in the audience.14 Certainly, attempts to show the war’s most solemn aspects on stage were not  Qtd. in Nicholson. Censorship, p. 115.  Nicholson. Censorship, p. 52. 10  Sheila Stowell. 1996. Suffrage Critics and Political Action: A Feminist Agenda. In The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage, ed. Booth, Michael, and Joel Kaplan, 166–84. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 171–72. 11  George Bernard Shaw. 1919. Preface to Heartbreak House. London: Constable and Co. Ltd. 1949, p. 30. 12  Gordon Williams. 2003. British Theatre in the Great War: a Revaluation. London: Continuum, p. 161. 13  Anon. The Playgoer’s Duty. The Era, 14 October 1914, p. 9. 14  Heinz Kosok. 2007. The Theatre of War: The First World War in British and Irish Drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 197; Anon. 1918. ‘The Better ‘Ole’, a play of humorous and pathetic war incidents, as seen by Bruce Bairnsfather. Touchstone Magazine, November, p. 133. 8 9

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necessarily popular. Ernest Temple Thurston’s The Cost (1914), which portrayed a brain damaged soldier, closed after 20 performances.15 The scale and variety of wartime theatre is far too large to cover in full, even when restricted to humorous works. There were 7, 912 dramas submitted for licensing from 1912 to 1921, with L. J. Collins’ selective list of 1914–1918 ‘War Plays’ or ‘War-Related Plays’, containing 80 titles.16 There were full professional performances, revues, variety theatre, sketches, musical comedy, amateur drama, pantomime, charity plays, Shakespeare productions (multiplied by the 1916 death tercentenary), theatre staged for servicemen overseas, and dramatic works by troops and prisoners of war themselves.17 Touring companies performed throughout Britain and repertory theatres had been established in several cities before 1914, though performances of all kinds were concentrated in London.18 Audiences were diverse, varying depending on theatre and performance, having expanded in numbers during the Edwardian period.19 The traditionally working-class music hall had blended into the more middle-class 15  Andrew Maunder. 2015. Introduction: Rediscovering New Perspectives. In British Theatre and the Great War 1914–1919: New Perspectives, ed. Andrew Maunder, 1–39. London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 16; Emma Hanna. 2015. British Cinema, Regulation and the War Effort, 1914–1918. In Maunder, 195–214 (p. 200). 16  L.  J. Collins. 1994. The Function of Theatre Entertainment in the First World War 1914–1818. Royal Holloway University of London, pp. 508–13; John Johnston. 1990. The Lord Chamberlain’s Blue Pencil. London: Hodder & Stoughton, p. 278. 17  From 1912, revue became ‘a central part of variety entertainment’, taking the form of song and dance with loose plot threads. Dave Russell. 1996. Varieties of Life: The Making of the Edwardian Music Hall. In The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage, ed. Michael Booth and Joel Kaplan, 61–85. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, p. 70; Katharine Cockin. 2015. Edith Craig and the Pioneer Players: London’s International Art Theatre in a ‘Khaki-Clad and Khaki-Minded World’. In Maunder, 121–39; Lena Ashwell. 1917. Concerts at the Front. The Musical Herald, 1 February, p. 827; Felicia Hardison Londré. 2015. The Range of Laughter: First Person Reports from Entertainers of the Over There Theatre League. In Humour, Entertainment, and Popular Culture during World War I, ed. Clémentine Tholas-Disset and Karen A. Ritzenhoff, 169–79. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 18  Viv Gardner. 2004. Provincial Stages, 1900–1934: Touring and Early Repertory Theatre. In The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Volume 3: Since 1895, ed. Baz Kershaw, 60–85 Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 62–63, 72; Thomas Postlewait. 2004. The London Stage, 1895–1918. In Kershaw, 34–59 (pp. 35–37). 19  Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow. 2004. Victorian and Edwardian Audiences. In The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, ed. Kerry Powell, 93–108. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, p. 93; Joseph Donohue. 1996. What Is the Edwardian Theatre?. In The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage, ed. Michael Booth and Joel Kaplan, 10–35. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, p. 27.

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variety theatre by 1914; more women attended theatres as they embraced the opportunities for independence the conflict presented; and servicemen on leave provided a boost to the theatre industry in general.20 All this was aside from what the film industry offered, the cinema by the end of the conflict having become a dominant form of recreation.21 The selection of texts included in this chapter demonstrate how humour in war plays in part facilitates the discussion of topics and outlooks that may not have been staged if treated more solemnly, exploiting censors’ more relaxed views of ‘light’ theatre. Yet this was possible partly because both humour and the plays’ comic structures make potentially incendiary subjects less inflammatory. The plays’ comic structures reinforce and reinstate the status quo. The changes to class hierarchy and domestic life brought about by the war are represented as farcical; disruptions are laughable and resolvable rather than being enormous rifts. The humour in the plays invites mild emotional responses (amusement, levity), also creating taming and tempering effects. Rather than encouraging extreme emotional responses of the kind that are familiar in canonical First World War literature, such as anger, terror, and despair, the plays considered solicit minor feelings. In the plays below by John Galsworthy and Gertrude Jennings in particular, humour holds in balance that which has the potential to be emotionally provocative and politically controversial with that which is placatory and politically conservative. The use of familiar comedic genres and invitations to minor feelings create a careful negotiation of the war’s impact on class identity and politics in domestic settings. Humour diagnoses circumstances in which speech and political action are restricted at a moment when such circumstances adjoin and interact with a need to represent change and adaptation. Two plays by George Bernard Shaw are also explored below, and also diagnose a circumstance of restricted speech. Unlike Galsworthy’s and Jennings’ works, though, they do so by demonstrating the limits of humour’s capacity to temper political commentary. The different receptions of the plays suggest how particular styles of humour interacted with texts’ content and with playwrights’ reputations to determine whether dramas were made and received as being ‘harmless’. Galsworthy’s The 20  Barry J. Faulk. 2004. Music Hall and Modernity: The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture. Athens: Ohio UP, p.  4; Gardner. 2015. The Theatre of the Flappers?: Gender, Spectatorship and the ‘womanisation’ of Theatre 1914–1918. In Maunder, 161–78. 21  Hanna, p. 210.

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Foundations (Royalty Theatre, London, 1917) was licensed for public performance, as were Jennings’ No Servants (Prince’s Theatre, London, 1917) and Poached Eggs and Pearls (Apollo Theatre, London, 1916). Shaw’s The Inca of Perusalem (Little Theatre in the Adelphi, 1915), had alterations requested by the Lord Chamberlain’s office. Augustus Does His Bit (Court Theatre, London, 1917) was performed for a private society, avoiding the need for a licence, but was still met with some disapproval.22 In all of the dramas, humour holds in tension the provocative and the safe, negotiating the extent to which it was possible to joke about class politics, and never quite admitting to doing anything other than ‘just kidding’.

‘It’s a Great Leveller This Army’: Class, Revolution, Oblique Joking23 A review in the Manchester Guardian of Galsworthy’s The Foundations described it as a ‘fantastical comedy’ that could not be ‘believe[d] in’, but the outlandish and humorous misunderstanding at the centre of the play points to real concerns that the conflict could ‘brutalise’ the population.24 Set in a troubled post-war Britain, the plot involves Lemmy, a plumber, leaving what appears to be a bomb in the cellar of a house belonging to a well-meaning but slightly ridiculous upper-class character, Lord William Dromondy. Dromondy gives work to the men with whom he served, unlike other former officers who, in James the footman’s words, ‘looks down their noses’ as before.25 The play ends after Lemmy successfully deflects a revolutionary mob from Dromondy’s home and the ‘bomb’ 22  John Galsworthy. 1917. The Foundations. New  York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1920; George Bernard Shaw. 1915. The Inca of Perusalem. In Playlets, 191–220. London: Constable and Company. 1919; Shaw. 1917. Augustus Does His Bit. In Playlets, 221–46. The 1915 date and performance location of Inca is taken from the reader’s report, dated 11 November 1915 and stating the play is ‘To be produced at the Little Theatre, this week’ (Street. 1915. Report. The Inca of Perusalem. British Library. LCP Corr 1915/3885). Elsewhere, the first performance is listed as 7 October 1916 at the Repertory Theatre, Birmingham. A Shaw chronology indicates he finished the play on 9 August 1915, ‘for Gertrude Kingston to perform in America’. See: A.  M. Gibbs. 2001. A Bernard Shaw Chronology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 214, 221. 23  Sewell Collins. 1916. A Day in a Dug-Out. British Library. LC Plays 1916/19, p. 3. 24  Jon Lawrence. 2003. Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence, and Fear of Brutalization in Post–First World War Britain. The Journal of Modern History 75: 557–89 (p. 557). 25  Galsworthy. Foundations, p. 5.

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turns out to be a ballcock.26 Lemmy does give voice to revolutionary ideas. ‘If yer went into the foundytions of your wealf—would yer feel like ‘avin’ any?’, he says, ‘It all comes from uvver people’s ‘ard, unpleasant lybour’. ‘Dahn wiv the country […] Begin agyne from the foundytions’. Dromondy’s house will make a ‘palace of varieties where our children can […] see ‘ow they did it in the good old dyes’.27 Towards the play’s conclusion, furthermore, Dromondy goes out to address the crowd that has gathered at his house in order to calm them, and his failure to deliver an articulate speech—he stutters and stumbles—provokes ‘rude and hoarse laughter’, the kind of laughter that is not gentle in nature but of the more critical, satirical kind.28 The Foundations was nevertheless granted a licence for public performance. This was partly because it suggested a need to prevent revolution. Street judged that the drama could ‘do nothing but good in the way of warning’.29 As he also indicates, Galsworthy’s humour contributed to him getting away with his politically charged subject. Street noted that ‘Taken merely as a comedy Mr Galsworthy’s new play is an admirable […] work’, and that ‘Lemmy is a humorous socialist’.30 The qualifier ‘merely’ does a lot of work for Street here in positioning the comedy as low risk—though the comment does also leave open the possibility that the drama could be ‘taken’ as something else. The equally

 Galsworthy. Foundations, pp. 87, 90.  Galsworthy. Foundations, pp. 76, 85. 28  Galsworthy. Foundations, p. 83. A moment featuring a similar kind of laughter—albeit even more aggressive—features in Rose Macaulay’s novel What Not: A Prophetic Comedy. Set just after the Great War, the work centres on the ‘Ministry of Brains,’ which aims to maximise the intelligence of future generations by regulating who can marry. The Minister of Brains, Nicky Chester, flouts his own policy when he marries and a crowd of protestors force the Minister to admit his hypocrisy. The protesters decide to ‘let him off’ as he’s ‘just married’, and begin to laugh. Macaulay describes this as: ‘the laughter, good-humoured, stupid, scornful, of the British public at ideas, and particularly at ideas which had failed. But in it, sharp and stinging, was another, more contemtuous laughter, levelled at a man who had failed to live up to his own ridiculous ideas, the laughter of the none too honest world, which yet respected honesty, at the hypocrisy and double-dealing of others’. The novel is dedicated ‘To civil servants I have known’ and, as Macaulay explains in an opening note dated 1919, could not be published during the war since ‘it was discovered that a slight alteration in the text was essential, to safeguard it against one of the laws of the realm’. Rose Macaulay. 1919. What Not: A Prophetic Comedy. London, Constable and Company, pp. 222–23. 29  Street. 1917. Report. Foundations. British Library. LC Plays 1917/11; Galsworthy. Foundations, pp. 20, 42. 30  Street. Foundations. 26 27

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hard-­working description of Lenny as a ‘humorous’ socialist strongly indicates that it is the humour that makes the socialism acceptable for public airing. Foundations is in fact partly about the relationship between humour and stage censorship. The play’s central joke revolves around something that cannot be said, but which can be laughed at for those who are in the know. When Lemmy whispers to Dromondy what the bomb really is, Dromondy ‘bends double in silent laughter’, ‘whispers to his wife’, and ‘LADY WILLIAM drops the bomb and gives way too’.31 The nature of the object remained obscure even to a Manchester Guardian critic who reviewed the play. Or, at least, the critic chose to maintain the obscurity to add to the fun. S/he commented that ‘what it really was is a joke which Mr Galsworthy must be left to make himself’.32 Part of the joke was perhaps on those audience members who were unable to solve the puzzle. Galsworthy teases anyone not in the know by leaving Anne, the Dromondys’ child, out of the joke. Her governess ‘has her hands placed firmly over her pupil’s eyes and ears’, and the play’s final line is from Anne: ‘Oh! Mum! what was it?’33 Though he had never ‘been troubled by the Censor’, Galsworthy was against the system of licencing and it is difficult to resist the sense that the Lord Chamberlain’s readers may be being mocked.34 This would explain Galsworthy’s prominent thematisation of humour’s capacity to communicate that which may not be said explicitly— his playfulness with the idea that the bomb/ballcock is incendiary in more ways than one.35 Street, not in on the joke, did query it in his readers report: ‘What on earth it [the bomb/ballcock] is supposed to be I do not know […] One cannot suspect Mr. Galsworthy of any offensive joke. Perhaps, however, the Lord Chamberlain would like an enquiry made’.36  Galsworthy. Foundations, p. 89.  A.  S. W. 1920. A Little Theatre on Tour: ‘The Foundations’ at The Prince’s. The Manchester Guardian, 14 December, p. 11. 33  Galsworthy. Foundations, pp. 89–90. 34  Jan McDonald. 2014. Barrie and the New Dramatists. In Gateway to the Modern: Resituating J. M. Barrie, ed. Bold, Valentina, and Andrew Nash, 1–16. Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, p. 11. 35  C.f. Freud’s perspective: ‘The repressive activity of civilization brings it about that primary possibilities of enjoyment, which have now […] been repudiated by the censorship in us, are lost’, but joking is sufficiently oblique to allow us to access this pleasure. Sigmund Freud. 1905. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. Strachey, James. London: Hogarth Press. 1960, p. 101. 36  Street. Foundations. 31 32

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The ‘bomb’ is also a projection of the war’s pervasive influence. Though most obviously a warning of what the conflict’s legacy might be, it is charged with other concerns about the transition to peacetime as well.37 James is quick to see the ballcock as a bomb because the war is still on his mind. After it has been discovered, he sees the cellar transform into the front: ‘the habits of the past are too much for him. He sits on the ground’; Anne re-enters ‘as from a communication trench’.38 Dromondy’s inarticulacy, his tendency to ‘stammer’ and to ‘lose the thread of his thoughts’, is a symptom of shell shock. When Lemmy comes to his aid, he is rescuing Dromondy from more than one effect of the war, helping to deal with the symptoms of psychological strain as well as the revolutionaries.39 The Press, once the situation has been brought under control, notes ‘far up in the clear summer air the larks were singing’. His description causes Dromondy a moment of confusion: ‘[Blinking] Those infernal larks! Thought we were on the Somme again!’40 This is a joke about the cliché of referring to larks as a metaphor for peace after battle, as well as a comic take on the experience of shell shock—it is birds that haunt Dromondy rather than bombs. Given the taboos surrounding shell shock, Galsworthy’s brief comic reference to it might be understood as an instance where one of Sigmund Freud’s understandings of humour helps to explain what the joke offers. Freud suggests that ‘Pleasure in the joke’ comes from ‘an economy in expenditure upon inhibition’.41 Even so, the subject may also be viewed as uncomfortable despite, or because of, the amusement Galsworthy invites. This could be the case for modern audiences well-­ versed in the psychological trauma that the conflict caused and for original audience members who may have witnessed such effects. Front-line experience was known to have caused such trauma at the time, with symptoms of mental ill health in servicemen having been officially labelled ‘shell shock’ from 1915, two years before the play was performed.42 It is unusual

 Galsworthy. Foundations, p. 4.  Galsworthy. Foundations, p. 7. 39  Galsworthy. Foundations, p. 59. 40  Galsworthy. Foundations, p. 87. In the typescript, Lemmy echoes Dromondy: ‘Thought I was in me ‘igh explosive works agyne—those internal [sic] larks’. Galsworthy. Foundations. LC Plays 1917/11, pp. 29–30. 41  Freud. Jokes, pp. 236. 42  Tracey Loughran. 2017. Shell-Shock and Medical Culture in First World War Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 10–11. 37 38

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to find humorous references to shell shock, and this is one instance where inviting amusement in response to the subject may jar. Returning to Sianne Ngai’s theory of minor feelings, it emerges that humour in Foundations creates a complex balance between the tame and the risqué or controversial, never quite going beyond the bounds of the former. Minor feelings do not provoke ‘forceful’ action—they do not encourage crowds to ‘burn the city’ in the way that the Times commentator quoted above was concerned that some theatre might.43 At the same time, it is the dissociation of minor feelings from ‘forceful or unambiguous action’ that means they draw attention to circumstances in which action is suppressed.44 It is amusement which signals that unambiguous action on Lemmy’s part has not really taken place (when the bomb turns out not to be a bomb), and it is amusement which replaces the stronger emotions associated with the supposed unambiguous action. The Dromondys’ fear and Lenny’s anger are dissipated in amusement in the play’s comic ending. Such neutralisation of strong emotion and of decisive action highlights that a stage subject to censorship is a space ‘marked by blocked or thwarted action’.45 The characters’ amusement and secrecy over its source draws attention to the fact that they are also actors who are not permitted to say anything too rude, ‘diagnosing’ a circumstance in which censors seek to block action by blocking the provocation of strong emotion. This is not to say that all humorous dramas on the subject of social change had these effects. On the contrary, the reception of Galsworthy’s pre-war work lends weight to the suggestion that it is specifically a kind of gentle, mild amusement that is important here. (This reflects the dynamic whereby J. M. Barrie could ‘get away with’ his social commentary because it was expressed through or accompanied by a light, whimsical style of humour—see Chap. 3). Galsworthy’s The Silver Box (1907), for example, depicts upper-class hypocrisy and a justice system that favours the rich. Remarks from one Times commentator suggest that it was Galsworthy’s particular brand of humour that made such criticism palatable.46 S/he wrote that ‘To contrast the wit of [Eugène Brieux’s] Les Hannetons with that of The Silver Box’ is to compare the ‘genuinely comic spirit and the bitter, almost savage, fun of a man who, though he laughs, is angry’.  Qtd. in Nicholson. Censorship, pp. 56–7.  Sianne Ngai. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 2007, p. 27. 45  Ngai, p. 27. 46  Galsworthy. 1907. The Silver Box. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916. 43 44

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Galsworthy ‘handled his subject so lightly that […] though dangerously moved, [we are] ready to hear all he has to tell’.47 The mention of anger here is significant, the implication being that this grander passion was more difficult to accept as permissible. While the comment that Galsworthy’s play is ‘dangerously mov[ing]’ leaves open the possibility that his humour may provoke, it is the slightness of his comedy that is seen as making audiences receptive. Discussions of Shaw’s The Inca of Perusalem illustrate the negotiation between playwrights, theatre managers, and censors to demarcate how far humour could go in addressing class and politics during the war. Shaw’s protagonist, the well-born and recently widowed Ermyntrude, takes literally her father’s recommendation that she works as a lady’s maid until she finds another husband rich enough to support her extravagance. She convinces a princess to employ her. The Inca, a caricature of Wilhelm II, comes to visit the princess having disguised himself as a ‘Captain Duval’. The princess in turn urges Ermyntrude to impersonate her, and the Inca eventually proposes to Ermyntrude while she is in character. They do not however actually marry because, due to the war, ‘Kings nowadays belong to the poorer classes’.48 The humour is mainly at the expense of Wilhelm II. The princess fears marrying the Inca because he ‘has made war on everybody’, and ‘I shall have to pretend that everybody has made war on him’. He is ‘prepared to embrace the Mahometan faith’ to ‘please the Turks’, and in Street’s words there is ‘funny chaff about his moustache’.49 Class, too, is however a central theme, particularly as regards the war’s effect on members of the upper classes, and is the source of much of the humour. Ermyntrude’s waiter is for example incompetent because he was 47  Anon. 1907. Royal Court Theatre. The Times, 9 April, p. 5. In his preface to a volume of Brieux’s plays, George Bernard Shaw wrote that Les Hannetons ‘is a very powerful and convincing demonstration of the delusiveness of that sort of freedom which men try to secure by refusing to marry, and living with a mistress instead’, describing the play’s comedy as meaning that ‘the audience laughs throughout; but the most dissolute man present leaves the theatre convinced that the unfortunate hero had better have been married ten times over than fallen into such bondage as his liaison has landed him in’. Shaw also notes that ‘Brieux has left his mark even on the English censorship’, since ‘the prohibition of his plays was one of the strongest items in the long list of grievances by which the English playwrights compelled the Government to appoint a Select Committee of both houses of Parliament to enquire into the working of the censorship’. Shaw. 1911. Preface. Three Plays by Brieux, with a Preface by Bernard Shaw, xxxvi–Xxxi. London: A. C. Fifield. 48  Shaw. Inca, p. 217. 49  Shaw. Inca, pp. 205, 217; Street. Inca.

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previously an eminent doctor: ‘the war came’ and his ‘patients were ordered to give up their luxuries. They gave up their doctors, but kept their week-end hotels’.50 The princess’ tea is cold because ‘it was made by the wife of a once fashionable architect’, and the cake is ‘half toasted’ because baked by ‘a ruined west-end tailor’.51 Street’s report on the play again indicates that he was less suspicious of comic elements in drama that he was of serious representation. His concerns about Shaw’s work primarily stem from the fact that he does not read it purely as a ‘light’ piece. Again using ‘mere’ to preface the term ‘comic’, and making a distinction between humorousness and profundity, Street describes the text as ‘an elaborate presentment, partly satirical and comical, partly (at least in intention) profound, of the German Emperor’. He decides that Shaw’s representation of the monarch is ‘on a different footing from a mere comic introduction in a pantomime’.52 A large part of his concern is related, perhaps surprisingly, to Shaw’s portrayal of the German Emperor in the form of the Inca. Playwrights were not generally allowed to write in a way that could jeopardise relations with other nations. Scripts that identified Germany as a potential enemy before the war proved problematic, while even ‘sympathetic portrait[s]’ of British monarchs could be controversial with the Lord Chamberlain.53 The rules surrounding foreign leaders were relaxed during the war. By August 1915, the Lord Chamberlain’s office no longer saw a need to prohibit representations of Wilhelm II. Street allows Shaw’s references to the German ruler, ‘since it is agreed that he no longer be treated with respect’, a decision with which Douglas Dawson, the Lord Chamberlain’s Comptroller, agreed.54 Even so, the censors partially retained their pre-war reluctance to allow aggression towards the German ruler. The amendments asked of Gertrude Kingston, actress and proprietor of the Little Theatre where Inca was to be performed, included a request that make-up for the actor playing the Inca should not ‘too closely resemble the German Emperor’. Something of the intensity of the aggression that these amendments sought to curb

 Shaw. Inca, p. 202.  Shaw. Inca, p. 202. 52  Street, Inca. 53  Nicholson. Censorship, pp. 101, 121, 76. 54  Nicholson. Censorship, p.  122; Street. Inca; Douglas Dawson. 1915. Memo, 12 November 1915. British Library. LCPCorr 1915/3885. 50 51

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emerged in Kingston’s response.55 She accused the censors of being ­‘careful’ of the Kaiser’s ‘sensitive feelings’, adding that ‘when I think of the many “gemütlich” [pleasant, genial] Germans I have known who are proved of such misdeeds[?] as Louvain & Lusitania, I shudder to think I have ever treated them as equals, or even as humans’.56 Kingston’s vehemence may have been stoked by the fact she had previous skirmishes with Dawson, to whom her remarks were addressed. The exchange nevertheless highlights that even in the midst of the war officials were sensitive to a need to maintain public respect for members of the ruling class (as well as highlighting how patriotic sentiment could be mobilised for personal ends).57 A concern with protecting the ruling class, and in particular the monarchy, is reflected elsewhere in Street’s response to Shaw’s play. As noted above, references to the British monarchy could be controversial even if seemingly innocuous, and this is reflected in the edits that Street requests. For example, he states that he has ‘blue-pencilled’ (censored) an ‘allusion to King George’s abstinence from wine’, and he cuts any possible reference to connections between the British and German royal families. He censors a reference to the Inca’s uncle (‘As this obviously means King Edward it may be thought disrespectful to his memory’), and a mention of the Inca’s grandmother, Queen Victoria.58 Minimising allusions to such connections is logical in a context where the two families belonged to antagonistic nations, but Street was perhaps also correct to be wary more generally of any parallels Shaw drew between Britain and Germany. The familial connections Shaw alludes to point towards the potential for the play to be read as criticising the British account of the war alongside the German one. Shaw attributed responsibility for the war ‘almost evenly between British commercial adventurers and Germany’s militarists’. His highly controversial 1914 essay ‘Common Sense about the War’

55  H.  Trundell. 1915. Letter to Gertrude Kingston, 15 November. British Library. LCPCorr 1915/3885. 56  Gertrude Kingston. 1915. Letter to Douglas Dawson, 20 November. British Library. LCPCorr 1915/3885. 57  Nicholson. Censorship, p. 75. 58  Street. Inca.

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questioned the narrative that the Allies were innocent victims.59 The Inca of Perusalem potentially reflects this view, and may be one instance of an attempt being made to use humour to ‘sneak’ a highly controversial perspective past the censor. Even so, the play expresses awareness that humour is limited in what it can achieve, that it might not be, politically, ‘enough’. This is an awareness that even direct satire is too tame to effect political change.60 Ermyntrude claims that ‘mak[ing] fun’ of the Inca is ‘fair’: ‘What other defence have we poor common people against your shining armour, your mailed fist, your pomp and parade, your terrible power over us?’61 Though she sees satire as a means for members of the public to assert themselves, her inclusion of herself among ‘common people’ is questionable, since she is an archdeacon’s daughter. Her stated powerlessness is also disingenuous considering her substantial manipulative ability.62 Whatever she may say, Ermyntrude could use her capability and wit to do more than tease. This intimation that her mockery may be profitless is given weight by the fact that her comments follow a solemn speech by the Inca in which he reveals his subjects’ influence and suggests that satire may not lead to progressive change. For years he ‘gave them art, literature, science, prosperity’ and they ‘ridiculed [him], caricatured [him]’, but they are ‘devoted’ now he gives ‘death’.63 Immediately before Ermyntrude’s claim to have no power other than derision, in other words, the Inca has pointed out that he takes account of citizens’ views, and that ‘ridicule’ and ‘caricature’ do not prevent disaster. While Galsworthy thematised the idea of laughter as an expression of that which it is difficult to say, Shaw’s dialogue calls into question the efficacy of his own medium of satire. Shaw’s Augustus Does His Bit contained a more explicit critique of a militaristic, British upper class, and its performance context and reception 59  Holroyd. 1997. Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition. London: Chatto & Windus, p.  448; Shaw. 1914. Common Sense About the War. In Current History of the European War, 11–60. New York: The New York Times Company. ‘Common Sense’ sold 75,000 copies in the first year of publication, and ‘earned Shaw widespread ignominy’. According to Marxist critic Granville Hicks, it was his position as ‘licensed court jester’ that helped Shaw to avoid ‘serious retaliation’. Matthew Shaw. 2017. ‘Pamphlets and Political Writing’. In The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts, ed. Ann-Marie Einhaus and Katherine Isobel Baxter, 277–87. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, p. 282. 60  Nicholson. Getting Away, p. 65. 61  Shaw. Inca, p. 220. 62  Shaw. Inca, p. 195. 63  Shaw. Inca, p. 219.

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reflects this. It was performed privately instead of being submitted for public licence and it received some criticism. The plot centres on the incompetent, upper-class civil servant, Lord Augustus Highcastle, who is tricked by a character called only ‘the Lady’ into giving away secret military information. Augustus protests that the bet is an ‘abuse’ of officials who ‘are doing their bit’ whilst ‘our gallant fellows are perishing in the trenches’, a phrase that resonated with Shaw. He later commented that it was only when ‘first-class’ Lusitania passengers were killed that many realised the war was ‘more serious than reading dispatches […] about “our gallant fellows in the trenches”’.64 In response to Augustus’ reproach, the Lady suggests that there are servicemen in the audience and ‘I am sure you won’t grudge them a little fun at your expense’.65 This ‘fun’ includes mockery of what the Era’s reviewer called Augustus’ ‘high-fallutin [sic]’ talk about ‘“serving his country” and “doing his duty” and “making sacrifices”’.66 The Lady’s claim to be entertaining soldiers is rich with meta-theatrical resonance. It is as much Shaw legitimising his own mockery and taunting any disgruntled audience members as it is a comment on her own practical joke. As Joanne Gilbert notes, the rhetorical device of saying ‘I’m just kidding’ is not always placatory. Joke-tellers have been condemned ‘precisely because of the “weight” of a purported “jest”’. When it is not clear ‘whether someone is speaking in jest’, ‘the discourse does carry the same weight as ordinary communication’, while certain topics may be perceived as entirely ‘“off-limits” and will always be taken “seriously”’.67 The ostentatious provocativeness of the Lady’s assertion that she is ‘just kidding’ suggests Shaw knew very well that her excuse could be incendiary rather than mollifying. It has the potential to irritate any audience members, military or civilian, who do not find her prank and the drama’s satire funny, since it denies the legitimacy of such disapproval. Indeed, Shaw was not universally admired among the servicemen he professes to please. To give just one example, a call for submissions that appeared in a trench newspaper called the Growler in July 1915 read ‘CONTRIBUTIONS, literary and otherwise (G.  Bernard Shaw please 64  Qtd. in Gibbs. 1990. Shaw: Interviews and Recollections. London: The Macmillan Press, p. 253. 65  Shaw. 1916. Augustus Does His Bit: A True-to-Life Farce. In The Complete Plays of George Bernard Shaw. London: Odhams Press, 839–48. 1934, p. 246. 66  Anon. 1917. First Nights of the Week. Era, 24 January, p. 1. 67  Joanne Gilbert. 2014. Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique. Detroit: Wayne State UP, p. 12.

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refrain) will be welcomed’.68 Of the performance of Augustus itself, a writer for the Stage noted that the play was ‘by no means received with enthusiasm at the Court’. They added a jibe about the drama with reference to the absence of Shaw’s name from the programme. It ‘may have been unusual modesty (it can hardly have been that for once in a while the great “G. B. S.” was a little bit ashamed)’.69 The Sunday Mirror’s reviewer stated that Augustus ‘roused even the dizzy-browed Stage Society to demonstrations of disapproval’, while the Observer’s reporter wrote that ‘Mingled with the applause at the fall of the curtain […] were one or two sounds of a sibilant kind’.70 Augustus was performed for a private society, avoiding the need for the script to be submitted for licencing, and Street actually used Shaw as a benchmark when assessing the viability of granting a licence to Galsworthy’s Foundations. He commented that Galsworthy’s drama, though likely to ‘shock old-fashioned opinion’, was ‘a trifle to much in Mr. Shaw’s plays’.71 Shaw’s humour is removed from the kinds of tameness that characterises Foundations. His work reveals problems with class privilege that are not resolved or tied up neatly in a comic ending, instead maintaining criticism of the status quo. Indeed, as has been seen, Augustus challenges the idea that the issues depicted can be dissipated in amusement. Instead he plays provocatively with the idea that humour, or the rhetorical defence of ‘I’m just joking’, creates resolution. Shaw’s brand of humour suggests the importance of minor feelings, in combination with comic structure, for dampening provocation and for maintaining a balance between the incendiary and the acceptable. Indeed, Shaw’s established reputation for provocation may have contributed to the censors’ reception of his work during the war. O’Flaherty, V.C. only received a licence for public performance in 1922, five years after its staging at Treizennes, partly because Street judged that if alterations were demanded, ‘Mr Shaw would refuse and there would be a disproportionate fuss’.72 Most famously before the war, Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893), with its exploration of prostitution, did not receive a  Anon. 1915. The Growler, July, p. 12.  There was little doubt amongst reviewers as to his authorship. See: Anon. 1917. The Stage Society. The Stage, 25 January, p. 16. 70  Initially performed for the Stage Society, Augustus was licensed for the public in 1924. Anon. 1917. In the Limelight: Criticising the Audience. The Sunday Mirror, 28 January, p. 11; G. Fay. 1917. Augustus Does His Bit. Observer, 28 January, p. 5. 71  Street. Foundations. 72  Street. 1922. Report. O’Flaherty, V. C. British Library. LCPCorr 1922/4288. 68 69

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licence for public performance until 1925, though it was staged privately in 1902. Similarly, The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet was staged at the Abbey Theatre in 1909, having been banned from performance in England because of alleged blasphemy.73 Commentators in the press had observed long before 1914 that Shaw had a tendency to use ‘ironic comedy’ to ‘mask a serious purpose’, reporting on his work in terms not dissimilar from those used to describe Barrie’s plays. Barrie’s dramas do however seem to have been treated as more politically inoffensive.74 In 1910, a tongue-in-cheek profile compared Shaw to a ‘Mephistophelian Puck’. With ‘diabolical intuition’, the profile states, Shaw ‘says exactly the opposite to what he means to convey, and conveys it’; his language is ‘tangential and paradoxical’; he can ‘prove with equal facility’ that ‘black is white, that Anarchism and Conservatism are one and the same thing’.75 One commentator in 1905 described Shaw’s narratives as ‘disagreeable’, but containing ‘facts […] which the reformer and the philosopher must be prepared to face’. Shaw delivered morals ‘with a jest’.76 While Barrie’s work was more warmly received, reviewers of Shaw’s wartime plays used his reputation as a source of either praise or of blame, depending on the extent to which his dramas conformed to patriotic, war-supporting views. Some of the comments on Augustus above use Shaw’s standing against him (the sarcastic references to his ‘unusual modesty’ and position above ‘lesser m[e]n’), yet a Saturday Review account of the ostensibly patriotic Inca did the opposite. As with Augustus, Shaw was not named on programmes, and the reporter commented that ‘The bushel is not yet made which can hide the talent of Mr. Shaw’.77 The differing receptions of Shaw’s and Galsworthy’s works indicate how a complex network of factors affected whether audiences would respond to humorous commentary with the kind of mild amusement that would allow playwrights to get away with critical discussion of class politics. It was not only the playwrights’ choice of subject matter, but also the style of humour in their work and its performance context that shaped their dramas’ emotional provocations. Galsworthy’s gentle 73  L.  W. Connolly. 2004. Mrs Warren’s Profession and the Lord Chamberlain. Shaw: the Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 24: 49–95 (pp. 49, 56, 64). 74  Michael Booth. 1991. Theatre in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, p 177. 75   C.  N. Desmond. 1910. Bernard Shaw’s Secret. Penny Illustrated Paper, 19 November, p. 653. 76  Anon. 1905. Knowledge Is Power. The Morpeth Herald, 18 March, p. 2. 77  Anon. 1917. The Inca of Perusalem. Saturday Review, 22 December, p. 501.

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humour, use of reassuring comic resolution, and reputation meant that his plays were greeted with mild, indulgent amusement. This in turn led to leniency for his depiction of an imagined post-war revolt. Shaw’s more Juvenalian satire and reputation for being politically mercurial meant that his humorous takes on class politics were met with disapproval, anger, and suspicion, limiting censors’ and audiences’ willingness to indulge his work.

‘I’ve Only Learnt Things Like Greek and Latin and French and Spanish’: Upper Class Women in War78 Multiple wartime dramas gave humorous treatment to the impact of the conflict on women, often with a focus on the new forms of work undertaken by upper- and middle-class women. This is the case in the texts discussed below: Jennings’ Poached Eggs and Pearls and No Servants.79 The comedy in both revolves around disruption the war caused to roles that were rooted in class and gender, though the dramas focus on the kinds of work and relationships with which women were stereotypically associated. As with Galsworthy’s Foundations, the plays both drive towards reassuring maintenance of the status quo. Continuity of genre is important to this. Jennings’ plays very much reflect the domestic farces that had long been popular before 1914. Domestic farces depicted comic disruption, and tended in the end to be resolved in favour of the status quo. Within this framework, the war becomes just one more disruption that is fodder for entertaining misunderstandings. The effects of conflict become small enough to be resolved under the umbrella of a neat comic ending. Poached is set in a canteen for servicemen run by aristocratic women under the management of ‘the Duchess’. The play is concerned with inter-­ class contact, the plot centring on one of the waitresses, ‘Lady Clara’, and her secret relationship with Jimmie, an airman. Their romance’s clandestine beginnings are eventually overlooked when Jimmy’s financial position improves with inheritance from his aunt. Alongside the farcical plot, much 78  Gertrude Jennings. 1917. No Servants. Cambridge UL.  French’s Acting Edition No. 2480, pp. 15–16. 79  Jennings. 1916. Poached Eggs and Pearls: A Canteen Comedy in Two Scenes. London: Samuel French. 1917; Jennings. 1917. No Servants: A Comedy in One Act. London: Samuel French. 1919.

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of the play’s comedy arises from the newness of the women’s contact with servicemen lower in the social hierarchy. Two servicemen, for example, enter and discuss the women in class-based and sexualised terms—‘I like that one covered all over wiv diamings and pearls’—and there is frequent comic reference to class difference.80 For instance, the men’s sensitivity to their position makes them uneasy about complaining when a Miss Deacon accidentally puts polish in their cocoa. It has a taste that they ‘‘ardly like ter mention in ladies’ society’.81 The incongruity of upper-class women doing manual work is the subject of many of the jokes. Lady Mabel avoids washing-up because she has had a manicure and is dining at the Ritz. Lady Penzance, asked to cut bread, remarks ‘my place is really at the desk, but I’ll cut bread with pleasure’ and, similarly, when told she is wearing too much jewellery, she retorts ‘I can’t see how I could wear less’.82 Miss Deacon is comically incompetent and her representation owes something to the well-established theatrical figure of the lower-class clown. Although she is sufficiently well off to give Jimmie, her nephew, his early inheritance, she is the only canteen worker without a title. Clara and Mabel also gossip over her ‘flannel petticoat’, a common garment amongst women of non-­ elite classes.83 No Servants opens with several female servants preparing to leave domestic employment in favour of, variously, running a ‘sausage shop,’ becoming a ‘policeman,’ ‘going on the stage,’ and ‘marrying a bargee’. They insist that the change is ‘a sign of the times’ rather than a result of ill-treatment from their mistress. This is Victoria, a young widow who is kind but sufficiently ‘absent minded’ that she has not fully grasped that the servants will depart (she points out that they ‘gave […] notice every month’ and yet ‘never went’).84 The news causes Victoria some distress (‘I can’t possibly be left alone here, miles from anywhere, with no servants!’). Her distress is amplified by the imminent arrival of her suitor, Francis Mayfield of the Foreign Office. Francis is due to visit for a last lunch with her before he goes to West Africa (‘A horrid place! And I just wanted him to have a nice little lunch before he went, just a little memory of England and ––– [Sniffs])’.85 Her pleas have no effect, however, and Victoria is  Jennings. Poached, p. 15.  Jennings. Poached, p. 15. 82  Jennings. Poached, pp. 7–8, 12, 14. 83  Jennings. Poached, p. 9. 84  Jennings. No Servants, pp. 11–13. 85  Jennings. No Servants, p. 15. 80 81

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forced to take charge of the meal herself, though with help from Francis, to disastrous effect. Contemplating the duck, for example, she says ‘I like a duck to be all bare and tidy with its knees folded and no head. I don’t like the sort of duck just off a pond’. She attempts to cook it without plucking it or removing its head.86 All is resolved when the couple bond over their hopeless efforts in the kitchen and get engaged. Their joy at having some privacy because the servants have gone is then interrupted when they all reappear, having missed their train. There is an evident gendered aspect to the play’s comedy, Victoria being painfully aware that her domestic abilities fall short of what might be expected of Francis’ ideal wife. When begging for help cooking, she says ‘I’ve a visitor coming, and it’s so very important—you know what men are’. Thinking about Francis’ new job overseas, she wistfully ‘suppose[s] a woman who could cook and sew and do things would be very useful in a place like that?’. She also points out that she knows how to say ‘potato’ in seven different languages, but not how to cook one.87 In contrast, Francis’ chauffeur has also left him, but he does not have any problems driving his own car.88 Underlying the narrative in other words is the suggestion that women’s academic education may not be as useful as domestic skills, or certainly not useful in isolation from domestic skills, especially in a time of war. Jennings’ jokes at Victoria’s expense are as much about class as they are gender roles. She was told that the servants were leaving as she was given her morning tea, but when reminded of this she responds ‘As if that was any use! You know that at eight o’clock I’m always like a person recovering from drowning’.89 Similarly, when explaining why she has no cookery skills, she states (to comically ironic effect) ‘I’ve never had time for anything nice. I’ve never had your opportunities, Agnes. I’ve only learnt things like Greek and Latin and French and Spanish’.90 Her anxieties about class interaction are also ridiculed—after putting on an apron to begin work on lunch, she instructs ‘Don’t let the chauffeur come in here! He’ll think I’m the cook and it may lead to anything’ (a good example of a joke based on the convergence of assumptions about both class and gender).91 Jennings’ interest in class in the play in fact extends beyond her  Jennings. No Servants, p. 19.  Jennings. No Servants, pp. 15, 23, 26. 88  Jennings. No Servants, p. 17. 89  Jennings. No Servants, p. 13. 90  Jennings. No Servants, pp. 15–16. 91  Jennings. No Servants, p. 17. 86 87

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heroine’s comic dialogue. When Maud the kitchen maid refuses an order from the cook (‘You won’t do wot Missus sez—why should I do what you sez?’), the cook responds ‘What things are coming to with these ‘ere girls no tongue can tell. It’s anarchism, that’s wot it is’. Jennings here creates a humorous parallel between hierarchies within the household’s labour force and society more broadly.92 The plays do depict the war as something that has brought about significant change and both dramas favour characters who adapt to the circumstances of the conflict. No Servants sees characters leaving domestic labour in favour of alternative employment, and their upper-class mistress being forced to take on more forms of work in the home. While her efforts are represented as comically inept, audiences are encouraged to view her attempts with sympathy. Victoria’s willingness to attempt to adapt in fact helps her to bond with Francis, when he too is prepared to attempt to make lunch. In Poached Eggs and Pearls, as has been seen, Penzance is ridiculed for sticking rigidly to the trappings of her class identity (wearing jewellery, being reluctant to do manual labour), and in her attempts to frustrate Clara’s and Jimmie’s romance she is depicted as being both a killjoy and a hypocrite.93 There is a hint that she herself may have current and past (possibly disreputable) romantic entanglements, potentially accounting for her bitterness towards the young couple. Accused of making an appointment with Jimmie, Clara tells Penzance ‘I leave that to you and Lord Mornington’ and Deacon at one point states vaguely that ‘there was some very painful scandal about Lady Penzance, wasn’t there?’ 94 While supporting some level of adaptation to societal change, though, both dramas fall short of promoting dramatic alteration to women’s roles, instead conveying the impression that wartime changes to women’s lives and identities need not be extensive. No Servants sees its protagonist focussed on pursuing the role of being a wife, while the cause of the play’s comic plot—the departure of the servants—turns out not to be much of a disruption at all when they all return at the conclusion. This kind of resolution is reflected in the structure of Poached Eggs and Pearls. Jimmie and Clara’s romance is legitimised both by the inheritance Jimmie receives from Miss Deacon and by the approval of the Duchess. These structurally comic resolutions convey the sense that variations to class roles in wartime  Jennings. No Servants, p. 10.  Jennings. Poached, pp. 16, 24–25, 30, 42. 94  Jennings. Poached, pp. 25, 30. 92 93

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were easily ironed out. Ernest Bendall, Street’s fellow reader, described Poached as ‘light and thin but quite amusing’, concluding that the ‘satirical fun is quite good-natured and free from any lapse of taste’.95 Jennings represents upper-class women moving beyond their usual spheres of work as a cause for minor, mild amusement rather than as a substantial change to gendered work and social structure. With this in mind, Bendall was right to view the play as being non-subversive and politically safe for public performance. The plays’ structure and style of humour resemble genres of theatre that had long been popular before the start of the conflict, including several of Jennings’ own pre-war works, giving them a familiarity of style that also contributes to the mildness of their social and gender politics. In popular variety theatre, as Dave Russell explains, ‘social, political, and moral issues and conflicts could be aired and worked through’, but these issues ‘tended to be resolved in the interests of dominant social groups’.96 Jennings’ Between the Soup and the Savoury (the Playhouse, London, 1910) is a good example of this kind of pattern in popular theatre. It sees a kitchen maid with little prospect of marriage invent a suitor, who turns out to be a creation made out of letters she has ‘borrowed’ from the young lady of the house. The comedy frequently stems from an upstairs-­ downstairs dynamic. The action takes place in the kitchen while the domestic staff are serving a meal, the parlour maid entering and exiting as the courses progress while the servants gossip and complain about their employers.97 Jennings’ Our Nervous System, subsequently retitled The Pros and Cons (Playhouse, London, 1911) is similar in outlook. It involves the unmarried heroine, Evangeline, record the benefits and disadvantages of marriage, mainly by observing the tribulations of a married couple who constantly quarrel. She eventually manipulates them into ending their most recent feud by persuading them that other people caused their row.98 Acid Drops (Royalty Theatre, London, February 1914) is set in the sick ward of a women’s workhouse, in which there develops a romance between Flora, a charitable visitor, and a reverend. When not bickering about the sweets Flora has brought, the women on the ward gossip about the  Ernest Bendall. 1916. Report. Poached Eggs and Pearls. British Library. LC 1916/28.  Russell, p. 81. 97  Jennings. 1910. Between the Soup and the Savoury. London: Samuel French. 98  Jennings. 1911. The Pros and Cons. In Four One Act Plays. London: Samuel French, 59–84. 1914. 95 96

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couple, reflecting the relationship between upper- and working-class characters seen in Between the Soup and the Savoury.99 At one humorous moment Flora explains that ‘we don’t all want to get married nowadays’, but by the end of the drama she is very happy to be engaged.100 That Jennings’ wartime plays continue in the same vein as her pre-war work give them a reassuring familiarity in a broad sense. Audiences during the conflict could still go to the theatre and enjoy plays that resembled those they had been used to in a peacetime context. The incorporation and resolution of wartime disruptions into familiar comic structures conveys the impression that the impact of the conflict could be dealt with similarly to the farcical trouble found in pre-war domestic comedy. The plays show audiences that the conflict did not have to be approached as an experience so monumentally impactful that it demanded new forms of cultural production in response.

‘It Turns Out to be No Bomb […] Recommended for License’: Conclusions101 Each of the dramas discussed in this chapter centre on ways in which the war could affect the roles of and interactions between members of different classes, with alterations to class structure themselves becoming sources of humour. The reception of Shaw’s Augustus Does His Bit and The Inca of Perusalem suggest the limits of how much humour could temper the provocativeness of certain aspects of class politics during the conflict. Despite Shaw’s recognition in The Inca of Perusalem that satire cannot change politics, the censor’s suspicion of the play demonstrates just how sensitive officials were to a need to protect the portrayal of the ruling class on the public stage. This was particularly the case as regards a writer with Shaw’s history of conflict with the censorship. That Augustus Does His Bit met with audience disapproval having been performed without the need for a licence likewise indicates that humour did not always ‘make safe’ discussion of class. As has been seen, his explicit and biting satire of incompetent leadership provoked anger among some audience members. A milder form of humour, more in Galsworthy’s style, was more likely to

 Jennings. 1914. Acid Drops. London: Samuel French.  Jennings. Acid Drops, p. 14. 101  Street. Foundations. 99

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produce minor feelings of amusement—the kind of amusement that moderated writers’ depictions of war experiences. Evidence from reports by the Lord Chamberlain’s readers suggests that the more seriously a drama treated the subject of class during the war, the less tame that drama was likely to be, and the less likely it was to be waved through for a licence. Playwrights’ use of humour facilitated the discussion of potentially controversial subjects, but it did so by making these subjects less politically and emotionally provocative. Galsworthy’s and Jennings’ use of humour and comic structure especially have a taming effect. Their plays reinstate order by the time they conclude: Galsworthy’s bomb turns out not to be a bomb, and Jennings’ heroines are not substantially changed by wartime alterations to their roles. Societal and personal changes to class roles that the war is depicted as having caused are resolved. Both of Jennings’ works in particular also present a tame picture of the war via their conformity to well-established conventions of popular drama. The effects of the conflict in these works are comparable to the effects of the domestic disruptions that similar popular comedies had dealt with before 1914. Far from having the deep, extensive, and traumatic impact that the most famous Great War literature suggests the conflict created, the upheavals in the comedies analysed are manageable and resolvable within the traditions of familiar genres. Finally, the humour in Jennings’ and Galsworthy’s works generates the emotional tameness of minor feelings, inviting such responses as mild amusement and levity. These are the kind of feelings that are dissociated from strong action, but that can draw attention to circumstances in which such action is frustrated. Amusement in the plays is encouraged in response to fractures in societal and cultural norms brought about by the conflict. Equally, it is amusement that smoothes over these fractures as well. Instructive of circumstances in which speech and action were restricted and in which public compliance with the war effort was critical, the particular inflection that humour takes on in these dramas is to make wartime changes to social structure and attitudes tame, manageable, and controllable. Humour acknowledges and softens the effects of the conflict on class on the home front and in the domestic sphere.

References A. N. M. 1917. Prince’s theatre: A kiss for Cinderella. Manchester Guardian, 16 October, p. 4. A. S. W. 1920. A little theatre on tour: ‘The foundations’ at the Prince’s. Manchester Guardian, 14 December, p. 11.

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Anon. 1905. Knowledge is power. The Morpeth Herald, 18 March, p. 2. ———. 1907. Royal court theatre. The Times, 9 April, p. 5. ———. The Playgoer’s duty. The Era, 14 October 1914, p. 9. ———. 1915. The growler, July, p. 12. ———. 1917a. First nights of the week. The Era, 24 January, p. 1. ———. 1917b. The stage society. The Stage, 25 January, p. 16. ———. 1917c. In the limelight: Criticising the audience. The Sunday Mirror, 28 January, p. 11. ———. 1917d. The Inca of Perusalem. Saturday Review, 22 December, p. 501. ———. 1918. ‘The better ‘Ole’, a play of humorous and pathetic war incidents, as seen by Bruce Bairnsfather. Touchstone Magazine, November, p. 133. Arrington, Lauren. 2008. The censorship of O’Flaherty V.C. The Annual of George Bernard Shaw Studies 28: 85–106. Ashwell, Lena. 1917. Concerts at the front. The Musical Herald, 1 February, p. 827. Bendall, Ernest. 1916. Report. Poached eggs and pearls. British Library. LC 1916/28. Booth, Michael. 1991. Theatre in the Victorian age. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Cockin, Katharine. 2015. Edith Craig and the Pioneer players: London’s international art theatre in a ‘Khaki-Clad and Khaki-Minded World’. In British theatre and the great war 1914–1919: New perspectives, ed. Andrew Maunder, 121–139. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Collins, Sewell. 1916. A day in a dug-out. British Library. LC Plays 1916/19. Collins, L.  J. 1994. The function of theatre entertainment in the first world war 1914–1818. Royal Holloway University of London. Connolly, L. W. 2004. Mrs Warren’s profession and the Lord Chamberlain. Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 24: 49–95. Davis, Jim, and Victor Emeljanow. 2004. Victorian and Edwardian audiences. In The Cambridge companion to Victorian and Edwardian theatre, ed. Kerry Powell, 93–108. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Dawson, Douglas. 1915. Memo, 12 November 1915. British Library. LCPCorr 1915/3885. Desmond, C.  N. 1910. Bernard Shaw’s secret. Penny Illustrated Paper, 19 November, p. 653. Donohue, Joseph. 1996. What is the Edwardian theatre? In The Edwardian theatre: Essays on performance and the stage, ed. Michael Booth and Joel Kaplan, 10–35. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Ervine, John. 1920. ‘At the play: The secret history of O’Flaherty, V. C. Observer, 12 December, p. 11. Faulk, Barry J. 2004. Music hall and modernity: The late-Victorian discovery of popular culture. Athens: Ohio UP. Fay, G. 1917. Augustus does his bit. Observer, 28 January, p. 5.

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Freud, Sigmund. 1905. Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. Trans. Strachey, James. London: Hogarth Press. 1960. Galsworthy, John. 1907. The silver box, 1916. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ———. 1917. The foundations, 1920. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Gardner, Viv. 2004. Provincial stages, 1900–1934: Touring and early repertory theatre. In The Cambridge history of British theatre, volume 3: Since 1895, ed. Baz Kershaw, 60–85. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ———. 2015. The theatre of the flappers?: Gender, spectatorship and the ‘womanisation’ of theatre 1914-1918. In British theatre and the great war 1914-1919: New perspectives, ed. Andrew Maunder, 161–178. Gibbs, A.  M. 1990. Shaw: Interviews and recollections. London: The Macmillan Press. ———. 2001. A Bernard Shaw chronology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gilbert, Joanne. 2014. Performing marginality: Humor, gender, and cultural critique. Detroit: Wayne State UP. Gunby, David. 1999. The first night of O’Flaherty, V.  C. Shaw and History 19: 85–98. Hanna, Emma. 2015. British cinema, regulation and the war effort, 1914-1918. In British theatre and the great war 1914–1919: New perspectives, ed. Andrew Maunder, 195–214. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Holroyd, Michael. 1989. Bernard Shaw volume II: 1898–1918: The pursuit of power. New York: Random House. ———. 1997. Bernard Shaw: The one-volume definitive edition. London: Chatto & Windus. Jennings, Gertrude. 1910. Between the soup and the Savoury. London: Samuel French. ———. 1911. The pros and cons. In Four one act plays, 59–84. London: Samuel French. 1914. ———. 1914. Acid drops. London: Samuel French. ———. 1916. Poached eggs and pearls: A canteen comedy in two scenes, 1917. London: Samuel French. ———. 1917a. No Servants. Cambridge UL. French’s Acting Edition No. 2480. ———. 1917b. No servants: A comedy in one act, 1919. London: Samuel French. Johnston, John. 1990. The Lord Chamberlain’s blue pencil. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Kingston, Gertrude. 1915. Letter to Douglas Dawson, 20 November. British Library. LCPCorr 1915/3885. Kosok, Heinz. 2007. The theatre of war: The first world war in British and Irish Drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lawrence, Jon. 2003. Forging a peaceable kingdom: War, violence, and fear of Brutalization in Post–First World War Britain. The Journal of Modern History 75: 557–589.

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Londré, Hardison, and Felicia. 2015. The range of laughter: First person reports from entertainers of the over there theatre league. In Humour, entertainment, and popular culture during world war I, ed. Clémentine Tholas-Disset and Karen A. Ritzenhoff, 169–179. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Loughran, Tracey. 2017. Shell-shock and medical culture in first world war Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Macaulay, Rose. 1919. What not: A prophetic comedy. London: Constable and Company. Maunder, Andrew. 2015. Introduction: Rediscovering new perspectives. In British theatre and the great war 1914–1919: New perspectives, ed. Andrew Maunder, 1–39. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McDonald, Jan. 2014. Barrie and the new dramatists. In Gateway to the modern: Resituating J.  M. Barrie, ed. Bold, Valentina, and Andrew Nash, 1–16. Glasgow: Scottish Literature International. Messinger, Gary. 1992. British propaganda and the state in the first world war. Manchester: Manchester UP. Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly feelings, 2007. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Nicholson, Steve. 2003. The censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Volume One, 1900–1932. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. ———. 2004. Getting away with it: Strategies and practice, 1902–1944. In The Lord Chamberlain regrets… A history of British theatre censorship, ed. Dominic Shellard, Steve Nicholson, and Miriam Handley, 57–130. London: British Library. Postlewait, Thomas. 2004. The London stage, 1895–1918. In The Cambridge history of British theatre, volume 3: Since 1895, ed. Baz Kershaw, 34–59. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Russell, Dave. 1996. Varieties of life: The making of the Edwardian music hall. In The Edwardian theatre: Essays on performance and the stage, ed. Michael Booth and Joel Kaplan, 61–85. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Shaw, Bernard. 1911. Preface. Three plays by Brieux, with a preface by Bernard Shaw, xxxvi–xxxi. London: A. C. Fifield. ———. 1914. Common sense about the war. In Current history of the European war, 11–60. New York: The New York Times Company. ———. 1915. The Inca of Perusalem. In Heartbreak house, great Catherine, and Playlets of the war, 191–220. London: Constable and Company. 1919. ———. 1916. Augustus does his bit: A true-to-life farce. In The complete plays of George Bernard Shaw, 839–848. London: Odhams Press. 1934. ———. 1917. Augustus does his bit. In Heartbreak house, Great Catherine, and Playlets of the war, 221–246. London: Constable and Company. 1919. ———. 1919. Preface to Heartbreak house, 1949. London: Constable and Co. Ltd.

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Shaw, Matthew. 2017. Pamphlets and political writing. In The Edinburgh companion to the first world war and the arts, ed. Ann-Marie Einhaus and Katherine Isobel Baxter, 277–287. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Sheffield, Gary. 2014. A short history of the first world war. London: Oneworld. Stowell, Sheila. 1996. Suffrage critics and political action: A feminist agenda. In The Edwardian theatre: Essays on performance and the stage, ed. Michael Booth and Joel Kaplan, 166–184. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Street, G.S. 1915. Report. The Inca of Perusalem. British Library. LCP Corr 1915/3885. ———. 1916. Report. A day in a dug-out. British Library. LC Plays 1916/19. ———. 1917. Report. Foundations. British Library. LC Plays 1917/11. ———. 1922. Report. O’Flaherty, V. C. British Library. LCPCorr 1922/4288. Trundell, H. 1915. Letter to Gertrude Kingston, 15 November. British Library. LCPCorr 1915/3885. Williams, Gordon. 2003. British theatre in the great war: A revaluation. London: Continuum.

CHAPTER 5

War and the Depiction of Gender: ‘Let us hope for the best and assume that he is dead’ F. Tennyson Jesse and H. M. Harwood, Billeted (1917)

The humorous texts explored in this chapter in different ways address the war’s impact on the roles played by men and women. Their particular focus is on what kind of behaviour was appropriate for men and women to adopt in response to the conflict. The humour in these texts largely presents conservative perspectives on provocative subjects, raising the question of whether humorous representation of social change makes that change appear less radical. Or, to reverse this, the question of whether conservative points of view can still be deemed safe if the subject discussed breaks taboos or even pushes at the boundaries of what could be discussed under censorship rules. The texts below do include discussion of war experiences which challenge the status quo of gendered roles. This includes male hierarchies being broken down, and women taking on new forms of work and interacting with those they would not have met outside of the wartime context. As seen in relation to the humorous depiction of class dynamics in Chap. 4, however, the humour with which these topics are represented serves to make them ‘safe’. Amusement dampens the emotional impact of the changes depicted, while the structures and genres that many of the texts follow—continuing from well-established literary

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conventions—see order restored and conventions upheld regardless of the comic disruptions that have occurred over the course of their narratives. The texts explore what the war did or could do to different aspects of gender identity, such as disruptions to norms of masculine maturity, with each work privileging whatever behaviour or views could be considered most patriotic and supportive of the British war effort. One partial exception to this pattern included here is a short story that satirises aspects of patriotic behaviour itself—or, at least, that satirises extreme forms of patriotism that go so far as to cross the line into jingoism. This is Evelyn Sharp’s ‘The Patriot’s Day’ (1916), in which jingoism and irrational fears are associated with men while the female protagonist continues with her life calmly and sensibly, at the same time as making private jokes at the expense of her brother.1 Even here, however, the story’s humour makes the subject matter tamer than it would appear if given serious treatment. The implication that the conflict need not give rise to dramatic changes in behaviour in addition suggests that it is containable—something to which it is possible to respond in a measured way rather than an enormity that could only prompt extreme reactions. The theatrical world to which the majority of the texts here belong is important in shaping their comedy and their perspectives. In the 1890s there had been a move towards ‘high art’ in the theatre, with late-­Victorian and Edwardian plays ‘written for publication as well as performance, with elaborate […] stage directions and commentary’. The ‘idiom of the new theatre was reformist—its prophets were [Henrik] Ibsen, William Archer, and [George Bernard] Shaw’.2 At this point, in fact, ‘even aside from Shaw, comedies were more intelligent and more daring in theme than a generation before’.3 Until recently, criticism regularly subscribed to the view that theatre during the Great War regressed. According to this assessment, wartime theatre was ‘stuck in an earlier age, its productions dictated by vulgar showmanship and newspaper stories about German villainy’, contrasting a stage before 1914 that was ‘a place of lively cultural cross-­ fertilization and exchange, commercial and populist but also energized by imports from Ireland, France, Germany, the United States, 1  Evelyn Sharp. 1916. The Patriot’s Day. Herald, 4 November. In British Literature of World War I: The Short Story and the Novella, ed. Andrew Maunder, 89–92. London: Pickering & Chatto. 2011. 2  Nina Auerbach. 2004. Before the Curtain. In The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, ed. Kerry Powell, 3–14. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, p. 6. 3  Michael Booth. 2004. Comedy and Farce. In Powell, 129–44 (p. 137).

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and Norway among others’.4 Shaw for example used his preface to Heartbreak House (1919) to deliver a diatribe against the popularity of light comedy during the conflict. He claimed that ‘from the moment when the routine leave for our soldiers was established’, servicemen who were novices to play-going ‘crowded the theatres to the doors’. According to Shaw, ‘the best music-­hall comedians ransacked their memories for the oldest quips and the most childish antics to avoid carrying the military spectators out of their depth’.5 They were however ‘only a minority’, and the ‘cultivated soldier, who in time of peace would look at nothing theatrical except the most advanced post-Ibsen plays’, found himself ‘thirsting for silly jokes, dances, and brainlessly sensuous exhibitions of pretty girls’. According to Shaw, experience of the battlefield ‘produced a condition of hyperaesthesia […] Trivial things gained intensity and stale things novelty’, with actors only being required to ‘exploit the bliss of smiling men who were no longer under fire’.6 Changes in literary culture are however rarely as simple as this narrative would suggest. While there may have been a rise in serious, complex, and reformist theatre before the war that was slowed by changing tastes and the onset of propaganda after 1914, this does not mean that the performances that were available were homogenous or valueless. As Andrew Maunder points out, there has ‘always been a difficulty in “pinning” down the theatre of 1914-1919’, and this ‘has a great deal to do with the complexity and scale of the field, its broad coordinates and different stages’.7 Popular theatrical comedy had not lost its widespread appeal by the time war broke out in 1914, and the theatrical comedy that helped to raise morale during the conflict continued from this.8 While Shaw may have lamented the popularity of light entertainment, moreover, the fact that audiences turned to it suggests its value for many people. There were diverse and widespread efforts to entertain servicemen especially, both in the creation of their own theatrical groups and in the many overseas

4  Andrew Maunder. 2015. Introduction: Rediscovering New Perspectives. In British Theatre and the Great War 1914–1919: New Perspectives, ed. Andrew Maunder, 1–39. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 2, 5. 5  George Bernard Shaw. 1919. Preface to Heartbreak House. London: Constable and Co. Ltd. 1949, p. 30. 6  Shaw, preface, p. 31. 7  Maunder. Rediscovering, p. 9. 8  Booth. Comedy and Farce, p. 137.

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performances by professional actors.9 There were even reports of comedy having a miraculous effect on those who were suffering from shell shock. In 1915 the Era reported on an incident at a music hall where ‘a soldier in the audience, who had been wounded and gassed’, was ‘so highly amused at one of the comedians that he recovered’ his speech and hearing.10 The association that Shaw makes between ‘hyperaesthesia’ (an abnormal increase in sensitivity) from the battlefield and the desire for light comedy to some extent chimes with the taming function of literary humour during the conflict. It makes sense that one important section of the audience—servicemen—would be grateful for any form of entertainment, but particularly entertainment that was not emotionally or intellectually challenging, after being faced with the conditions of military service. Yet Shaw’s trap of dismissing popular wartime comedy as worthless should be avoided. Recent scholarship has recognised the significance and vibrancy of theatre during the conflict, paying especial attention for example to what it does reveal about tastes and attitudes. The selection of texts discussed below is designed to be accessible and entertaining, and many of the values the texts express do not reflect modern sensibilities. Their humour however brought onto the stage for public consideration important issues of identity at a time when these were of heightened personal and social consequence. This, and the fact that humour simultaneously worked to negotiate and soothe anxieties arising from these issues, meant it functioned in wartime plays beyond entertainment alone.

‘You’ll Find Him Different’: Wartime Masculinity and Male Relationships11 Both before and after 1914 military identities were presented as the ideal of masculinity. The soldier was ‘constructed as exemplary and aspirational in a range of cultural forms, and the characteristics which he was supposed 9  L.  J. Collins. 1994. The Function of Theatre Entertainment in the First World War 1914–1818. Royal Holloway University of London, p. 312. 10  Gordon Williams. 2003. British Theatre in the Great War: a Revaluation. London: Continuum, p. 103. 11  A.  A. Milne. 1918. The Boy Comes Home. In  First Plays, 105–28. London: Chatto & Windus. 1932, p. 113. All subsequent references to this edition unless otherwise stated.

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to embody were celebrated’. Many texts ‘elevated the triumphant soldier to the pinnacle of aspirational manliness in their patriotism and dangerous adventures’.12 In the nineteenth century, the ‘figure of the imperial soldier hero […] was one of the most potent and widespread images of idealised masculinity in cultural circulation’. He featured in ‘history, fiction, children’s literature, on the lecture circuit and in newspapers’. This image of masculinity continued into First World War strategies of recruitment and propaganda.13 In writing by soldiers of the Great War, one of the main identities presented is an ideal to be mimicked, a heroism associated ‘with the battlefront and the homosocial society of the military sphere’.14 Many young men had in addition in advance of the Great War been taught to admire the masculine military ideal, and to champion the patriotism with which this ideal was associated.15 Humorous representations of wartime masculinity are often based in serious and potentially uncomfortable subjects. The plays discussed here are concerned with reversals of domestic power dynamics and concerns with what kinds of masculinity the war required. The humour in these works however holds in balance the provocative and the permissible, the challenging and the reassuring, depicting the concerns of the day in a way suitable to the contested space of the stage. Ultimately, their humour privileges the identity of the soldier and encourages the adoption of work, attitudes, and types of masculine behaviour and identity deemed to be dutiful responses to the conflict. The plays included are Sewell Collins’ The Conscienceless Objector (Conscienceless, London Hippodrome, 1916), A. A. Milne’s The Boy Comes Home: A Comedy in One Act (Boy, Victoria Palace, London, September 1918), and J. M. Barrie’s The New Word (New Word, Duke of York’s Theatre, London, 1915).16 They elucidate a range of aspects of masculinity in the wartime context: the implications of being

12  Lois Bibbings. 2009. Telling Tales about Men: Conceptions of Conscientious Objectors to Military Service During the First World War. Manchester UP, p. 90. 13  Jessica Meyer. 2009. Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain. London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 5. 14  Meyer, p. 2. 15  Bibbings, p. 90. 16  Sewell Collins. 1916. The Conscienceless Objector. British Library. LC Plays 1916/5; Milne, Boy Comes Home; J. M. Barrie. 1915. The New Word. In Echoes of the War. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 65–108. 1920. All subsequent references are to this edition unless otherwise stated.

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a conscientious objector (a ‘C. O.’); the effect of military experience on young men’s maturity; and the war’s effect on father-son relationships. Performed in 1916 after the Military Service Act introduced conscription, Conscienceless depicts three tribunals for men requesting military exemption. The primary plot line is rooted in homophobia: the suggestion in the play is that there is a connection between conscientious objection, effeminacy or implied homosexuality, and cowardice. The first applicant for example is a ‘manufacturer of powder puffs’, which is not only an object associated with femininity, but at the time also had a slang meaning: a ‘Powder puff’ was a ‘man who pays excessive attention to his appearance, a fop; an effeminate man (frequently with suggestion of homosexuality)’.17 Greatest attention however is given to the third applicant, Spratt. Spratt is a conscientious objector, whose character Collins bases on homophobic stereotype (and whose name itself—referring to small stature—plays into his characterisation). He is a: little worm of a person. Neatly dressed, with a collar much too big for him and his hair gummed with brilliantine. He minces up to the table and stands examining his nails which he polishes with a silk handkerchief.18

He speaks in a ‘high, almost feminine voice’, and gives his occupation as a ‘cucumber polisher […] I’m an expert in removing a—what one might call the warts from cucumbers’.19 The committee unsuccessfully attempts to make Spratt admit that he would use force under certain circumstances, and initially grants his exemption. Spratt, however, displays an extraordinary ability to fight when a sergeant on the tribunal punches him, and he is ‘Referred to the Lord Kitchener—with recommendation!’20 Collins’ humour is satirical and ‘corrective’. Foppish, pacifist and, as touched on below, subject to his wife’s authority, Spratt is the antithesis of what was thought of as desirable, heroic military identity.21 The sergeant in particular mocks him; for example, when Spratt explains, ‘I don’t believe in taking life’ the sergeant replies ‘Seems to me he takes life pretty easily’.22 17  Sewell Collins, p.  3. OED. 2018. Powder Puff, N. and Adj. OED Online, Oxford University Press. oed.com/view/Entry/149158. Accessed 16 August 2018. 18  Sewell Collins, p. 5. 19  Sewell Collins, p. 5. 20  Sewell Collins, pp. 10–11. 21  Meyer, p. 2. 22  Collins, p. 8.

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Such satire has the antagonistic quality of the ridicule discussed in superiority theories of humour, a ‘species of joy mingled with hatred’, according to which we are ‘delighted by the evils that befall [others], and regard them as deserved’.23 Equally relevant here is the Freudian, tendentious function of humour, according to which humour is theorised as venting aggression and providing a means of circumventing psychological repression to address taboo subjects, in this case homosexuality. Collins’ play perhaps offered a chance for those who felt resentment towards conscientious objectors to indulge their aggression. Such ridicule was at the less serious end of the spectrum of hostility and violence that was directed towards conscientious objectors. Collins’ titular pun was not original— jokes about ‘conscienceless’ objectors were common in the British press— and the depiction of Spratt reflects representations of these men found elsewhere as being, in Lois Bibbings’ words, ‘suspected of sexual inversion’.24 Conscientious objectors lost relationships with friends and family, were refused employment and promotion, and were subjected to ‘derision, hatred and violence’.25 Spratt does give several witty responses to the panel’s questions, briefly reversing the direction of the joke and subverting the assumptions on which his interrogation is based. Asked what he would do if a man were to beat his wife, he says ‘Feel very sorry for him’.26 When probed over whether he would attempt to stop enemy soldiers from torching his home, he replies ‘No, my home is insured’, counteracting military bombast with a common-sense part of domestic life.27 Strikingly, his retorts undermine key arguments against conscientious objection. The moment in which he declares opposition to killing, depending on the line’s delivery, may even act as an arresting reminder of the seriousness of what he is being asked to do. Spratt would not attempt to destroy a Zeppelin because ‘I might kill some of the human beings inside it. I don’t believe in taking life’.28 Though his opinions contradict the status quo, they make it onstage via inclusion 23  René Descartes. 1649. The Passions of the Soul and Other Late Philosophical Writings. Trans. Moriarty, Michael. Oxford: Oxford UP. 2015, p. 268. 24  Bibbings, p.  89. For examples of ‘conscienceless’ jokes, see: Anon. 1916. Home Enemies. The Wells Journal, 10 March, p. 5; Anon. 1916. In the Limelight. Liverpool Echo, 24 March. 25  Bibbings, pp. 66–67, 69. 26  Sewell Collins, pp. 6, 8. 27  Sewell Collins, p. 8. 28  Sewell Collins, p. 8.

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in a work that otherwise ridicules his views and implied sexuality. The play is in this sense a good illustration of how humour, in being able to take liberties with taboos, can be slippery in the meanings it conveys and the feelings it provokes. Collins’ inclusion of Spratt’s pacifist views is very much as an inadvertent subversion—Collins is not trying to promote sympathy for conscientious objection by furtively including arguments in its favour while appearing to ridicule it. Rather, the text has the potential to take on a life of its own once performed. The censor’s report on the play casts light on the mixture it contains of that which is safe and that which is less tame. The censor, G. S. Street, judges that the play can be licensed for public performance, and does not address in his report the subject of Spratt’s implied homosexuality. It was ambiguous whether playwrights could present characters ‘accused’ of homosexuality in circumstances ‘where this is denied and remains unproven’, but the subject of homosexuality in general would not be permitted in public performances.29 Street’s silence here possibly speaks to a topic sufficiently taboo that it leaves gaps even in a censors’ report. That the play passes censorship speaks to the overall ideological direction of Collins’ satire, which as Street himself explains is firmly aimed towards ridiculing conscientious objectors. Street judges that the ‘“conscientious objector” is fair game’. The casualness of his comment, given the aggression in Collins’ satire, suggests the permissibility during the conflict of ridiculing conscientious objectors. Sensitive to humour’s ability to work in different ideological directions within the same play, Street was more concerned with the representation of the committee. His primary interest is to assure himself that nothing in Collins’ depiction could be detrimental to the reputation of those who assessed claims of conscientious objection. Aware that public interest in the hearings meant they could ‘hardly be excluded from the purview of the stage’, he seeks to protect them: ‘it is not desirable that too much fun should be made out of the tribunals’. He objects to what he calls the chair’s ‘dubious’ line. The second applicant is worried about what would happen to his children, who are attractive young women, were he to join the forces, and the chair declares that if the  Steve Nicholson. 2004. Getting Away With It: Strategies and Practice, 1902–1944. In The Lord Chamberlain Regrets… A History of British Theatre Censorship, ed. Shellard, Dominic, Steve Nicholson, and Miriam Handley, 57–130. London: British Library, p. 109. ‘Until 1958 the Lord Chamberlain maintained an absolute ban on homosexuality as a stage theme’. John Johnston. 1990. The Lord Chamberlain’s Blue Pencil. London: Hodder & Stoughton, p. 171. 29

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country does not provide for them, ‘the committee will’ (Collins’ emphasis).30 Street judges that it is ‘not worth cutting, but the piece would be better without the incident, which may be thought derogatory to the tribunals’.31 This is one instance in which a joke is sufficiently close to the line of acceptability that it almost prevents Collins from getting away with the sexual reference and the irreverent treatment of authority. Noting Spratt’s altercation with the sergeant, and that Spratt ‘makes hay of the sergeant and the committee’, Street states that he ‘see[s] no harm in this incident’ but has ‘mentioned it fully in case a different view is taken’.32 It is telling that this was the censor’s main concern about a play that includes much more risqué joking—the sexual innuendo of ‘cucumber polishing’ is the moment that stands out. That Street was primarily interested in the portrayal of the committee members is a strong indication of how the tameness (or riskiness) of humour was determined. Humour was considered safe if it worked in the ideological direction of perceived patriotism and duty. A similar dynamic, with humour working in support of servicemen above all else, emerges in Milne’s The Boy Comes Home—though this is a very different play in subject matter and tone. Set ‘the day after the war’, 23 year old Philip who has been serving in the military returns to his aunt and uncle (Emily and James), having gained maturity and self-assurance during his time in the forces. The new personality that Philip’s war experience has given him has a disruptive impact on familial and domestic dynamics, with his assertion of his personal domestic preferences signalling his new power. The play opens with Philip ordering his own breakfast after the usual time at which it is served (‘Breakfast has been cleared away an hour ago | Exactly. That’s why I rang’), in doing so taking on and successfully defeating the household cook, who intimidates both the maid and Aunt Emily herself.33 When Emily expresses her alarm at this—‘Philip, how could you! I should have been terrified’—her nephew explains, ‘Well, you see, I’ve done your job, for two years out there […] Mess President ….’34 Philip’s aunt is willing to accept the new, post-war identity that Philip has adopted, but his uncle James attempts to reinstate the masculine hierarchy  Sewell Collins, p. 4.  G. S. Street. 1916. Report. The Conscienceless Objector. British Library. LC Plays 1916/5. 32  Sewell Collins, p. 4. 33  Milne. Boy Comes Home, p. 107. 34  Milne. Boy Comes Home, pp. 111–12. 30 31

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that existed in advance of the conflict (‘understand once and for all, Philip, while you remain in my house I expect not only punctuality, but also civility and respect’).35 Before his military experience, as Philip admits, he ‘always used to be frightened’ of his uncle, but the drastic change in power between the two men since Philip’s return quickly becomes clear.36 James falls asleep while waiting for Philip to finish his breakfast and the play enters a dream sequence in which Philip refuses to join the family business. He threatens James with weapons brought back from the front until his uncle agrees to support his preferred career of becoming an architect. The humour is squarely at James’ expense: having faced angry Brigadiers, Philip is no longer impressed by James’ attempts to assert his dominance. Philip toys with a revolver, contemplating aloud ‘that there are about a hundred thousand people in England’ who are ‘accustomed’ to these guns and ‘who have nobody to practise on now’, adding ‘You mustn’t think that after five years of war one has quite the same ideas about the sanctity of human life’.37 He demonstrates James’ fear by suggesting a fair fight (offering him a bomb he is too afraid to touch), tricks James into standing to attention, and threatens to bring out his gun daily until allowed to forge his own career: ‘Fear—it’s a horrible thing. I’ve had nearly five years of it’.38 The audience is firmly encouraged to sympathise with Philip, invited to be in on the joke of putting an imperious non-combatant in his new, post-war place. Milne portrays the conflict as having had effects on masculine identity and male relationships that could have caused audiences concern. First, Philip’s threats of violence hint at fears of how those trained in combat may react if left without work—bringing to life anxieties that the conflict may have a brutalising effect. In this sense it expresses similar concerns to those found in Galsworthy’s play The Foundations (1917), discussed in Chap. 4, which depicts socialist unrest developing after the war because servicemen have returned to civilian life only to face unemployment and

 Milne. Boy Comes Home, p. 116.  Milne. Boy Comes Home, p. 109. 37  Milne. 1918. The Boy Comes Home. British Library. LC Plays 1918/16, p. 19. In the typescript, references to ‘four years’ have been altered to ‘five years’. The published version uses ‘four years’. Milne. LC Plays 1918/16, p. 20; Milne. Boy Comes Home, p. 122. 38  Milne. LC Plays 1918/16, p. 22. 35 36

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poverty.39 The adult, authoritative masculinity Philip has adopted is after all based on his familiarity with physical force and destruction: in one solemn moment he tells James that he ‘became twenty-five … or thirtyfive … or forty-five’ on the Somme.40 The precocious maturity the war has given Philip is at the core of the second, and principle, concern in the play with how military service might affect young men. This is a concern with the idea that the conflict endowed young men with the kind of experience that would have consequences for the distribution of power. Milne’s suggestion that older men who did not fight would have to relinquish power to younger men who did is a potentially emotive one, playing on apprehension surrounding masculine and familial hierarchies. It is difficult to imagine the Lord Chamberlain’s reader licensing as easily as he did The Boy Comes Home a drama that depicts seriously a serviceman threatening his family with weapons picked up in the war.41 That the threats of violence take place as part of a dream sequence is an important factor in lessening the stakes of what could otherwise be a more tense confrontation, but the humour of the scene also plays a crucial role in this.42 If Philip’s use of his weapons were ‘real’ (within the fictional world of the play) it would be less likely that his threats would invite or produce amusement, since a sense of being in a playful rather than a serious mode encourages mirth. Were the audience presented with a depiction of an ex-­ soldier ‘really’ threatening a civilian, nervousness or tension could take the place of amusement, even if the episode were intended to be funny. Equally, if Milne had chosen not to play the dream sequence for laughs, for example if it were depicted more like a nightmare, the subject matter would not be as safe. The censor who wrote the licencing report for the play, Ernest Bendall, judged that it was innocuous (and comments it is ‘a well-written if not very dramatic little sketch’). This judgement seems accurate, with the drama’s tameness stemming at least in part from Milne’s humour.43 Amusement here as elsewhere functions as a minor emotion, 39  This was itself an important political issue: employment was one of the problems the British government faced in planning for peacetime. Carolyn Malone. 2013. A Job Fit for Heroes? Disabled Veterans, the Arts and Crafts Movement and Social Reconstruction in Post-World War I Britain. First World War Studies 4: 201–217 (p. 202). 40  Milne. LC Plays 1918/16, p. 14. 41  Ernest Bendall. 1918. Report. The Boy Comes Home. LC Plays 1918/16. 42  The typescript of Milne’s play has hand-written alterations that make it ambiguous whether James’ experience was in fact a dream. Milne. LC Plays 1918/16, pp. 11, 26–27. 43  Bendall. Boy Comes Home.

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circumventing stronger feelings, while the joke being at the expense of the civilian rather than the (ex) serviceman adds another layer of safeguarding. Anything that could cast aspersions on members of the military themselves may not have been banned, but could be noteworthy enough to attract comment from the censorship. As with Galsworthy’s depiction of socialist unrest in The Foundations, furthermore, Milne’s comedy suggests that relatively small changes resulting from the conflict (a shift in power dynamics between older and younger men), should be accepted to preclude more dramatic effects (younger men now trained in violence using it to demand power or recognition). A comment from the journalist who reviewed the play for the Era reflects the drama’s mixture of facetiousness and corrective: ‘If there are any […] iron-willed parents and guardians’ who still believe ‘they will be able to exert pre-war authority when the boys get back, they had better go to the Victoria Palace’ to see ‘Mr A. A. Milne’s comedy […] and be warned in time’.44 The war’s effects on family dynamics are also at stake in Barrie’s New Word. Barrie addresses the relationship between war and new modes of expression, a focus that allows him explore how the conflict might affect father-son interaction. Roger, the son of the Torrance household, has become a second lieutenant and is offstage donning his uniform when the action starts. After the ‘Uniform comes forward with Roger inside it’ Mrs. Torrance, having instructed her husband to show Roger some parental warmth, leaves them alone.45 Though they treat their encounter as an ordeal (‘Father and son! He’ll bolt; or if he doesn’t, I will’, says Mr. Torrance), they decide that they do have affection for each other. The drama concludes with Roger prefacing ‘father’ with the novel qualification ‘dear’.46 Mr. Torrance ‘casts all sense of decency to the winds; such is one of the effects of war’. He finds courage because ‘There is a war on’ to say ‘I’m going to cast a grenade into the middle of you […] I’m fond of you’.47 In return, Roger admits ‘I sometimes—bragged about you at school’.48 The conflict ‘makes us know all new things’, including that Roger is ‘the head of the house now’, which statement and its emotional

 Anon. 1918. Next Week’s Calls. Era, 11 September, p. 7.  Barrie, pp. 75–76, 86. 46  Barrie, pp. 75, 107. 47  Barrie, pp. 89, 92. 48  Barrie, p. 92. 44 45

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weight are then partially reversed: Mr. Torrance says ‘I’ll have to be jolly respectful’, and Roger replies, with teenaged embarrassment, ‘Shut up, father!’49 As in Milne’s Boy, here the humour is partially didactic, pressing fathers and sons to cast off their reticence urgently: Roger and other second lieutenants may not return. Fittingly enough for a play that thematises barriers to expression, Barrie does not state explicitly what the ‘new word’ is. Another candidate is ‘second lieutenant’, as novel an appellation for Roger as ‘dear’ is for his father. This term and the Torrances’ comic reactions to it help to articulate a sense of patriotism, as well as contributing to the depiction of the war’s domestic impact. Roger’s sister announces him in his uniform with different forms of military and familial naming: ‘Allow me to introduce Second Lieutenant Torrance of the Royal Sussex. Father—your son; Second Lieutenant Torrance—your father. Mother—your little Rogie’.50 When she lists the ‘fine words’ she has noticed in military vocabulary (‘Platoon! Dragoon! […] Maréchal de France’), Mrs. Torrance replies ‘there is nothing so nice as Second Lieutenant’—in the 1936 edition of Barrie’s work her line is ‘there is no word so nice as 2nd Lieutenant’.51 Such interest in new language is most explicit in Mr. Torrance’s reflection that before the war ‘we were so little of a military nation that most of us didn’t know there were Second Lieutenants’. The term is, he says, ‘like a new word to us— one, I dare say, of many that the war will add to our language’, his plural pronouns reaching beyond his own family.52 Barrie may have chosen the rank of second lieutenant for personal reasons: George Llewelyn Davies to whom he was guardian and who was one of the boys that inspired Peter Pan (1904), served as a second lieutenant and was killed in March 1915.53 The rank however also fits the play’s everyman narrative. Barrie’s opening stage directions state that ‘Any room nowadays must be the scene, for any

 Barrie, pp. 97–98.  Barrie, p. 76. 51  Barrie, p. 81; Barrie. New Word. In The Plays of J. M. Barrie in One Volume. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 739–57. 1936, p. 745. 52  Barrie, p. 98. 53  Piers Dudgeon. 2008. Captivated: J. M. Barrie, Daphne Du Maurier and the Dark Side of Neverland. London: Vintage Books, p.  207; Anon. Second Lieutenant Davies, George Llewlyn. Commonwealth War Graves Commission. www.cwgc.org/find-war-dead/casualty/456458/. Accessed 10 November 2017. 49 50

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father and son are the dramatis personae’.54 While the backgrounds of those who became second lieutenants changed during the war and depended on individual units, the role was associated with young, upper-­ middle class men.55 These are the kind of men with whom Barrie’s audience might be very familiar, West End theatre generally being patronised by London’s middle classes and middle-class visitors to the capital. This familiarity is reflected in reviews from the time.56 As A. Croom-Johnson of the Review of Reviews noted, ‘“The New Word” is “Second Lieutenant”’, around which is ‘woven’ scenes ‘paralleled in thousands of English homes to-day’.57 The certainty with which he assumes that the new word is ‘second lieutenant’ speaks to the contemporary pervasiveness of the conflict, the extent to which such military words may have been on many people’s minds. The war had a primacy that may be difficult for modern readers to imagine. Heinz Kosok, in his brief description of the play, assumes that the new word is ‘dear’, speaking to his greater distance from the conflict as well as to modern familiarity with masculine expressions of love.58 Croom-­ Johnson captures how Barrie’s play invites a sense of national unity based on shared experience. Again, there is a didactic element here: families are encouraged to accommodate themselves to the conflict’s intrusions. The new words, ‘second lieutenant’ and ‘dear’, encapsulate the themes around which the play revolves: the war’s invasion into the home and the familial and emotional effects of this. These themes have the potential to provoke anxiety or other non-pleasurable feelings, but they are presented in ways that invite amusement, or at least amusement alongside other

 Barrie, p. 67.  Peter Simkins. 1988. Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of the New Armies. Manchester: Manchester UP, pp. 212–13. 56  Michael Booth. 1977. East End and West End: Class and Audience in Victorian London. Theatre Research International 2: 98–103 (p. 99). Jenna Kubly, acknowledging the humour in Barrie’s war plays, argues that it prevented audiences from recognising that he depicted ‘events happening around them’, but reviews from the time suggest that the topicality of the Torrances’ situation was understood well. Jenna Kubly. 2015. J. M. Barrie and World War I. In Humor, Entertainment, and Popular Culture during World War I, ed. Tholas-Disset, Clémentine, and Karen Ritzenhoff, 197–208. London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 205. 57  A. Croom-Johnson. 1915. The Drama During War-Time: The Two Barries. The Review of Reviews 51: 348. 58  Heinz Kosok. 2007. The Theatre of War: The First World War in British and Irish Drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 31. 54 55

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emotions.59 There is pathos in Roger’s departure—the fact that he is still ‘little Rogie’ to his mother, his defensiveness when teased (‘Shut up, father!’), his reference to schoolboy bragging, and his uniform’s dominance over him all emphasise his youth. To borrow the term used i­ ronically in the title of Milne’s play, he is more of a ‘boy’ than a soldier, making New Word a wartime manifestation of Barrie’s career-long interest in childhood and its loss. Barrie’s subject matter invites sympathy for the young going to fight, pride in them, and apprehension on their behalf. At the same time, Barrie’s depiction of a son embarking into the military world does invite amusement. And, more specifically, it solicits amusement that is predominantly observational, reflecting and contributing to the everyman narrative and setting of the play. The anxieties and awkwardness that the characters experience are funny largely because they reflect back to audiences what may very well have been familiar experiences. The humour here is similar to the observational humour that is a favourite with modern stand-up comedians. This is a style whereby comedians turn anxieties into jokes by confessing openly to embarrassing situations that many people may have experienced (and cringed over internally), the laughter provoked being the laughter of recognition. This kind of humour perhaps has an especial impact in a crowd. Audience laughter in response to the Torrances’ conversation signals that those in the auditorium relate to the topic at hand: this is one moment in which humorous Great War literature stands to offer some catharsis. In Barrie’s play, humour makes potentially incendiary subjects less controversial, and less likely to provoke strong negative emotions. In place of stronger feelings, New Word encourages more muted responses, such as mild amusement or sympathetic recognition of masculine emotional awkwardness. The same pattern is found in Milne’s work. As has been seen, Boy creates humour from potential changes in domestic life that could otherwise cause friction and anxiety, with older men having to come to terms with a loss of power in favour of younger men who had fought. Collins’ play is a different case in that it directs homophobic ridicule towards conscientious objectors. The strength of its satire differentiates it 59  In published versions, there is a moment of political satire.: Mrs. Torrance comments that had Roger’s older brother, who died as a child, been alive, she would have wanted him to fight, ‘if it is the noble war they all say it is. […] Surely they wouldn’t deceive mothers’. This comment did not appear in the version of the play submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office, though it is not clear whether it was removed before submission, or added before publication. Barrie, pp. 85–86; Barrie. LC Plays 1915/5).

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from the milder forms of humour that characterise the other works discussed. Yet in the context of minor feelings, laughter might be considered a milder form of response than the anger provoked by Collins’ topic elsewhere. This is particularly apparent in the sense that the ‘larger’ feeling of anger was, for some, sufficiently strong during the war to lead to action in the form of physical violence against conscientious objectors. All of the plays work in favour of patriotic support for those in the military. In Milne’s and Barrie’s plays servicemen are framed as being at the top of a new social hierarchy, with both families depicted as finding that they will have to come to terms with the new social order the conflict has introduced. In Collins’ work, the hints about homosexuality are there only for the sake of satire on the side of Britain’s military operations. Humour’s role here in the depiction of masculine experiences of the conflict thus has a taming effect not solely in an emotional sense but in an ideological sense as well.

‘They Are Having the Time of Their Lives, Probably Being Quite Useful too’: War and Roles for Women60 Humorous representations of the conflict’s effects on women’s work that were published during the war were often positive and reassuring. This includes depictions of women moving into workplaces that are framed as not being typical for female labour. Examples on this topic written from male perspectives include the poems ‘Feminine Invasion’ (1916), published in the magazine of the Royal Army Medical Corps, and ‘To My Successor’ by William Kersley Holmes’, a serviceman who published two volumes of his work in 1915.61 ‘Feminine Invasion’ describes a new culture emerging in military hospitals following the entrance of female workers. The poem speaks to the expectations and stereotypes surrounding women at the time of the war, as does the reference to them as ‘girls’. The 60  F.  Tennyson Jesse. 1918. The Sword of  Deborah: First-hand Impressions of  the  British Women’s Army in France. London, Heinemann, p. 3. 61  Anon. 1916. Feminine Invasion. RAMC Magazine, June, p. 9. While this is anonymous, an editorial note that accompanies it implies that the author is male: ‘Women and girls are now largely employed in Military Hospitals, and especially in the various offices. The following is contributed by a correspondent at Netley, who is apparently feeling the influence of the feminine invasion’. W. Kersley Holmes. 1915. To My Successor. More Ballads of Field and Billet. Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 40–41.

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speaker describes for example, how ‘We’re kind to each other, and never say “d---,” | We content our poor selves with just saying “hang,”’ and ‘talk about fashions as much as we can | Because we have girls in the office’.62 ‘To My Successor’ is written in the voice of a clerk-turned-soldier, who portrays the woman who has replaced him in the job he left vacant. Addressing this replacement, the speaker says ‘on that very seat, whereon I spend | Full many an hour in weariness, you sit’. He goes on to implore her to ‘bear in mind that one you never knew | Thinks sometimes of you’, and ‘likes to picture you | Transforming his old office like a flower’. The poem closes with the reassurance that the speaker ‘does not grudge your triumph’, since ‘You’ve found your rôle, the Army a recruit’. He continues, ‘One certain fact emerges in the case—| You’re jolly welcome to your present place!’63 These two poems again work in the ideological direction of support for the war effort. The narrative is, (a) that women in the office bring about improvements and should be welcomed, and (b) the roles vacated by men are not as desirable as military service and so men should not be concerned about leaving them to female replacements. There is a large degree of reassurance as regards the war’s effects on workplace gender dynamics, not dissimilar to Milne’s urging in The Boy Comes Home that shifting power dynamics between men should be calmly accepted. Women stepping into new roles is presented as a comic disruption, but also as something that stood to benefit men. The focus of this section is however on two humorous texts that were written or co-written by women, selected for the different attitudes towards gender that their humour articulates. The first of these, F. Tennyson Jesse and H. M. Harwood’s Billeted: A Comedy in Three Acts (Billeted, Royalty Theatre, London, 1917), does not diverge greatly in ideology from the male-authored poems above, contributing to the same widespread, war-supporting literary culture. Its humour facilitates the discussion of changes and experiences that could be taboo. It does so by portraying these in a way that lessened their potential to be emotionally provocative and acted as a corrective, encouraging behaviour deemed to be useful to the nation and directing ridicule towards those who do not engage in such activity.64 Billeted privileges flexible attitudes to  Anon. Feminine Invasion, p. 9.  W. Kersley Holmes, pp. 40–41. 64  Tennyson Jesse and H. M. Harwood. 1917. Billeted: A Comedy in Three Acts. London: Samuel French, 1920. 62 63

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conventions of social and romantic interaction and, set in a substitute domestic environment for servicemen away from home, to domestic space itself. It depicts such flexibility as being a necessity of war. This narrative is made more appealing through the portrayal of alterations that are not enormous. Women’s war work is seen as an extension of familiar domestic female labour, reflecting the trend that Sos Eltis identifies of wartime heroines ‘maintain[ing] their traditional domestic roles of wife, mother and sweetheart’. The performance of women’s employment was ‘characterised by continuity’, despite large numbers of women in reality having gone into a range of jobs.65 The emphasis on familiar roles is echoed in and amplified by the fact that Billeted belongs to a genre that was well established before 1914. Billeted echoes the style of comic treatment given to sexual and romantic relationships in domestic farce. While joking could be risqué and domestic worlds turned topsy-turvy, resolutions tended to work in favour of the status quo. The second text discussed here, Sharp’s short story ‘The Patriot’s Day’, satirises what Sharp presents as a particularly male form of panic over the war. The female protagonist’s much more measured responses stand in humorous contrast to her brother’s exaggerated fear and anger.66 The story’s humour works to suggest that one admirable female response to the conflict is to resist being swept up in fervours of patriotism and jingoism. The suggestion that women need not respond to the conflict with excessive emotion has a tempering effect on the picture of the war created: it is framed as being not so extreme as to demand only extreme reactions. The subject of upper- and middle-class women’s roles in war is central to Billeted. Betty Taradine provides billets for servicemen in her home. Her estranged husband, Peter, whom she does not initially know with certainty to be alive, is unexpectedly posted to her. Before Peter’s arrival a character called Miss Liptrott, who is the sister of the village vicar, expresses disapproval of soldiers staying with Betty because she is separated from her husband (rather than widowed, as Miss Liptrott had previously believed). Betty, angry at her interference, pretends to have received a telegram announcing her estranged husband’s death just before she is introduced to him as her new houseguest. Overhearing this, he comments dryly ‘How 65  Sos Eltis. 2015. From Sex-War to Factory Floor: Theatrical Depictions of Women’s Work during the First World War. In British Theatre and the Great War, 1914–1919: New Perspectives, ed. Andrew Maunder, 103–20. London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 103. 66  Sharp, pp. 89–91.

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do you do? I’m afraid I have turned up at a very inopportune moment’.67 Much of the humour arises from contact between characters who would not have been thrown together if it weren’t for the war. It is often based on stereotypes relating to gender, or badinage about the institution of marriage. For example, Miss Liptrott is ridiculed for her prudery. She is shocked that Betty received several proposals when entertaining soldiers on leave, believing that ‘A woman does not allow a man to propose unless she intends to accept him’, whereas for Betty’s friend Penelope ‘a proposal is but indefinitely related to marriage’.68 Similar moments include Penelope’s judgement, before Peter’s arrival, that it is ‘too ridiculous’ for Betty’s husband to ‘interfere like this when he isn’t here. It’s as bad as if he really were here’; Reverend Liptrott’s ironic comment on his sister’s concern that Peter is alive—‘Let us hope for the best and assume that he is dead’; Peter’s suggestion that marriage is only a ‘harbour and an anchorage’ in ‘the celibate view’—for a woman ‘there is always a choice of harbours’; and Peter’s retort when Betty accuses him of having no respect for her—‘should I have married you if I had?’69 Betty herself, challenged by Miss Liptrott about ‘unmarried officers—staying in the same house, under the same roof’, retorts ‘But not under the same ceiling, Miss Liptrott’.70 The attitudes to domestic arrangements that form the set-up of Billeted are perhaps more novel than the jokes are risqué. While light-hearted in tone, the play asks what might happen when new ways for women to interact with men came about, and the wartime situation provides the opportunity for the characters to express progressive views about gender relations that go beyond the specific wartime moment. Mr. Liptrott the vicar at one point comments ‘Do you know, I think too much importance is given to the question of what particular people occupy the same dwelling place’.71 Penelope, meanwhile, when Miss Liptrott asks if her mother is aware of Betty’s situation, responds ‘Oh yes—mother doesn’t mind that sort of thing. She thinks marriage rather rot. She says that if people can’t got on together they ought to separate’.72 The play’s preoccupation with the expansion of romantic and sexual freedom for women however is framed  Tennyson Jesse and Harwood, p. 34.  Tennyson Jesse and Harwood, pp. 11–12. 69  Tennyson Jesse and Harwood, pp. 17, 10, 25, 43, 62, 47. 70  Tennyson Jesse and Harwood, p.14. 71  Tennyson Jesse and Harwood, p. 9. 72  Tennyson Jesse and Harwood, p. 12. 67 68

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with reassurance, assuaging anxieties about the potential loss of men’s domestic, romantic, and sexual power when leaving home to join the forces. A large part of this reassurance is the suggestion that more liberal attitudes to the rules of gendered behaviour are necessary for the war effort. For instance, when Preedy explains to Peter the objections to them staying with someone who has an absent husband, Peter comments: ‘that sounds most awful rot to me, sir. Why, if we were to consider that, there wouldn’t be any available billets in the country’.73 Similarly, Betty declares to Colonel Preedy that, ‘My duty to the country is to see that you are comfortable, and if it can’t be done without my reputation suffering,—so much the worse for my reputation. That’s a very small thing to give’.74 The play in any case concludes with the norms of domestic order being reinstated, made possible by Peter’s unexpected posting. This is true in the romantic sense in that Betty and Peter resume their marriage, but also in the sense that ordered household management is reinstated. Betty is represented as being comically incompetent in managing money, and Peter’s return is also the return of financial stability. The challenge to the status quo in the domestic sphere made by the arrival of servicemen in Betty’s home turns out not to be a challenge at all. In this form of resolution, there is overlap with Poached Eggs and Pearls (see Chap. 4). In Jennings’ play Clara and Jimmie’s inter-class romance only comes to fruition once they receive the Duchess’ sanction, meaning the sanction of an authority figure in polite society, as well as Jimmie’s inheritance money from Miss Deacon. Street’s report on Billeted does not raise concerns: he characterised it as a ‘charming comedy’ with ‘often witty’ dialogue.75 The conventions of genre to which Billeted conforms contributes to the sense that its representation of wartime life does not seriously challenge the status quo. The play for example continues the style in which romance and female experience had been staged before 1914, Domestic farce, in Jacky Bratton’s words, relied on ‘the old comedy of relations between the sexes and between classes’.76 Such dramas could involve characters who expressed feminist views, and wives who demanded that their husbands atone for poor behaviour. They generally ended, as in the two war plays  Tennyson Jesse and Harwood, p. 32.  Tennyson Jesse and Harwood, p. 22. 75  Street. 1917. Report. Billeted. British Library. LC 1917/15. 76  Jacky Bratton. 2004. The Music Hall. In The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, ed. Kerry Powell, 164–82. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, p. 172. 73 74

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discussed here, with the reinstatement of domestic convention and calm.77 Equally, Billeted borrows from the ‘returning soldier’ genre that developed during the war. Based on the trope of servicemen arriving home unexpectedly, this genre addressed potential disjunctions between the lives of servicemen and their civilian loved ones, often to farcical effect.78 As the censor’s report for another such drama, W. Somerset Maugham’s Home and Beauty (1919), suggests, these were ‘playfully written’ texts that presented situations ‘which if handled realistically would be […] very serious’.79 A reviewer for the Play Pictorial echoed his sentiment: if the heroine were taken ‘seriously’, s/he wrote, ‘we should be disgusted’.80 Billeted is less risqué than the plot of Maugham’s work, in which the protagonist marries the best friend of her husband before divorcing him for a third man; but there is nevertheless an impulse in the play to address within the reassuring field of comedy a real anxiety.81 As well as Billeted showing how the war need not pose a threat to domestic conventions (and indeed could actually reconnect estranged spouses), humour is itself important to the bracketing off of anxieties about the war’s impact on martial relationships. Rather than experiencing the kind of strong feelings—feelings that, to borrow a term from the Play Pictorial’s reviewer, would be powerful enough to be taken ‘seriously’—audiences are asked to feel a smaller sense of levity. The humour in Billeted is often most pointed when it comes to women who do not conform to patriotic wartime behaviour. Miss Liptrott is portrayed as being hypocritically jealous of Betty and Penelope, whose attractiveness is regularly commented upon. Not only is Miss Liptrott tediously prim, but it is also clear that she would far prefer the soldiers to be billeted at her own house.82 The narrative here is that women who are not willing to adapt social boundaries in response to the conflict are frustrated prudes and are jealous of the male attention that more attractive women receive, while those women who do adapt are sufficiently desirable to be non-­threatening. Betty may claim power over her romantic and domestic life by living separately from her husband, but she does  Booth. 1991. Theatre in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, p. 191.  Kosok, p. 42. 79  Bendall. 1919. Report. Home and Beauty. British Library. LCPCorr 1919/2211. 80  Anon. 1919. Home and Beauty. Play Pictorial 35: 94. 81  W. Somerset Maugham. 1915. Home and Beauty. In For Services Rendered, The Letter, Home and Beauty, 157–237. London: Pan Books. 1980. 82  Tennyson Jesse and Harwood, p. 22. 77 78

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so with a mixture of charm and incompetence that means her arrangement is a problem for no one except the prudish sister of the village vicar. While the war is depicted as opening up some freedoms for women, Tennyson Jesse and Harwood did not present in Billeted a corresponding, progressive move away from misogynistic stereotypes. It is telling that a brief reference to women’s industrial war work is a comment that derides such employment as unfeminine. Betty’s cook, contemplating with horror the idea of working in ‘these mewnitions [sic] every one’s talking about’ informs her that: I’ve never held with such work for women—never. My brother, who works up north in one of these factories […]—‘e told me about them as worked up there. Not women at all ‘e said, […] all as flat as ‘addicks.83

When women do step into new roles as a result of the war, that is, and especially into spheres associated with male labour, they are ridiculed as not being women—the identity of a woman apparently being defined here as having noticeable breasts. In light of this, it is possible that Billeted reflects a wartime appetite for reassurance that whatever the conflict may bring, certain elements of the status quo could remain unaffected. A propagandist account of women’s war work that Tennyson Jesse created in 1918 has similar connotations. As with Billeted, the account seeks to suggest that any alteration brought about to female labour during the war was non-threatening to gender norms and was also, above all, reversible. The Sword of Deborah: First-hand Impressions of the British Women’s Army in France was written, as Tennyson Jesse states in the foreword, ‘at the request of the Ministry of Information’. It was intended to raise awareness of women’s war work in France at a moment when ‘we are all struggling back into our chiffons’. She declares that ‘I am not […] a feminist’, and insists that women’s work overseas did not involve sexual impropriety or threaten traditional gender roles.84 She imagines the workers’ ‘eagerness’ to buy ‘pretty clothes again’, stressing ‘how unchangedly woman they had all remained’.85 Similarly, she observes that ‘I never saw a woman’s office anywhere in France that was not a mass of flowers’, with ‘window-boxes’ and ‘flower-beds’. Every office, also,  Tennyson Jesse and Harwood, p. 50.  Tennyson Jesse. Deborah, pp. 7, 47–48. 85  Tennyson Jesse. Deborah, p. 132. 83 84

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‘though strictly businesslike, has chintz curtains of lovely colours’. She concludes this description with ‘You can always tell a woman’s office from a man’s, which is a good sign, and should hearten the pessimists who cry that this doing of men’s work will de-feminise the women’.86 It would be too strong to echo Kosok’s assessment that Billeted shows no engagement with the issues of the day: he includes it in a group of ‘full-­ length home-front plays’ that are ‘straightforward comedies (with farcical elements) without any pretence at depicting a serious situation or at discussing weighty problems’.87 It is true that the situation depicted in Billeted does not come across as serious, and the misunderstandings and domestic confusion that drive the plot are not presented as being weighty problems. Yet this is not to say that the play ignores issues important to life on the home front. Rather, it treats comically circumstances and issues that would appear to be serious if they were conveyed as being so. Billeted addresses head on certain areas of the war’s effects on women’s work and on the roles and societal rules defined for them by their gender, as well as suggesting what desirable responses to such effects might look like. The play indicates that women should adapt their work to the demands of the wartime situation, including in their interactions with men whom they would not otherwise meet, with the joking privileging those characters who embrace the new situations to which the conflict gives rise. Because the structures of the comic genres to which Billeted belongs resolve themselves in favour of the status quo, it is easy to miss the play’s engagement with socially significant aspects of war experience. Had Billeted discussed the war’s impact on women’s lives with a more solemn tone, it might have been more readily received as a direct attempt to tease out significant aspects of war experience. Sharp’s ‘The Patriot’s Day’ takes a contrasting approach to the portrayal of female identity in wartime. Sharp was a progressive writer and activist, a ‘pacifist, a socialist and a suffragette’.88 She published novels and  Tennyson Jesse. Deborah, p. 54.  Kosok, p. 34. Kosok writes more broadly that ‘Not a single play written during the war’, with the exception of Shaw’s Heartbreak House (1919), ‘seems to have grasped the serious issues that must have overshadowed everybody’s lives on the home front’, with the partial exception of Barrie’s New Word—though Kosok assesses that Barrie’s work ‘all too often turn[s] into downright sentimentality, prevent[ing] him from coming to grips with them [serious issues]’. Kosok, p. 31. 88  Andrew Maunder, ed. 2011. British Literature of World War I: The Short Story and the Novella. London: Pickering & Chatto, p. 78. 86 87

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short stories, including in the Yellow Book, a periodical associated with decadence and which developed a reputation for a capacity to shock. Sharp also wrote for newspapers including the Manchester Guardian, Pall Mall Gazette, the Westminster Gazette, and the Morning Leader.89 She was active in the Women’s Social and Political Union and the United Suffragists, disapproving of the tactics of militant suffragettes.90 During the Great War, she was declared bankrupt as a result of her refusal to pay income tax. She commented that, ‘A war fought to save democracy did not seem to me to provide the best reason for supporting the principle of taxation without representation’.91 Sharp’s feminism and pacifism are reflected in ‘The Patriot’s Day’ in the connections she makes between masculinity and expressions of aggression in response to the conflict. Equally, her views are present in the story in the connections she makes between femininity and a refusal to succumb to fear-mongering and xenophobia. ‘The Patriot’s Day’ gives a snapshot into the lives of Miss Amelia Billow and her brother Giles, and is squarely focussed on the war’s impact on domestic spheres of British society. The opening of the story provides a flavour of how these concerns are addressed. It describes Miss Billow asking her brother if anything is the matter, ‘looking round from behind the coffee-pot’ and Mr. Billow in response: flung the Morning Wail on the floor, and made a savage attack on a plateful of sausage and bacon. “Matter!” he echoed. “If the Government don’t get a move on, the Germans will be here within a fortnight—a fortnight, I tell you”. His sister withdrew behind the coffee-pot and smiled amiably. “I was afraid it was the bacon again”, she observed.92

The joke here is based on the convergence between an extreme emotional response to large geopolitical events and an extreme emotional response to something as small as the temperature of bacon. It continues with the revelation that, ‘At that moment it was the bacon, Mr. Billow’s onslaught upon it having been premature’ with the result that it is too hot. The siblings’ characterisation remains in this vein throughout the story. Mr. Billow goes on to accuse his sister, and women in general, of being  Maunder, p. 77.  Maunder, p. 78. 91  Maunder, p. 78. 92  Sharp, p. 89. 89 90

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impractical in having a lack of passion on the subject of the conflict. Miss Billow immediately undermines the accusation by reminding him that he is running late for his train.93 When he does get on the train, Mr. Billow is ‘surrounded by sympathisers, all of whom took the masculine and practical view of things’ and either ‘wailed with the Morning Wail or whooped with the Daily Whoop’.94 Sharp does include one exception here to her satire of masculinity. In doing so she avoids making generalisations about an entire gender in the way that Mr. Billow does, and recognises the work individuals did for the cause of pacifism (or at least for the cause of common sense). The exception is a man seated in the corner of the carriage who reads a book instead of a newspaper, and only speaks when directly asked ‘for his opinion as to the possible presence of Germans in the War Council’. He answers that the rumour is driven by ‘fear’, and once he has departed, the other men decide that ‘he was probably in the pay of Mr Bertrand Russell’ (who was famous for his pacifist views, and was imprisoned in 1918).95 The men in the carriage in addition engage in a game of one-upmanship over how many younger friends and family members they each know who have enlisted. They also complain about the War Office, the Admiralty, and conscientious objectors.96 On his way home from the train in the evening, Mr. Billow ‘saw a spy in every special constable as he walked up from the station in his admirably guarded and searchlit suburb’.97 The story ends with Mr. Billow remarking to his sister that he does not ‘like the look of’ the cook, asking where Miss Billow found her and what her name was. Miss Billow replies ‘“From the Society for Assisting Distressed Enemy Aliens, and her name is Johanna Wilhelmina Blankenstein”’. Her brother, ‘left standing in the firelight with the Evening Hooter in his hand, could have sworn she was laughing as she went by’. He exclaims ‘Really— women!’ and goes to see ‘that no one was signalling from the roof’.98 Sharp’s satire is thus directed towards what she presents as male overreaction, extreme pomposity, exaggeration, fear, and susceptibility to sensationalism. She instead privileges what she suggests is a female tendency towards understated common sense. Importantly, she takes as her target  Sharp, p. 89.  Sharp, p. 90. 95  Sharp, p. 90. 96  Sharp, p. 90. 97  Sharp, p. 91. 98  Sharp, p. 91. 93 94

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older male civilians, and includes a scene that makes it clear these men are safely removed from the fighting (the scene in which they brag about connections with those who are in the forces). There is no suggestion that Sharp is satirising the attitudes or actions of servicemen: any attempt to do so would have been political anathema. Also important to the tameness of the humour—in this instance emotional tameness—is the portrayal of Miss Billow’s own amusement. This is seen in her reaction to her brother confounding his anger over the war and over the bacon, as well as in her laughter following her revelation about the nationality of the cook. The attitude of calm amusement that she adopts in response to the conflict, however much her brother may encourage her otherwise, is reminiscent of that privileged in service-author stories (see Chap. 8). As with the personas and protagonists of many service-author stories, Sharp presents a sardonic raised eyebrow as being a desirable reaction to the disruptions of the conflict. Going further, in Sharp’s case this is explicitly preferred over extreme emotional responses of the kind her protagonist’s brother expresses. Sharp’s work makes clear that there is not a male monopoly on the proportionality, balance, or coolness associated with humour in representations of conflict experience. The heroine’s understated response to the conflict furthermore conveys a sense of the war being scaled down or looming less large as a threat. Unlike her brother and the men he meets on the train, Amelia does not allow the conflict to invade her life, with the result that the war appears as an experience that is not such an enormity as to require a hysterical or otherwise extreme reaction. While Sharp does not suggest that the war is not terrible, her protagonist’s cool response frames the conflict as being of manageable proportions.

‘We Must All Do More: It Being War time and All That’: Conclusions99 The texts included in this chapter each address aspects of war experience that have the potential to be sources of anxiety, and to challenge roles and expectations that are based on normative conceptions of gender. Barrie’s The New Word highlights ways in which masculine emotional reserve may be pushed to its limits and broken under the extraordinary circumstances of war, as well as hinting towards some necessary alterations in male  Tennyson Jesse and Harwood, p. 8.

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familial hierarchies. The latter theme is explored in greater depth in Milne’s The Boy Comes Home. Collins’ Conscienceless Objector includes a portrayal of (implied) homosexuality, while Tennyson Jesse’s and Harwood’s Billeted shows women taking on new freedoms in the workplace and in their personal lives. Sharp meanwhile puts forward a direct challenge to what she presents as unearned male authority. Yet the humour in the depiction of these war experiences is reassuringly tame: it consistently works in favour of what is (represented as being) necessary for the British war effort. Humour in these texts privileges the calm acceptance of new forms of interaction brought about by the conflict, whether between classes, between genders, or between members of the same gender. In this sense, they have a political tameness. The partial exception is Sharp’s ‘The Patriot’s Day’, which is not concerned with the war effort so much as restoring common sense and recognising female competence, rationality, and sardonicism. In making this recognition the story ‘tames’ the war in the sense of presenting it as something manageable. The other texts considered similarly play down the wartime changes that audiences are encouraged to accept. This is seen particularly strongly in the resolution of Billeted, which restores social, domestic, and romantic order by the time it concludes. Such minimising of the conflict’s impact is reflected in the prominence of amusement as an aesthetic emotion in each of the works considered. The smallness of the war’s effects is signalled by the fact that audiences are invited to laugh at them rather than being concerned, angry, or otherwise agitated.

References Anon. 1916a. Feminine invasion. RAMC Magazine, June, p. 9. ———. 1916b. Home enemies. The Wells Journal, 10 March, p. 5. ———. 1916c. In the limelight. Liverpool Echo, 24 March. ———. 1918. Next week’s calls. Era, 11 September, p. 7. ———. 1919. Home and beauty. Play Pictorial 35: 94. Anon. Second Lieutenant Davies, George Llewlyn. Commonwealth War Graves Commission. www.cwgc.org/find-­war-­dead/casualty/456458/. Accessed 10 Nov 2017. Auerbach, Nina. 2004. Before the curtain. In The Cambridge companion to Victorian and Edwardian theatre, ed. Kerry Powell, 3–14. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Barrie, J.  M. 1915. The New Word. In Echoes of the war, 65–108. New  York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1920.

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———. 1936. The New Word. In The plays of J. M. Barrie in one volume, 739–757. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Bendall, Ernest. 1916. Report. Poached eggs and pearls. British Library. LC 1916/28. ———. 1918. Report. The boy comes home. LC Plays 1918/16. ———. 1919. Report. Home and beauty. British Library. LCPCorr 1919/2211. Bibbings, Lois. 2009. Telling Tales about men: Conceptions of conscientious objectors to military service during the first world war. Manchester UP. Booth, Michael. 1977. East end and west end: Class and audience in Victorian London. Theatre Research International 2: 98–103. ———. 1991. Theatre in the Victorian age. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ———. 2004. Comedy and farce. In The Cambridge companion to Victorian and Edwardian theatre, ed. Kerry Powell, 129–144. Bratton, Jacky. 2004. The music hall. In The Cambridge companion to Victorian and Edwardian theatre, ed. Kerry Powell, 164–182. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Collins, Sewell. 1916. The conscienceless objector. British Library. LC Plays 1916/5. Collins, L.  J. 1994. The function of theatre entertainment in the first world war 1914–1818. Royal Holloway University of London. Croom-Johnson, A. 1915. The Drama during war-time: The two barries. The Review of Reviews 51: 348. Descartes, René. 1649. The passions of the soul and other late philosophical writings. Trans. Moriarty, Michael. Oxford: Oxford UP. 2015. Dudgeon, Piers. 2008. Captivated: J. M. Barrie, Daphne Du Maurier and the dark side of Neverland. London: Vintage Books. Eltis, Sos. 2015. From sex-war to factory floor: Theatrical depictions of Women’s work during the first world war. In British theatre and the great war, 1914–1919: New perspectives, ed. Andrew Maunder, 103–120. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Harwood, H. M. 1912. Honour thy father. In Three one-act Plays, 27–57. London: Ernest Benn. 1926. Johnston, John. 1990. The Lord Chamberlain’s blue pencil. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Kersley Holmes, W. 1915. To my successor. More ballads of field and billet, 40–41. Paisley: Alexander Gardner. Kosok, Heinz. 2007. The theatre of war: The first world war in British and Irish Drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kubly, Jenna. 2015. J. M. Barrie and World War I. In Humor, entertainment, and popular culture during world war I, ed. Clémentine Tholas-Disset and Karen Ritzenhoff, 197–208. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Malone, Carolyn. 2013. A job fit for heroes? Disabled veterans, the arts and crafts movement and social reconstruction in post-world war I Britain. First World War Studies 4: 201–217.

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Maunder, Andrew, ed. 2011. British literature of world war I: The short story and the novella. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 2015. Introduction: Rediscovering new perspectives. In British theatre and the great war 1914–1919: New perspectives, ed. Andrew Maunder, 1–39. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Meyer, Jessica. 2009. Men of war: Masculinity and the first world war in Britain. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Milne, A. A. 1918a. The boy comes home. British Library. LC Plays 1918/16. ———. 1918b. The boy comes home. In First plays, 105–128. London: Chatto & Windus. 1932. Nicholson, Steve. 2004. Getting away with it: Strategies and practice, 1902–1944. In The Lord Chamberlain regrets… a history of British theatre censorship, ed. Dominic Shellard, Steve Nicholson, and Miriam Handley, 57–130. London: British Library. OED. 2018. Powder Puff, N. and Adj. OED Online, Oxford University Press. oed.com/view/Entry/149158. Accessed 16 Aug 2018. Sharp, Evelyn. 1916. The Patriot’s day. Herald, 4 November. In British literature of world war I: The short story and the novella, ed. Andrew Maunder, 89–92. London: Pickering & Chatto. 2011. Shaw, George Bernard. 1919. Preface to heartbreak house. London: Constable and Co. Ltd. 1949. Simkins, Peter. 1988. Kitchener’s Army: The raising of the new armies. Manchester: Manchester UP. Somerset Maugham, W. 1915. Home and beauty. In For services rendered, The letter, Home and beauty, 157–237. London: Pan Books. 1980. Street, G.  S. 1916a. Report. The conscienceless objector. British Library. LC Plays 1916/5. ———. 1916b. Report. A day in a dug-out. British Library. LC Plays 1916/19. ———. 1917. Report. Billeted. British Library. LC 1917/15. Tennyson Jesse, F. 1918. The sword of Deborah: First-hand impressions of the British Women’s Army in France. London: Heinemann. Tennyson Jesse, F., and H. M. Harwood. 1917. Billeted: A comedy in three acts, 1920. London: Samuel French. Williams, Gordon. 2003. British theatre in the great war: A revaluation. London: Continuum.

CHAPTER 6

The War and the Domestic Sphere: ‘That perpetual sense of the ridiculous’ Edward de Stein, The Poets in Picardy and Other Poems (1919)

Many of the texts explored in this chapter may not seem to be straightforwardly or directly ‘about’ the Great War. Many do not depict either military settings or protagonists who belong to the military. They may be more likely to be labelled as ‘texts set during the First World War’ than as ‘First World War literature’. These are works that give a different point of view on what constitutes ‘war experience’. They are reminders that this could mean relatively small or quotidian ways in which the conflict had an impact on everyday life. Whereas humour can emerge in response to confrontations with the ‘larger’ elements of conflict, for example texts that deal with death, it is far more common within the corpus of Great War literature to encounter humour that emerges from that which is more mundane. The texts that focus on the domestic sphere and include humour in this way are a reminder of an overall tendency in humorous literature of the Great War that has much to do with appropriateness and sensitivity. The humour in these texts in addition has a belittling effect on elements of the conflict that might be seen as ‘larger’. By zooming in on the small things, the war becomes less gargantuan, a matter of small disruptions that

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can be comprehended and laughed at. There are two primary ways in which this diminishment of the conflict takes place. The first occurs in texts that are more interested in the ordinary aspects of characters’ lives than they are about the conflict itself (romance and domestic disputes are particular favourites). That the war functions as a comic narrative device in many of these works, as a setting or a means of establishing a plot point or character feature, means that it appears as little more than a minor disruption, one of life’s small challenges to be endured until order is restored. The second way in which the war is diminished occurs in texts that foreground the domestic or quotidian within military settings. These are works in which practical conditions in the military—shelter, food—are presented to humorous effect within the framework of more homely domestic arrangements. The domestic is transplanted into the military. There is a taming effect here in the sense that the war is condescended to. By centring attention on its smaller effects it is itself made small, and by moving it into a framework of domestic or quotidian reference points it is made more familiar or ordinary. In addition, as elsewhere, these texts are tame in that they invite the minor feeling of amusement rather than the grander extremes of emotion that are associated with the most solemn representations of the war, in which the conflict appears as an aberration. In inviting amusement, the texts carry a political tameness too. The politics of amusement as an aesthetic emotion here encourage acceptance of the conflict rather than protest. The feelings of amusement the texts invite are on the side of endurance, putting forward an emotional experience of the conflict that is bearable. Those texts which are focused on domestic settings range from narratives about jam shortages, to the disrupting effects of the conflict on hens’ laying habits, to competitive patriotism in the British suburbs, to the attempts of shopkeepers to sell unnecessary wartime gadgets, and to a prank played at a fancy dress ball. The relationship between the conflict and the domestic was also a favourite subject for illustrator and cartoonist W. Heath Robinson. His wartime work includes depictions of Christmas rituals being militarised; of those returning from the army being ‘untrained’; and of war and peace, home and fighting fronts being amalgamated after the end of the conflict (such as siege mortars being used to deliver milk). Those texts which are focused on picturing the military sphere through the frame of the domestic or quotidian include sketches that emphasise the ordinariness of servicemen’s interests and concerns, as

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well as poetry which dwells on the importance of food and objects to create comfort. These highlight the military space as a dwelling place rather than solely as a space in which fighting is conducted.

‘Ladies of the Burtonbury War Relief Fund Committee Crowded Round Her’: The War at Home1 Popular periodicals during the conflict published a wide variety of short narratives addressing an imaginative variety of the war’s effects on everyday life. Authors played with creating different ways in which the conflict could permeate domesticity—and the smaller the effect of the war the better. One of the best examples is a short sketch by writer Richard Dark that was published in Punch in 1915, entitled ‘Poultry and the War’.2 This tells the tale of a couple’s tribulations over breakfast. The husband is unhappy with his egg, which is not fresh because purchased from the grocer’s, since the couple’s own hens have stopped laying. The wife suggests that the war has affected Christine, the ‘oldest hen’, who has ‘always […] set the tone of our establishment, and her influence has on the whole been good’. Empathising with Christine, the husband muses that ‘“if by any chance we were invaded, things would be rather awkward for the hen community […] [t]he only accommodation we could provide for them would be internal, so to speak”’. He goes to see the hens, with the intention of giving Christine an ‘extremely blunt’ reminder that ‘the motto of every patriotic British hen in the present crisis was “eggs as usual”’. Instead, he declares in the hens’ hearing that a rumour exists that ‘the Kaiser is a prisoner at La Bassée’, which immediately causes the hens to start laying once more.3 R.  K. Risk’s ‘Jamouflage’ (1918) is a similar example.4 The inconvenience of the conflict in this case also relates to food. The narrator complains of a lack of jam, marmalade, and honey at breakfast. His wife explains that ‘“You forget that the bees have now been controlled’, the ‘Apiary Commissioner’ having ‘commandeered all the hives, to be set up in aircraft factories as an example’. She cannot afford to ‘make marmalade with oranges uncontrolled at 5d’, especially with oranges set to be sold without the skins, since the skins ‘are wanted for  May Edginton. 1917. War-Workers. Strand Magazine 54: 386–94 (p. 386).  Richard Dark. 1915. Poultry and the War. Punch, 3 March, p. 162. 3  Dark, p. 162. 4  R. K Risk. 1918. Jamouflage. Punch, 11 September, p. 162. 1 2

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high explosives or something’. As for jam, she continues, ‘Fruit crops a failure; sugar short; so many more men in the Army’, in response to which the narrator begs her ‘don’t talk like a newspaper’. He reasons that ‘Even if there are five million more men eating jam in France than there were last autumn, there must be five million fewer men eating jam in this country’. (She thinks, ‘they eat more jam in the Army. They are hungrier than civilians’.) The narrative continues to give comic instances of resources being commandeered for the sake of the war effort, such as ‘All the gooseberry bushes on St Kilda’ being ‘taken over by the Afforestation Board’. Eventually, though, the wife reveals that the mustard pot is in fact full of strawberry jam. The narrator exclaims ‘“Hooray!” […] “More camouflage. No visitor would ever guess what was in that pot”’. He is however swiftly banned from touching the treasure until he succeeds in resisting his habit of mentioning camouflage at every opportunity. Presumably, it is a reference to a trend for the use of the term; the narrator does not feel he could manage the feat: ‘The strain will be too great. No war-jam is worth it’.5 The short story ‘The Interpreters’ (1914) by regular Punch contributor Bertram Smith is in contrast not focussed on food, but its comedy is developed from the difficulties of communication between Belgian refugees and their British hosts. The characters end up forming a chain of interpreters to work from English to French and Flemish, one of the complications being the inability of an English character to understand a Scot.6 The humour in each of these narratives emerges from the insistent focus on the war’s most mundane effects. It is not simply food shortages— potentially a significant problem—that are addressed but a specific shortage of breakfast condiments and a specific shortage of high-quality eggs. In the case of Dark’s story, in fact, the narrative shifts from a minor concern that affects the narrator (his wife appears less worried by the egg situation), towards a concern felt by chickens and in particular a single, ‘leading’ chicken. ‘The Interpreters’ sees a similar shift away from a larger issue—the ability of British and Belgian people to co-exist comfortably— towards a more local communication problem (between an Englishman and a Scot). The stories invite amusement via comic contrast. This is one place in which incongruity theories of humour are relevant. Humour emerges from the absurd connections made between something as 5 6

 Risk, p. 162.  Bertram Smith. 1914. The Interpreters. Punch, 7 October, p. 296.

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enormous as the Great War and elements of everyday life that are as mundane as hens and jam. From this perspective, humour in the stories relies upon an understanding that the war does have a massive scale. It is shown to have the power to reach into every nook and cranny of the lives of the people who lived through it. The stories at the very least signal extreme preoccupation with the conflict among the producers and presumably the readers of Britain’s national press. Yet the main impression of wartime life in the stories is one of humorous diminishment. The conflict is placed and understood within such mundane domestic frames that it shrinks. It becomes a matter of minor issues that are at worst irritating or frustrating.7 In the case of ‘The Interpreters’ the reassuring element of such portrayals is especially pronounced. Any concerns about potential differences or awkwardness between British and Belgian people are shrunk to comic misunderstandings, and levelled to be on a par with differences that exist within the British Isles. The narratives moreover come to positive resolutions (the hens start laying, it turns out that jam is available after all)—or at least do not end with serious problems (‘The Interpreters’ ends with a Flemish-speaking Belgian mistakenly believing she has been asked to cut down an old spruce tree). Humorous narratives such as these continued in the same vein as the tales that appeared in popular periodicals before the start of the conflict. These older narratives had taken a similarly light approach to a similarly eclectic range of subjects. Romance and romantic comedy were among the genres of short fiction popular before the war that continued to be so after its outbreak. Multiple narratives in these genres took on a wartime setting or slant. A narrative published in 1917 entitled ‘A Way they (Sometimes) Have in the Army’ for example, represents servicemen as having special attractiveness, to comic effect, with the humour aided in particular by the

7  It was also possible for amusement to be invited at the expense of those in the UK who were too attached to their pre-war lives and civilian reference points. A good example is Ernest Halsey’s ‘A Candidate for the Force’ (1914. Punch, 2 September, p. 199). The hapless narrator goes to enrol as a Special Constable—initially attempting to do so at a steam laundry rather than the police station next door—and proceeds to make it clear how unsuitable a candidate he is because of his attachment to all things non-military (for instance he mistakes ‘squad drill’ for ‘quadrille’ and does not think he can manage four-hour shifts because he is in the middle of completing a jigsaw and is expecting a new motor car. He and the inspector mutually agree that his name should be crossed off the list.

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accompanying illustrations by the famous cartoonist H. M. Bateman.8 The tale sees a maid frequently take time off her work, supposedly in order to help her aunt; but after an ill-timed telephone call, it emerges that she has in fact been socialising with soldiers. A story called ‘Miss Pett’s Grand Chance’ (1917) by Keble Howard is similar (Keble Howard was the pen name of author and journalist John Keble Bell who served in the navy, the flying corps, and the Ministry of Information). ‘Miss Pett’s Grand Chance’ is the tale of how a spinster who is desperate to aid the war effort inadvertently and temporarily comes between an officer and his fiancé. ‘A Shock for Uncle Timothy’ (1918) by the same author is similarly focussed on romantic entanglements. It centres on a comic mix-up involving a serviceman, his uncle, his uncle’s Dictaphone, and the serviceman’s romantic interest—a character called Miss Devenish. ‘The Censor Habit’ (1914) by Punch contributor A. Gordon Laws meanwhile sees a couple tease each other by leaving out crucial information from their letters.9 A good illustration of how the conflict formed the background to humorous romance tales is a short story ironically titled ‘War-Workers’ (1917), which is by the popular novelist May Edginton. The story tells the tale of what happens when some lingerie is donated by an actress (via the much-admired ‘Lady Tubb’) to a war relief fund being run by the ladies of a small village. The joke initially is the ladies’ excitement over having received a donation from a member of high society. When Mrs. Brown-­ Perkins announces she is about to open the parcel from Lady Tubbs, there is ‘a thrill in her voice’ and ‘her hand shook a little’ as the other ladies ‘crowded round her with appropriate curiosity’. The reaction to its contents is a gentle satire of village prudery. Following a ‘shock of horror, preceding a chill silence’, Mrs. Baker comments that she had held ‘an impression of quite a different type of woman’.10 A note attached to the donation does not assuage the shock. It explains that the lingerie is from a ‘prominent actress, lately widowed, who, while, of course, wearing the usual black outwardly, feels that she must at least be mauve throughout

8  The author is given as Mrs. John Lane, whose maiden name was Annie Phillippine King. Mrs. John Lane [Annie Phillippine King]. 1917. A Way They (Sometimes) Have in the Amy. Strand Magazine 54: 14–16 (p. 14). 9  Keble Howard. 1917. Miss Pett’s Grand Chance. Strand Magazine 54: 463–70; Howard. 1918. A Shock for Uncle Timothy. Strand Magazine 56: 238–43; A. Gordon Laws. 1914. The Censor Habit. Punch, 9 September, p. 221. 10  Edginton, p. 386.

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underneath’.11 The humour in the rest of the tale is in a similar pithy style. When the ladies try to hide the garments from the ‘saintly’ Professor Ruby, Miss Crombie comments that ‘being a bachelor, he would not know what they are’—to which Mrs. Baker replies ‘Neither would my husband know, my dear, though we have been married for twenty-five years’.12 When readers are given a snapshot of Professor Ruby alone, however, it is revealed that he is lonely in part because obsessed by finding his ‘ideal’ woman, who is based on an advert from the ‘Three Graces Corset Company’.13 Caught in a catch-22, he is determined to marry a woman who wears lingerie yet, being a gentleman, cannot be sure if any individual woman wears it without marrying her first. Both Miss Vestal and Miss Crombie take a liking to the donated lingerie and buy their own. Their decision swiftly travels round the entire village via a chain of gossip and results in them being ostracized from the War Relief Fund Committee. The series of comic confusions that follow end with the Professor discovering the lingerie (‘Thanks entirely to the Three Graces advertisement, he was enabled to guess at the nature of what he saw before him’). He proposes to Miss Vestal, and then proposes to Miss Crombie when he discovers that the former has donated her lingerie to the latter in a fit of piety immediately after becoming engaged.14 The war is thus very much peripheral to the story. The conflict is indirectly the cause of what takes place—without the war relief committee there would be no donation of lingerie and no social and romantic complications. Yet the story could easily instead take place in a peacetime context—the lingerie could be donated as part of any village fundraising effort. ‘War-Workers’ does give some hints that everyday life has been affected by the conflict. The ladies seem to be working particularly hard (the Professor comments ‘dear Mrs Brown-Perkins, can you not persuade these indefatigable ladies to take a little rest? War is war, of course’). The Professor is a particular favourite with the ladies in part because he has ‘taken upon himself all parish duties’, since the village’s usual rector was ‘now C.F. [Chaplain to the Forces]’.15 This kind of background is however incidental to the narrative. By far the most overwhelming impression  Edginton, p. 387.  Edginton, p. 387. 13  Edginton, p. 389. 14  Edginton, pp. 394, 392. 15  Edginton, pp. 387–88. 11 12

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is of village life continuing undisturbed, an impression seen throughout the story in its focus on extremely small details of the workings of the village ecosystem. A good example is the description of how news is communicated. By the end of the same day that Miss Vestal has travelled to London, the Professor ‘knew with the rest of Burtonbury’ that she ‘had returned from London with two parcels, one containing Army flannel’. Two days after this, ‘he heard, with other local gossip’, that ‘an inquiring postman had delivered a torn newspaper-wrapped package at Miss Crombie’s door, and was talking about what the post-mistress said of the exuding contents’.16 There is a large degree of reassurance here. The tale implies that whatever may be happening in the wider world there will always be villages like Burtonbury and the associated casts of characters who inhabit them. Part of this is that the humour in the tale emerges from familiarity. The assumption behind the invitation to amusement is that readers will be familiar with (or at least familiar with the idea of) the workings of small village society. A fond mockery of such society comes through in passages such as the description of gossip spreading. Amusement is also invited from the specificity of the details included. Part of the fond mockery of that which is familiar in village life is the smallness of social issues that villagers treat as being larger (wearing or not wearing lingerie), the smallness of discoveries that are treated as revelations of mysteries (glimpses through torn wrapping paper), and the extreme locality of village society (everyone knows everybody else, and all live a short distance apart). This is a story where the subject of the humour reflects especially well the kind of aesthetic emotion it elicits—a kind of amusement that is mild and unchallenging. The war is shrunken to simply being the background to minor village drama; the scale of the village drama is itself reassuringly little and the associated aesthetic emotions are equivalently proportioned. Some humorous visual art of the period reflected this drive to tame the conflict by incorporating it into domesticity. The Strand Magazine for example published in June 1917 a piece entitled ‘Untraining the Army: One Solution to a Pressing Problem’. The anonymously authored piece includes some text depicting a character who claims to be ‘first President of the National Institute for Untraining the British Soldier’, but who turns out to be an inhabitant of an asylum. He explains that ‘one of the greatest problems of demobilization arises from the fact that our soldiers will have  Edginton, p. 390.

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become quite unfitted by their campaigning experiences for the ordinary amenities of civilian life’.17 The focus of the piece however is on the large illustrations by Heath Robinson, the well-known cartoonist and illustrator who became famed for his depictions of ridiculously elaborate machines shown generating simple outcomes.18 The illustrations depict comically absurd situations showing military to civilian transformation. Mannequins and statues are used to re-accustom servicemen to the presence of women (‘We shall requisition female effigies of various kinds, and by harnessing the men to these in such a manner that they cannot escape their close company’). Soldiers are shown undertaking ‘two hours’ sentry duty’, instead of ‘rifle with fixed bayonet’ he will perform duties ‘for infant and bottle’. Servicemen are also depicted as having to endure the sounds of babies crying (‘Several babies, with exceptionally sturdy lungs, have been adopted by the Institute, and these will be operated upon with pins in the soldier’s presence’).19 In order to become used once more to the civilian workplace, meanwhile, soldiers must re-acquire ‘the quick-lunch habit’. The illustration shows a soldier in a small sentry box with his lunch being pulled past him on a rope along a long table.20 The Strand Magazine had published a similar piece in March 1917, which in this case consisted of a series of full-page illustrations by Heath Robinson. The drawings depict humorous uses for military machinery in peacetime. Tanks become ‘motor buses’ with passengers inside and perched on top reading newspapers; siege howitzers are adapted for milk deliveries; submarine mines are used to power stair lifts for elderly people; torpedoes become footwarmers in bed; war balloons are used to draw corks from the champagne at birthday parties; and those who are learning to swim use the wrecks of submarines to rest on.21 The first piece described here, ‘Untraining the Army,’ speaks to anxieties about the differences that may have opened between soldiers and their families over the course of the war. The whimsical picture they present of soldiers transitioning to their old lives, while not always light (babies are pricked with pins), is reassuring. The worst families and soldiers have to 17  Anon. 1917. Untraining the Army: One Solution of a Pressing Problem, Illustrated by W. Heath Robinson. Punch 53: 515–17 (pp. 515, 517). 18  Simon Heneage. 2004. Robinson, William Heath (1872–1944). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. oxforddnb.com/view/article/35803. Accessed 16 October 2017. 19  Anon. Untraining, pp. 515–16. 20  Anon. Untraining, p. 517. 21  W. Heath Robinson. 1917. When Peace Comes Along. Strand Magazine, 53: 249–54.

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fear, it is implied, is the process of servicemen being re-accustomed to wives and children. More than this, though, the humour relies on and conveys the suggestion that elements of domestic life—crying babies, fast lunches, and carrying ‘in dutiful fashion cloaks, umbrellas, vanity bags’— are no less challenging to adapt to than military life was when the men first enlisted.22 The impression conveyed is that people can be accustomed or unaccustomed to any experience, including involvement in a world war, with conflict experience and the experience of domestic life presented in a way that levels them. Similarly to the focus in ‘Untraining the Army’ on how men could stop being resources for conducting warfare, ‘When Peace Comes Along’ addresses the incongruity in peacetime of the conflict’s materials, particularly weaponry. The humour of the illustrations emerges from the comic contrast between the equipment of mass mechanised warfare being used for mundane purposes. In this sense it highlights the extraordinary and extreme element of such equipment, showing as it does how little tanks and howitzers should have to do with ordinary life. Yet at the same time, Heath Robinson’s illustrations do in an imaginative sense domesticate and tame the equipment of war. In the playful fantasy world of the illustrations, machines designed to kill are claimed and repurposed for ordinary, familiar, comforts—used to make improvements to domestic life rather than to cause catastrophic destruction. Heath Robinson’s re-imagination of these machines makes them figures of fun rather than figures of fear.23 Similarly taming, domesticating treatment of anxieties are seen in the many spy stories that were published in response to the war. As Ann-Marie Einhaus notes, the ‘safety buffer of fictionality’ facilitated the ‘open voicing’ of concerns about German agents in Britain.24 Humorous works added an extra layer of reassurance to this subject through their encouragement of amusement. Fears about spies could be laughed off just as fears about the machines of war could be in the illustrations explored

 Untraining, p. 515.  There is an irresistible parallel here with the representation of ‘boggarts’ in Harry Potter. These are creatures that take the form of people’s greatest fears, and the Hogwarts students are encouraged to defeat them by imagining these fears in a ridiculous form or incongruous situation, since laughter will cause a boggart to retreat. J. K. Rowling. 1999. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 140–41. 24  Ann-Marie Einhaus. 2013. The Short Story and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 47, 118. 22 23

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above. A good example is Winifred Graham’s ‘The Ballunatics’ (1918).25 The protagonist, Lady Louisa, plans a fancy-dress ball for servicemen from a nearby barracks before they leave for the front, with her overworked brother, a Major, making a bet with her that he will be bored with the event. She becomes the victim of a prank by her nephews. Two guests arrive, who are announced as ‘The Ballunatics’. They are ‘entirely concealed by large artificial balloons, and their faces hidden behind absurd smiling masks, with abnormally large heads’. They take to the dance floor with extreme energy, the ropes attached to their costumes swinging round and clearing the room.26 Louisa is led to believe that the two men are in fact spies and can turn a tap inside their balloons to release ‘poison gas, which would prevent any of these chaps here ever seeing any fighting again’.27 Taking it upon herself to protect her guests, Louisa draws the Ballunatics into a separate room and, aided by her brother, forces them to remove their costumes. The prank is revealed—with her brother the Major having lost the bet—and all involved agree not to reveal the deception to the other guests. Louisa as a result is ‘looked upon as the most courageous woman of her time, one who tackled two dangerous spies without turning a hair’.28 There is a strong didactic element to the tale. While the story revolves around a prank and does not include any actual spies, the action Louisa takes in the belief that she has spies in her house is firmly depicted as brave and admirable. In this respect, Graham’s tale shares a characteristic with many other stories that focussed on non-combatant life during the conflict. For example, these stories addressed concerns about how non-­ combatants could best aid the war effort; civilians profiting from the conflict, such as shopkeepers raising prices and salesmen who attempt to sell bizarre gadgets that they claim to be ‘indispensable’ to servicemen; overzealous patriots, such as female characters with wartime schemes to arrange their hair ‘quite plainly’; and civilians who enjoyed reflected glory

 Winifred Graham. 1918. The Ballunatics. Strand Magazine 56: 116–19.  Graham, p. 116. 27  Graham, p. 118. 28  Graham, p. 119. 25 26

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from connections (however tenuous) to those at the front.29 In Louisa’s case, there is comedy in the seriousness with which she takes a situation that is not really serious at all, but readers are left in no doubt that her actions are the right course to take. Alongside the didacticism, though, the humour in the story plays an important part in the representation of the defeat of the ‘spies’. Despite the majority of the characters believing that the Ballunatics carry with them poison gas, they are made to look ridiculous. The illustration of the men in their costumes by artist G. E. Studdy (best known for his character Bonzo the dog who appeared in the 1920s) in particular mixes slightly sinister grinning masks with absurd bulbous bodies, while the scene in which Louisa forces them to remove their costumes sees them compelled to admit that they are ‘rather scantily clad beneath’.30 The ‘spies’ in other words are depicted as being sufficiently ludicrous as to be capable of defeat. They are comic villains rather than imposing criminal masterminds. The variety of subjects treated humorously in the texts considered means that, collectively, they create the impression that almost any wartime circumstance could be met with amusement. It is as though the conflict could be a source of disruption or unruliness in any area of life, but could always be laughed-off. The depiction of war experience as comically absurd applies equally to subjects that at least had the potential to be serious or severe—weaponry, spies—and to subjects that might be considered smaller, lighter matters—a lack of eggs or jam. There is a levelling effect here. ‘Slighter’ subjects are inflated to form the focus of many narratives, leaving no room in the frame for more extreme manifestations of war experience. The topic of the fighting, the experience of death and destruction cannot fit into the small scale of these works. Where ‘larger’ considerations do appear, they are shrunken down by the texts’ comedy, made to appear ridiculous, and come across as issues or experiences that it is possible to live with or overcome.

29  A.  A. Milne. 1914. They Also Serve. Punch, 26 August, p.  182; C.  L. Graves and E.  V. Lucas. 1915. Our Country’s Loss. Punch, 2 June, p.  427; T.  P. C.  Wilson. 1917. Trench Coats. Punch, 26 December, pp.  428–29; Barry Pain. 1917. Owing to the War. Strand Magazine 53: 61–63; Ina Garvey. 1914. Blanche’s Letters. Punch, 2 September, p. 206; N. R. Martin. 1914. The War in Acacia Avenue. Punch, 7 October, p. 303; Graves and Lucas. 1915. My Ewe Lion. Punch, 13 January, p. 38. 30  Graham, p. 119.

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‘All Bowling’s More or Less Alike on a Pitch Full of Shell-Holes Like This One’: At Home in War31 As well as deriving humour from reimagining the experience of war in the domestic sphere, authors regularly created comic representations of military life by transplanting trappings of domestic and civilian life into the military context. This includes texts in which a cricket match between military units is interrupted by mules; a fad for gardening and a gardening competition take place at the front (though this ends sadly when one of the best gardens is destroyed by a shell); and in which an officer complains about not being able to wear pyjamas in public while recovering from injury (‘Hospital authorities hate their guests to appear in the streets in pyjamas, no matter how artistic or becoming—a queer prejudice’).32 Similar to the texts analysed above, much of the humour in such texts stems from comic incongruity, which necessarily involves the military world being framed as highly unlike the world of the domestic. Yet once again, this sense of oddness is balanced against a drive towards normalising experience of front-line conditions. By lending aspects of the domestic to the context of military life, authors present the war through perspectives that make it appear to be less about bombs and bullets and more about aspects of life that are gentler and more familiar. A poem entitled ‘Rats’ that was published anonymously in the B.E.F. Times in December 1916 is a good example.33 While admitting that rats ‘are no subject for an elegy’, the speaker writes that they ‘fill my waking moments’ and ‘spend the midnight hours with me’, going on to describe the disruptions the rodents cause. They ‘will open tins of bully [beef] with their teeth’, and should a friend send the speaker a cake from the UK, the rats will ‘extricate it from its cardboard sheath’. One stanza even describes how rats have learnt to use kitchen implements: Just to show you, on my table lay a tin of sardines—sealed— With the implement to open hanging near, The old buck-rat espied them, to his missis loudly squealed, “Bring quickly that tin-opener, Stinky dear!”  A. W. Bird. 1918. Playing the Game. Punch, 18 September, p. 178.  Bird, p.  178; W.  J. Shakespeare. 1916. Horrock’s Pride. Punch, 9 August, p.  107; W. K. Holmes. 1918. Warriors’ Wear. Punch, 18 September, p. 188. 33  Anon. 1916. Rats. B.E.F. Times, 25 December. In Christopher Westhorp, ed. The Wipers Times: The Famous First World War Trench Newspaper, 143. London: Bloomsbury. 2013. 31 32

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The male rat proceeded ‘with all his might and main’ to open the tin ‘and then—‘tis here you’ll dub me “Liar”—| He closed it down, and sealed it up again’. The poem ends on a note of especially dark comedy. Should a rival rat threaten another’s ‘love affair’, the challenged rat will place a Mills bomb—a type of hand grenade used extensively in the war— under his antagonist’s ‘lair’, and ‘then he’ll pull the pin out with his teeth’.34 The poem’s comic inversion of power relations between rodent and human means that life in the war zone appears to be topsy-turvy, to be a world in which humans watch helplessly while rats conduct love affairs and perform extraordinary feats of dexterity in making use of human tools, food, and weapons. The final image of the poem—that of the rodent pulling out the pin of a grenade—even leaves, with black comedy, the threat of human destruction at the hands of the lordly creature hanging in the air. Even so, the juxtaposition in the poem of a creature that is a symbol of the war zone’s awful conditions with human-like behaviour, domesticity, and romance, are coloured by playfulness and whimsy. (The most famous literary rat of the war also appeared in 1916—in Isaac Rosenberg’s ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’—and is the more celebrated cousin of the rodents that appear in the B.E.F. Times poem and elsewhere. Rosenberg’s rat owes something to the traditions of humorous human-rat inversions to which the B.E.F. Times text belongs. His ‘sardonic’ rat has a freedom in the war zone that his speaker lacks, but the rodent’s attitude is reflected at the start and end of the poem in the speaker’s whimsy and playfulness in putting a poppy behind his ear).35  Anon. Rats.  Rosenberg’s poem is most often encountered side-by-side with serious poems in anthologies. Reading it in the context humorous literary rats instead foregrounds how the poem’s anger and dark irony is mixed with, on a smaller scale, whimsy, playfulness, and wryness. The history of the poem’s composition indicates that these elements are important, with Rosenberg returning to them as his ideas evolved. A ‘droll’ rat appears in an untitled poem he composed between June 1914 and February 1915: ‘A rat whose droll shape would dart and flit | Was like a torch to light my wit’, but ‘when the rat would rape my cheese | He signed the end of his life’s lease’. The speaker of ‘In the Trenches’, written in France around the same time as ‘Break of Day’, describes placing a poppy behind his ear as a ‘jest’. Authorial alterations made in the manuscript of ‘Break of Day’ also pay attention to specific words relating to humour (‘sardonic’, ‘droll’). See: Rosenberg. 1916. Break of Day in the Trenches. In Isaac Rosenberg, ed. Vivien Noakes, 106. Oxford: Oxford UP. 2008; Rosenberg. 1914/15. [A Flea Whose Body Shone like a Bead]. In Noakes, 80; Rosenberg. 1916. In the Trenches. In Noakes, 105; Rosenberg. 1916. Break of Day in the Trenches. In letter to Gordon Bottomley, First World War Poetry Digital Archive http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/ items/show/8086 [accessed 23 February 2016]. 34 35

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As an illustrative point of comparison, E. J. L. Garstin’s ‘To the Rats’ (1916) also deals with the subject of the pervasiveness of rodents in the war zone, but does so in solemn terms that solicit very different aesthetic emotions from those associated with the B.  E. F.  Times text. Garstin’s speaker for example describes how ‘Above the noise of Hun projectiles shrieking | The sound of scratching footfalls never cease’ and, addressing the rats, ‘stretched upon this bed, my body numb, | I see you, agile, helterskelter fly’.36 As with many of the other texts included in this monograph, the ‘Rats’ poem published in the B.E.F.  Times takes an experience that could be, as Garstin’s text indicates, disturbing, uncomfortable, distressing or horrifying, and presents it in a way that invites the contrasting, minor feeling of amusement. As well as the emotional tameness of the poem’s presentation of life in the military, the representation of the rats’ activities focusses attention on domestic concerns rather than on the conflict’s more extreme or alien forms of suffering. Aside from the final, darkly comic threat of a rat using a Mills grenade—and even this is presented as part of the rats’ romantic lives—the rodents’ activities and the speaker’s concerns revolve around subjects that, while important to servicemen’s wellbeing, are relatively prosaic in the context of mass warfare: bully beef, sardines, cake, tin openers. Similarly to those texts in which couples living in Britain focus on how the conflict affects jam or chickens, the author of the B.E.F.  Times poem creates a shrunken or ‘zoomed-in’ image of the conflict, with this constricted lens excluding the war’s larger and more painful aspects. The poem’s scrutiny of that which is small and the anthropomorphised charm of the rodents make it part of a trend in trench newspapers of using animals and objects to offer comically skewed perspectives on conflict experiences.37 To give just a few examples, texts were printed that were written from the point of view of a mule, a ‘cuss-word’, and a tin of bully

36  E.  J. L.  Garstin. 1916. To the Rats. In Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men, ed. Galloway Kyle, 24. London: Erskine Macdonald. 37  These resembled ‘It narratives’, popular in the nineteenth century. They were ‘stories related by everyday things’, including, published between 1844 and 1873, the tales of a feather, an umbrella, a London doll, a needle, a pin, a shilling, and a book. Elaine Freedgood. 2010. What Objects Know: Circulation, Omniscience and the Comedy of Dispossession in Victorian It-Narratives. Journal of Victorian Culture 15: 83–100 (pp. 83–84).

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beef.38 The Gambardier featured a tale of two guns that fall in love, while cartoons depicting insects on sentry duty and horses on sick parade appeared in the Buzzer and the Hades Herald respectively.39 This genre of works includes other examples of anthropomorphised rats, such as a ‘Diary of a Rat’ in the Pennington Press of 1916. The eponymous rat recounts such adventures as ‘Discovered curious tent in 6 Coy. [Company] lines. Weird-looking men sleeping here. Had good look round. Turned out to be the editorial tent of the Pennington Press’. The rat accidentally eats ‘the Editor’s blue pencil’, the colour used for censorship, commenting ‘Silly fool shouldn’t leave them lying about’.40 These texts in turn participate in a wide-ranging and longstanding tradition of anthropomorphism and comic anthropomorphism, which flourished in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This was a period that saw especially prominent examples in well-known children’s literature such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Edward Lear’s work.41 The fashion for anthropomorphism included the creation of human-like rats. The description of rodents taking over the environment in ‘Rats’ in particular is similar to that in Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1842). In Browning’s text the rats ‘ate the cheeses out of the vats’, ‘licked the soup from the cook’s own ladles’, and ‘Split open kegs of salted sprats | Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats’.42 An 1890 piece in Punch reported a ‘mass meeting of Rats’ under the ‘Reformer’s Oak in Hyde Park’, the object of which was to ‘protest against 38  Penypre. 1916. The Confessions of a Mule. Joy Prong, March; Jujube. 1918. Memoirs of Moment: No.1 The War Story of A Cuss-Word. Lines of Fire, June, p. 14; Anon. 1915. The Diary of a Tin of Bully Beef. Salient, December. 39  Anon. 1915. The Gloomy Side of War. Gambardier, March; Anon. 1916. Cartoon. Buzzer, April; Anon. 1916. Cartoon. Hades Herald, August. 40  Anon. 1916. Rats! Being an Extract from the Diary of a Rat Discovered Recently under the Floor Boards of a Tent in 7 Coy. Lines. Pennington Press, 22 September, p. 8. Other humorous representations of rats in the trench press include the story ‘The Bog Rats in Harts Spring’ and a cartoon showing rats and frogs as servicemen’s ‘bedfellows’. Anon. 1917. The Bog Rats in Harts Spring. HBOCB, August; Anon. 1915. Cartoon. War Makes Strange Bedfellows. Dump, December. 41  Anthropomorphism, as today, was not only used for humour but was also common in children’s literature in general. Celebrated examples are Beatrix Potter’s stories (1902–30), Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894). 42  Robert Browning. 1842. The Pied Piper of Hamelin. In Robert Browning: Selected Poems, ed. Daniel Karlin, 30–38. London: Penguin. 1989.

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Fig. 6.1  Palmer Cox. 1888. A Letter to the Rats. Atalanta, 1 June, p. 527

the proposal made by a Correspondent of The Times’ that the rats in the park should be removed. The senior rat presiding says that they would show by ‘orderly behaviour’ at their gathering that ‘Rats knew how to conduct business […] A barbarous suggestion had been made to evict them […] Arbitration seemed to him the most polite course’.43 A 1906 poem in the same publication told the story of ‘The Rat and the Dormouse’, in which a rat who owned ‘a ducal Mayfair mansion’ had a dormouse as a guest. Thinking the mouse in need of ‘education’, the rat attempts to inspire him with London culture, but fails because the mouse prefers the simple pleasures of the country.44 Atalanta in 1888, meanwhile, printed a poem in which rats are told to leave the speaker’s home, accompanied by drawings of them packing up possessions and beginning their journey (Fig.  6.1).45 The representation of military experience via the lens of anthropomorphised rats in other words belonged to a strand of humour in British literary culture that was well-established by the time war broke out. The poem has a literary familiarity that reflects its subject matter: the use of familiar trappings of domestic life and a focus on the prosaic. While the ‘Rats’ poem from the B.E.F.  Times emphasises fantastical ways in which rodents could disrupt the few domestic comforts available in military life, another poem that was also published in 1916 focusses  Horace Lester. 1890. Rats in Council. Punch, 27 September, p. 153.  Robert Palk. 1906. The Rat and the Dormouse. Punch, 7 February, p. 98. 45  Palmer Cox. 1888. A Letter to the Rats. Atalanta, 1 June, p.  527. From: Alison Chapman (ed.) and the DVPP team. Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project. Edition 0.97beta. University of Victoria. dvpp.uvic.ca/poems/atalanta/1888/pom_1779_a_letter_ to_the_rats.html. Accessed 10th April 2022. 43 44

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instead on how domestic comfort could be increased. Over the course of the text, this focus turns into an elision between comfort and a sense of physical protection from the dangers of the fighting.46 The poem is entitled ‘Macfarlane’s Dug-Out’ and it is by Joseph Lee. Lee was a journalist and poet before the war and served in the Black Watch, eventually being captured and becoming a prisoner of war. The speaker of his poem declares that since ‘the breed that were our forebears first crouched within a cave’ there has ‘been nothing like the dug-out that Macfarlane made!’ He goes on to describe and praise the features of the construction.47 The dug-out was designed to be ‘something spacious in which one might stretch a leg […] And not be butted in the back by t’other fellow’s knees’.48 It is well shored-up and roofed ‘with tin | Torn from the battered boxes that they bring the biscuits in’ (Macfarlane apparently ‘even used the biscuits, but he begs I should not state | The number that he took for tiles, the number that he ate!’). Macfarlane secured it to withstand storms, even filling in a crevice ‘with the latest gift of socks’.49 Sandbags line the walls, and wood lines the floor, and there is ‘A little shelf for bully, butter, bread, and marmalade’.50 Having described the sturdy construction and creature comforts of the dugout, the speaker goes on to explain, in dramatic terms, the value of the shelter during the worst moments of the fighting. When ‘the night was dark with dread, and the day was red with death’, when ‘speeding steel passed like a shuddering breath’, when ‘all the earth did spit and spume like the cauldron of hot Hell’, and when ‘the heart of man might falter, and his soul be sore afraid’, the speaker declares, ‘We just dived into the dug-out that Macfarlane made!’51 Indeed, more than this, he claims that ‘Deep is the sleep I’ve had therein, as free from sense of harm, | As when my curly head was laid in the crook of my mother’s arm’. In the final stanza, his imagination turns from the dug-out to the possibility of having a similarly sturdy grave. If it should happen, the speaker says, that ‘I bequeath my body to the soil of sunny France’, he will not ask for

46  Joseph Lee. 1916. Macfarlane’s Dug-Out. In Ballads of Battle, 5–10. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company. 47  Lee, p. 5. 48  Lee, pp. 5–6. 49  Lee, p. 6. 50  Lee, p. 8. 51  Lee, p. 9.

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a sepulchre ‘beneath some cypress shade—| Just a six by two feet “dug-­ out” by Macfarlane made’.52 The tone of the poem thus moves through humorousness—the hyperbole of the construction, the jokes about Macfarlane’s use of biscuits and unwanted socks—through to a more serious reflection on the dangers that were part of front-line experience, including reflection on the prospect of being killed in action. The ‘zoomed-in’ focus on the practicalities and comforts of the dug-out with which the poem begins are similar to the zoomed-in lenses seen in ‘Rats’ and in the stories dealing with the smaller aspects of war experience (such as food). Lee’s speaker draws attention to the details of the dug out—the materials used to make it, the space it has to store specific kinds of food—rather than to the killing machines it was built to withstand, in doing so shrinking down the experience of the war. Unlike the other texts discussed in this chapter, Lee’s work does address the serious, painful, ‘larger’ aspects of front-line experiences. Even here, though, there is a hint of gallant, soldierly nonchalance in the line describing how when bombardments begin the soldiers ‘just dived into the dug-­ out that Macfarlane made!’ (my emphasis).53 In addition, the humorous opening with its focus on domesticity establishes a framing context of reassurance, facilitating the movement Lee makes when he places the violence of war alongside a comforting, familiar, domestic image: Macfarlane’s dug-out is sufficiently well-made that the speaker can sleep in it as well as he did when a baby being held by his mother. The two characteristics that make Macfarlane’s dug-out remarkable—it offers outstanding creature comforts and outstanding protection from the machinery of war—create a space that is not only reassuring because it is a sound military defence but also because of its comforting domestic associations. The convergence between the domestic/ comfortable and the extremes of war extends into the poem’s finale, with the speaker’s wish to be buried in a grave that Macfarlane has constructed. This moment reads as a more

 Lee, pp. 9–10.  Lee did in fact emphasise that he was writing from personal experience of the front. After describing the horrendous bombardments from which Macfarlane’s dug-out provided shelter, he adds a footnote stating that ‘It may interest the reader to know that these lines are being written during a very considerable bombardment, in which one misses the friendly proximity of just such a dug-out as Macfarlane’s’ (p. 9). There is a parallel here with the way in which the service authors who wrote humorous prose accounts of war experiences, and/ or their editors sought to emphasise their proximity to the fighting (see Chap. 8). 52 53

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domestic version of the famous closing image of Thomas Hardy’s ‘Drummer Hodge’—‘Yet portion of that unknown plain | Will Hodge for ever be’, his ‘homely Northern breast and brain | Grow up a Southern tree’—or indeed as a more domestic version of Rupert Brooke’s ‘corner of a foreign field | That is for ever England’. (Lee’s ‘cypress shade’ echoes Hardy’s ‘Southern tree’ in particular).54 In Hardy’s and Brooke’s poems, the British grave dug overseas becomes a domestic site because the serviceman’s body makes it part of the home nation (the home nation is transplanted into the war zone) and a similar movement takes place in Lee’s poem. The difference here, though, is that it is the construction of the grave itself, built by a comrade known to have the skills to make a home-away-from-home, that makes the foreign field a domestic site. A grave made by Macfarlane is a grave that is already England before the serviceman’s body has even been interred. The aesthetic emotions evoked by the poem’s close have moved away from the amusement of its opening, but there is an impression of comfort here that has been set up by the humorous introduction of and focus on the domestic theme in the first section of the text. This framing of comfort takes on an especial resonance in the context of a footnote from Lee: ‘It unfortunately falls to me to add a postscript of sadder import. Since the Advance of 25th September, my comrade has been counted among the missing’.55 While Lee transplants into the war zone various aspects of domestic life to create a general sense of comfort, elsewhere in humorous Great War literature there is a trend for bringing a very specific element of domestic life into the war zone—an element that was also a very specific comic trope before the start of the conflict. This is the telephone, or rather mishaps with and misuse of the telephone. Humorous confusion caused by crossed wires and deliberate mischief was a frequent feature of popular comic writing by 1914. The many instances of this trope that appeared in Punch provide a good illustration. For example, a piece published in 1912 called ‘Pamela at the Telephone’ sees the titular heroine deliberately making her own fun when accidentally misconnected. She will ‘stand for hours misleading the people the other end, pretending to take their orders […], 54  Thomas Hardy. 1899. Drummer Hodge/ The Dead Drummer. In Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. Claire Tomalin, 119. London: Penguin, 2006; Rupert Brooke. 1915. The Soldier. In Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology, ed. Tim Kendall, 106. Oxford: Oxford UP. 2013. 55  Lee, p. 10.

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accepting invitations to dinner […], inventing bulletins from invalids to anxious enquirers’.56 Other examples of the trope recount confusing conversations, such as ‘Telephone Triolets’ (1905), which includes such exchanges as ‘What’s that? Your Aunt Jane—| Great Scott! What a row | In the ‘phone’; ‘Temporary Insanity’ (1910), featuring such lines as ‘“Are you there?” | “Yes” | “Where?”’; and ‘Through the Wires’ (1901) which sees a member of the public increasingly exasperated at the unintelligibilty of a telephone call he pays multiple times to make.57 As well as humour in these pieces emerging from mix-ups and misunderstandings, they have an element of satire in sending-up the failings of the telephone technology. This side to their humour is seen particularly clearly in works such as ‘And Then There Was None’ (1913), a poem in which the only person in London to be satisfied with his telephone service changes his opinion.58 The titles of these humorous telephone pieces at times themselves highlight the frequency with which telephones were used for the purposes of comedy. In 1913, Punch published ‘More Telephone Troubles’ (a cartoon captioned ‘‘Ye can’t hear what I’m sayin’? Well then, repeat what ye didn’t hear an’ I’ll tell it ye again’), and in March 1914 it published ‘The Telephone Again’.59 The humour here seems partly to be a result of a fascination with modern communications technology and a desire to belittle that technology, perhaps as a result of wariness of or resistance to that which is new. A more modern comparison might be comedian Dom Joly’s mobile phone pranks that were broadcast at the start of the twenty-first century: Joly would go to different public places and ‘answer’ an absurdly oversized mobile by shouting into it as loudly as he could.60 That telephones were a stock comic prop before the outbreak of the conflict primed their wartime counterparts to be equally humorous objects. Representations of humorous incidents involving telephones were common in trench newspapers. These include ‘Five Minutes With a Field  Mrs. Marillier. 1912. Pamela at the Telephone. Punch, 24 July, p. 86.  G.  K. Menzies. 1905. Telephone Triolets. Punch, 22 November, p.  376; Dornford Yates. 1901. Temporary Insanity. Punch, 25 May, p. 392; Arthur A’Beckett. 1901. Through the Wires. Punch, 6 March, p. 184. 58  Gilbert Collins. 1913. And Then There Was None. Punch, 24 September, p. 266. The titles of the telephone pieces sometimes focus on the satirical/ critical element, such as: Hawkin. 1900. The Trials of the Telephone. Punch, 17 October, p. 276. 59  Leonard Raven-Hill. 1913. More Telephonic Troubles. Punch, 8 October, p.  311; C. K. Phillips. 1914. The Telephone Again. Punch, 4 March, p. 175. 60  Dom Joly and Sam Cadman. Trigger Happy TV. Channel 4. 2000–03. 56 57

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Telephone’, which appeared in the Whizz-Bang in January 1916. It is set in the trenches, ‘Anywhere in France’, between ‘2 a.m. and 2 p.m. every day’, and is based on crossed wires and miscommunication: Fourth Voice (Brigadier-General): “I want the battery”. Third Voice (singing): “I want to be—” Buzzer: Umpty—iddy umpty—iddy. Second Voice: “Get off the line!” Fifth Voice: “I say, dry up, this is the O.C. P Coy [Officer in Charge, P Company].—jolly important!” First Voice: “Is that you, Alfie? Can you hear Jock trying to sing ‘Dixie’!”61

Similar problems occur in ‘Telephonic Troubles’ (the Dump, December 1915), a text supposedly made up of transcripts of what linesmen overhear on military telephones. Reflecting the generic setting of the text above (‘anywhere in France’, ‘every day’), the linesmen are presented as everyman characters: ‘There isn’t any need to tell you their names because you all know them; they belong to your brigade or battalion or company or battery’.62 A typical exchange reads: ‘Get off the line, can’t you?’ ‘Get off it yourself. Whose line do you think you’re on?’ ‘This is our direct line to WW.’ ‘I tell you it is my wire to KQ.’ ‘It can’t be, you ass!’ ‘Here, not so much of it! I tell you the wire’s labelled ‘KQ’ on my compytater [sic].’ ‘Your compytater! You mean your complicator.’ 63

Other conversations include servicemen repeatedly shouting ‘Hello!’ at each other, asking if the line is ‘OK’, criticising each other for not knowing what ‘OK’ means, complaining about callers not identifying themselves, discussing buzzing noises, and being interrupted by senior officers telling

 H. M. 1916. Five Minutes With a Field Telephone. Whizz-Bang, January, p. 5.   Anon. 1915. Telephonic Troubles: Things the Linesman Overhears. Dump, December, p. 12. 63  Anon. Telephonic Troubles, p. 12. 61 62

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them not to use the line for personal conversations.64 Elsewhere, a German officer is said to have invented ‘a new machine for tapping our trench telephones’, but is not rewarded as he expected, instead overhearing such comments as ‘it’ll be all the same après la guerre, nayce pas, Bill. ‘Ullo! ‘Ullo! I say, Bill, did I tell you about that girl in my billet?’65 Telephones could also appear more incidentally in trench-newspaper texts, but here too they are comic props. A parody that appeared in the Hangar Herald in February 1915, for example, which is ironically described as a set of ‘lucid instructions’ for dealing with fire, includes the directives that the picquet officer should ‘attempt to locate the telephone, which is at the other end of the Hangar, embedded in the centre of a haystack’. At ‘the word of command “tele-PHONE”, the N.C.O. [Non-Commissioned Officer] or an intelligent private will advance three paces and ring up the Exchange pronouncing clearly the words “are you there?”’66 There are a number of different layers to the humour here. One aspect, as the latter example from the Hangar Herald illustrates especially well, is a Bergsonian contrast between that which is regulated and that which is erratic, eccentric, and human. As is explored in Chap. 7 in more detail, philosopher Henri Bergson argued in 1900 that humour stems from the perception of ‘mechanical elasticity, just where one would expect to find the wideawake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being’.67 To take the Hanger Herald text as an example, humour emerges from an attempt to mechanise that which resists mechanisation. Humans are given ridiculously rigid and specific orders to regulate their use of a technology designed for efficiency (taking three paces and pronouncing scripted words). At the same time, the imperative that it must be an N.C.O. or ‘intelligent private’ who uses the phone points towards human error that 64  Anon. Telephonic Troubles, pp.  12–13. The term originated in the U.S. in the midnineteenth century: OED. OK, Adj., int.1, n.2, and Adv. OED Online, Oxford University Press. oed.com/view/Entry/258326. Accessed 23 August 2017. 65  Pip-Toc. 1916. Trench Telephony. Periscope, November, p. 5. 66  The Outsideclopedia. 1915. Our Letter Box. Hangar Herald, 1 February. The phrase ‘Are you there?’ seems to have been associated with telephone conversation. For instance, a 1914 Punch cartoon showed a ‘Territorial Sentry (by profession a telephone operator)’ asking ‘Are you there?’ Leonard Raven-Hill. 1914. Territorial Sentry. Punch, 23 September, p. 257. 67  Henri Bergson. 1911. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Trans. Brereton, Cloudesley and Fred Rothwell. New York: Macmillan Company. 1914, p. 10.

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it is difficult to control. Likewise, the phrase the servicemen are ordered to say (‘Are you there?’) is incongruously vague in the context of the minute regulation of the other orders, hinting that telephone technology could often hinder rather than help efficient communication. These kinds of tensions between the mechanical and the organic or eccentric are also at work in the pre-war examples of comic telephones, which similarly hint that technological innovations may not be as reliable, efficient, and regulated as might be expected. This feeds into a sense of resistance to mechanisation in the trench-newspaper texts especially. As is suggested in the Bergsonian conception of humour, humour can work to criticise and correct that which is overly mechanical: for Bergson ‘rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective’.68 One aspect of the humour is closer to that in ‘Rats’ and ‘Macfaralane’s Dug-Out’, since the comic representations of phones sees domestic or familiar concerns brought into the military context. Part of the human and eccentric side to the Bergsonian tensions in the texts is that the servicemen who (mis)use military telephones often do so in order to have cosy chats of the kind that might take place in a domestic setting. The effect is to add a more familiar, more domestic colouring to the use of technology in the war zone. Again, the humorous representation of an aspect of military life brings the military closer to something more quotidian. The sense of familiarity is bolstered by the familiarity of the telephone as a comic trope, as explained above. Indeed, the trench-newspaper texts draw their humour partly from an expectation that something will go wrong when using the technology. Jokes about telephones have a predictable repetitiousness that means they belong—as their Bergsonian quality also testifies—to machine-age comedy (see Chap. 7). This is a kind of humour that emerges from repetition itself: good examples are the stock gags and sketches of vaudeville.69 Partly because the telephone was a comic trope well in advance of 1914, there would be an expectation among readers of trench newspapers that the appearance of a telephone heralded humorous mishaps. The anticipation of something inevitably going wrong when using a telephone itself became the subject of a short, humorous anecdote that appeared in Punch in 1911. The narrator spends time explaining the use of a telephone to his pupil, a Territorial Sapper,  Bergson, p. 21.  Michael North. 2009. Machine-Age Comedy. Oxford: Oxford UP, p. 9.

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apparently in the belief that it is a complicated process and likely to confuse, only to discover that the student is a professional telephone operator in civilian life.70

‘Squad Drill, Sir’ | ‘O-o-h! I Thought You Said “Quadrille”’: Conclusions71 The two different kinds of texts discussed in this chapter both frame the Great War in ways that shrink its scale. Those which centre on the life in the UK during the conflict, with a focus on details of domestic spaces and lives, see the conflict become a minor plot point, or a convenient disruption on which to hang events that form the real interest of the narratives. Those which centre on life in the war zone see the trappings of domesticity brought into the context of the military sphere where they also take centre stage, with the conflict’s more dramatic or extreme elements becoming peripheral. All of the texts make the war a matter of that which is familiar, in doing so finding aspects of war experience that are small enough to form the basis of minor, mild amusement. There is a smallness or tameness of emotion associated with the smallness of the scale of the representation—with concerns about jam, rats, and sleeping arrangements prioritised over discussion of mass mechanised modern warfare. Such concerns open-up amusement to a variety of readers. It may not have felt possible or appropriate for non-combatants to take enjoyment from the kind of gallows humour with which servicemen filled their own publications. Comedy based on wartime domesticity was however safer ground. Such comedy at times tempered the strength of subjects that have the potential to provoke, such as the speaker’s contemplation of his own death in ‘Macfarlane’s Dug-Out’, by associating larger subjects with that which is slighter.

References A’Beckett, Arthur. 1901. Through the wires. Punch, 6 March, p. 184. ———. 1911. The learner. Punch, 29 November, p. 402. Anon. 1915a. Cartoon. War makes strange bedfellows. Dump, December. ———. 1915b. The diary of a tin of bully beef. Salient, December.  A’Beckett. 1911. The Learner. Punch, 29 November, p. 402.  Halsey, p. 199.

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———. 1915c. The gloomy side of war. Gambardier, March. ———. 1915d. Telephonic troubles: Things the linesman overhears. Dump, December, p. 12. ———. 1916a. Cartoon. Buzzer, April. ———. 1916b. Cartoon. Hades Herald, August. ———. 1916c. Rats. B.E.F. Times, 25 December. In The wipers times: The famous first world war trench newspaper, ed. Christopher Westhorp, 143. London: Bloomsbury. 2013. ———. 1916d. Rats! Being an extract from the diary of a rat discovered recently under the floor boards of a Tent in 7 Coy. Lines. Pennington Press, 22 September, p. 8. ———. 1917a. The bog rats in harts spring’. HBOCB, August. ———. 1917b. Untraining the army: One solution of a pressing problem, illustrated by W. Heath Robinson. Punch 53: 515–517. Bergson, Henri. 1911. Laughter: An essay on the meaning of the comic. Trans. Brereton, Cloudesley and Fred Rothwell. New York: Macmillan Company. 1914. Bird, A. W. 1918. Playing the game. Punch, 18 September, p. 178. Brooke, Rupert. 1915. The soldier. In Poetry of the first world war: An anthology, ed. Tim Kendall, 106. Oxford: Oxford UP. 2013. Browning, Robert. 1842. The pied piper of Hamelin. In Robert Browning: Selected poems, ed. Daniel Karlin, 30–38. London: Penguin. 1989. Collins, Gilbert. 1913. And then there was none. Punch, 24 September, p. 266. Cox, Palmer. 1888. A letter to the rats. Atalanta, 1 June, p. 527. From: Alison Chapman (ed.) and the DVPP team. Digital Victorian periodical poetry project. Edition 0.97beta. University of Victoria. dvpp.uvic.ca/poems/atalanta/1888/ pom_1779_a_letter_to_the_rats.html. Accessed 10 Apr 2022. Dark, Richard. 1915. Poultry and the war. Punch, 3 March, p. 162. Edginton, May. 1917. War-workers. Strand Magazine 54: 386–394. Einhaus, Ann-Marie. 2013. The short story and the first world war. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Freedgood, Elaine. 2010. What objects know: Circulation, omniscience and the comedy of dispossession in Victorian it-narratives. Journal of Victorian Culture 15: 83–100. Garstin, E.J.L. 1916. To the rats. In Soldier poets: Songs of the fighting men, ed. Galloway Kyle, 24. London: Erskine Macdonald. Garvey, Ina. 1914. Blanche’s letters. Punch, 2 September, p. 206. Gordon Laws, A. 1914. The censor habit. Punch, 9 September, p. 221. Graham, Winifred. 1918. The Ballunatics. Strand Magazine 56: 116–119. Graves, C. L. and E. V. Lucas. 1915a. My ewe lion. Punch, 13 January, p. 38. ———, 1915b. Our Country’s loss. Punch, 2 June, p. 427.

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H. M. 1916. Five minutes with a field telephone. Whizz-Bang, January, p. 5. Halsey, Ernest. 1914. A candidate for the force. Punch, 2 September, p. 199. Hardy, Thomas. 1899. Drummer Hodge/ the dead drummer. In Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. Claire Tomalin, vol. 119. London: Penguin. 2006. Hawkin. 1900. The trials of the telephone. Punch, 17 October, p. 276. Heath Robinson, W. 1917. When peace comes along. Strand Magazine 53: 249–254. Heneage, Simon. 2004. Robinson, William Heath (1872–1944). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. oxforddnb.com/view/article/35803. Accessed 16 Oct 2017. Holmes, W. K. 1918. Warriors’ wear. Punch, 18 September, p. 188. Howard, Keble. 1917. Miss Pett’s grand chance. Strand Magazine 54: 463–470. ———. 1918. A shock for uncle Timothy. Strand Magazine 56: 238–243. Joly, Dom and Sam Cadman. 2000–2003. Trigger Happy TV. Channel 4. Jujube. 1918. Memoirs of moment: No.1 the war story of a cuss-word. Lines of Fire, June, p. 14. Lane, Mrs John. [Annie Phillippine King]. 1917. A way they (sometimes) have in the Amy. Strand Magazine 54: 14–16. Lee, Joseph. 1916. Macfarlane’s dug-out. In Ballads of battle, 5–10. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company. Lester, Horace. 1890. Rats in council. Punch, 27 September, p. 153. Marillier, MRS. 1912. Pamela at the telephone. Punch, 24 July, p. 86. Martin, N. R. 1914. The war in acacia avenue. Punch, 7 October, p. 303. Menzies, G. K. 1905. Telephone triolets. Punch, 22 November, p. 376. Milne, A. A. 1914. They also serve. Punch, 26 August, p. 182. North, Michael. 2009. Machine-age comedy. Oxford: Oxford UP. OED. OK, Adj., int.1, n.2, and Adv. OED Online, Oxford University Press. oed. com/view/Entry/258326. Accessed 23 Aug 2017. Outsideclopedia, The. 1915. Our letter box. Hangar Herald, 1 February. Pain, Barry. 1917. Owing to the war. Strand Magazine 53: 61–63. Palk, Robert. 1906. The rat and the dormouse. Punch, 7 February, p. 98. Penypre. 1916. The confessions of a mule. Joy Prong, March. Phillips, C. K. 1914. The telephone again. Punch, 4 March, p. 175. Pip-Toc. 1916. Trench telephony. Periscope, November, p. 5. Raven-Hill, Leonard. 1913. More telephonic troubles. Punch, 8 October, p. 311. ———. 1914. Territorial sentry. Punch, 23 September, p. 257. Risk, R. K. 1918. Jamouflage. Punch, 11 September, p. 162. Rosenberg, Isaac. 1914/15. A flea whose body shone like a bead. In Isaac Rosenberg, ed. Vivien Noakes, 80. Oxford: Oxford UP. 2008.

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———. 1916a. Break of day in the trenches. In Vivien Noakes, ed. Isaac Rosenberg, 106. Oxford: Oxford UP. 2008. ———. 1916b. Break of day in the trenches. In Letter to Gordon Bottomley, First World War Poetry Digital Archive. http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/ items/show/8086. Accessed 23 Feb 2016. ———. 1916c. In the trenches. In Vivien Noakes, ed. Isaac Rosenberg, 105. Oxford: Oxford UP. 2008. Rowling, J.K. 1999. Harry potter and the prisoner of Azkaban. London: Bloomsbury. Shakespeare, W. J. 1916. Horrock’s Pride. Punch, 9 August, p. 107. Smith, Bertram. 1914. The interpreters. Punch, 7 October, p. 296. Wilson, T. P. C. 1917. Trench coats. Punch, 26 December, pp. 428–429. Yates, Dornford. 1901. Temporary insanity. Punch, 25 May, p. 392.

CHAPTER 7

Parody and Pop Culture in Trench Newspapers: ‘Let’s whistle ragtime ditties while we’re bashing out Hun brains’ ‘Why Not’, The B.E.F. Times, 25 December 1917

Trench newspapers, or trench journals, were humorous periodicals that servicemen produced while in the armed forces, often from training camps and the front line. The editor of the Quaysider, the magazine produced by B Company, 9th Northumberland Fusiliers, wrote in 1914 of the ‘onerous task of literary composition under somewhat weird conditions’, including hearing ‘an occasional savage growl’ as a ‘comrade […] squelches into an extra deep mud-pool’.1 One such publication, the Wipers Times, has become relatively well known, having been reprinted in book form as well as featuring on television and the stage.2 The Wipers Times was printed at the front with an abandoned printing press, but other papers were created via different means, such as manuscripts being sent to the U.K. for

 Anon. 1914. Quo Fata Vocant. Quaysider, November, p. 1.  It is the subject of a BBC docudrama as well as a play that debuted in the West End and toured the U.K. in 2017. See: Ian Hislop and Nick Newman. 2013. The Wipers Times. BBC 2, 11 September; Hislop and Newman. 2017. The Wipers Times, dir. Caroline Leslie. Recent book editions include: Christopher Westhorp, ed. 2013. The Famous First World War Trench Newspaper. London: Bloomsbury; Malcolm Brown, ed. 2006. The Wipers Times: The Complete Series of the Famous Wartime Trench Newspaper. London: Little Books. 1 2

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reproduction, being printed using army equipment, or being written out by hand.3 Most trench newspapers began publication in 1915 as the new armies developed, though some were continuations of existing military newspapers, for example the Snapper: The Monthly Journal of the East Yorkshire Regiment.4 Contrary to what their name suggests, trench newspapers were not made only by those serving in the trenches, but also by personnel from many different areas of the military posted to a range of theatres of war.5 They were composed predominantly for entertainment, for the amusement of their readers but also of their writers, who could be officers, men, or a mixture of both groups.6 Editors also sometimes stated that the newspapers were historical records, not only sources of fun.7 The extent to which censorship affected the journals is difficult to establish, although, as J. G. Fuller notes, the rules printed in the Minden Magazine give some idea of what was prohibited. The editors were not allowed to include place names, to ‘discuss too minutely […] our prolonged misunderstanding and unpleasantness with the Germans’, or to

3  The Wipers Times ran from 1916 to December 1918 and all its issues survive. J. G. Fuller. 1990. Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies 1914–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 9, 11. 4  Fuller, p. 11; Anon. 1914. Snapper: The Monthly Journal of the East Yorkshire Regiment, August, p.  141. Robert Nelson estimates that many military periodicals would have been produced in the long nineteenth century. (2010. Soldier Newspapers: A Useful Source in the Social and Cultural History of the First World War and Beyond. War in History 17: 167–91 [p. 191]). 5  Women in service also wrote comic periodicals. For example, the hospital team behind the Wallacefield Christmas Book wanted to show that ‘the gentlewomen of England’ ministered ‘to the literary and artistic tastes’ of wounded men as well as their medical needs. Anon. 1916. Wallacefield Christmas Book, December. However, the contributors to the journals studied in this chapter belonged to male units, and so the term ‘servicemen’ is used. 6  Some newspapers were explicitly presented as being for men and officers, while senior officers at times also supported the journals. See, for example: Anon. 1916. Editorial. Braganza, May, pp.  1–2; Anon. Editorial. 1914. Minor Offence, December; The Editors. 1917. Foreword. Old Firm, January. 7  For examples of editors presenting their work as a historical record, see: Anon. 1914. Editorial. Searchlight, December, pp. 4–5; Anon. 1917. Editorial. B1: Chronicle of the Reserve Garrison Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, October, p.  1. In 1917, the war office issued a General Routine Order requesting that war-related ephemera be deposited at the British Museum. See: John Pegum. 2007. British Army Trench Journals and a Geography of Identity. In Publishing in the First World War: Essays in Book History, ed. Hammond, Mary, and Shafquat Towheed, 129–47. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 131.

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‘criticise too freely our political enemies or friends’.8 Beyond this, ‘considerable freedom was allowed’, with editors being able to pursue satirical coverage, including satire of the highest-ranking officers and of censorship itself.9 (To quote just one example, in September 1916 the 718 W.T. Company’s Magazine defined the censor as ‘a man who never buys comic papers’).10 Such contents were designed to appeal to the journals’ primary readership: servicemen who belonged to the units in which the magazines were produced. At times, though, the newspapers had a wider military audience, as well as being sent to those at home.11 A note added to one copy of the December 1917 edition of Hangar Happenings reads ‘Thinking of you all a Merry Xmas, a happy new year. I will explain the jokes when I get my “Little bit of Heaven” Ernie’. Ernie’s note hints at the tightknit military readership who would understand the in-jokes, but also shows a desire to communicate with those at home when finally in ‘Heaven’—on leave.12 There are approximately 40 trench newspapers cited over the course of this monograph. These belonged to a mixture of units: infantry, medical, Army Service Corps, artillery, cadets, cavalry, engineering, and naval— including submarine. The widespread use of anonymity in the papers makes precise identification of their creators problematic, though Fuller’s sample gives some indication of the mix of servicemen involved: 66 of the 107 newspapers he draws on have editors of identifiable rank; 27 were edited by officers, 25 by men of other ranks, and 14 by a combination of men and officers.13 Several of the trench newspapers cited here were edited by officers or trainee officers (the 718 W.T.  Company’s Magazine, the Hangar Herald, the Wipers Times, Lines of Fire, the Hobocob); others were edited or primarily written by servicemen who enlisted in the ranks (the Fifth Gloucester Gazette and the Growler); and some marketed themselves

 Fuller, p. 19.  Fuller, p. 19. 10  Anon 1916. Definitions. 718 W.T. Company’s Magazine, September, p. 3. 11  Fuller, pp.  9, 12; Graham Seal. 2013. The Soldiers’ Press: Trench Journals in the First World War. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 128. 12  Ernie. 1917. Note. Hangar Happenings, December. The Braganza editors, meanwhile, stated that their journal would ‘enable those at home to take a yet keener interest in the doings and fortunes of their comrades across the water’. Anon. 1916. Editorial. Braganza, May, pp. 1–2. 13  Fuller, p. 11. 8 9

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to or had contributors from both men and officers (the Braganza, the Dump, the Periscope, the Searchlight).14 One of the most striking aspects of the newspapers is the pervasiveness of their humour: the representations of war experience they present are almost universally comic. Parody especially is ubiquitous. Trench newspapers are filled with comic rewritings of well-known texts, songs, and characters, ranging from Shakespeare’s plays to Pepys’ diaries, to Chaplin’s Tramp, and to music-hall lyrics.15 Many trench newspapers also include parodies of answers to correspondents, of adverts and battalion news, and of anthropological and archaeological studies. In using the same structures and types of content as home-front newspapers, the entire trench-­ newspaper genre is in fact a kind of parody of the professionally produced press. The reliance in the trench press for its contents on parodying famous literature and aspects of popular culture allowed servicemen to maintain strong connections with civilian and pre-war culture and experience.16 The ubiquity of parody in the newspapers also means that familiarity underpins the entire trench press. The periodicals are an important part of 14  Anon. 1916. Cover. 718 W.T. Company’s Magazine, September; Anon. 1915. Editorial. Hangar Herald, June, p. 1; Westhorp. 2013. Introduction. In Wipers Times, n.pag; Anon. 1918. Cover. Lines of Fire, April; Anon. 1917. Cover. Hobocob, December. For the Fifth Gloucester Gazette see: James Grant Repshire. 2014. A True Tale of the Listening Post. blogs. exeter.ac.uk/fwharvey/2014/05/21/a-true-tale-of-the-listening-post/. Accessed 3 August 2018. For the Growler, which belonged to the Northumberland Fusiliers—not to be confused with the Royal Montreal Regiment’s R.M.R.  Growler—see: C.  H. Cooke. 1923. Historical Records of the Sixteenth (Service) Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers. Newcastleupon-Tyne: Council of the Newcastle and Gateshead Incorporated Chamber of Commerce, p. 192; Anon. 1916. Editorial. Braganza, May, pp. 1–2; Anon. 1915. Contributors. Dump, December, p. 1; Anon. 1916. Editor’s Notes. Periscope, December, 26–27 (p. 27); Anon. 1914. Greeting. Searchlight, December, pp. 3–5. Future studies could investigate possible differences between the humour presented in newspapers of different kinds of unit or by different ranks of servicemen, as well as allocating greater space to the different varieties of humour in the papers. The focus here is on parody and on texts that echo earlier cultural productions because the repeated appearance of both types of text suggests their importance to the genre. 15  Even so, some papers offered solemn reflection on the conflict, obituaries of fallen comrades, and casualty lists. 16  Fuller uses trench newspapers as evidence to argue that the continuance at the front of institutions and attitudes from civilian life, such as music-hall shows, sports fixtures, and humorous cynicism helped men to adjust to the military (p. 175). Seal in addition notes that the connections between the trench press and civilian culture means that ‘the war was not quite the chasm […] sundering past from future, that it is sometimes depicted’ (pp. x–xi).

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the pattern whereby humorous literature frames the conflict within modes of familiarity, tameness, or domesticity. Descriptions and experiences of the conflict are rendered through the medium of well-known, well-loved texts and characters. As a result, it is presented within the same frames of reference as that which is ordinary, rather than appearing to be sui generis or to demand an extreme or new response. This is not to say that trench newspapers ignore differences between civilian and military life or the opportunities for comedy that such differences afforded. In the case of parody, the opposite is partially true, since part of the joke relies on readers being encouraged to identify discrepancies between source and parody texts. As Margaret Rose explains, ‘One of the chief sources of the comic effect in parody’ is ‘the incongruous juxtaposition of texts’.17 Especially pertinent to the parodies in trench newspapers is humour that emerges from incongruity between source texts and the new contexts in which these are placed. This can mean seeing a well-known character transplanted into the war zone, for example Sherlock Holmes incongruously appearing at the front and attempting to solve absurd mysteries. Such incongruity extends in the trench press to forms of (fairly muted) satire, as is the case with the Chaplinesque characters who regularly appear in trench newspapers. These are sympathetic character types from outside the world of the conflict, and readers are given the impression that they should not have to face mass mechanised warfare—a protest against humans being co-opted into the war machine. At the same time, the parodies pull towards identifying and creating humour from similarities. The mimics of Chaplin that appear invite amusement partly by drawing out similarities between the Tramp and servicemen. Here as elsewhere in Great War literature, furthermore, the satire that does emerge from highlighting differences between the world of conflict and the world of civilian life is tame in the sense of being slight and gentle in its content and in its emotional provocations—censorship would not have allowed much beyond this in any case. The papers contain protest, yet their contributors and editors consistently tethered experiences of the conflict closely to elements of culture that were well-known before the war, doing so to invite amusement. The effect is to root the war’s portrayal in the familiar and the tame.

17  Margaret Rose. 1979. Parody/ Metafiction: An Analysis of Parody as a Critical Mirror to the Writing and Reception of Fiction. London: Croom Helm, pp. 21, 22–23.

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‘I Ain’t No Bloomin Kipling’: Parody and Familiarity18 Ubiquitous in trench newspapers, parody was similarly commonplace in music hall and in the professionally produced comic papers that the trench press imitated. A double iteration (repetition of the source text and of a staple of comic publishing) therefore took place whenever a parody was published in soldiers’ papers. The parodies were more affectionate than mocking—they suggest that the source texts were well-liked, providing welcome familiarity and connections to home culture—but also at points indicate the gaps between life in service and civilian life. Authors and texts that were particularly popular targets for parody in the journals include The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Samuel Pepys’ diary, Kipling’s work (especially ‘If’), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855), and Shakespeare. Taking the latter as an example, a ‘Sentry’s Soliloquy’ appeared in the Periscope in November 1916: ‘Is this a ruddy Boche I see before me, | Just by yon corpse in No Man’s Land? | Come, let me strafe thee’.19 Owen Rutter, who was later a successful writer and historian, even published a lengthy imitation of Hiawatha in book form in 1920, having originally serialised the parody in the Balkan News, which paper served soldiers on the Macedonian Front and which was one of the most regular and long-lasting of the trench journals.20 Also popular were mock answers to correspondents (‘Troubled Tom.—We thoroughly appreciate your difficulties as the Commander of a mixed Company, but you really must keep the Waacs [Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps] out of the way on Saturday afternoons’); adverts  Anon. 1918. Thoughts. B.E.F. Times, 22 January. In Westhorp, p. 273.  Anon. 1916. The Sentry’s Soliloquy. Periscope, November, p. 6. See, for example: Anon. 1915. The Rubaiyat of Omark I Am Fedup. Hangar Herald, 16 February; Anon. 1915. The Song of the Reconnoitring Patrol. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, July; Anon. 1915. Poetry? Buzzer, 30 November, p. 2; Anon. 1916. The Rubaiyat of Ole Mark Hyam. Whizz-Bang, March, p.  10; Fatigue. 1916. Higher Water, or a Picardy Romance. Lead-Swinger, 26 October, 287–88; Anon. 1917. Extracts from the ‘Britannia’ Pepys. Helm, 1 August; Anon. 1917. Postalatha. Royal Engineers Postal Section, December, p. 29; Anon. 1918. Omar at the Front. Mudhook, 1 January; Jujube. 1918. Hiawatha on the Modern Warpath. Lines of Fire, April, pp. 8–10. 20  Andrew Scragg. Reconsidering a ‘Neglected Classic’ and Widening the Canon of World War I Poetry: The Song of Tiadatha. researchgate.net/publication/265725032. Accessed 20 January 2016; Shafquat Towheed, Francesca Benatti and Edmund King. 2015. Readers and Reading in the First World War. The Yearbook of English Studies 45: 239–61 (pp. 257–58). 18 19

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(‘FAMOUS NERVE FOOD’, ‘Lieut. West writes: “I tried a bottle of your food and now only find it necessary to lie down for two hours each afternoon instead of four”’); and battalion news (‘The Librarian Fusiliers were noticed to wind their puttees with two twists at the back […] Warm approval has been expressed of this momentous and far-reaching scheme, the importance of which […] cannot be exaggerated’).21 Spoof Sherlock Holmes stories also appeared, generally involving the detective solving mysteries in a military context. For example, in the ‘Adventures of Lockholme Shears’ (1916) the mystery is that men recalled from the front to work on munitions never arrive at the factory.22 Elsewhere, war experience is given humorous treatment in parodies of biblical tales, including such descriptions as ‘it came to pass that, after many days, the heavens opened and poured down their wrath’, and ‘when the trumpeter did trump upon his trumpet then did all the young men […] assemble with […] their weapons’.23 Mock academic accounts were also printed, purportedly written from the future, about the mysterious ancient inhabitants of the battlefields. Extracts from ‘Professor Dug-Out’s’ work in the Lead-­ Swinger in 1915 for example contained such notes as: ‘there have been found long rows of cave-like dwellings situated along the banks of a depression which may have been at one time the bed of a river’.24 Other trench-journal texts were parodic in a subtler sense, referencing well-­ known works without being obvious rewritings. For instance, the 718 W.T. Company’s Magazine of September 1916 contained a poem called ‘The Only Man’, of which more below, that is not an exact imitation of S.  T. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), but which does strongly echo it to comic effect.25 These trench-newspaper texts were part of parody’s wider popularity in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Professionally produced 21  Anon. 1917. Answers to Correspondents. Kinglet, December, p.  9; Anon. 1917. Adverts. Kinglet, December, p. 18; Anon. 1917. Battalion News. Kinglet, December, p. 17. 22  Honeydew. 1916. The Adventures of Lockholme Shears: No. 4—The Adventure of the Eight Munitioneers. Lead-Swinger, 21 June, pp. 212–18. 23  Iodinus Castorius. 1915. The Journey of the Tribes. Lead-Swinger, 6 November, pp. 28–29; Anon. 1917. The Book of Chronicles of the Cadetti. Hobocob, December. Similar texts include Ardy. 1914. The Northern Nomads. Quaysider, November, p. 3; Esdras the Scribe. 1918. Chronicles of the Great War. Dump, December, pp. 24–26. 24  Bunthorne. 1915. Recent Discoveries in the Rhin [sic.] Valley. Lead-Swinger, 27 November, 17–19 (p. 18). See also: Revd. Dr. C. F. A. Cooper. 1915. Cage Denizens in Alcoholia. Hangar Herald, 15 April, p. 3. 25  Anon. 1916. The Only Man. 718 W.T. Company’s Magazine, 1 September, p. 5.

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humorous periodicals of this period often contained parodies of a range of works.26 For example, in Victorian parody ‘the exalted personages of well-­ known poems’ were put to ‘inappropriate tasks’, such as ‘the Ancient Mariner hail[ing] a cab’.27 This rings true of the trench-journal parodies as well. Holmes, as has been seen, is given ridiculous wartime work, and there are many wartime Hiawathas who struggle through modern military life. Both of these characters were popular subjects of parody and rewriting before the war. Holmes fans were encouraged to write their own stories about the detective—though these were often a form of fanfiction rather than parody as such—and Longfellow’s poem was quickly and extensively parodied.28 Lewis Carroll wrote a spoof of this latter work (1857), prefacing it with the comment that ‘I can claim no special merit for this slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy’, since ‘Any fairly practised writer […] could compose, for hours together’ in the poem’s ‘easy running metre’. Carroll’s version tells the tale of Hiawatha failing to take successful photographs: ‘All the family in order | Sat before him for their pictures’, each ‘in turn, as he was taken, | Volunteered his own suggestions, | His ingenious suggestions’.29 Many other mock versions of it surfaced in periodicals ranging from Punch (‘‘Tis a poem in this metre, | And embalming the traditions, | Fables, rites, and superstitions’ [1856]), to school magazines, such as the Tonbridgian (1892).30 The trench-press parodies of Holmes stories give rise to impressions of the war zone as being absurd, not dissimilarly to the trench-newspaper nonsense rhymes discussed in Chap. 3. Holmes, famed for his logic and reason, 26   Craig Howes. 2016. Comic/Satiric Periodicals. In The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, ed. King, Andrew, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, 318–27. London: Routledge, p.  325; Donald Gray. 1966. The Uses of Victorian Laughter. Victorian Studies 10: 145–76 (pp. 153–54). 27  Gray. 1988. Victorian Comic Verse; Or, Snakes in Greenland. Victorian Poetry 26: 211–30 (p. 214). 28  Ann McClellan. 2017. Tit-Bits, New Journalism, and Early Sherlock Holmes Fandom. Transformative Works and Cultures 23; James Williams. 2013. The Jokes in the Machine: Comic Verse. In The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis, 817–33. Oxford: Oxford UP, p. 820. 29  Lewis Carroll. 1857. Hiawatha’s Photographing. In Phantasmagoria and Other Poems, 66–77. London: Macmillan. 1919, pp. 66, 68. 30  Ann Wilsher. 1979. Hiawatha’s Photographing: Lewis Carroll and A. B. Frost. History of Photography 3, p. 304; Anon. 1856. The Song of Hiawatha: Author’s Protective Edition. Punch, 12 January, p. 17; A. D. Harvey. 1998. School Magazines. The Contemporary Review 273: 35–40 (p. 38).

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when placed in the war zone engages in such behaviour as searching for a ‘lost [mathematical] formula’ (in Lines of Fire), discovering the ‘source of wild rumours’ in a training camp, and trying to solve the case of an officer who ‘felt thirsty at two a.m’.31 In the Growler, the Holmes character invents nonsensical aphorisms, conceals himself as ‘a machine gun, a tuft of grass, and a frontage of three hundred yards’, vanishes ‘disguised as two days leave, on the back of a flash of lightening’, and behaves so oddly that ‘he was offered three stripes as a reward for his splendid initiative’.32 More common, though, are parodies that undermine the idealised heroism of adventurous military masculinity. A good example is ‘The Only Man’, a narrative poem in which the speaker, looking ‘pale and wan’ tells the tale of being left ‘the only man’ not, as most of the poem leads the reader to believe, after a terrible battle, but the only man not to be made an N.C.O (Non-Commissioned Officer).33 The irreverence shown in these trench-newspaper texts does not necessarily suggest a rejection of or antagonism towards serious Great War literature, or to the sources of the parodies. Creators of the journals did show appreciation for elevated and exalting war poetry. For example, the editors of the RAMC Depot Magazine reprinted Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ in its entirety in the periodical’s edition of 4 August 1916.34 Trench newspapers instead offer a different point of view on military masculinity and military life from more aggrandising perspectives. Parody before the war was employed for the comic disruption of seriousness and gravity, and continued to serve this function in trench newspapers. Soldiers who stumble through military life, charmingly falling short of the kind of idealised bravery that might be found in an adventure story, were popular protagonists in mock diaries. In the Fifth Gloucester Gazette, an initially over-confident narrator suggests to his Company Commander that he did not believe there were any Germans in the opposite trenches, 31  Sir Arthur Gohan Boyle. 1918. Adventures of the Lost Formula. Lines of Fire, April 2–3 (p. 2); Anon. 1915. The Sad Case of the Rumour Stricken Camp. Growler, July, pp. 10–11. The latter mystery was a reference to an actual incident that took place at Catterick Camp, North Yorkshire. The rumour column of the same edition of the Growler in which this Holmes case appeared reported that officers held a ‘celebration’, but ‘we were not there and we don’t believe all we HEAR at 2 a.m. in the morning’. Anon. 1915. Canvassed Catterick Camp Cackle: Censored Conscientiously. Growler, July, 2–3 (p. 3). 32  Anon. 1915. The Sad Case. 33  Anon. 1916. The Only Man. 34  Rupert Brooke. 1914. The Soldier. RAMC Depot Magazine, 4 August, p. 2.

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only for the commander to reply: ‘in that case I was just the man he wanted, and would I go across at 9.30 p.m. and find out’. The prospect of a raid on enemy trenches prompts much anxiety, as well as teasing from the group he is meant to be leading: ‘Found Patrol whistling “Dead March” in unison. Tell patrol we will wait a bit’. The raid itself does not go completely smoothly: ‘Fall over trip-wire into several tin cans. Suspect Corporal of using bad language about me’; ‘Reprove patrol for being unobservant. Flare shows my Germans to be trees. Suspect patrol of sniggering’.35 This is also the flavour of other mock diaries in the trench press, including a 1915 ‘Diary of [an] Officer on Duty’ (‘Reprove servant for calling me too early. Find it isn’t servant but dug-out falling in’), and a 1918 ‘Day in the Life of a Field Ambulance Medical Officer’ (‘8.35 C.O. [commanding officer] inspecting last section. Find I am without “Sam Browne”, box-respirator, gloves […] 8.36 Pray to a kindly fate to protect me’).36 Some 1917 ‘Leaves from an Orderly Dog’s Diary’ included such comments as ‘Allow Orderly Sgt. to show me how untidy Billets can be. Consider mirth untimely and ill-disguised when I fall down ladder and bend nose’.37 A 1914 ‘Extract from the Diary of an Orderly Officer’ sees the narrator explain how he ‘looked at the guard all over twice, and stupidly forgot what the word of command was to get rid of them. Too shy to ask’.38 In 1916, the Plum and Apple printed a similar ‘Day in the Diary of a Private’, and in 1918 the Mudhook included an equally comic ‘Extracts from the Diary of an R.N.D. [Royal Naval Division]’.39 These diaries continue a trend for humorous autobiographical writing that was established decades before the outbreak of the conflict. Multiple nineteenth-century spoofs emerged in response to a publishing fad for (straight) life writing. This was for example the context for George and Weedon Grossmiths’ Diary of a Nobody, originally serialised in Punch 35  Anon. 1915. Extracts from the Diary of O.C., Reconnoitring Patrol. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, 12 July. 36  Anon. 1915. Diary of [an] Officer on Duty. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, 1 December; Professor Meinzer. 1918. One Day in the Life of a Field Ambulance Medical Officer. LeadSwinger, 12 August, 486–89 (p. 486). 37  Anon. 1917. Leaves from an Orderly Dog’s Diary (Bowglerised). Old Firm, January, 10–11 (p. 10). 38  Anon. 1914. Extract From the Diary of an Orderly Officer. Minor Offense, December, 6–7 (p. 6). 39  Anon. 1916. A Day in the Diary of a Private. Plum and Apple. August, 7–9 (p.  8); M. Trench Mortar Officer. 1918. Extracts from the Diary of an R.N.D. Mudhook, October.

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(1888–89), which was followed by such texts as ‘Diary of a Somebody’ (1900). It was accompanied by other Victorian mock diaries, such as ‘Extracts from the Diary of a Dyspeptic’ (1889) and ‘Diary of a Pessimist’ (1888).40 Later examples, some with a military setting, include ‘From a Bachelor Uncle’s Diary’ (1900), ‘Diary of a “Peace” Orator’ (1900), ‘Diary on Board a Submariner (Prophetic and Probable)’ (1901), ‘Leaves from an Aeronaut’s Diary’ (1901), ‘A Leaf from a German Officer’s Diary’ (1910), ‘Cinderella’s Diary’ (1910), ‘The Diary of a Diplomatist’ (1912), and ‘Pages from the Diary of a Fly’ (1913).41 Parodies of orders were also regular features in trench newspapers, their humour stemming from contrasts with the usual formality and solemnity of such documents, as well as from satire of real orders. For example, the Lines of Fire of July 1918 included instructions for how a unit of men, referred to by number, should build a dug-out, featuring such lines as: No. 1 is ‘responsible that the Grace of God is not the only visible means of support of the Dug-out’ and should ‘see that all numbers appear to be well employed, though no actual work is being done’. Nos. 2 and 3 ‘are responsible that no intrusion is made by enquiring officers’. No. 4 is ‘responsible for the distribution of sandbags, taking care that the proportion of bottomless sandbags is everywhere maintained’. Other men have such duties as seeing that ‘no men are outside when the Dug-out collapses’, while ‘Skilled carpenters’, must ‘lean against the Dug-out […] to prevent it from collapsing’.42 The Mudhook of September 1917, in a similar vein, provides instructions regarding an order that ‘subsequent to a gas attack, clothes are to be taken off and beaten before the gas mask is

40  Arthur A’Beckett. 1900. Diary of a Somebody. Punch, 22 August, p.  132; Jonathan Wild. 2006. The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880–1939. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 57. 41  Anon. 1900. From a Bachelor Uncle’s Diary. Punch, 24 January, p. 67; Anon. 1900. Diary of a ‘Peace’ Orator. Punch, 28 March, p.  220; A’Beckett. 1901. Diary on Board a Submariner. Punch, 23 January, p. 64; St. John Hankin. 1901. Leaves from an Aeronaut’s Diary. Punch, 16 October, p. 278; A. T. Smith. 1910. A Leaf from a German Officer’s Diary. Punch, 12 October; A. A. Milne. 1910. Cinderella’s Diary. Punch, 28 December, p. 454; E. V. Lucas and C. L. Graves. 1912. The Diary of a Diplomatist. Punch, 26 June; Walter Emanuel. 1913. Pages from the Diary of a Fly. Punch, 27 August, p. 188. Some mock military diaries appeared in Punch during the conflict: J. B. Naismith. 1915. Field Kit Allowance. Punch, 2 June, p.  434; Frank Elias. 1914. How War Is ‘Made in Germany’. Punch, 19 August, p. 163. 42  W. 1918. Dug-Out Drill. Lines of Fire, July, 26–27.

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Fig. 7.1  Anon. 1917. Gas And—Clothes. Mudhook, 1 September © The British Library Board

removed’.43 Carpet beaters, readers are told, ‘are not to be regarded as weapons of offence’ and are not ‘to take the place of rifle and bayonet’. Clothes should be hung on a line so that ‘cover from view will be obtained whilst the flagellation of the clothes is in progress’ and, should an attack occur while the men are beating their clothes, they should ‘pursue without delay […] the imposing appearance presented […] will attain the desired end’ (Fig. 7.1).44 The September 1918 edition of Lines of Fire included orders for ‘An enemy nest (wasp)’ to be ‘blocked and put out of action’, and featured guidance on protecting ‘Strawberry Jam and Marmalade, Pèche Melba and Bread and Butter Pudding’.45 The August 1916 Behind the Lines 43  This may have been based on real advice. Brigadier General James Harbord instructed that, ‘When a man is close to the burst of a gas shell his clothes may become contaminated […] When possible the clothes will be removed’. James Harbord. 1917. Defensive Measures Against Gas Attacks. France: Headquarters American Expeditionary Force, p. 10. 44  Anon. 1917. Gas And—Clothes. Mudhook, 1 September. © The British Library Board. Image published with permission of ProQuest LLC.  Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Image produced by ProQuest LLC as part of ProQuest® Trench Journals and Unit Magazines of the First World War Database. www.proquest.com. 45  Captain O. B. E. Wangler. 1918. Operation Orders. Lines of Fire, September, pp. 20–21.

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­ resented orders for action in the event of a fire, which revolved around p rescuing the best food and all that was necessary for recreation: ‘remove all the beer, tins of salmon, biscuits, stewed fruits, packs of cards, cigarettes’; rescue ‘2 Footballs, 1 Rugby Ball, the complete Cricket outfit’. Should the ‘Bully-Beef’ be threatened, officers must ‘take the necessary steps to keep the fire burning’.46 The Christmas 1914 edition of the Gambardier offered instructions for festivities (‘staggerers who are not drunk by 10 p.m. will parade on the flag halyards for inspection by the Assistant Adjutant-­General Boozer’), and in May 1916, the editors of the Buzzer printed comically absurd orders, examples of which include: ‘All submarines found must be handed in to the Quartermaster’s Stores’ and ‘Anyone turning out on parade rusty will be handcuffed to a ghost’.47 The parodies that appeared in trench newspapers are too numerous to analyse in detail individually, but an example that appeared in the Growler in February 1915 offers an illuminating case study of how they could communicate quite complex elements of war experience. ‘Will We— Mind?’ is a parody of Gertie Gitana’s music-hall song ‘Never Mind’.48 It may have been written by the Growler’s editor, Corporal Ben Carr, an actor in civilian life who composed much of the newspaper singlehandedly.49 The song’s original lyrics are written from the point of view of a father comforting his daughter who has been disappointed in love. The title appears as a refrain in the chorus: ‘Though your heart may ache awhile, never mind | Though your face may lose its smile, never mind’.50 The comedy in ‘Will We—Mind?’ emerges from the interplay between the source text and the parody’s divergences from it. This interplay contributes to the evocation of a complex relationship between those in service and those remaining at home, as well as an ambivalent attitude towards the familiar, home-front world of the music hall. The parody also articulates subjects of importance to new recruits: their own rawness, the discomforts of military life, and taboos and difficulties surrounding the expression of emotion and the contemplation of violence. 46   T.  Bennicke. 1916. ‘Some’ Orders for ‘Some’ Fire-Party. Behind the Lines: The (Unofficial) Magazine of No. 10 Stationary Hospital, British Expeditionary Force, August. 47  Pecked Parsnips. 1914. Company Orders. Gambardier, December, p. 10; J. Harkaway. 1916. Battalion Orders by Colonel Dooly Dooly. Buzzer, May, p. 10. 48  Anon. 1915. Will We—Mind? Growler, February, p. 10. 49  Cooke, p. 192. 50  Tim Kendall, ed. 2013. Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford UP, p. 294, n. 222.

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Will We—Mind? With Apologies to Gertie Gitana. When you’re digging in the trenches—Never Mind, And have left behind the wenches—Never Mind. Just raise up your voice and sing ‘It’s the cutest little thing’, I’m a soldier of the King—Never Mind. When the Germans come to Alnwick—Never Mind, Don’t go hairless in a panic—Never Mind. If they send across a shell Just raise up your voice and yell, Get yourself away to—Well—Never mind. When you’re called up at 6.30—Never mind, With your face half clean, half dirty—Never mind. You Northumb’land Fusiliers, I am sending you three cheers— Though you’d rather they were ‘Beers’—Never Mind. If you’re fed on bread and bread—Never Mind, And you wish that you were dead—Never Mind, You’ll get home again—if lucky, And so long as you’ve been plucky, We won’t mind if you look ‘mucky’—WE won’t mind. Your People.

The battalion to which the Growler was attached had only been in existence for six months at the time of the text’s publication.51 The parody steers clear of intimidating, story-book masculine ideals, instead creating an impression of soldiers getting used to the conditions of military life. Tempted to panic, and only partially washed, these servicemen do not embody venerated, heroic soldierliness, while the references to a lack of ‘wenches’ and ‘beer’, to early starts and a poor diet, hint at the unfamiliarity of military discipline and discomfort. The kind of ‘grouses’ the text contains are a staple of the trench-newspaper genre, a kind of mild criticism based on common complaints. Their articulation here is a statement of belonging to the group of men who knew about the more mundane, day-to-day aspects of the military. Similarly, the refrain of ‘Never mind’ reinforces through repetition the version of military identity according to which it involves stoical, amused, good-humoured acceptance of all circumstances. Trench newspapers helped to build senses of military and unit  Cooke, p. 1.

51

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identity, and the picture of soldiers presented in this parody reflects this. It sketches experiences, and an attitude towards them, that mark the ‘you’ of the song—the recruits addressed—as servicemen.52 The parody also hints at some darker aspects of war experience, expressed in blackly humorous terms.53 The soldiers will return only ‘if lucky’, a starkly truthful acknowledgement, while the reference to ‘hell’ via an oblique rhyme in line ten is both an amusing substitute for a swear word and a suggestion of the extremities that military experience could reach. Matthew Bevis draws attention to a technique employed by Marie Lloyd, star of the halls, of ‘sticking closely to the metrical structure of her songs even as she bent them to her will’, leaning on particular phrases in order to ‘bring out a double meaning’, a way of creating innuendo that is reflected in ‘Will We—Mind?’ by the dash before the implied reference to ‘hell’.54 More implicitly, there is dark humour in the incongruity between the song’s breezy refrain and its use as a generic response to a large number of eventualities. The war provides the context for imagining, with amusing incongruity, Alnwick being occupied, and the response recommended in the song is similarly incongruous in its extreme stoicism. The conditional, ‘If’ and ‘when’ situations in the text demand resolution but break off into a dash and ‘Never mind’, a phrase that seems reasonable as a response to digging and poor rations but ludicrous as a reaction to invasion and shells, part of the joke here being that ‘Never mind’ may also be the only possible response to such violence. The use of the refrain to gloss over anything that military life could encompass is in this light a half-­ serious, half-mocking echo of a military stereotype. The refrain comes across both as the only possible rejoinder to many of the circumstances described and as a slightly irreverent iteration of the idea that soldiers were, ideally, the epitome of stoicism.  Pegum, p. 131.  This is one area in which the psychological value of humour is especially relevant. Humour in the music hall had long addressed anxieties, for example about social change. Steven Gerrard. 2013. The Great British Music Hall: Its Importance to British Culture and ‘The Trivial’. Culture Unbound 5: 487–513 (p. 498). It had a similar function in soldiers’ songs, forming an acceptable context for the expression of anxieties. Emma Hanna connects this to a Freudian concept of humour as facilitating discussion of the taboo. Emma Hanna. 2018. Fighting Fear with Humour: Songs and Singing in the RFC/RAF, 1914–1918. Conference. Humour and the First World War. London: The Open University, 20 June. 54  Matthew Bevis. 2014. Eliot Among the Comedians. Literary Imagination 16: 135–56 (p. 143). 52 53

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There is some ambivalence in the relationship between those at home and those at the front. Imagined to be the sentiments of ‘Your People’, the parody is mainly to do with reassurance and support. The final assertion of ‘WE won’t mind’ opens up a point of connection between the servicemen in training and their loved ones: it is not only soldiers who can be stoical but also those at home who can join in with the attitude. At the same time, a more cynical element of the amusement is that ‘Never mind’—a comically inadequate response—is all that servicemen’s ‘people’ are able to offer. The Growler did elsewhere engage in some teasing of non-combatants and there is a knowing suggestion that civilians were not always able to empathise with servicemen’s experience.55 This is one moment where the balance of the text is ambiguous. There seems to be some joking at the expense of those at home, but this is accompanied by a straight attempt to articulate light-heartedly a reassuring rendition of how friends and family feel. Perhaps particularly for modern readers, able to confront openly the problems of praising or blaming such things as ‘bravery’ and ‘cowardice, the urging to be ‘plucky’ can read disquietingly as making psychological robustness a condition of familial support. At the time of the text’s publication, it would more likely have been read as encouragement. The peacetime music-hall advice is cast, only partially seriously, as a response to wartime experience, revealing a small gap between civilian and martial life even as the source text provides a shared reference for those within and without the military. The choice of Gitana’s song speaks to the popularity of music hall, including the parody that was a staple of such performance.56 Servicemen’s own self-made concerts often reproduced material from the halls directly, while professional shows were frequently staged across the different theatres of war.57 There are many references to such theatre in trench 55  In a series of mock letters between a fictional soldier (Horace) and his girlfriend (Hypatia) that appeared in the Growler, for example, Hypatia makes comments such as ‘A soldier here has told me that “C.B.” stands for “conspicuous bravery”. Is this true darling?’. In reality, ‘C.B.’ stood for ‘confinement to barracks’, a form of punishment. Anon. 1915. Horace to Hypatia. Growler, February, 4–5 (p. 4). 56  Music hall was deeply involved in propaganda, for example contributing much to recruitment drives. Even so, it remained popular with many servicemen, both when on leave and at the front. Gerrard, p. 500. 57  Gordon Williams. 2003. British Theatre in the Great War: A Revaluation. London: Continuum, p. 95; Fuller, pp. 99–100; John Mullen. 2015. The Show Must Go On! Popular Song in Britain during the First World War. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, p. 57.

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newspapers. The editor of Lines of Fire introduced the October 1918 edition, for example, as if it contained a series of variety acts: ‘Once more we make our bow to an eager and expectant house, and present an all-star company in our monthly entertainment of varieties […] permit us to ring up the curtain upon the following appetising programme:–’58 Elsewhere, the periodicals for example included other parodies of Gitana’s song, such as ‘The Song of the PO Operator’ in a 1915 edition of the Buzzer (‘Tho the wily Hun may strafe | Never mind! | We can well afford to laugh’), and a version in which the focus is alcohol (‘If the sergeant drinks your rum, never mind’).59 The Helm’s ‘Confessions of Noted Personages’ saw an interviewee answer ‘George Robey’, a music-hall star, to the questions ‘If not yourself who would you be’, ‘Your favourite poet’, and ‘Your favourite hero’.60 The ‘Song Parodies’ that appeared in the Lead Swinger, meanwhile, included a rewriting of Harry Fay’s ‘Sea, Sea, Sea’: ‘Floor, floor, floor, | I have always ignored you of yore’ but ever since ‘fifteen inchers | Started missing me by inches […] I’m loving you more and more’.61 There were also multiple parodies of ‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’, a 1911 work by Harry Lauder, these comic rewritings including lines such as, ‘Oh! It’s roaming in the gloaming | When you’re safely back at last’, when ‘your sentries haven’t shot you, | And the rum is flowing fast’.62 The fun and the pleasure of trench-newspaper parodies lie partly in the act of reproduction itself. Servicemen chose to address their experience by creating parodies of music-hall songs that were current before 1914, rather than referring to or reprinting the many songs from the halls that addressed the conflict directly. Of the 921 music-hall songs from the 1915–1918 period that John Mullen identifies, 25% had the war as their main theme, music-hall stars addressing ‘rationing, conscription or the new tanks’, just as ‘before the war they had sung about suffragettes, automobiles and the introduction of national insurance’.63 The preference in trench newspapers for parodies over reprints of songs originally about the war suggests that servicemen did not only rewrite existing works because they needed an easy way to address a new subject. Rather, creating new  Anon. 1918. Editorial. Lines of Fire, October, p. 2.  Anon. 1915. The Song of the PO Operator. Buzzer, 30 November; Anon. Never Mind. In Kendall, p. 222. 60  Anon. 1917. Confessions of Noted Personages: No I. Will de Luge. Helm, June. 61  Iodinus Castorius. 1915. Song Parodies. Lead-Swinger, 16 October, p. 2. 62  Anon. 1915. The Song of the Reconnoitring Patrol. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, July. 63  Mullen, pp. 87, 43. 58 59

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iterations itself afforded pleasure. This is also true of the other kinds of trench-newspaper parodies. In the case of mock diaries especially, as has been seen, this genre involved a single format being used repeatedly across a period that stretches over a decade before the war, with the diaries in trench newspapers continuing this tradition. The humour in popular periodicals printed before 1914 in other words already had a reproduced quality that reverberated into the trench press. The amusement that repetition affords is in part a matter of emphasising any incongruities that do exist between one version of a text to the next. As Bevis says, music-hall parodies showed ‘an insistent repetition’ that ‘allowed for—and accentuated— slight glitches or departures from the norm’, picking up on the amusement created in music hall theatres ‘when “machinery” is given the slip’: the audience laughed when ‘something living is encrusted onto the mechanical’.64 The reference to the comic relationship between the living and the mechanical here is made in relation to Henri Bergson’s theory of humour, which in turn belongs to a historical phenomenon that Michael North has identified as ‘machine-age comedy’. Bergson’s famous theory of laughter published in 1900 and translated into English by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell in 1911 as Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, is concerned with tensions between the mechanical and the organic. Bergson argues that humour stems from the perception of ‘mechanical elasticity, just where one would expect to find the wideawake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being’.65 The ‘attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine’.66 We ‘laugh’, Bergson says, ‘every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing’.67 For example, a man who ‘stumbles and falls’ when ‘running along the street’ provokes laughter because of the involuntary element in this change—his clumsiness […] Perhaps there was a stone on the road. He should have altered his pace or avoided the obstacle. Instead of that, through lack of elasticity, through absentmindedness and a kind of physical obstinacy, as a result, in fact, of rigidity or of momentum, the  Bevis, p. 143.  Henri Bergson. 1911. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Trans. Brereton, Cloudesley and Fred Rothwell. New York: Macmillan Company. 1914, p. 10. 66  Bergson, p. 29. 67  Bergson, p. 58. 64 65

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muscles continued to perform the same movement when the circumstances of the case called for something else.68

For Bergson, furthermore, laughter is ‘a sort of social gesture’, acting to redress or prevent outlandish behaviour. He speaks of ‘a certain rigidity of body, mind and character that society would still like to get rid of in order to obtain from its members the greatest possible degree of elasticity and sociability’. This ‘rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective’.69 Laughter ‘restrains eccentricity […] and in short, softens down whatever the surface of the social body may retain of mechanical inelasticity’.70 There are some clear parallels here with the parodies published in the trench press. First, there is a Bergsonian tension between the repetition created in the mimicry of the source text and the departures from the source text on the other. Second, there is a Bergsonian tension between the rigidity of behaviour demanded by life in the military and the inability of the servicemen depicted—who are living beings not machines—to live up to that demand. Both Bergson’s work and the genre of trench newspapers belong to the phenomenon of machine-age comedy that North describes.71 North draws together different forms of comic production popular in the nineteenth century, such as mass-market comic periodicals, vaudeville, and music hall. He theorises that these represent a particular kind of comedy that is characterised by ‘traces of mechanical reproduction’—a ‘mechanical quality’.72 The jerky, automata-like movements in Charlie Chaplin’s physical comedy are a key example.73 There is ‘something potentially comic in mechanical reproduction itself’, this humorousness arising not only from repetition but from newness: the ‘repetitions of comedy’ prompt amusement partly because ‘each iteration’ appears to offer ‘something […] new’.74 For North,  Bergson, p. 9.  Bergson, p. 21. 70  Bergson, p. 20. 71  Differentiating his own work from Bergson’s, North highlights that Bergson does not take account of the ‘delight of the masses in comic routines that embodied modern mechanization’. Nevertheless, as a theory of humour based on ideas of the mechanical published at the start of the twentieth century, Bergson’s work is an important element in the history of machine-age comedy. Michael North. 2009. Machine-Age Comedy. Oxford: Oxford UP, p. 4. 72  North, pp. 8–9. 73  North, pp. 3–5. 74  North, pp. 4–5, 200. 68 69

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such comedy is a reflection of ‘mechanization in the modern period’, by which he means a period characterised by the rise of industrial technology, and especially mass production. He also however points out that, particularly with reference to the stock gags and sketches of vaudeville, ‘the machine age had begun to affect comedy even before very much of it was mechanically reproduced’.75 Trench newspapers, filled with repetition and with borrowings from mass-market comic magazines, music hall, and from cinema, echo the comic productions on which North focusses and belong to the phenomenon of machine-age comedy. That machine-age comedy is characterised by repetition returns to the importance of familiarity and tameness in trench newspapers. Humour that relies on repetition in order to invite amusement also relies on readers’ familiarity with the element of culture being repeated. While the exaggerations or absurdity that can be involved in parody may be amusing in themselves to some extent, it is difficult to enjoy a parody fully without being familiar with the source text. In terms of aesthetic emotions, meanwhile, there is an emotional safety in being presented with that which is familiar rather than innovative, as modern fans of sitcoms could testify. Amusement functions here as elsewhere as a minor feeling: it dominates the trench press such that any other emotional responses to the newspapers are muted or muffled.

Charlie Chaplin and the Reproducibility of the Clownish Serviceman By 1914, there were approximately 5000 permanent cinemas in the UK.76 During the war, these were supplemented by overseas cinemas as well. The popularity of film, and its usefulness for morale, was reflected in the many film screenings that took place for servicemen at the front. Military authorities ‘valued the medium as an important and much needed form of recreation for its war-weary audiences within the context of modern warfare, just as much as any other form of entertainment, such as sport or 75  North, pp. 5, 9. Trench newspapers were not mass-produced on the same scale as some of North’s examples. Remarkably large circulations included the magazine of the 7th Manchesters, ‘selling 26,000 copies in Egypt’, and the magazine of the 7th Canadians, which reached ‘almost 20,000 on the Western Front’. Fuller, pp. 9–11. 76  Richard Abel, ed. 2005. Encyclopedia of Early Film. Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, pp. 283–84.

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musical performances’.77 Cinema was of ‘immense importance within day-­ to-­day life on the front line’.78 As well as civilian venues and cinemas provided by the YMCA, British military cinemas were ‘routinely set up in abandoned town halls, barns, purpose-built huts or simply in the open air’, operating for example as close as six or seven miles from no-man’s land.79 Programmes centred on comedy.80 Charlie Chaplin in particular was ‘an established favourite of the troops’.81 It was in 1915 that ‘the great Chaplin explosion’ took place, at which point ‘every newspaper carried cartoons and poems about him’. He was ‘a character in comic strips […] There were Chaplin dolls, Chaplin toys, Chaplin books’. Chaplin impersonators themselves became a fad: a revue in London called Watch Your Step included a song on this subject, with lines such as ‘Since Charlie Chaplin became all the craze, | Ev’ryone copies his funny old ways | They copy his hat and the curl in his hair’; ‘in London, Paris or New York | Ev’rybody does that Charlie Chaplin Walk!’82 Chaplin faced controversy when, working in the U.S., he elected not to return to the UK to enlist in the military. The lucrative contract he signed with Mutual Film in 1916 included a clause stating he should not return to Britain for the duration of the war, meaning he would avoid the risk of being recruited to the British armed forces.83 A 1917 editorial for example highlighted that Chaplin’s ‘screen acrobatics’ suggested his fitness for service; questioned whether he had invested as much as claimed to support the war effort; and argued that ‘It is his example which will count so very much […]. We shall win without Charlie, but (his millions of admirers will say) we would rather win with him’.84 There was also upset outside of the newspapers, with signs appearing outside cinemas stating ‘No Chaplin Here’, and sheet music was published with lyrics about Chaplin needing to mend ‘his little baggy trousers’ before ‘we send him | To the 77  Chris Grosvenor, 2018. Cinema on the Front Line: A History of Military Cinema Exhibition and Soldier Spectatorship during the First World War. University of Exeter, p. 29. 78  Grosvenor, p. 29. 79  Grosvenor, pp. 101–02. 80  Grosvenor, p. 122. 81  Hanna. 2015. Putting the Moral into Morale: YMCA Cinemas on the Western Front, 1914–1918. Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 35: 615–30 (p. 623). 82  David Robinson. 1985/2001. Chaplin: His Life and Art. London: Penguin, pp. 158–59. 83  Robinson, pp. 193–94. 84  David Robinson attributes such responses to newspaper-magnate Lord Northcliffe’s ‘personal pique’ following a dispute over the suppression of an unauthorised Chaplin biography, though aspects of this biography are particularly supportive of Chaplin (pp. 193–94).

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Dardanelles’.85 Set against this, the British Embassy supported Chaplin’s stance that he was contributing financially. The embassy’s position was that he would only be a ‘slacker’ were the compulsory service law to come into effect in the US, and were Chaplin at that point to refuse to join the military.86 Chaplin in his autobiography in addition notes that while some newspapers criticised him, others came to his defence, proclaiming [his] comedies were needed more than [his] soldiering’.87 Crucial to his continued popularity, however, was the fact that servicemen themselves did not attack him. Chaplin’s films continued to be shown at overseas cinemas as well as in military hospitals and first-hand accounts from servicemen demonstrate the value they saw in Chaplin’s work.88 He appeared regularly in the cartoons and jokes of the trench press. Contributors frequently compared servicemen to Chaplin, with many depictions of soldiers having Chaplinesque, clownish qualities. This kind of comic type or stock character was especially robust, enduring into the war period partly because associated with reproduction: the Tramp has an everyman quality that lends itself to iteration and rewriting. Hypatia, girlfriend of a fictional Private named Horace whose mock correspondence appeared in the Growler between January 1915 and July 1916, writes to her lover that ‘I would never dream of comparing you to Charlie Chaplin’.89 Her reference, which absolutely suggests a resemblance between Horace and Chaplin (and an anxiety about this on Horace’s part), is typical of how Chaplin was used in the trench press.90 85  Kenneth Lynn. 1933/2003. Charlie Chaplin and His Times. New York: Cooper Square Press, p. 175. 86  Robinson, p. 195. 87  Charles Chaplin. 1964/2003. My Autobiography. London: Penguin, p. 224. 88  Robinson, p. 196; Grosvenor, p. 207. 89  Anon. 1915. Horace to Hypatia. Growler, October, 4–7 (p. 7). Both members of the couple are portrayed as being at a ridiculous remove from their classical namesakes. 90  The ‘Horace to Hypatia’ series is another example of the trench press mimicking the professionally produced popular press. At one point Hypatia mentions reading ‘“Phrynette’s” sweet letters’ to lonely soldiers in the illustrated newspaper the Sketch. (Anon. 1916. Horace to Hypatia. Growler. July, 5–10.) ‘Lonely soldier’ correspondence was the term for pen-pal relationships between servicemen and women in Britain, with soldiers placing advertisements in papers to establish these connections. Phrynette was a funny and frivolous character, similar to Hypatia herself. She was the creation of Marthe Troly-Curtin and had appeared in novels in 1911 and 1912. As Hypatia’s remark indicates, during the war Phrynette turned in the Sketch to corresponding with servicemen at the front who needed a pen-pal, analogously to Hypatia’s own letters. See, for example: Troly-Curtin. 1915. Phrynette’s Letters: ‘Because –’. Sketch, 1 December, p. 176.

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Hypatia’s disingenuous reassurance that Horace is not like Chaplin gives a sense that her lover eagerly but unsuccessfully tries to play the hero. Chaplin seems to be a shorthand for the difficulties of exuding martial dignity. When, similarly, she advises Horace about his new uniform— ‘please insist upon a perfect fit, because your first coat did look so short and funny’—she highlights an item of clothing reminiscent of Chaplin’s famous Tramp costume to raise a practical problem that surely has a metaphorical implication.91 To give just a few other examples, a piece in the Growler describes a billeting officer as having such a ‘collection of hats and sticks’ that ‘you never know whether he’s meant to represent Winston Churchill or Charlie Chaplin’, while the ‘Things We Want to Know’ column of the December 1915 Fifth Gloucester Gazette includes mention of an N.C.O. whose nickname is ‘Charlie Chaplin’.92 Drawings of Chaplin are in addition found in the Whizz-Bang of January 1916, the Lines of Fire of June 1918, and the Buzzer of February 1916, as well as elsewhere.93 The cover of the October 1915 edition of the Growler shows a cartoon of Chaplin next to members of the battalion who have adopted trappings of his costume (Fig. 7.2). The cartoon soldier illustrating many Growler covers, with his oversized feet and hat, is also decidedly Chaplinesque.94 Chaplin’s Tramp character had only been seen for the first time in early 1914, not long after the comedian’s move into film from vaudeville, but this persona was already familiar in the early years of the conflict, and had been preceded by similar characters in Chaplin’s first films and as part of Fred Karno’s music-hall company.95 The progression of Chaplin’s career from stage to screen illustrates North’s observation that early comic cinema developed from and reflected vaudeville, an example of continuity in  Anon. 1915. Horace to Hypatia. Growler, February, 4–5 (p. 4).  Anon. 1916. Billets. Growler, March,10–11 (p. 10); Anon. 1915. Things We Want to Know. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, 1 December. 93  P. D. M. 1916. Some Chaplinisms. Whizz-Bang, January; Anon. 1918. Peeps into the Future. No.2: Cadet Chaplin, C, Interviews the Sergeant-Major. Lines of Fire, June, p. 20; Anon. 1916. Charlie Chaplin & His Favourite Paper. Buzzer, February. 94  C. O. Wade. 1915. Cover. Growler, October. © The British Library Board. Cooke notes that the Growler cover showed ‘many of the “characters” in the battalion’ (p. 192). Image published with permission of ProQuest LLC.  Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Image produced by ProQuest LLC as part of ProQuest® Trench Journals and Unit Magazines of the First World War Database. www.proquest.com. 95  Frank Scheide. 2004. Chaplin, Sir Charles Spencer [Charlie] (1889–1977). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/30917. Accessed 29 August 2018. 91 92

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Fig. 7.2  C. O. Wade. 1915. Cover. Growler, October © The British Library Board

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humorous art that reflects the durability in the aesthetics of machine-age comedy from the pre-war into the wartime period.96 Trench newspapers foreshadowed Chaplin’s own take on the war in his extremely successful 1918 film Shoulder Arms. Early in Shoulder Arms, for example, the comedian is pictured taking part in a drilling exercise.97 He is hopelessly out of step with his fellow recruits, completely confused about where and how to turn, unable to make his unruly body behave in the strict ways demanded, and capable of unsettling the efforts of his fellow recruits.98 This comic drilling closely resembles depictions of the exercise that appear in trench newspapers. As Horace points out, ‘Battalion Drill is extremely difficult to master, and I expect it is the last stage in an officer’s training’.99 Examples of comic drilling in the trench press include ‘The Grouper’s Army Guide’, published in the RAMC Depot Magazine (June 1916), and ‘The Officers’ School at Squad Drill’, which appeared in the Braganza (May 1916). The text in the RAMC Depot Magazine takes the form of a beginner’s guide to army life, specifically a section on ‘Squad Drill’. Its author indulges in light-hearted and not unaffectionate mockery of the pretensions and frustrations of the practice of drilling. His definition of a ‘squad’ sets the tone: ‘new chums will be stood up in the middle of the parade-ground and called a squad’. They ‘will subsequently be called a good many other things, too, by a highly charged, choleric sergeant-­instructor’.100 ‘No aesthetic stances are allowed’, and anyone who drills ‘languidly with his hands in his pockets’, or ‘with his whole attitude suggestive of newly washed pants on a clothes line’ faces punishment. After ‘a long and incoherent explanation as to the attitude of your body, head, and arms, the length of your pace and the time at which you are to take it’, the sergeant will ‘obligingly take two or three steps all by 96  North, p. 9. By 1914, cinema and music hall were actually merged: cinema became a ‘regular feature on a music-hall programme, having first been included in 1896’. Mullen, p. 42. 97  Charlie Chaplin, dir. 1918. Shoulder Arms. Charles Chaplin Productions; Peter Ackroyd. 2014. Charlie Chaplin. London: Chatto & Windus, p.  11. Chaplin’s ‘collaborators and friends shook their heads about the wisdom of making comedy out of so dreadful an event as the war’, but Chaplin, ‘aware of the proximity of comedy, drama and tragedy, was confident’. Robinson, p. 251. 98  In a 1911 work, Milne sends-up this kind of physical comedy in cinema by imagining slapstick events taking place as part of an actor’s everyday life. Milne. 1911. The Diary of a Cinema Actor. Punch, 25 October, p. 294. 99  Anon. 1915. Horace to Hypatia. Growler, April, 6–7 (p. 6). 100  Anon. 1916. The Grouper’s Army Guide. RAMC Depot Magazine, 2 June, 7–8 (p. 7).

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himself’. Here, there is no permission for ‘fancy stunts or speciality turns’. ‘You […] all have to march at the same pace and all in the same straight line’. Once these ‘simpler movements’ can be performed ‘without accidents’ men will ‘learn how to make patterns’, like ‘forming fours’.101 The guide concludes with a warning about mistakes. Men ‘violently collide, injure themselves disastrously, and perhaps threaten the whole discipline of our war’; nothing ‘looks so absolutely beastly rotten’ as ‘men falling about in all directions, nursing their toes, and rubbing their solar plexi’.102 The Braganza text is similar. The speaker—‘our Special Correspondent at Winnall Down Camp’—reports on how those in attendance at the ‘Officers’ School’ perform at drill. He describes how they fell in, stating that ‘there was no sign of that anxious hurry and feverish haste which is so characteristic of the nervous recruit’. They ‘strolled on to parade one after the other, calm, serene and dignified’, giving ‘an impression of imperturbable good-humour’. Swiftly, however, things started to go wrong. ‘“Right turn”. Mr. J-H-S-N turns left and Mr. S-H-M-R curses squad drill and all its works in four different languages’. With ‘Left turn’, ‘Mr J-H-S-N turns right; Mr S-H-M-R still curses’. Forming fours is ‘executed with consummate skill, the only possible objection being that half the squad forms fives—otherwise very smart’, and ‘Mr S-H-M-R is still cursing in four different languages’. When asked to form squad on the right, ‘Half the squad, in their laudable belief that bold initiative is essential to any successful military enterprise, form squad on the left’. On a second attempt, ‘Mr W-L-K-R, […] wishing to introduce a little variety into an otherwise dull entertainment, decides to mark time two paces’. The result is ‘hideous chaos and indescribable confusion’. For fifteen minutes, ‘Mr W-L-K-R and everyone whom in his zeal he has pushed into the wrong place, engage in a violent and acrimonious dispute as to where they should be’.103 These texts represent the activity of drilling as full of slapstick mishap. Servicemen are depicted as automata, as wind-up toys that collide: one of the examples Bergson gives to illustrate his view of humour is that of ‘toy soldiers standing behind one another. Push the first and it tumbles down on the second’, and this continues ‘until they all lie prone on the floor’.104  Anon. Grouper’s, p. 7.  Anon. Grouper’s, p. 8. 103  Special Correspondent at Winnall Down Camp. 1916. The Officers’ School at Squad Drill. Braganza, 1 May, p. 14. 104  Bergson, p. 80. 101 102

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Amusement is invited here in part as a riposte to what are presented as the ludicrous strictures of drilling: there is an element of criticism against mechanical rigidity. Partly this is framed as teasing of officers or of the officer class. The linguistic aptitude of Mr. S-H-M-R’s cursing hints at a good education being put to disreputable purposes, and ‘The Officers’ School’ (in Bergsonian terms) lampoons the trainees’ initial mechanical, puppet-like attempts to conform to the stereotype of the unflappable officer, humorously undermining their staged insouciance.105 The latter text is written by an anonymous member of the 24th (County of London) Battalion, London Regiment. The satire here may be an officer’s self-­ deprecation or an irreverent swipe from a serviceman of lesser rank. Certainly, as already mentioned, censorship was sufficiently relaxed that a large part of the amusement the periodicals afforded came from comic grousing, which included mockery of senior officers. In the drilling texts, as with the journals more broadly, the satire is predominantly good-­ humoured and inclusive rather than Juvenalian. These accounts of drilling are against regulation and authority to the extent that Chaplin’s disruptively clownish characters are: the entertainment stems from the depiction of the fallible individual caught up in a regulated system. Benjamin observes that in Chaplin’s work ‘the human being is integrated into the film image by way of his gestures’: Chaplin dissects the expressive movements of human beings into a series of minute innervations. […] Whether it is his walk, the way he handles his cane, or the way he raises his hat—always the same jerky sequence of tiny movements applies the law of the cinematic sequence to human motorial functions. Now, what is it about this behaviour that is distinctively comic?’106

As North points out, Benjamin does not explicitly answer his own question, but his comment draws attention to a close relationship between

105  Similarly, an account of ‘My Career in the “Terriers”’ sees the narrator record his experiences because he is ‘a rather important personage’, explaining that ‘About five years ago I agreed, with my Pater’s permission, to “honour” the Gunners of a certain Territorial Company with my presence in their midst’. Cushy Bill. 1915. My Career in the ‘Terriers’. Gambardier, March, p. 12. 106  Walter Benjamin. 1935. The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 31935–1938. Trans. Jephcott, Edmund and others, 94–95. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 2002, p. 94.

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humour and the mechanisation of the human.107 Benjamin observes that individuals can become part of the mass entertainment they consume, reflecting the closeness between audience and artwork in the trench-­ newspaper genre: ‘the weekly newsreel, for example, gives everyone an opportunity to rise from passer-by to film extra. [W]e may even, in this way, find [ourselves] transported into a work of art’.108 This process involves the individual, as in Benjamin’s description of Chaplin above, merging with mechanised media. One version of this is the illustration from the Growler above, in which specific servicemen have been drawn as versions of Chaplin. In this case, the amalgamation of individual and mass media goes one step further, in the sense that the men depicted have actually taken on the endlessly reproduced trappings of popular cinema’s key figure. While inviting amusement, the Bergsonian contrasts between man and machine that appear in trench newspapers also express servicemen’s sense of threatened individuality. Named only as ‘the recruit’ in Shoulder Arms, as Michael Hammond explains, Chaplin faces the depersonalising forces of the military, yet his physical individuality and the pathos and empathy his character creates work against becoming no more than ‘a cog in the military machine’.109 The ‘human-ness’ Chaplin displays in Shoulder Arms contrasts the ‘inhuman conditions of the front’.110 This dynamic in Shoulder Arms reflects Chaplin’s preoccupations elsewhere in his work. He drew on music-hall traditions to use his body and the trappings of his costume to become a source of disruption to strict regimes, the most famous instance of which is the production line in Modern Times (1936). Such early Chaplin films as The Bank (1915) and Work (1915) were set within ‘regulated environs’, foreshadowing the military setting of Shoulder Arms.111 As with the characters that Chaplin portrayed, the drilling servicemen in the texts from the RAMC Depot Magazine and the Braganza have disobedient bodies that disrupt attempts to regulate. The comedy of

 North, p. 3.  Benjamin. 1935. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Trans. Underwood, J. A. London: Penguin. 2008, p. 22. 109  Michael Hammond. 2010. ‘So Essentially Human’: The Appeal of Charles Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms in Britain, 1918. Early Popular Visual Culture 8: 297–313 (pp. 307–10). 110  Hammond, pp. 307–10. 111  Hammond, p. 304. 107 108

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‘The Grouper’s Army Guide’ in particular stems from representing drilling as aiming to eliminate all aspects of individual personality. Characteristic ‘aesthetic stances’ and displays of mood like ‘deep meditation’ are banned, it being crucial for the soldiers to make ‘patterns’, and it is through the introduction of ‘enterprise’ and ‘variety’ that drilling goes wrong. The slapstick comedy arises from a stark contrast between individuals subject to unique quirks and fallibility, and a requirement to become cogs in the army’s mechanistic workings.112 Benjamin commented of early cinema that ‘the majority of citydwellers, throughout the workday in offices and factories, have to relinquish their humanity in the face of an apparatus’ and ‘In the evening these same masses fill the cinemas, to witness the film actor taking revenge on their behalf’, in part ‘by asserting his humanity […] against the apparatus’. Performing in ‘the glare of arc lamps while simultaneously meeting the demands of the microphone’ is ‘to preserve one’s humanity in the face of the apparatus’, and to place ‘that apparatus in the service of his [the actor’s] triumph’.113 Such a process is at work in the texts about drilling. Servicemen’s working hours are devoted to military ‘apparatus’, but in their leisure time trench newspapers afford a kind of comic ‘revenge’ on the military machine of which they are part. There is a parallel between machine-age comedy as it appears in the trench press and the disturbing aspects of mass mechanised entertainment that Benjamin identifies. There is an argument that those who wrote and read the trench papers recognised through, or despite of, their humour the ‘horror’ of the military machine. Benjamin argues that ‘slapstick comedy is tendentious’, its ‘target’ being ‘technology’. Slapstick film ‘is comic, but only in the sense that the laughter it provokes hovers over an abyss of horror. The obverse of a

112  At points, the humorous fallibility attributed to servicemen in trench newspapers involved direct entanglements with technology or scientific innovation. In the Lead-Swinger, a servicemen responsible for transport struggles with the basic mechanics of cars: ‘I can start a motor […] and I could stop one if nothing else stopped it first, but of what happens in between these two motions I have only a very vague idea’. Vampire. 1918. Motors: A Few Orderly Remarks. Lead-Swinger, 12 August, 470–71 (p.  470). In the Kinglet, an officer accidentally takes men to be inoculated when they were meant to be having an eye test. Anon. 1917. A True Story. Kinglet, December, 10–11. 113  Benjamin. 1935/36. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version. In Selected Writings Volume 31935–1938. Trans. Jephcott and others, 101–33. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, p. 111.

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ludicrously liberated technology is the lethal power’ of military might.114 Trench-newspaper manifestations of machine-age humour may in particular point to fear of dehumanisation. In Nicholas Saunders’ words: in the Great War ‘the differences between war matériel’ and ‘human beings [were] elided’—the servicemen who wrote and read trench newspapers were aware that the military may have the capacity to sweep everything, including people, into its course of mechanised destruction.115 Not dissimilarly, meanwhile, Fuller speculates that one reason for Chaplin’s popularity among servicemen may be that his style of humour was particularly fitted to the nature of the conflict as a whole, which he notes Phillip Gibbs described in 1920 as being, in an ‘enormous’ way, like ‘a highly dignified man’ slipping on orange peel.116 The explanation, though an attractive metaphor, does not capture the broad attitude to the conflict taken in the papers. Whether due to the constraints of censorship or otherwise, contributors and editors did not question the overarching purpose or worthiness of the war. Too great an emphasis on the ‘horror’ that could underlie trench-­ newspaper slapstick does not capture the tone of trench-press comedy. While there is a layer of satire in the depiction of the military machine, horror is not the overriding aesthetic feeling. The papers are overwhelmingly characterised by invitations towards milder, minor feelings. Any larger feelings—including horror—are muted or thwarted in favour of amusement. Chaplin’s own explanation of his ‘concept of humour’ is useful here. It is through humour, he says, that ‘we see in what seems rational, the irrational; in what seems important, the unimportant’—a perspective that captures the soldier’s-eye-view of such things as drilling especially well. Yet it is also ‘Because of humour we are less overwhelmed by the vicissitudes of life. It activates our sense of proportion and reveals to us that in an over-statement of seriousness lurks the absurd’.117 Chaplin’s 114  Benjamin. 1927. Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 2 1927–1934. Trans. Livingstone, Rodney and others, 16–19. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 1999, p. 17. 115  Nicholas Saunders. 2004. Material Culture and Conflict: the Great War, 1914–2003. In Matters of Conflict: Material Culture, Memory, and the First World War, ed. Nicholas Saunders, 5–25. London: Routledge, p. 9. 116  Fuller, p. 112. 117  Chaplin. Autobiography, p. 210.

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reference to proportion here is subtly but importantly different from the implications of Gibbs’ analogy to slapstick. The kind of comedy that resonated with troops in trench newspapers was not to do with that which is ‘enormous’. It was instead to do with offering servicemen the sense that they could access or anchor to a sense of proportion even in the most extreme of circumstances. Also more relevant than horror to the trench papers’ multiple uses of Chaplin and Chaplinesque characters are the comic opportunities afforded by replication. Chaplin, North argues, was ‘just as popular for always appearing in the same costume—the famous cane, bowler hat, and tiny moustache—as he was for surprising his audience with outrageous gags’. 118 Influenced by Benjamin, North suggests as an analogy for machine-age humour the factory assembly line constantly making new versions of the same thing, writing that the ‘repetitions of comedy prompt laughter instead of surprise because they are familiar, and […] each iteration has something in it that seems new’.119 (North and Benjamin focus on similar kinds of cultural production, such as Chaplin’s work, but North elucidates why these productions are amusing, a question that Benjamin does not tackle in a substantial way.)120 As North emphasises, it is from the reproduced and reproducible quality of machine-age comedy that invitations to amusement arise, contributing to the popularity of this kind of comedy. The practice of taking amusement from the formulaic in trench newspapers is in fact at times explicit, with servicemen representing themselves and their comrades as members of particular categories. A good example is a set of illustrations entitled ‘Types in the Army’ published in the Whizz-­ Bang of March 1916, which showed types such as ‘The Orderly Man’, depicted carrying a broom and basket.121 Chaplin and Chaplinesque characters appear repeatedly in trench newspapers because their humour emerges partly from their reiteration, encouraging duplication and adding to the durability of machine-age comedy.  North, pp. 4–5.  North, p. 200. 120  Bergson, p. 148. 121  These images in fact also resemble cigarette cards: in the early-twentieth century, tobacco manufacturers issued thousands of cards on varied themes including, during the Great War, gas masks. Alan Blum. 1995. Cigarette Cards: Irony in Propaganda. Tobacco Control 4: 117–18 (p. 117). 118 119

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‘This, While the Unknown Stalked and Fear Was Chilly […] “Couldn’t I Do some Beef and Piccalilli”’: Conclusions122 Machine-age comedy can include protest, and this is true of its manifestations in trench newspapers. The periodicals put forward protest against the co-option of individuals into the military machine, articulated via Bergsonian contrasts between the human or the eccentric on the one hand and the rigid or the mechanistic on the other. Such contrasts involved the frequent portrayal of serviceman as being haplessly inept and clownishly error-prone, disrupting military demands for order, anonymity, and uniformity. The overriding effect of humour in the trench-newspaper texts discussed, however, is to convey experiences of the military machine in ways that are familiarising and emotionally tame. The emotional tameness of the trench press lies in the provocation of amusement as a minor emotion. It is this feeling which far overrides the more disquieting aspects of the texts associated with protest against the military machine, while much trenchpress humour—dominated by parody—has familiarity at its heart. Experiences and descriptions of the conflict are communicated through the medium of characters, works of literature, and aspects of popular culture that were famous in some cases long before the start of the war. This took place in the form of references to famous works via parody, and in the form of servicemen using the same types of humour as were found in nineteenth and early-twentieth century comic magazines, music hall, and film. Such treatment of the conflict meant that it was imagined not as something that demanded a departure from existing culture, but as something that could be imagined in the context of that which was familiar.

References A’Beckett, Arthur. 1900. Diary of a somebody. Punch, 22 August, p. 132. ———. 1901. Diary on board a submariner. Punch, 23 January, p. 64. Abel, Richard, ed. 2005. Encyclopedia of early film. Abingdon: Taylor and Francis. Ackroyd, Peter. 2014. Charlie Chaplin. London: Chatto & Windus. Anon. 1856. The Song of Hiawatha: Author’s Protective Edition. Punch, 12 January, p. 17. 122  F. W. Harvey. 1915. A True Tale of the Listening Post. The Fifth Gloucester Gazette, September.

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———. 1900a. Diary of a ‘Peace’ Orator. Punch, 28 March, p. 220. ———. 1900b. From a Bachelor Uncle’s Diary. Punch, 24 January, p. 67. ———. 1914a. Editorial. Minor Offense, December. ———. 1914b. Editorial. Searchlight, December, pp. 4–5. ———. 1914c. Extract from the diary of an orderly officer. Minor Offense, December, 6–7. ———. 1914d. Greeting. Searchlight, December, pp. 3–5. ———. 1914e. Quo Fata Vocant. Quaysider, November, p. 1. ———. 1914f. Snapper: The Monthly Journal of the East Yorkshire Regiment, August, p. 141. ———. 1915a. Canvassed Catterick Camp Cackle: Censored conscientiously. Growler, July, pp. 2–3. ———. 1915b. Contributors. Dump, December, p. 1. ———. 1915c. Cover. Growler, January. ———. 1915d. Cover. Growler, March. ———. 1915e. Cover. Growler, April. ———. 1915f. Cover. Growler, July. ———. 1915g. Cover. Growler, October. ———. 1915h. Diary of [an] officer on duty. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, 1 December. ———. 1915i. Editorial. Hangar Herald, June, p. 1. ———. 1915j. Extracts from the Diary of O.C., Reconnoitring Patrol. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, 12 July. ———. 1915k. Horace to Hypatia. Growler, February, pp. 4–5. ———. 1915l. Horace to Hypatia. Growler, April, pp. 6–7. ———. 1915m. Horace to Hypatia. Growler, October, pp. 4–7. ———. 1915n. Poetry? Buzzer, 30 November, p. 2. ———. 1915o. The Rubaiyat of Omark I Am Fedup. Hangar Herald, 16 February. ———. 1915p. The sad case of the rumour stricken camp. Growler, July, pp. 10–11. ———. 1915q. The song of the PO operator. Buzzer, 30 November. ———. 1915r. The song of the Reconnoitring patrol. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, July. ———. 1915s. Things we want to know. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, 1 December. ———. 1915t. Will We—Mind? Growler, February, p. 10. ———. 1916a. Billets. Growler, March, pp. 10–11. ———. 1916b. Charlie Chaplin & his Favourite paper. Buzzer, February. ———. 1916c. Cover. 718 W.T. Company’s Magazine, September. ———. 1916d. A day in the diary of a private. Plum and Apple. August, pp. 7–9. ———. 1916e. Definitions. 718 W.T. Company’s Magazine, September, p. 3. ———. 1916f. Editor’s notes. Periscope, December, pp. 26–27. ———. 1916g. Editorial. Braganza, May, pp. 1–2. ———. 1916h. The Grouper’s Army Guide. RAMC Depot Magazine, 2 June, pp. 7–8.

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———. 1916i. Horace to Hypatia. Growler. July, pp. 5–10. ———. 1916j. The Only Man. 718 W.T. Company’s Magazine, 1 September, p. 5. ———. 1916k. The Rubaiyat of Ole Mark Hyam. Whizz-Bang, March, p. 10. ———. 1916l. The Sentry’s Soliloquy. Periscope, November, p. 6. ———. 1916m. Types in the Army No. 2. Whizz-Bang, March, p. 7. ———. 1916n. Types in the Army No. 3. Whizz-Bang, March, p. 9. ———. 1916o. Types in the Army No. 4. Whizz-Bang, March, p. 12. ———. 1916p. Wallacefield Christmas book, December. ———. 1917a. Adverts. Kinglet, December, p. 18. ———. 1917b. Answers to correspondents. Kinglet, December, p. 9. ———. 1917c. Battalion News. Kinglet, December, p. 17. ———. 1917d. The book of chronicles of the Cadetti. Hobocob, December. ———. 1917e. Confessions of noted personages: No I. Will de Luge. Helm, June. ———. 1917f. Cover. Hobocob, December. ———. 1917g. Editorial. B1: Chronicle of the Reserve Garrison Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, October, p. 1. ———. 1917h. Extracts from the ‘Britannia’ Pepys. Helm, 1 August. ———. 1917i. Gas and—Clothes. Mudhook, 1 September. ———. 1917j. Leaves from an orderly Dog’s diary (Bowglerised). Old Firm, January, pp. 10–11. ———. 1917k. Postalatha. Royal Engineers Postal Section, December, p. 29. ———. 1917l. A true story. Kinglet, December, pp. 10–11. ———. 1918a. Cover. Lines of Fire, April. ———. 1918b. Editorial. Lines of Fire, October, p. 2. ———. 1918c. Omar at the front. Mudhook, 1 January. ———. 1918d. Peeps into the Future. No.2: Cadet Chaplin, C, Interviews the Sergeant-Major. Lines of Fire, June, p. 20. ———. 1918e. Thoughts. B.E.F. Times, 22 January. In Christopher Westhorp, ed. The wipers times: The famous first world war trench newspaper, 273. London: Bloomsbury. 2013. ———. Never Mind. In Poetry of the first world war: An anthology, ed. Tim Kendall, 222 Oxford: Oxford UP. 2013. Ardy. 1914. The Northern Nomads. Quaysider, November, p. 3. Benjamin, Walter. 1927. Reply to Oscar A.  H. Schmitz. In Walter Benjamin: Selected writings volume 2 1927–1934. Trans. Livingstone, Rodney and others, 16–19. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 1999. ———. 1935a. The formula in which the dialectical structure of film finds expression. In Walter Benjamin: Selected writings volume 3 1935–1938. Trans. Jephcott, Edmund and others, 94–95. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 2002. ———. 1935b. The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Trans. Underwood, J. A. London: Penguin. 2008.

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———. 1935c/36. The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility: Second version. In Selected writings volume 3 1935–1938. Trans. Jephcott and others, 101–33. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Bennicke, T. 1916. ‘Some’ Orders for ‘Some’ Fire-Party. Behind the Lines: The (Unofficial) Magazine of No. 10 Stationary Hospital, British Expeditionary Force, August. Bergson, Henri. 1911. Laughter: An essay on the meaning of the comic. Trans. Brereton, Cloudesley and Fred Rothwell. New York: Macmillan Company. 1914. Bevis, Matthew. 2014. Eliot among the comedians. Literary Imagination 16: 135–156. Bill, Cushy. 1915. My career in the ‘Terriers’. Gambardier, March, p. 12. Blum, Alan. 1995. Cigarette cards: Irony in propaganda. Tobacco Control 4: 117–118. Brooke, Rupert. 1914. The soldier. RAMC Depot Magazine, 4 August, p. 2. Brown, Malcolm, ed. 2006. The wipers times: The complete series of the famous wartime trench newspaper. London: Little Books. Bunthorne. 1915. Recent discoveries in the Rhin [sic.] Valley. Lead-Swinger, 27 November, pp. 17–19. Carroll, Lewis. 1857. Hiawatha’s photographing. In In Phantasmagoria and other poems, 66–77. London: Macmillan. 1919. Castorius, Iodinus. 1915a. The journey of the tribes. Lead-Swinger, 6 November, pp. 28–29. ———. 1915b. Song parodies. Lead-Swinger, 16 October, p. 2. Chaplin, Charlie. dir. 1918. Shoulder arms. Charles Chaplin Productions. ———. 1964/2003. My autobiography. London: Penguin. Cooke, C.  H. 1923. Historical Records of the Sixteenth (service) Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Council of the Newcastle and Gateshead Incorporated Chamber of Commerce. Cooper, Revd. Dr. C. F. A. 1915. Cage Denizens in Alcoholia. Hangar Herald, 15 April, p. 3. Editors, The. 1917. Foreword. Old Firm, January. Elias, Frank. 1914. How war is ‘Made in Germany’. Punch, 19 August, p. 163. Emanuel, Walter. 1913. Pages from the diary of a Fly. Punch, 27 August, p. 188. Ernie. 1917. Note. Hangar Happenings, December. Esdras the Scribe. 1918. Chronicles of the great war. Dump, December, pp. 24–26. Fatigue. 1916. Higher Water, or a Picardy Romance. Lead-Swinger, 26 October, pp. 287–288. Fuller, J. G. 1990. Troop morale and popular culture in the British and dominion armies 1914–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gerrard, Steven. 2013. The great British music hall: Its importance to British culture and ‘The Trivial’. Culture Unbound 5: 487–513.

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Gohan, Boyle, Sir, Arthur. 1918. Adventures of the lost formula. Lines of Fire, April 2–3. Grant Repshire, James. 2014. A true tale of the listening post. blogs.exeter.ac.uk/ fwharvey/2014/05/21/a-­true-­tale-­of-­the-­listening-­post/. Accessed 3 Aug 2018. Gray, Donald. 1966. The uses of Victorian laughter. Victorian Studies 10: 145–176. ———. 1988. Victorian comic verse; or, snakes in Greenland. Victorian Poetry 26: 211–230. Grosvenor, Chris. 2018. Cinema on the front line: A history of military cinema exhibition and soldier spectatorship during the first world war. University of Exeter. Hammond, Michael. 2010. ‘So Essentially Human’: The appeal of Charles Chaplin’s Shoulder arms in Britain, 1918. Early Popular Visual Culture 8: 297–313. Hankin, St John. 1901. Leaves from an Aeronaut’s Diary. Punch, 16 October, p. 278. Hanna, Emma. 2015. Putting the moral into morale: YMCA cinemas on the Western front, 1914–1918. Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 35: 615–630. ———. 2018. Fighting fear with humour: Songs and singing in the RFC/RAF, 1914–1918. Conference. Humour and the First World War. London: The Open University, 20 June. Harbord, James. 1917. Defensive measures against gas attacks. France: Headquarters American Expeditionary Force. Harkaway, J. 1916. Battalion orders by colonel dooly dooly. Buzzer, May, p. 10. Harvey, F. W. 1915. A true tale of the listening post. The Fifth Gloucester Gazette, September. Harvey, A.D. 1998. School magazines. The Contemporary Review 273: 35–40. Hislop, Ian and Nick Newman. 2013. The wipers times. BBC 2, 11 September. ———. 2017. The wipers times, dir. Caroline Leslie. Honeydew. 1916. The Adventures of Lockholme Shears: No. 4—The Adventure of the Eight Munitioneers. Lead-Swinger, 21 June, pp. 212–18. Howes, Craig. 2016. Comic/satiric periodicals. In The Routledge handbook to nineteenth-century British periodicals and newspapers, ed. Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, 318–327. London: Routledge. Jujube. 1918. Hiawatha on the modern warpath. Lines of Fire, April, pp. 8–10. Kendall, Tim. 2013. Poetry of the first world war: An anthology. Oxford: Oxford UP. Lucas, E. V. and C. L. Graves. 1912. The diary of a diplomatist. Punch, 26 June. Lynn, Kenneth. 1933/2003. Charlie Chaplin and his times. New York: Cooper Square Press. McClellan, Ann. 2017. Tit-Bits, New Journalism, and Early Sherlock Holmes Fandom. Transformative Works and Cultures 23.

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Meinzer, Professor. 1918. One day in the life of a field ambulance medical officer. Lead-Swinger, 12 August, pp. 486–89. Milne, A. A. 1910. Cinderella’s diary. Punch, 28 December, p. 454. ———. 1911. The diary of a cinema actor. Punch, 25 October, p. 294. Mullen, John. 2015. The show must go on! Popular song in Britain during the first world war. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Naismith, J. B. 1915. Field kit allowance. Punch, 2 June, p. 434. Nelson, Robert L. 2010. Soldier newspapers: A useful source in the social and cultural history of the first world war and beyond. War in History 17: 167–191. North, Michael. 2009. Machine-age comedy. Oxford: Oxford UP. P. D. M. 1916. Some Chaplinisms. Whizz-Bang, January. Pecked Parsnips. 1914. Company orders. Gambardier, December, p. 10. Pegum, John. 2007. British Army trench journals and a geography of identity. In Publishing in the first world war: Essays in book history, ed. Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed, 129–147. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007. Robinson, David. 1985/2001. Chaplin: His life and art. London: Penguin. Rose, Margaret. 1979. Parody/metafiction: An analysis of parody as a critical mirror to the writing and reception of fiction. London: Croom Helm. Saunders, Nicholas. 2004. Material culture and conflict: The great war, 1914–2003. In Matters of conflict: Material culture, memory, and the first world war, ed. Nicholas Saunders, 5–25. London: Routledge. Scheide, Frank. 2004. Chaplin, sir Charles Spencer [Charlie] (1889–1977). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/30917. Accessed 29 Aug 2018. Scragg, Andrew. Reconsidering a ‘Neglected Classic’ and Widening the Canon of World War I Poetry: The Song of Tiadatha. researchgate.net/publication/265725032. Accessed 20 Jan 2016. Seal, Graham. 2013. The soldiers’ press: Trench journals in the first world war. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, A. T. 1910. A leaf from a German Officer’s diary. Punch, 12 October. Special Correspondent at Winnall Down Camp. 1916. The officers’ School at Squad Drill. Braganza, 1 May, p. 14. Towheed, Shafquat, Francesca Benatti, and Edmund King. 2015. Readers and Reading in the first world war. The Yearbook of English Studies 45: 239–261. Trench Mortar Officer, M. 1918. Extracts from the Diary of an R.N.D. Mudhook, October. Troly-Curtin, Marthe. 1915. Phrynette’s letters: ‘Because –’. Sketch, 1 December, p. 176. Vampire. 1918. Motors: A few orderly remarks. Lead-Swinger, 12 August, 470–71. W. 1918. Dug-out drill. Lines of Fire, July, pp. 26–27.

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Wade, C. O. 1915. Cover. Growler, October. Wangler, Captain O.  B. E. 1918. Operation orders. Lines of Fire, September, pp. 20–21. Westhorp, Christopher, ed. 2013. The wipers times: The famous first world war trench newspaper. London: Bloomsbury. Wild, Jonathan. 2006. The rise of the office clerk in literary culture, 1880–1939. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, Gordon. 2003. British theatre in the great war: A revaluation. London: Continuum. Williams, James. 2013. The jokes in the machine: Comic verse. In The Oxford handbook of Victorian poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis, 817–833. Oxford: Oxford UP. Wilsher, Ann. 1979. Hiawatha’s photographing: Lewis Carroll and A.  B. Frost. History of Photography 3.

CHAPTER 8

Short Fiction and Service-Author Heroes: ‘You can’t expect glory and accuracy for a half-penny’ Alec Johnston, ‘At the Front’, Punch, 25 August 1915

Short stories enjoyed great popularity during the First World War and the years that surrounded it. There had been a boom in periodicals in the 1880s and 1890s due to improved printing technology, lower publishing costs, and wider audiences created by increased literacy rates.1 This flourishing market included a rise in the number of comic papers available, so much so that commentators at the time noted the near inescapable ubiquity of such publications.2 Humorous short stories relating to the Great War appeared both in papers that were specifically geared towards amusement and in those monthlies and weeklies that contained more solemn texts as well. These humorous narratives address a huge range of war experiences. The transition between civilian and military identity was a 1  Andrew Maunder. 2011. Introduction. In British Literature of World War I: The Short Story and the Novella, ed. Andrew Maunder, xxxiii–lxiii. London: Pickering & Chatto, p. xxxvii; Adrian Hunter. 2007. The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, p. 6. 2  Donald Gray counts ‘at least 275’ comic papers being published in England between 1832 and the end of the century. Donald Gray. 1966. The Uses of Victorian Laughter. Victorian Studies 10: 145–76 (pp. 150–51).

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popular topic, including stories that playfully frustrate the expectation that military experience would ‘improve’ those who enlisted.3 Two other staples of wartime stories, spy and romance tales, also had humorous manifestations, and elsewhere in the genre, satire is directed towards war profiteers, civilians who enjoyed reflected glory from combatants, and pacifists.4 Among the diverse plots found in short fiction of the conflict are the donation of lingerie to a war-relief fund, and soldiers perpetrating pranks at society balls (see Chap. 6).5 This chapter focusses on service-author stories: narratives by servicemen often based on their own experiences. Many were published in popular periodicals in Britain during the conflict, the most prominent examples being the stories of ‘Sapper’, the pseudonym of Herman Cyril McNeile, a serving soldier who is still relatively well-known for his popular war stories. Very similar examples also appeared in trench newspapers, and this chapter is unusual in the field of First World War studies in considering such representations alongside those in professionally produced periodicals. Without such comparisons, it is easy to adopt an inflated sense of the extent to which professional and servicemen’s periodicals differ in style, contents, and ideological position. Service-author stories reflect, often with greater intensity, the impression given by the other texts discussed in this monograph  that the conflict need only have a small impact (or no impact at all) on the emotional lives of those who endured it. Experiences of the conflict may be depicted as odd or absurd—such experiences could even cause physical or emotional discomfort—yet such effects do not emerge as unmanageable, devastating, or overwhelming, whether emotionally, socially, or politically. In these narratives, an attitude of amused stoicism in response to any and all circumstances of war is portrayed as being in itself heroic. The texts privilege amused insouciance above any other expression of feeling. Such an attitude regularly relies upon self-deprecation and understatement (often understatement of danger), which contributes to the particular version of heroic stoicism presented in the stories in a number of ways. First, the creation of humour from understatement in the stories relies upon an  For example: Ernest Halsey. 1914. A Candidate for the Force. Punch, 2 September, p. 199.  W. St. G. Drennan. 1915. On the Spy-Trail. Punch, 27 January, p. 66; Keble Howard. 1917. Miss Pett’s Grand Chance. Strand 54: 463–70. 5  May Edginton. 1917. War-Workers. Strand 54: 386–94; Winifred Graham. 1918. The Ballunatics. Strand 56: 116–19. 3 4

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implicit recognition of bravery in frightening situations. Humorous understatement tends to be based on a contrast between a circumstance that is extreme—in this case, the physical dangers or war—and what is said of that situation. In order to find an understatement funny, such as a description of a near-death experience as being ‘a little worrying’, we have to be aware that it is an understatement rather than an accurate description. The message conveyed is that servicemen are not only brave enough to face the dangers and discomforts of the conflict, but that they are also sufficiently heroic to belittle those dangers and discomforts. They have the capacity to set aside, overcome, or bypass distress. Second, service authors’ use of humorous self-deprecation, with narrators mocking their own capabilities and preoccupations, is an expression of confidence while also making war heroes more approachable. Their self-deprecation expresses confidence because it relies upon some degree of self-assurance (here the message might be translated as ‘not only am I brave enough to face the dangers of war, but I also have the poise not to boast about that’). It also means that service authors and the characters they depict are presented as ordinary men with ordinary foibles, rather than servicemen possessing extraordinary, unreachable heroism. Self-deprecating humour implies that these are men with whom readers can feel at home. Service-author stories in addition build on character types that were well-established in British literature and culture in advance of the outbreak of war. As with the other humorous texts that have been explored, which saw significant continuity of genre and style from the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries into the wartime period, the emphasis in service-­ author stories is very much on literary familiarity rather than disruption or novelty. Such continuity included recycling the style of nineteenth-­century special or war correspondents, combining this with the stoical, amused insouciance of ‘British’ humour. The Great War is understood as something on which it is possible to report using similar literary frameworks to those used for Britain’s previous military endeavours. Service authors in multiple instances in addition make use of the archetype of the ‘knut’. This was a slang term for a type of well-dressed man-about-town, who was also a figure of fun.6 Knuts are depicted engaging in military service, 6  Lynda Mugglestone. 2016. How to Be ‘knuts’ for War: Refashioning Male Identity in WW1. English Words in Wartime: Tracking Language on the Move in WW1. wordsinwartime. wordpress.com/2016/08/22/how-to-be-knuts-for-war-fashioning-male-identity-inww1/#more-2440. Accessed 30 July 2018.

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contributing to the humorous perspective on the military ‘hero’ that the stories present. The attitude of amused insouciance that features in many service-author stories reflects the ideas about ‘British humour’ that were expressed in some of the same periodicals in which the stories were published (see Chap. 2). The stories very much support the propagandistic element of the discourse on British humour, and this could include the presence of government machinery at work behind the writing. The Propaganda Bureau recognised the potential value of the work of John Hay Beith, who wrote under the pen name Ian Hay, and made sure that censors swiftly approved the publication of his famous work the First Hundred Thousand (1915).7 Many of Sapper’s stories, meanwhile, though not commissioned by the government, were first printed in the Daily Mail, which had a reputation as a propagandist paper, with its editor Lord Northcliffe going on to accept a post in 1918 directing ‘propaganda in enemy countries’.8 Sapper’s collections were also published by Hodder & Stoughton, which was heavily associated with propaganda, and which published pamphlets and books on behalf of the government.9 The propagandistic aspect of service-author stories is further evidence to suggest the usefulness that minor feelings had for encouraging compliance with the war and the war effort in Britain. Even today, the humour in some examples of the stories can be beguiling in the charisma and resilience that it conveys. Appropriately to the popular periodicals in which they were published, the majority of the narratives discussed in this chapter do not have the kind of ‘new “literary” status’ that Adrian Hunter argues the short story genre developed in the late nineteenth century—they do not have an affinity with or represent senses of modern social fragmentation and

7  David Finkelstein. 1998. Literature, Propaganda, and the First World War: The Case of Blackwood’s Magazine. In Grub Street and the Ivory Tower: Literary Journalism and Literary Scholarship from Fielding to the Internet, ed. Treglown, Jeremy, and Bridget Bennett, 91–111. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 102. 8  Lise Jaillant. 2011. Sapper, Hodder & Stoughton, and the Popular Literature of the Great War. Book History 14: 137–66 (p. 141). 9  Jaillant, p. 141.

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change.10 They are instead the kind of text that David Finkelstein describes in his study of propaganda and Blackwood’s Magazine: ‘reflections of middle-­class, middle-brow tastes and views […] “thumping good reads”’.11 The most popular war stories were those that ‘celebrated resistance to change, comradeship and the survival of the human spirit in a fairly unequivocal way, at the same time as acknowledging the very great dangers involved in fighting for one’s country’—a description that captures the stories discussed in this chapter.12 The service-author stories included here appeared in widely read publications: Blackwood’s, the Strand, the Daily Mail and Punch. The latter of these recorded some of its largest circulations during the Great War, being consumed by ‘peers, politicians, and common readers alike’.13 Estimates of the Strand’s readership immediately before the war reach as high as two million, and Blackwood’s saw increased popularity during the conflict.14 From 1914–1917, Edinburgh sales rose from ‘4,900 to 18,500 copies a month’, and London sales ‘from 4,200 to 13,700 copies a month’.15 In 1915, meanwhile, the ‘Daily Mail circulation peaked at 1,105,214’.16 Collections of service-author stories were also popular: Sapper’s works published in book form saw sales figures as high as 50,000 in the first year of publication.17 Hay’s The First Hundred 10  Hunter, pp. 1–2, 8. As my emphasis on popular texts suggests, my definition of a short story is inclusive, reflecting the broad, nineteenth-century use of the term: ‘short story’ could be used synonymously with ‘the single-episode, prose tale, short narrative, or sketch’ (See: Beth Palmer. 2016. Prose. In The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, ed. King, Andrew, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, 138–50. London: Routledge, p. 144). I follow Einhaus’ practical definition of short stories as ‘any self-contained, short, fictional narrative published in a periodical, anthology or collection’, with the qualification that service-author stories are not always strictly invented, but relate in fictionalised form what was presented, though often facetiously, as actual conflict experience (See: Ann-Marie Einhaus. 2013. The Short Story and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, p. 10.) 11  Finkelstein, p. 93. 12  Maunder, p. li. 13  Punch Magazine Cartoon Archive. 2017. http://www.punch.co.uk/about/. Accessed 14 March 2017; Patrick Leary. 2010. The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London. London: British Library, p. 1. 14  Einhaus, p. 44. 15  Finkelstein, p. 108. 16  Jaillant, p. 141. 17  Jessica Meyer. 2007. The Tuition of Manhood: ‘Sapper’s’ War Stories and the Literature of War. In Publishing in the First World War: Essays in Book History, ed. Hammond, Mary, and Shafquat Towheed, 113–28. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 116.

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Thousand sold over 115,000 copies within the British Empire in its first year of publication.18

Service-Author Stories: ‘I Wonder if the Chap Who First Thought Out This Shell Business Realised the Extraordinary Inconvenience it Would Cause’19 Two serials published in Punch employ humour in ways that are typical of service-author narratives. One is by R. F. White and is entitled ‘A Territorial in India’ (January 1915–May 1916), and the other is called ‘At the Back of the Front’ or ‘At the Front’ (March 1915–January 1916) depending on the location of its author, Lieutenant Alec Johnston, who also contributed to Punch before the war.20 Both include humorous reflections on servicemen’s poor living and working conditions. For example, White refers in February 1915 to the ‘improbable circumstance of my surviving plague, dysentery, enteric, smallpox, heat apoplexy, snakebite and other perils of a prolonged sojourn in India’. In January 1915 he outlines the problems of living in a tent, or rather ‘that portion of it which is not required by some five hundred millions of ants’, which can in five  minutes ‘eat a loaf of bread, two pounds of treacle, a tin of oatmeal (unopened), eight bananas, a shaving brush and a magazine’. Some of the ‘more friendly’ of these creatures ‘indulge in playful little pranks’: one ‘upset a bottle of ink over a document [he] had just completed’.21 Johnston’s pieces of 8 December 1915 and 15 March 1916, meanwhile, give satirical accounts of unsatisfactory rest periods. The first of these tells the tale of Johnston’s unit being ‘sentenced to rest’, marching ‘deliberately out of a civilized town to a soggy malodorous marsh’ and includes, for instance, the blackly comic assertions that: There are no temptations. The mud is not deep enough to drown oneself, and no good soldier ever uses his rifle or side-arm to commit suicide with.  Finkelstein, p. 103.  Alec Johnston 1916. At the Front. Punch, 15 March, p. 180. 20  Anon. 1916. Lieutenant Alec Johnston. Obituary. Punch, 17 May, p. 326. 21  R. F. White. 1915. A Territorial in India. Punch, 17 February, p. 135; White. 1915. A Territorial in India. Punch, 27 January, p. 69. 18 19

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For two days we lay in a condition of bleak and comatose resignation, while our complaints passed through the usual channels to the usual official terminus. (Wicker, 2s. 6

1 22 d). 2

The 1916 text includes similarly dark humour in its representation of hardship. ‘Once upon a time’, Johnston claims, billets were spaces in which soldiers ‘forgot about the War unless you got an odd shell into the kitchen’: But now—well, about noon on the first day’s rest, seventy odd batteries […] set about their daily task of touching up a selected target […]. This is all right in its way; but the Hun still owns one or two guns opposite us. […] This is all right in its way; but about 3 p.m. the Hun is roused to the depths of his savage utterance […] This again is all right in its way […].23

Johnston’s flippant attention to subjects such as suicide and bombardment creates strikingly black humour but, as with the difficulties that White describes, the impression created is of a narrator who stoically endures his conditions—his humorous outlook being evidence of such resilience. The refrain in his 1916 report encapsulates his attitude: the irony of stating that increasingly perilous conditions are ‘all right’ is tempered by the humour of the understatement involved. That is, there is a tension between the refrain’s irony, which points towards the seriousness of the situations described, and its understatement, which belittles and trivialises the danger, almost suggesting that the narrator’s circumstances really are ‘all right’. The text is a partially mocking but partially straight depiction of soldierly stoicism. It both suggests the ridiculousness of saying that being under intense bombardment is not a problem, and upholds a sense that humorously underplaying such an experience makes it less problematic. Johnston leaves readers in little doubt as to the nature of conditions on active service, but his humour suggests an ability to endure the front line (or in this case, rest). The same can be said of White’s descriptions, his list of diseases in particular resembling Johnston’s dark

 Johnston. 1915. At the Front. Punch, 8 December, p. 476.  Johnston. 1916. At the Front. Punch, 15 March, p. 180.

22 23

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comedy.24 The narratives set up and privilege a kind of heroism that is founded on emotional resilience, articulated through the ability to maintain a sense of humour. Other frustrations of everyday life on active service that were given humorous treatment include rank and bureaucracy. Johnston for instance tells a tale in which he loses leave papers and must persuade the authorities he is not a deserter: he does so by presenting his problem when he knows the relevant officer is keen to go to lunch, ensuring that the issue is dealt with swiftly. Here too there is black comedy: ‘I shall arrive at dawn to-­ morrow just in time to be shot’, he writes, ‘It is true that the last time I was shot at dawn I got up and walked away’, but ‘this is not a reliable precedent’.25 Elsewhere, he tells the story of receiving notice of an inspection by an eminent figure: ‘“Company Commanders”, read the message, “will be expected to know everything”’, information that makes him, a Company Commander, realise that he ‘was ill—horribly ill; had been for weeks’.26 Similarly comic presentations of ineffective soldiering appear in ‘How to Become a Town Major’ (1917) by Captain T. P. C. Wilson. In this tale a serviceman gains the titular rank via incompetence, being appointed ‘Town-Major of some brick-dust, a rafter and two empty bully-­ beef tins—all of which in combination bore the name of a village’. In Sapper’s ‘Bendigo Jones—His Tree’, similarly, the hero is a futurist artist who has ‘inflicted’ his work on the public. He fails to produce anything resembling a tree when asked to do so to create camouflage, and is therefore thought to be suffering from shell shock.27 All of these stories are partially satirical—they highlight problems with conditions and with being subject to the workings of the military machine. Such tales as ‘How to Become a Town Major’ and ‘Bendigo Jones—His Tree’ have elements of Hobbesian ridicule, of ‘men laugh[ing] at the 24  A light-hearted take on a disquieting element of hierarchical change, meanwhile, appeared in ‘The Instantaneous Rank-Adjuster’ (1918). It is the tale of a servicemen’s trip to see a tailor whose military grandson has invented a solution to rapid changes in rank, changes that, though the story does not focus on the subject, were caused by the need to replace casualties. The Adjustor changes badges with ‘No unpicking; no sewing’. Anon. 1918. The Instantaneous Rank-Adjuster. Punch, 9 October, p. 230. 25  Johnston. 1915. At the Back of the Front. Punch, 29 September, p. 270. 26  Johnston. 1915. At the Back of the Front. Punch, 15 December, p. 496. 27  T. P. C. Wilson. 1917. How to Become a Town Major. Punch, 21 November, pp. 346–47; Sapper. 1917. Bendigo Jones—His Tree. In No Man’s Land, 197–216. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

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infirmities of others, by comparison of which their own abilities are set off and illustrated’.28 In the former, we are invited to take pleasure in the ineptitude and pride of the eponymous Major and all those with whom he shares his office; in the latter, readers are encouraged to take amusement from the aesthetic ‘infirmity’ of the modernist artist. The stories flatter audiences by placing them firmly on the side of the superior, mocking narrators, sharing their privileged vantage point that cuts through military and personal folly. Service authors also invite amusement in response to self-deprecating and retrospective depictions of themselves, which often involve their past selves becoming wrapped up in comic scrapes that expose their fallibility.29 White jokingly blames his own clumsiness (spilling ink) on ants and emphasises that his posting does not seem to require actual military action (see below). In Johnston’s work, his persona and other servicemen are not above manipulation and being swayed by the relatively unimportant (lunch), nor above pretending illness to avoid responsibility. Such laughter at past versions of themselves is crucial to Johnston’s and White’s sympathetic characterisation. It conveys the impression that their unsoldierly quirks are the result of comic exaggeration by authorial presences sufficiently in control to recognise and make light of their own weaknesses. Johnston casts himself as the shirking company commander with a kind of humorous self-deprecation that hints at confidence underneath his reported ineptitude. This kind of self-awareness appears in such comments as ‘I fell back and would have swooned but for—I can’t really think why I didn’t swoon. Perhaps because there was no one looking’.30 It is more usual for service authors to create comedy from a lack of violence than from engagement with the enemy, the opportunities for comic self-deprecation this afforded being fully exploited. Although some of the examples above, especially Johnston’s writing, hint at potentially disquieting aspects of the conflict, service-author stories are generally more likely to treat the less extreme aspects of war experience with humour. The Strand even published a ‘Special Humour Number’ that did not 28  Thomas Hobbes. 1650. Human Nature. In The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin, 21–108. Oxford: Oxford UP. 1994, p. 54. 29  There is a parallel here with Hobbes’ recognition that people sometimes laugh at themselves, at ‘the follies of themselves past, when they come suddenly to remembrance’. Hobbes, pp. 54–55. 30  Johnston. 1915. At the Back of the Front. Punch, 15 December, p. 496.

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contain any humorous stories dealing with the war specifically.31 White, writing of the experience of territorial soldiers in India, recounts training in which he and his comrades were only allowed blank ammunition after proving they were no ‘danger to ourselves and the public’, mentions how ‘We still get indications that there is a war going on somewhere in Europe’, and suggests that rather than being involved in ‘slaying Boches’ the purpose of the Territorials in India was ‘merely ornamental’.32 The relative lack of humorous treatment given to death and injury is due to a mixture of factors: sensitivity to readers involved in or with loved ones involved in the fighting; a need for periodicals to distract from the war; imperatives to avoid censorship; and/or a desire to present the conflict with an optimistic slant.33 The avoidance of the subject of violence and death in humorous stories is part of the association between humour and tameness in Great War literature. Representing conflict experience as involving an amusing lack of violence places such experience within the bounds of safety. The opportunities for self-deprecation that the lack of violence affords also contribute to the familiarity of service-author heroism. The refusal to suggest that servicemen are employed in extraordinary activities conveys a view of them as being ‘just ordinary men’—the kind of individuals whom readers feel they may know and with whom they could sympathise. J. G. Fuller, in his assessment of trench newspapers, identifies a sense that during the conflict ‘British troops had always remained “citizens first”, never quite discarding a set of attitudes which distanced them from the profession of arms’.34 The emphasis on the unextraordinary expressed in some service-authors stories reflects and perpetuates this. At the same time, the insistent implication in White’s narratives that he and his fellow servicemen would very much like to be involved in the fighting avoids any hint of reluctance to see action, hence avoiding anything that could be perceived as ‘cowardice’. The narratives thus gesture towards an inner confidence and steeliness that complements their narrator’s capacity to poke fun at himself.

 Einhaus, p. 48.  White. 1915. A Territorial in India. Punch, 12 May, p. 366; White. 1915. A Territorial in India. Punch, 6 October, p.  287; White. 1915. A Territorial in India. Punch, 22 December, p. 506. 33  Einhaus, p. 48. 34  J.  G. Fuller. 1990. Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies 1914–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 159. 31 32

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Similar approaches to the representation of conflict experience are found in trench-newspaper stories. A series in the Lead Swinger for example includes a piece, published in March 1916, in which a speaker identified as Falstaff recounts his experience (Shakespearean references are common in trench newspapers). The piece is called ‘A Free Trip to the Continent’ and Falstaff claims to have been motivated to enlist by what ‘seemed a very liberal offer’. Such ‘little inconveniences as hostile riflemen did cross [his] mind, but only in a fleeting sort of fashion’, since he ‘imagined a people possessed of a never-ending hospitality and a delightful appreciation of the British Tommy, which would include [him]self’. The tale goes on to include humorous complaints about conditions and the reality of treatment from local people: ‘That they would regard us as a legitimate object of plunder never crossed my wildest dreams’.35 A story by an author named as A.  Muir in Salut Poilu from April 1916, meanwhile, sees a hapless narrator describe a sorry tale of how, as he announces in his opening paragraph: ‘I the junior subaltern, am wearing the Colonel’s best pair of trousers’.36 He describes how he ‘used to consider [him]self as punctilious a sub [subaltern] as ever strolled Piccadilly’, and on arrival at the front is worried about uniform etiquette. He ‘gasp[s] with relief’ when the Colonel informs him he may wear ‘a dressing-gown and carpet-­slippers in the firing-line if you feel bitten with the desire’.37 When his trousers are put out to dry on the barbed wire and are lost overnight, he wakes up to find he has no choice but to respond to a summons bare-legged: ‘I barged down the trench. Chuckles followed in my wake’.38 Eventually: The Brigadier and the Colonel were coming round the sap…They turned the corner. They stopped. They looked. I heard a sound like hiccoughing, and the Brigadier staggered back. He wasn’t a young man, and the shock seemed to unman him. My khaki shirt flapped cheerily.39

While White’s narratives rely on distance from the fighting for their humour and for their focus on the unextraordinary, for Muir’s hapless narrator things that were important in the civilian world (looking dapper)  Falstaff. 1916. A Free Trip to the Continent. The Lead Swinger, 19 March.  A. Muir. 1916. The Khaki Bags. Salut Poilu, 39–40 (p. 39). 37  Muir, p. 39. 38  Muir, p. 39. 39  Muir, p. 40. 35 36

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continue to be central even at the heart of the fighting. The refusal to abandon a connection to the civilian world is incongruous. This is necessary for the humour, but it is also endearing; embarrassment in front of a senior officer over something relatively mundane takes on the whiff of a comical schoolboy caper. Embarrassment before senior officers is also the subject of ‘Attacked by a Submarine’ (The Gambardier, April 1915), in which a narrator who is confident of his abilities at the start of the narrative incorrectly identifies an object he spots in the sea as a submarine. He recounts how ‘as we approached the object, I heard some splutterings behind, and knew that the Captain was saying some hurtful things about me. How was I to know that one of Nestle’s milk tins had run adrift?’40 In ‘An Unexpected Visit, or Caught Bending’ (The Kinglet, September 1917), the trope of the less-than scrupulous narrator includes humorous depiction of deliberate dishonesty, presented in such a way that the audience does not lose sympathy with the protagonist.41 The narrator is told the C.O. wishes to see him, and at the time is ‘in a comatose condition after partaking of one of those lunches which render one unfit for further duty for the rest of the day’.42 Asked to account for six men who have not yet completed training, he begins to create a series of elaborate excuses. When the adjutant, realising this, attempts to interject with less extravagant explanations, the narrator comments that ‘a barefaced, shameless lie of that sort always annoys me’, since it ‘takes all the beauty out of the art and reduces it to mere blatant vulgarity’.43 When the C.O. asks to observe the men, a chauffeur who is not meant to be present has to hide: ‘On beholding him, the Adjutant’s face turned to a deathly pallor […] he opened up a series of desperate semaphorical gesticulations, with the result that there was a complete disappearance of the said Ward under a large and dirty car’.44 The C.O. eventually gives ‘a glowing report’ after being provided with ‘light refreshment’ in the Mess.45 These trench-newspaper stories do not feature exactly the same kind of self-deprecation as appears in the service-author stories such as Johnston’s or White’s. The trench-newspaper examples, aimed predominantly at  X. 1915. Attacked by a Submarine. The Gambardier, April, p. 21.  Anon. 1917. An Unexpected Visit, or Caught Bending. The Kinglet, September, pp. 12–13. 42  Anon. 1917. An Unexpected Visit, p. 12. 43  Anon. 1917. An Unexpected Visit, p. 12. 44  Anon. 1917. An Unexpected Visit, p. 13. 45  Anon. 1917. An Unexpected Visit, p. 13. 40 41

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servicemen, are more likely to invite amusement at the expense of soldierly incompetence, perhaps in the knowledge that the readership would be able to connect the hapless characters to servicemen they have actually met. There is a greater distance in the trench-newspaper narratives between the author and the narrator, as seems to be especially the case in the example of the narrator who loses his trousers, with readers being invited to find amusement in part at the expense of the narrator rather than laughing along with him. The humour in the stories is nevertheless self-deprecating in a broader sense—they have a kind of humorous self-deprecation that encompasses servicemen as a group. Written by servicemen for servicemen, the stories resist any temptation to depict life in the forces as heroic and dashing in the traditional sense, instead giving a knowing wink to a readership already well aware that daring-do is not always a staple of military life. The Flashman-like antihero of ‘An Unexpected Visit’ is an especially good illustration of how the trench-newspaper stories encourage identification with those in the forces who are mischievous, imperfect, and rebellious. While the humorous stories in trench-newspapers and in the professionally produced press tend to focus on characters, subjects, and situations that are familiar and tame, dangerous military action is not always ignored or played down. Some stories that include humorous narratives do interweave their light-hearted elements with descriptions of combat. The effect is a more intense version of the impression that servicemen possess a mixture of light-heartedness and inner bravery. A 1916 story by Sapper entitled ‘Retribution’ opens with the narrator and the hero enjoying the height of the Riviera season. This is especially true of Jerry Travers, the hero, who has ‘an infinite capacity for consuming cocktails, and with a disposition merry and bright as the morning lark’.46 The onset of war sees Travers pitted militarily against his peacetime romantic rival Dressler. Commanding a German U-boat, Dressler attacks a passenger ship on which the woman of their mutual affection is travelling, leaving Travers to rescue her and destroy the submarine. Dressler’s military vanquishing is also a romantic defeat, and the end of the story returns to the romance plot, giving and the narrator opportunity for a concluding quip: ‘Can anyone recommend me a good cheap book in “Things a Best Man Should Know”’.47  Sapper. 1916. Retribution. Strand 52: 51–60 (p. 52).  Sapper. Retribution, p. 60.

46 47

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A story by Sapper entitled ‘The Passing of the Seasick Cow’ (1918), to give another example, includes similar shifts from seriousness to humorousness in accordance with switches between front-line and home-front settings. The story sees one character, James, tell the narrator a story about a tank crew becoming trapped, parts of which tale are highly serious and disturbing. Excursions into the home-front setting of the framing narrative involve humour, which revolves around James’ flashes of frivolity and of social audaciousness. At one point, he tells the narrator ‘at present, it’s my story, and it’s very rude to interrupt. You may say yes or no, Peter, if your feelings overcome you’.48 At the same time, James’ anecdote makes it clear that he is someone who has come face to face with terrible war experiences, making his coolness all the more impressive. His tale is that of a tank crew who were stranded in no man’s land for three days and two nights (the story is prompted by James seeing a comrade called Jonah). The crew become a sitting target, with the living forced to inhabit the same space as those who have been killed. Both ‘The Passing of the Seasick Cow’ and ‘Retribution’ comment on the proximity of humour and seriousness in their narratives. The authors are conscious of the contribution this mixture makes to their depiction of war experience. The narrator in ‘Retribution’ states that ‘the serious and the gay, the tears and the laughter, come to us’ in ‘jumbled succession’. He comments that though his tone in describing the love affair has been ‘wantonly flippant’ and the wartime section may ‘savour of melodrama’, ‘is it not life, my masters, is it not life?’49 When James in ‘The Passing of the Seasick Cow’ comes to describing the tank crew’s plight he tells his interlocutor: ‘It may have seemed to you that up-to-date I have been speaking with undue flippancy’, but that ‘I’ll cut it now’, because ‘what I’m going to tell you is absolutely great’.50 There are some instances in service-author stories in which mixtures of soldierly humour and grit are taken to what modern readers especially may see as ridiculous extremes. In ‘Shell Out!’ (collected in Carrying On, 1917), Hay tells the tale of a practical joke on a relieving unit. The servicemen taking over are told that, due to the area’s geography, shelling sounds very close when it is actually quite distant. The new unit are eventually forced to doubt the information:  Sapper. 1918. The Passing of the Seasick Cow. Strand 55: 175–82 (p. 175).  Sapper. Retribution, p. 54. 50  Sapper. Seasick Cow, p. 178. 48 49

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Hush Hall rocked. The Mess waiter appeared. ‘A shell has just came [sic] in through the dining-room window, sirr [sic],’ he informed the Mess President, ‘and broke three of they new cups!’ [sic] ‘How tiresome!’ said the Brigadier. ‘Dug-outs, everybody!’51

Injury and hospitals receive analogous treatment elsewhere. Johnston’s piece from 1 September 1915 opens ‘The ideal of every good soldier’ is ‘to go through a battle that isn’t really dangerous and emerge from it with a wound that doesn’t really hurt’, going on to describe an engagement in which ‘my troubles began’. He describes how an ‘evilly disposed person imagined he had seen a bullet come into me and sneaked about it to the doctor’, meaning that he is ordered to retire despite his protestations. ‘[E]ven if [the bullet] had come in it had gone straight on practically without stopping’; ‘there must be plenty without bothering about that one, if it was munitions they wanted’.52 These are some of the starkest examples in humorous Great War literature of tightly controlled emotional responses to extreme conflict experience—of a refusal to match extreme experience with equally extreme expression of feeling. The brand of heroism depicted in professionally produced periodicals and in trench-newspaper stories is similar, but stories such as Hay’s and Johnston’s, published in Punch and Blackwood’s Magazine, lean more towards a romanticised version of the stiff upper lip and of soldierly heroism. This may be a result of the professionally produced periodicals’ closer alignment with cultural mobilisation and with propaganda. Cultural mobilisation is a phenomenon which sees the ‘imaginative’ engagement ‘of the different belligerent nations in their war efforts […], through collective representations and the belief and value systems giving rise to these’.53 Links between the national press in Britain and formal governmental propaganda were also in place, as described at the start of this chapter. Punch defined itself as a patriotic form of entertainment. Johnston was killed in 1916, and the obituary Punch published betrays an eagerness to 51  Ian Hay. 1917. ‘Shell Out!’ In Carrying On—After the First Hundred Thousand, 24–46. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, pp. 44–45. 52  Johnston. 1915. At the Front. Punch, 1 September, p. 187. 53  John Horne. Qtd. in Matthew Hendley. 2012. Cultural Mobilization and British Responses to Cultural Transfer in Total War: The Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1916. First World War Studies 3: 25–49 (p. 26).

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emphasise closeness between the service author and the magazine. Described as having been written by a ‘brother-officer’ and ‘rather especial friend’, the obituary emphasises that Johnston wrote in front-line conditions. There is heavy emphasis on the heroism of Johnston’s final hours, with his death itself being portrayed as neat and quick. His company ‘was in the centre’ of an attack that had been ordered suddenly: ‘Johnston led the Company and captured the position most gallantly with the bayonet’ and then ‘personally reconnoitered the ground up to the German line’. He was ‘indefatigable all night consolidating the recaptured position’ and at dawn ‘sent the only other officer then remaining unwounded to the safest part of the trench’. Johnston himself, ‘stayed up too long, and was shot through the heart by a German sniper’.54 The obituarist also describes Johnston ‘lying flat on his face in a tiny dug-out […] in the front-line trench, dashing off the first half of one of his quaint articles to Punch’ before breaking-off to go on patrol. He would have a ‘scrap’ with ‘Bosch’ rivals, and then return ‘soaked to the skin and covered with mud, to finish his article in time for the post’. He adds that Johnston, if alive, would ‘have had a decoration conferred for his work in this last show’, and concludes that ‘his articles were awfully appreciated by every one out here, and in his quaintly witty way he caught perfectly the spirit “at the Front”’.55 Johnston thus appears as the epitome of heroic soldierliness, as well as the embodiment of the stoical, brave, witty persona he adopted in his stories. The purported popularity of his writing with servicemen and supposed ability to capture faithfully the essence of front-line life also legitimises his account of the conflict. Humorous service-author stories and their attendant publishing contexts convey a sense that an attitude of aloof, amused insouciance was a desirable, heroic, and realistic response to conflict experience. The narrators and protagonists are commonly depicted as possessing the same kinds of human foibles as might characterise any civilian, making them appear as familiar characters to whom readers could relate. Such humanising representations of servicemen include the regular depiction of them recognising and joking about both their own weaknesses and the adverse circumstances in which they find themselves. Their sense of humour contributes to a characterisation according to which heroism involves having

 Anon. Lieutenant Alec Johnston. Obituary, p. 326.  Anon. Lieutenant Alec Johnston. Obituary, p. 326.

54 55

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a brave, inner strength in combination with outward levity. It signals emotional resilience in even the most testing of situations, with readers encouraged to admire their sangfroid.

Pre-War Continuity: ‘The Humour of Tommy and Jack Is Proverbial’56 As with the texts explored in previous chapters, service-author stories relied on tropes, genres, and character types that were familiar in British literary culture before the outbreak of war. Individual characters who featured in series begun before 1914 even appeared during the conflict as servicemen, shown enlisting in the forces as events in the real world became difficult to ignore in the fictional one. Sam Briggs, the protagonist of one wartime serial by Richard Marsh, for example, had appeared in the Strand in stories published 1904–06, undergoing the transformation from civilian to soldier in 1915 alongside many of those who read about him.57 (Richard Marsh, the pseudonym of Richard Heldmann, was not a service author, but his representation of Sam Briggs’ transformation has overlaps with the representation of the soldiers who appeared in service-author stories). The genre and style of service-author stories are furthermore part of the legacy of the war or special correspondents who were popular in the nineteenth century especially. These writers presented themselves as dashingly and excitingly close to the exploits of British imperialism. Andrew Griffiths argues that special correspondents ‘linked events on the imperial frontiers to the parlours and kitchens of British homes’, producing a ‘mediated experience of empire which was readily comprehensible to British readers’.58 Their work had a sensationalist and novelistic style, combining reportage with the style of adventure stories, inviting readers  Anon. 1916. Papers of the Firing Line. The Strand Magazine 52: 558–762 (p.558).  There was also continuity of authorship. Several writers worked for Punch, for example, before and during the war, including A. A. Milne, Ernest Halsey, and R. C. Lehmann. For examples of Sam Briggs stories, see: Richard Marsh. 1904. The Girl on the Sands. Strand 28: 423–33; Marsh. 1905. The Gift Horse. The Strand Magazine 29: 281–90; Marsh. 1905. Her Fourth. The Strand Magazine 30: 760–70; Marsh. 1906. That Hansom. The Strand Magazine 31: 564–71; Marsh. 1915. Sam Briggs Becomes a Soldier: III. Two Stripes. The Strand Magazine 49: 334–44. 58  Andrew Griffiths. 2015. The New Journalism, the New Imperialism and the Fiction of Empire, 1870–1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 2. 56 57

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to experience the British Empire, in fictionalised form, vicariously.59 Special correspondents themselves were presented as ‘paragon[s] of imperial masculinity’, possessing a combination of great hardiness and gentlemanly manners, and appeared ‘as heroes in their own narratives’.60 Griffiths points out that the ‘golden age’ of the special correspondent was over by the end of the century.61 In the texts discussed here, the kind of heroism privileged is not as glamorous as that of the heroes of adventure stories. Yet these humorous representations leave readers in little doubt that servicemen have inner bravery and strength. Sapper was in fact at points referred to as a war correspondent during the Great War, while the serials by White and Johnston in particular make the most of presenting themselves as journalistic reportage from those at the heart of the action.62 Service-author stories also had precedents in the form of pre-1914 humorous narratives with a military setting. For instance, in ‘The Snowflake of the Service’ (1899), a ‘naval gentleman’ tells the story of ramming a derelict vessel, partly to impress two ladies. The result is that the spotless gunboat is covered in the abandoned vessel’s cargo of treacle.63 ‘The Soldier’s Progress’ (1901) is the tale of Wellington Marlborough Smith who attempts to comic effect to live-up to his military name by rising through the ranks of the armed services, a task which requires him to source ever-increasing funds for social expenses.64 ‘A Sweep of the Pen’ (1911) centres on how the life of an ordinary soldier is affected by army bureaucracy. It is not comic in structure or amusing throughout, but it does involve moments of humour, such as the extra training the hero has to undergo involving a ‘squad of beer-laden old men hopping about, jumping over forms, bending and stretching their knees, and going through many other contortions’—another take on the humorous  Griffiths, pp. 17, 31, 13, 22.  Griffiths, pp. 31–32, 39. 61  Griffiths, p. 53. 62  For an example of Sapper being described in this way, see: Anon. 1917. Fiction. Rev. of No Man’s Land. The Spectator, 18 August, p. 17. Humorous takes on war reporting had also been published in advance of the Great War, such as a series of letters published in Punch that were entitled ‘Our Mr. Jabberjee in the Far East’. These were the output of a fictional correspondent, purportedly writing from such locations as the ‘War-Correspondents’ Compound, Tokyo, Japan’ in 1904, during the Russo-Japanese war. F. Anstey. 1904. Our Mr. Jabberjee in the Far East. Punch, 20 April, p. 286. 63  Frank Stockton. 1899. The Snowflake of the Service. The Strand Magazine 18: 401–08. 64  Arthur A’Beckett. 1901. The Soldier’s Progress. Punch 22 May, p. 391. 59 60

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possibilities of drilling.65 The theme also appears in ‘The More than Usually Gay Soldier at Islington’ (1901), in which it is argued that ‘comic relief’ might be introduced to the armed services via ‘comic squad drill’: ‘At the caution of the Instructor, “Prepare to grin”, the recruit will bring his right eyebrow sharply up to the level of the lobe of his left ear’ (a moment that very much speaks to a culture of enforced British, military cheerfulness).66 In ‘An Eddy of War’ (1907), meanwhile, the protagonist, James, has been ill and to prevent distress his wife has kept from him the news that war has broken out, meaning that when he is recovered enough to leave the house he fails to stop for a sentry and (to his bemusement) is detained. The challenge ‘Alt-oo-goes-there?’ puzzles him because ‘it sounded like English, yet conveyed no sense to his mind’, and ‘he walked on, not feeling personally interested’.67 Sketches and parodies that, though not short stories, foreshadow service-author humour include: ‘Plans for the Defence of London’ (1900), featuring such suggestions as ‘The fleet of the Penny Thames Steamboats to receive a coat of paint to fit them for active service’, and ‘military statues to be washed and put in good order’; and ‘The Way to the Service; or, Then, Now, and To-Morrow’ (1900), the writer of which satirises imagined changes to martial training.68 Another important precedent for the representation of Great War servicemen as humorous, stoical, and dutiful is the figure of ‘Tommy Atkins’, or the ‘smiling Tommy’. The most influential representation of the Tommy character type is Rudyard Kipling’s. Used as a generic name for private soldiers in the British military long before the Great War, Tommy Atkins as he appears in Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) is given the kind of characteristics that are later attributed to soldiers in service-author

 Anon. 1911. A Sweep of the Pen. Blackwood’s Magazine, April, 550–54 (pp. 550, 552).  A’Beckett. 1901. The More than Usually Gay Soldier at Islington. Punch, 5 June, p. 419. This moment of soldiers being instructed to grin finds echo, as with many other elements of humorous Great War literature, in Wyndham Lewis ‘Tyros’—the grinning characters he developed who were products of a connection he made between British humour, repression, and shell shock. See: Emily Anderson. 2022. An ‘unseemly joke’: Service-author Stories and Wyndham Lewis’s Blasting and Bombardiering (1937). Journal of Modern Literature 45: 34–51 (pp. 43–44). 67  Anon. 1907. An Eddy of War. Blackwood’s Magazine, April, 454–72 (p. 454). 68  A’Beckett. 1900. Plans for the Perfect Defence of London. Punch, 21 February, p. 133; A’Beckett. 1900. The Way to the Service; Or, Then, Now, and To-Morrow. Punch, 21 February, p. 129. 65 66

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stories of the First World War.69 Samuel Hynes notes the impact of the Tommy Atkins character on the portrayal of the soldiers in Sapper’s Sergeant Michael Cassidy and Hay’s First Hundred Thousand, writing that Tommy is ‘the ur-figure of the entire tradition’ to which these authors’ servicemen belong. He is the ‘archetypal British enlisted man’, ‘brave, comical, devoted, prosaic’. Going further, Hynes speculates that Kipling ‘by writing about British soldiers in this mode, made them like that’.70 The culture of life imitating art as regards propagandistic, fictional portrayals of soldierly good humour adds to the persistent sense that service-author stories create overlap between what was factual and what was not. These ambiguities leave open the possibility that British servicemen really were as heroically amused and stoical as the stories suggest. The connection between fiction and reality contributes to the sense that service-authors’ protagonists were men with whom readers were already familiar and whom they might meet in their everyday lives. The archetype of the knut, aspects of which character type appear in multiple service-author stories, was similarly borrowed from pre-war literary culture. The knut was an ‘irresponsible young man-about-town who gets into comic difficulties’, who featured for example in the music halls of the late nineteenth century and in Punch, as well as in the theatre and prose fiction.71 Well-known examples include Algernon Moncrieff in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) and P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster, the latter of whom appeared mostly after 1918, but who initially surfaced in 1915.72 Wodehouse explained in September 1914 that ‘knut’ was thought of as the ‘proper term for the 69  Rudyard Kipling. 1892. Tommy. In Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses, 6–9 London: Methuen. The poems were initially published in the Scots Observer in 1890. 70  Samuel Hynes. 1992. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. London: Pimlico, pp. 49–50. Hynes’ suggestion is also relevant to servicemen’s portrayals of themselves in trench newspapers, in which publications the name of Tommy Atkins frequently appears. For example, F. W. Harvey’s poem ‘A True Tale of the Listening Post’ is prefaced with the comment ‘Men are queer things right through—whatever make | But Tommy Atkins really takes the cake’ (Harvey. 1915. A True Tale of the Listening Post. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, September). The poem gives a comic perspective on events for which Harvey and his friend R. E. Knight received Distinguished Conduct Medals. It contrasts the official, more aggrandising account printed in the same edition of the trench newspaper (Anon. 1915. Report. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, September). 71   Lawrence Dugan. 2011. Worcestershirewards: Wodehouse and the Baroque. Connotations 20: 228–47 (p. 230). 72  Dugan, p. 230.

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young man cutting a swathe through [London’s] midst on his father’s money’. He is ‘bored to death, but he does it simply because it’s done’.73 Sapper’s stories often include narratives of war teaching ‘individuals how to be “proper” men’, with those who remained civilians being characterised as ‘repulsively’ effeminate. The knut was given analogous treatment.74 During the conflict, the kind of masculinity that the knut represented was regularly castigated as not welcome or appropriate to the moment. Knuts were imagined either refusing to enlist in the military or lacking the attributes to do so. For instance, a cartoon published in February 1915 showed two smartly dressed men, labelled ‘1st knut’ and ‘2nd knut’, complaining about rain. The latter suggests ‘These weathah conditions give one a vewy vivid ideah of life in the twenches!’75 In E. V. Lucas’ The Vermilion Box (1916), similarly, there is a moment in which knuts are discussed as incongruous to the wartime context. An older character remarks of a younger civilian that, ‘He must be almost the last of the tribe, but here he is, just as knutty as though the Algies and Berties were still ruling the roast, and not Mars at all’.76 There is an element of this kind of mockery, though in gentler form, in the humour at the expense of the knut in Muir’s story, who remains deeply concerned with his appearance after enlisting and who is embarrassed by the loss of his trousers over the parapet. Elsewhere, participation in the armed forces was represented as diminishing young men’s status as knuts. Two servicemen in a 1917 Punch cartoon are for example depicted eagerly eating an army meal of bread and tea or water while sitting on boxes, and are referred to as ‘ex-Knut[s]’.77 The editors of the RAMC Depot Magazine in 1916 meanwhile expressed the view that ‘If compulsion [conscription] serves no other purpose, it will at least transform many of the “Knut” species into something of a more manly variety’.78 Such a conversion was praised in one serviceman’s rewritten version of the pre-war music-hall song ‘Gilbert the Filbert’. Gilbert was a comic knut character for whom  P. G. Wodehouse. 1914. The Knuts O’London. Vanity Fair, September, p. 43.  Meyer, p. 119. Such views reflect broader depictions of non-combatant men. As Lois Bibbings identifies, for example, conscientious objectors especially were ridiculed using homosexual stereotypes. Bibbings. 2009. Telling Tales about Men: Conceptions of Conscientious Objectors to Military Service During the First World War. Manchester UP, p. 89. 75  Anon. 1915. Waining Again. Punch, 24 February, p. 146. 76  E. V. Lucas. 1916. The Vermilion Box. New York: George H. Doran Company, p. 77. 77  D. L. Ghilchip. 1917. First Ex-Knut, Punch, 1 August, p. 67. 78  Anon. 1916. Editorial Notes. RAMC Depot Magazine, June, p. 2. 73 74

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the actor Basil Hallam had become famous before the conflict (Hallam was killed in action during the war). The song’s lyrics featured lines such as ‘I’m Gilbert the Filbert the Knut with a K | The pride of Piccadilly the blasé roué’. The updated, wartime version of the song included such lines as ‘You would know him in the old days by his smooth and well-oiled locks’, but ‘Now he’s fighting’ and ‘There’s a cheer and a “God bless you!” for the man we call the “K-nut”’.79 It was however also possible in service-author fiction for knuts to remain themselves while being engaged in active service. This is demonstrated particularly well in Sapper’s 1915 story entitled ‘James and the Land Mine’ (1915).80 The narrator unexpectedly encounters the eponymous hero at the front. The two men have met previously, ‘before the war’, at the ‘Pytchley Hunt ball’. The narrator explains that at this event a German waiter had unscrupulously left some grapes on a chair, which James then sat on and in doing so ruined his ‘new silk breeches purchased at great cost from his already despondent tailor’. James is deeply concerned with such things as the loveliness of his ‘pink coat’ and delicacies like ‘lobster mousse’. Once in military service, he acts with extreme bravery at the front, with his attitude towards the fighting being all the more impressive because it shows the same nonchalance as he exhibited as a knut before the war. He appears unexpectedly when the narrator is attempting to find a trench in the dark in order to mine it, and he is carrying ‘six German helmets, a few bayonets, and a variety of other trophies’ that he has taken as souvenirs.81 He joins the narrator’s group, commenting ‘Splendid […] I’m your man’ when he discovers what the mission is, and guides them towards the trench, explaining that ‘I think there are one or two Germans in it’.82 When James falls into the trench and ‘hit[s] a German’, causing an enormous uproar, the ‘only person who seemed quite oblivious of all the turmoil was James’.83 James (inevitably) comes across the German waiter from the Pytchley Hunt ball, now serving in the enemy forces, giving James the opportunity to exact his revenge. In the midst of the fighting, James appears ‘dragging a diminutive Boche behind 79  Laura Ugolini. 2016. Men and Menswear: Sartorial Consumption in Britain 1880–1939. London: Routledge, pp. 72–73. 80  Sapper. 1915. James and the Land Mine. Daily Mail, 3 June. In Sapper’s War Stories, 351–57. London, Hodder and Stoughton. 1941, p. 355. 81  Sapper. James and the Land Mine, p. 355. 82  Sapper. James and the Land Mine, p. 355. 83  Sapper. James and the Land Mine, p. 356.

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him’.84 The man is, as James puts it, ‘the accursed swine-dog of a waiter at the Pytchley Hunt ball’. James asks him ‘Are you aware that you spoilt the best pair of silk breeches I ever had, and I haven’t paid for them yet?’ before tossing him into ‘the bit of trench where the land mines were’.85 James’ identity as a knut thus actually contributes to the fierceness of his fighting. Sandie Byrne’s comments on Saki’s characters in wartime are illuminating here, helping to explain how men who were knut-like before the war might find themselves well suited to the fighting. Byrne argues compellingly that in Saki’s work ‘a male may be languid, flaunt his nice eyelashes, or be obsessed by his hair-parting, and be attractive’, but he cannot ‘be weak-willed or cowardly’. This combination of ‘virtus and the love of England combine to make it not implausible that the Saki youths would put aside the pleasures of wardrobe and palate to fight for their country’.86 The ‘Saki youths’ in uniform would in this sense reflect the rare cases seen elsewhere in service-author stories of men becoming soldiers without relinquishing the knut-like qualities of the pre-war identities. The wartime stories that Saki did write in fact show something of this, with their narrators maintaining mischievousness while also recognising the terrible conditions of the front line (see Chap. 2). The continuity between service-author stories and pre-war literary culture feeds into the impression of stability that was fostered in the professionally produced press. Popular periodicals were marketed as points of permanency in a world of flux. A Punch editorial in 1911, for example, listed a number of fashions and innovations that had been mocked in the magazine, including the bicycle, the telephone, lawn tennis, newly coined words, and ‘the rise of the aesthetes’. The implication was that Punch’s derision was a source of constancy in an ever-changing world.87 As Patrick Leary explains, Punch’s editors also, in a similar appeal to the enjoyment to be found in familiarity, took the ephemerality of the comic magazine format, its ‘close engagement with the passing topics of the moment’ and ‘successfully commodified it in the form of nostalgia’. Twenty years after the magazine first appeared, it was possible for readers to buy it in bound volumes with editorial comment explaining the ‘jokes and fashions of the  Sapper. James and the Land Mine, p. 356  Sapper. James and the Land Mine, p. 357. 86  Sandi Byrne. 2007. The Unbearable Saki: The Work of H. H, Munro. Oxford: Oxford UP, p. 11. 87  Anon. 1911. 1841–1911, Punch, 19 July. 84 85

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1840s to the readers of the 1860s’.88 The Strand likewise enjoyed success partly for the impression of steadiness that it gave in a society that seemed to be altering radically at the end of the nineteenth century. Celebrating the magazine’s first ten years, its editor George Newnes reflected that it had endured ‘manifold and amazing changes, […] most of which it was itself the cause’, embracing the complexity involved in modern publishing practice being presented as a source of constancy.89 David Finkelstein meanwhile attributes the increased sales of Blackwood’s during the war to its continued resistance to change: it ‘gained renewed vigour from maintaining the literary status quo’.90 The humour in First World War service-­ author stories that is associated with resilience, calmness, and stoicism, reflects the magazines’ image as being sources of stability and durability. The war as it appeared in their pages seemed to be one more disruption that could be laughed off.

‘Look! A Man with a Lamp Is Signalling to us | That’s a Light in a Cottage Window, Sir’: Conclusions91 Pre-1914 periodicals’ marketing, pre-1914 military stories, and pre-1914 depictions of Tommy Atkins and knuts all fed into the idealised representations of humorous soldierliness that service-author stories present. The narrators and characters that feature in service-author narratives are portrayed as having the capacity to maintain a sense of humour during the war and to be in possession of inner, sometimes hidden, strength or ‘grit’. Displaying a sense of humour is depicted as a commendable reaction to warfare. Such depictions reflected the idealised, exclusive notions of martial masculinity and British identity that were articulated elsewhere in national periodicals before and during the conflict. Humorous war stories and the periodicals in which they appeared show large degrees of continuity with their pre-war counterparts, aligning with the stability of humorous literature identified in previous chapters. Experience of the conflict and characters’ responses to it are squarely positioned in service-author  Leary, p. 3.  Qtd. in Kate Jackson. 2001. George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910: Culture and Profit. Aldershot: Ashgate, p. 90. 90  Finkelstein, p. 108. 91  Anon. 1915. A Signal Success: A Comedy of Flagging Interest. Growler, October, p. 8. 88 89

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stories as appropriate and possible to represent through existing, familiar literary culture. War experience is not seen as being so extraordinary that it required new forms of expression. Correspondingly, service-author stories are underpinned by the kind of emotional tameness that is found elsewhere in humorous Great War literature. The narratives privilege mild, amused, sardonic attitudes to the conflict, avoiding any expression of extreme feeling.

References A’Beckett, Arthur. 1900a. Plans for the perfect Defence of London. Punch, 21 February, p. 13. ———. 1900b. The way to the service; or, then, now, and to-morrow. Punch, 21 February, p. 129. ———. 1901a. The more than usually gay soldier at Islington. Punch, 5 June, p. 419. ———. 1901b. The Soldier’s Progress. Punch 22 May, p. 391. Anderson, Emily. 2022. An ‘unseemly joke’: Service-author stories and Wyndham Lewis’s Blasting and Bombardiering (1937). Journal of Modern Literature 45: 34–51. Anon. 1907. An Eddy of war. Blackwood’s Magazine, April, pp. 454–472. ———. 1911a. 1841–1911, Punch, 19 July. ———. 1911b. A sweep of the pen. Blackwood’s Magazine, April, pp. 550–554. ———. 1915a. Report. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, September. ———. 1915b. A signal success: A comedy of flagging interest. Growler, October, p. 8. ———. 1915c. Waining Again. Punch, 24 February, p. 146. ———. 1916a. Editorial Notes. RAMC Depot Magazine, June, p. 2. ———. 1916b. Lieutenant Alec Johnston. Obituary. Punch, 17 May, p. 326. ———. 1916c. Papers of the firing line. The Strand Magazine 52: 558–762. ———. 1917a. Fiction. Rev. of No Man’s Land. The Spectator, 18 August, p. 17. ———. 1918. The Instantaneous Rank-Adjuster. Punch, 9 October, p. 230. ———. 1917b. An unexpected visit, or caught bending. The Kinglet, September, pp. 12–13. Anstey, F. 1904. Our Mr Jabberjee in the Far East. Punch, 20 April, p. 286. Bibbings, Lois. 2009. Telling Tales about men: Conceptions of conscientious objectors to military service during the First World War. Manchester UP. Byrne, Sandi. 2007. The unbearable Saki: The work of H.  H. Munro. Oxford: Oxford UP. Drennan, W. St. G. 1915. On the Spy-Trail. Punch, 27 January, p. 66.

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Dugan, Lawrence. 2011. Worcestershirewards: Wodehouse and the baroque. Connotations 20: 228–247. Edginton, May. 1917. War-workers. Strand 54: 386–394. Einhaus, Ann-Marie. 2013. The short story and the first world war. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Falstaff. 1916. A free trip to the continent. The Lead-Swinger, 19 March. Finkelstein, David. 1998. Literature, propaganda, and the first world war: The case of Blackwood’s magazine. In Grub street and the ivory tower: Literary journalism and literary scholarship from fielding to the internet, ed. Jeremy Treglown and Bridget Bennett, 91–111. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fuller, J. G. 1990. Troop morale and popular culture in the British and dominion armies 1914–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ghilchip, D. L. 1917. First Ex-Knut, Punch, 1 August, p. 67. Graham, Winifred. 1918. The Ballunatics. Strand 56: 116–119. Gray, Donald. 1966. The uses of Victorian Laughter. Victorian Studies 10: 145–176. Griffiths, Andrew. 2015. The new journalism, the new imperialism and the fiction of empire, 1870–1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Halsey, Ernest. 1914. A candidate for the force. Punch, 2 September, p. 199. Harvey, F.  W. 1915. A true tale of the listening post. Fifth Gloucester Gazette, September. Hay, Ian. 1917. Shell out! In Carrying on—after the first hundred thousand, 24–46. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons. Hendley, Matthew. 2012. Cultural mobilization and British responses to cultural transfer in Total war: The Shakespeare tercentenary of 1916. First World War Studies 3: 25–49. Hobbes, Thomas. 1650. Human nature. In The elements of law natural and politic, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin, 21–108. Oxford: Oxford UP. 1994. Howard, Keble. 1917. Miss Pett’s grand chance. Strand 54: 463–470. Hunter, Adrian. 2007. The Cambridge introduction to the short story in English. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hynes, Samuel. 1992. A war imagined: The first world war and English culture. London: Pimlico. Jackson, Kate. 2001. George Newnes and the new journalism in Britain, 1880–1910: Culture and profit. Aldershot: Ashgate. Jaillant, Lise. 2011. Sapper, Hodder & Stoughton, and the popular literature of the great war. Book History 14: 137–166. Johnston, Alec. 1915a. At the front. Punch, 1 September, p. 187. ———. 1915b. At the Back of the front. Punch, 29 September, p. 270. ———. 1915c. At the front. Punch, 8 December, p. 476. ———. 1915d. At the Back of the front. Punch, 15 December, p. 496. ———. 1916. At the front. Punch, 15 March, p. 180.

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Kipling, Rudyard. 1892. Tommy. In Barrack-room ballads and other verses, 6–9. London: Methuen. Leary, Patrick. 2010. The punch brotherhood: Table talk and print culture in mid-­ Victorian London. London: British Library. Lucas, E. V. 1916. The vermilion box. New York: George H. Doran Company. Marsh, Richard. 1904. The girl on the sands. The Strand Magazine 28: 423–433. ———. 1905a. The gift horse. The Strand Magazine 29: 281–290. ———. 1905b. Her fourth. The Strand Magazine 30: 760–770. ———. 1906. That hansom. The Strand Magazine 31: 564–571. ———. 1915. Sam Briggs becomes a soldier: III.  Two Stripes. The Strand Magazine 49: 334–344. Maunder, Andrew. 2011. Introduction. In British literature of World War I: The short story and the novella, ed. Andrew Maunder, xxxiii–lxiii. London: Pickering & Chatto. Meyer, Jessica. 2007. The tuition of manhood: ‘Sapper’s’ war stories and the literature of war. In Publishing in the First World War: Essays in book history, ed. Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed, 113–128. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mugglestone, Lynda. 2016. How to be ‘knuts’ for war: Refashioning male identity in WW1. English Words in Wartime: Tracking Language on the Move in WW1. wordsinwartime.wordpress.com/2016/08/22/how-­to-­be-­knuts-­for-­ war-­fashioning-­male-­identity-­in-­ww1/#more-­2440. Accessed 30 July 2018. Muir, A. 1916. The Khaki Bags. Salut Poilu, pp. 39–40. Palmer, Beth. 2016. Prose. In The Routledge handbook to nineteenth-century British periodicals and newspapers, ed. Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, 138–150. London: Routledge. Punch Magazine Cartoon Archive. 2017. http://www.punch.co.uk/about/. Accessed 14 Mar 2017. Sapper. 1915. James and the Land Mine. Daily Mail, 3 June. In Sapper’s war stories, 351–357. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1941. ———. 1916. Retribution. Strand 52: 51–60. ———. 1917. Bendigo Jones—His tree. In No Man’s land, 197–216. London: Hodder & Stoughton. ———. 1918. The passing of the seasick cow. Strand 55: 175–182. Stockton, Frank. 1899. The snowflake of the service. The Strand Magazine 18: 401–408. Ugolini, Laura. 2016. Men and menswear: Sartorial consumption in Britain 1880–1939. London: Routledge. White, R. F. 1915a. A territorial in India. Punch. 27 January, p. 69. ———. 1915b. A territorial in India. Punch, 17 February, p. 135. ———. 1915c. A territorial in India. Punch, 12 May, p. 366.

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———. 1915d. A territorial in India. Punch, 6 October, p. 287. ———. 1915e. A territorial in India. Punch, 22 December, p. 506. Wilson, T.  P. C. 1917. How to become a town major. Punch, 21 November, pp. 346–47. Wodehouse, P. G. 1914. The Knuts O’London. Vanity Fair, September, p. 43. X. 1915. Attacked by a submarine. The Gambardier, April, p. 21.

CHAPTER 9

Conclusions

Humorous texts of the First World War provide valuable and often surprising insights into how the conflict was represented and processed emotionally in a large and varied body of literary culture. Humorous portrayals indicate how audiences wanted to feel. The large number of humorous texts that were produced about the conflict—and the large number of these that appeared in popular publishing contexts—shows that many people did seek out humour and were successfully amused by the humorous texts they consumed. Humorous representations of the conflict also reveal the attitudes and behaviour that were popularly idealised and privileged, as well as the anxieties the war provoked. This not only includes exploration of death and loss and how to respond to them, but also the war’s effects on family, gender, and class dynamics. These texts highlight the importance of the muted and the un-dramatic in war experiences and their representation. Often focussing on more ordinary and familiar spaces than the front line, they bring to the fore ‘smaller’ aspects of what the war involved, zooming in on that which could otherwise escape notice. When grander, better-known parts of war experience such as death and loss do appear, humour shrinks and familiarises them. Amusement, in this context a mild and minor feeling, signals that the conflict need not have an enormous, extreme emotional impact and encourages endurance.

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The humorous First World War literature discussed in this book often has propagandistic elements. At the very least, the texts communicate perspectives on war experiences that show the conflict to be manageable and as having a limited impact, rather than as being devastatingly destructive. The more extremely propagandistic works go beyond this in vilifying individuals who are deemed to contravene wartime society’s expected behaviour. Where elements of protest do appear, as in for example those trench-newspaper texts in which contributors react against the military’s mechanistic quality, this protest still has the effect of presenting a tamed, familiarised perspective on war experiences. Those servicemen who react against the military machine for instance do so by painting themselves as familiarly fallible humans. Works of protest have historically had the greatest prominence in First World War studies and wider culture. Yet studying humorous perspectives reveals among other things how representation and amusement as an aesthetic emotion worked in tandem to encourage particular attitudes and responses. Humorous literature did much to encourage war-supporting convictions and conduct. If audiences were laughing rather than angry, and if the conflict is framed as a smaller disruption than it might otherwise seem, then the likelihood of resistance diminishes. The example that springs to mind here—particularly subtle because it acknowledges grief while still recommending stoicism—is J.  M. Barrie’s depiction of a bereaved father trying to maintain his sense of humour in A Well-­ Remembered Voice (1918). Because humorous Great War literature has generally lacked visibility, there is much more to discover in how it can expand and add nuance to understandings of the conflict and its culture. Questions remain about the place of humour in changing attitudes to the war—about different generations’ views of the conflict. Equally, there is work to be done in tracing the afterlives and influences of different styles of First World War humour in literature published in the post-war period. It would be understandable if humorous stances on war experience diminished at this point. Perhaps, as with lots of humour, the humour of the wartime period is ephemeral since ‘you had to be there’. And perhaps increases in narratives of disillusionment meant that Great War humour was dismissed in the decades after the conflict’s cessation. It seems likely that the number of jokes being made (or recorded) would dwindle once military units disbanded and servicemen returned to civilian life, losing outlets such as trench newspapers in which to express themselves.

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Yet even a light scratching of the post-war literary surface shows that humour did not disappear from representations of the conflict. Memoirs and war books published in the 1920s and 1930s are a revealing starting point. These often express senses of disillusionment, but some of the most famous examples also employ the kind of tame, insouciant, British humour on which this monograph focusses. In doing so, they hark back with some affection to the humour of the Great War. Exploration of humour in these works has already begun with reference to Wyndham Lewis’ Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), and similar work could usefully be extended to look in more detail at texts such as Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That (1929) and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928).1 Graves’ memoir for example contains some highly satirical and mischievous passages; episodes that play with classic punch lines; and a ‘joke’ at the expense of the reader in its famous last line (Graves states he has ‘learned to tell the truth—nearly’).2 He also experiments with neat comic structures to express how certain experiences mixed the traumatising and the absurd, making use of humorous form to convey considerable nuance.3 Sassoon likewise includes anecdotes that could have come straight out of a trench newspaper. (The narrator for instance, nervous when on sentry duty in misty conditions, shouts out a challenge not as he anticipated to an approaching foe, but to what turns out to be a ‘Kentish cow’).4 Having established the huge cultural prominence of humour during the war, certain works by some of the most well-known authors of the conflict take on a different colouring. This includes reassessment of texts published during the war as well as afterwards. For example, in the knowledge of humour’s importance, humorous elements and influences start to come to the fore in poems such as Graves’ ‘Escape’ (1917) (‘Then swiftly Cerberus’ wide mouths I cram | With army biscuit smeared with 1  Emily Anderson 2022. An ‘unseemly joke’: Service-author Stories and Wyndham Lewis’sBlasting and Bombardiering 1937. Journal of Modern Literature 45: 34–51. 2  Robert Graves 1929. Good-Bye to All That. 2014. London: Penguin Classics, p. 446. 3   Emily Anderson 2016. ‘A great joke?’ The Role of Humour in Robert Graves’ Representation of the First World War’. St John’s College, Oxford: Thirteenth International Robert Graves Conference. There is a similar interest in the challenges of retrospective ‘neatening’ in Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), in which Lewis writes: ‘A spot-of tidying-up had to be effected. It was an area of my past which requires a little retrospective attention. Don’t you often feel about some phase of your existence that it requires going over with a fine comb and putting in order?’ (London: Imperial War Museum. 1992, p. 6). 4  Siegfried Sassoon 1928. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. In The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. London: Faber and Faber. 1986, p. 223.

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ration jam’).5 At the same time, the existence and representational value of humour in writing by the well-known war authors should not be the only route explored. This would risk suggesting that humour is of legitimate interest simply because the canonical writers used it. Because humorous Great War literature tends not to be canonical, lesser-studied works offer the most potential. Humorous texts about the Great War are generally un-dramatic and muted in what they portray, the perspectives they take, and the feelings they invite, and speak to the more everyday experiences of the conflict. These humorous texts do not necessarily work against or contradict the better-known poetry and prose that gives powerful representations of the most traumatic and extreme elements of the war. Humorous texts can instead sit alongside celebrated, serious Great War literature, enriching our picture of wartime experiences and of wartime literary culture. Humorous texts of the Great War still often have the capacity to amuse— to confront audiences with a feeling they may not anticipate encountering when consuming First World War literature—and because of this they also have the capacity to provoke, both emotionally and intellectually. There is room for this kind of disruption to how we think about the conflict and its literature.

References Anderson, Emily. 2016. ‘A great joke’? The Role of Humour in Robert Graves’ Representation of the First World War’. In Thirteenth international Robert Graves conference. Oxford: St John’s College. ———. 2022. An ‘unseemly joke’: Service-author Stories and Wyndham Lewis’s Blasting and Bombardiering (1937). Journal of Modern Literature 45: 34–51. Graves, Robert. 1917. Escape. In Fairies and Fusiliers. London: William Heinemann. ———. 1929. Good-bye to all that. 2014. London: Penguin Classics. Lewis, Wyndham. 1937. Blasting and bombardiering. London: Imperial War Museum. 1992. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1928. Memoirs of a fox-hunting man. In The complete memoirs of George Sherston. London: Faber and Faber. 1986.

5

 Graves 1917. ‘Escape’. In Fairies and Fusiliers. London: William Heinemann, p. 63.

Index1

A Abbey Theatre, 89 Academy and Literature, The, 21 Anderson, Benedict, 27 Anglocentricism, 24, 29 Animals, 35, 38–43, 81, 132, 133, 145, 146 Anthologies, 13, 13n31, 201n10 Anthropomorphism, 33n38, 145, 146, 146n41 Apollo Theatre, London, 78 Atalanta, 147 Athenaeum, The, 26, 61 B B.E.F. Times, see Wipers Times, The Bairnsfather, Bruce, 23, 24, 29 Balkan News, The, 164

Barrie, J. M., 14, 48, 55, 58, 59n46, 115, 226 New Word, The, 17, 53, 105, 112, 115, 126 Peter Pan, 56–58, 58n40, 113 pre-war work, 58, 59, 82, 89 views on censorship, 58 Well-Remembered Voice, A, 16, 47, 48, 51, 53, 58, 59, 68, 69, 226 Bateman, H. M., 136 Behind the Lines, 170 Belgium, 63n67, 134, 135 Bendall, Ernest, 94, 111 Benjamin, Walter, 185, 187, 189 Bergson, Henri, 26, 153, 154, 176, 177, 177n71, 184, 185 Bird, A. W., 143–155 Blackadder, 1

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Anderson, Humour in British First World War Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34051-2

229

230 

INDEX

Blackwood’s Magazine, 15, 201, 211, 220 Bluestone 42, 50n4 Blunden, Edmund ‘The Guard’s Mistake,’ 37 Undertones of War, 37 Boer War, 25 B1: Chronicle of the Reserve Garrison Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, 160n7 Braganza, The, 162, 183, 184, 186 Brieux, Eugène, 82, 83n47 British humour, 16, 26–31, 36, 37, 39, 200, 215n66 Brooke, Rupert ‘The Soldier,’ 150, 167 Browning, Robert, 146 Buzzer, The, 146, 171, 175, 181 Bystander, 32 C Carr, Corporal Ben, 171 Carroll, Lewis, 62, 146, 166 Cartoons, 23, 60, 132, 136, 139, 146, 180 Casualties, 48 Catch-22, 2 Censorship, 8, 16, 49, 51, 57, 57n34, 58, 63, 74, 74n7, 77, 80, 80n35, 82–85, 83n47, 88, 90, 101, 108, 108n29, 112, 121, 146, 160, 163, 185, 188, 200, 206 Lord Chamberlain, The, 49, 54, 57, 57n34, 59, 74, 78, 80, 84, 96, 111 Chaplin, Charles, 162, 163, 177–189 Shoulder Arms, 183, 186 Churchill, Winston, 181 Cinema, 178, 179, 181, 183n96, 183n98, 186, 187

Class, 16, 21, 24, 29, 47, 77–90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 101, 114, 118, 120, 185, 201, 225 Coleridge, S. T. Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 165, 166 Collins, Sewell, 78–90, 108 Conscienceless Objector, The, 17, 105, 106, 127 Comfort, 4, 48, 133, 140, 147–150 Conditions, 4, 63, 63n67, 132, 143, 144, 159, 172, 186, 202–204, 207, 212, 217 Conscientious objectors, 106–108, 115, 125, 217n74 Court Theatre, London, 78, 88 Croom-Johnson, A., 114 Cultural mobilisation, 211 D Daily Mail, The, 23n9, 200, 201 Dark, Richard, 133 ‘Poultry and the War,’ 17, 133 de Stein, Edward, 131 Death, 4, 7, 9, 16, 41, 42, 47–53, 60–69, 86, 118, 142, 148, 155, 199, 206, 217 Dehumanization, 42 Diaries, 146, 162, 168, 169, 169n41, 176 Domestic farce, 90, 118 Drilling, 65, 135n7, 155, 183–185, 187, 215 du Maurier, Gerald, 59n46 Duke of York’s Theatre, London, 105 Dump, The, 49, 152, 162 E Edginton, May, 136 ‘War-Workers,’ 17, 136, 137

 INDEX 

Eggs, 4, 35, 133, 134, 142 Egoist, The, 32 Emanuel, Walter, 25, 26 Era, The, 87, 112 F Fag Ends, 49 Female identity, 106, 116, 124 Fifth Gloucester Gazette, The, 62, 63n67, 161, 167, 181, 216n70 Film, 178 Food, 4, 35, 63, 63n67, 132–134, 144, 149, 165, 171, 172 bacon, 124, 126 bully beef, 63n67, 143, 145, 148, 204 cocoa, 91 coffee, 124 eggs, 133, 134 jam, 4, 132–135, 142, 145, 155, 170 Fortnightly Gazette of the 22nd Battalion Royal Fusiliers, 32 Fortnightly Review, 59 France, 15, 22, 26, 28, 32, 73, 122, 134, 148, 152 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 9, 26n17, 52, 55, 57, 80n35, 81 Fuller, J. G., 14, 160, 161, 162n16, 188, 206 Fussell, Paul, 37 G Galsworthy, John, 77, 88, 89, 95, 96 Foundations, The, 16, 78–80, 82, 86, 88, 90, 110, 112 pre-war work, 82, 83 views on theatre censorship, 80 Gambardier, The, 49, 146, 171, 208 Garstin, E. J. L., 145

231

Gehenna Gazette, The, 49 Georgian poetry, 5 Germans, 15, 22, 23, 28, 30, 41, 64, 84, 85, 124, 125, 140, 153, 160, 167–169, 172, 209, 212, 218 Gibson, Wilfred W. Gitana, Gertie, 171, 172, 174, 175 Gordon Keown, Anna Reported Missing, 7 Gordon Laws, A., 136 Graham, Winifred ‘The Ballunatics,’ 17, 141, 142 Grahame, Kenneth, 146n41 Graves, Robert, 227 ‘Escape’, 227 Good-Bye to All That, 227 Grief, 47, 48, 52–55, 57, 62, 69 Grousing, 63, 172, 185 Growler, The, 87, 161, 162n14, 167, 167n31, 171, 172, 174, 174n55, 180, 180n90, 181, 181n94, 186, 220–221 H Hades Herald, The, 146 Haig, Field Marshal Douglas, 73 Hangar Happenings, 161 Hangar Herald, The, 49, 153, 161 Hardy, Thomas ‘Drummer Hodge,’ 150 Harvey, F. W., 190, 216n70 Harwood, Harold Marsh Billeted: A Comedy in Three Acts, 17, 117–123, 127 Hay Beith, John, see Ian Hay Hay, Ian, 200, 201, 211 Carrying On, 210 First Hundred Thousand, The, 200–202, 216 Heath Robinson, W., 132, 139, 140 Hector Hugo Munro, see Saki

232 

INDEX

Heldmann, Richard, see Marsh, Richard Helm, The, 49, 175 Hobbes, Thomas, 27, 28, 204 Hobocob, The, 64, 161 Holmes, Sherlock, 163, 165–167, 167n31 Homosexuality, 106–108, 108n29, 116, 127 Howard, Keble, 136 I Ibsen, Henrik, 75, 102 Injury, 4, 16, 49, 50, 63, 143, 206 Insouciance, 5, 17, 37, 185, 198–200, 212 It narratives, 145n37 J Jennings, Gertrude, 77, 96 Acid Drops, 94 Between the Soup and the Savoury, 94, 95 No Servants, 16, 78, 90, 91, 93 Poached Eggs and Pearls, 16, 78, 90, 93, 94, 120 pre-war work, 94, 95 The Pros and Cons, 94 Jerome, Jerome K, 26 Johnston, Alec, 202–205, 208, 211, 212, 214 Joint Select Committee on Stage Plays, 1909, 74 K Kant, Immanuel, 9 Keble Bell, John, see Howard, Keble Kersley Holmes, William, 116 ‘Feminine Invasion,’ 116

Kierkegaard, Søren, 9 Kinglet, The, 187n112, 208 Kingston, Gertrude, 84, 85 Kipling, Rudyard, 146n41, 164–178, 215 Barrack-Room Ballads, 215 Kirby, Walter, 22 Kitchener, Lord, 22, 106 Knuts, 199, 216–220, 217n73 L Larks, 34, 56, 81, 81n40, 209 Lead-Swinger, The, 49, 187n112, 207 Lear, Edward, 61, 66, 68, 146 Book of Nonsense, 60 Lee, Joseph, 148, 149n53, 150 Macfarlane’s Dug-Out, 17, 150, 154, 155 Leete, Alfred, 22 Lewis, Wyndham, 30–33, 30n31, 41–44, 54, 227 Blast, 30 Blasting and Bombardiering, 30n31, 40, 215n66, 227 Cantleman’s Spring Mate, 31, 33n37, 39, 42 ‘French Poodle,’ 32, 39–41 Meaning of the Wild Body, The, 42 Tyros, 42, 215n66 Limericks, 10, 16, 49, 51, 60–68, 61n59 Lines of Fire, 161, 169, 170, 175 Little Review, The, 32, 33n37 Little Theatre in the Adelphi, 78, 84 Lloyd, Marie, 173 London Hippodrome, 105 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth Song of Hiawatha, The, 164, 166 Lucas, E. V., 217

 INDEX 

M Macaulay, Rose What Not: A Prophetic Comedy, 79n28 Machine-age comedy, 154, 176–178, 177n71, 183, 187, 189 Maidstone Magazine, The, 60n55 Male, 17, 53, 101, 104–117, 121, 125, 126, 144, 160n5, 219 Manchester Guardian, The, 23, 78, 80, 124 Marsh, Richard, 213 Masculinity, 36, 53, 104–116, 124–126, 167, 214, 217, 220 McNeile, Herman Cyril, see Sapper Milne, A. A., 36, 37, 60, 183n98, 213n57 Boy Comes Home, The, 17, 105, 109, 111, 117, 127 Minden Magazine, The, 160 Modernism, 4, 5, 43, 200, 204, 205 Monarchy, British, 85 Morale, 9, 14, 31, 51, 55 Morning Leader, The, 124 Morning Post, 32 Morreall, John, 10, 67 Mourning, 48, 52, 53, 57 Mud, 7, 35–37, 63, 64, 159, 202, 212 Mudhook, The, 168, 169 Muir, A., 207 Music hall, 13, 162, 162n16, 164, 171, 173–177, 173n53, 174n56, 181, 183n96, 186, 190, 216, 217 Gilbert the Filbert, 217 N National identity, 7, 15, 24, 27, 29, 36 New Drama, 58 Newnes, George, 27, 32, 220 Ngai, Sianne, 5–7, 9, 11, 30, 44, 55, 82

233

Nonsense, 16, 61, 62, 63n67, 65, 66n79, 166 Nursery rhymes, 49–51, 60–63, 67 O Outlook, The, 32 Owen, Wilfred, 6, 12n28 ‘Apologia Pro Poemate Meo,’ 7 P Pall Mall Gazette, The, 124 Pall Mall Magazine, The, 25, 26 Parody, 49, 50, 60–68, 162, 164–167, 171, 175–177, 215 Pastoral, 34, 36, 37, 41 Pennington Press, The, 146 Pepys, Samuel, 162, 164 Phillippine King, Annie, 135, 136n8 Philpotts, Eden, 61n59 The Playhouse, London, 94 Play Pictorial, The, 121 Plum and Apple, The, 168 Potter, Beatrix, 146n41 Prince’s Theatre, London, 78 Propaganda, 6, 16, 21, 25, 29, 31, 43, 73, 105, 122, 174n56, 200, 201, 211, 216, 226 Punch, 15, 21, 23–25, 60, 60n54, 136, 146, 150, 153n66, 154, 168, 198n4, 201, 202, 202n19, 211, 212, 213n57, 216, 217, 219 Q Quaysider, The, 159 R RAMC Depot Magazine, 116, 167, 183, 186, 217

234 

INDEX

Rats, 17, 34, 143, 145–147, 149, 154, 155 Raven-Hill, Leonard, 24, 153n66 Refugee, 134 Review of Reviews, 114 Risk, R. K. ‘Jamouflage,’ 133 Royalty Theatre, London, 78, 94, 117 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, The, 164 Rutter, Owen, 164 S Saki, 31–39, 33n38, 42, 43, 219 ‘Birds on the Western Front,’ 31, 33, 35–38 Square Egg, The, 31, 34–38 When William Came, 36 Salut Poilu, 207 Sapper, 198, 200, 201, 209, 214, 214n62, 216–218 ‘Bendigo Jones – His Tree,’ 204 ‘James and the Land Mine,’ 218 ‘The Passing of the Seasick Cow,’ 210 ‘Retribution,’ 209, 210 Sassoon, Siegfried, 6, 12n28, 227 ‘The General,’ 67 Satire, 7, 31, 39, 41–43, 58, 60, 86, 87, 90, 95, 107, 108, 115n59, 116, 125, 151, 161, 163, 169, 185, 188, 198 Saturday Review, The, 26, 89 Schopenhauer, Athur, 9, 10 Seaman, Owen, 26 Searchlight, The, 160n7 Self-deprecation, 185, 198, 199, 205, 208 Service authors, 17, 36, 37, 43, 126, 198–213, 216 precedents, 214, 215, 219, 220 stories, 32, 40

718 W.T. Company’s Magazine, 165 Shakespeare, William, 26, 162, 164, 207 Sharp, Evelyn, 123, 124 ‘Patriot’s Day, The,’ 17, 102, 118, 123, 124, 127 Shaw, George Bernard, 26, 73, 75, 77, 83n47, 84–90, 87n65, 102, 123n87 Augustus Does His Bit, 16, 78, 86, 87n65, 88, 89, 95 Common Sense about the War, 85 Inca of Perusalem, The, 16, 78, 78n22, 83, 84, 86, 89, 95 Mrs Warren’s Profession, 88 O’Flaherty, V.C., 73, 88 pre-war work, 89, 95 Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, The, 89 Shell shock, 30n31, 41, 42, 81, 82, 204, 215n66 Sketch, The, 180n90 Smith, Bertram ‘The Interpreters,’ 134, 135 Snapper: The Monthly Journal of the East Yorkshire Regiment, 160 Somerset Maugham, W. Home and Beauty, 121 Somme, The battle of, 22, 64, 81, 111 Speaker, The, 59 Special correspondents, see War correspondents Spectator, The, 1, 214n62 Sphinx, The, 60n55 Spiritualism, 51 Stage, The, 88 Stage Society, The, 88 Stampa, G. L., 22 Strand Magazine, The, 15, 23, 25, 27, 32, 138, 139, 201, 205, 213, 220 Street, G. S., 57, 74, 79, 80, 83–85, 88, 94, 108, 109, 120 Studdy, G. E., 142

 INDEX 

Suffragism, 124, 175 United Suffragists, 124 Women’s Social and Political Union, 124 Sunday Mirror, The, 88 T Telephones, 136, 150–155, 153n66, 219 Tennyson Jesse, Fryniwyd (Winifred), 122 Billeted: A Comedy in Three Acts, 17, 117–123, 127 The Sword of Deborah: First-hand Impressions of the British Women’s Army in France, 122 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 62 Theories of humour, 28, 41, 42, 54, 215n66 incongruity theory, 8, 9 play theory, 8, 10 relief theory, 8, 55 superiority theory, 8, 10, 27 Times, The, 59, 74, 82, 147 Tommy Atkins, 22–24, 207, 213–220, 216n70 Trench newspapers, 14–17, 33n38, 49–51, 60, 63, 64, 67, 145, 151, 154, 160, 161, 163, 167, 169, 171, 175, 177, 189, 198, 206, 207 Troly-Curtin, Marthe, 180n90 U Understatement, 198, 199, 203 Unfinishing, 50n4

235

V Very Light, The, 23 Victoria Palace, 105, 112 W Wallacefield Christmas Book, 160n5 Wangler, The, 62 War correspondents, 199, 213, 214 Westminster Gazette, The, 32, 124 White, R. F., 202, 203, 205–208, 214 Whizz-Bang, The, 23, 23n9, 63n67, 152, 181, 189 Wilde, Oscar The Importance of Being Earnest, 216 Wilhelm II, 83–85, 133 Wilson, T. P. C., 204 Winter, Jay, 4 Wipers Times, The, 17, 33, 34n40, 143, 145, 159, 159n2, 160n3, 161 Wodehouse, P. G., 216 Women’s war work, 116, 118, 122, 123, 160n5 Wordsworth, William, 62 Wyndham’s Theatre, London, 47 Y Yellow Book, The, 124 YMCA, 179 Z Zoomorphism, 35, 38, 42