The novels of D.H. Lawrence provide some interesting comment upon the war. In chapter X of Aaron’s Rod, titled ‘The War Again’ we read:
It was the same thing here in this officer as it was with the privates, and the same with this Englishman as with a Frenchman or a German or an Italian. Lilly (one of the main characters of the novel and possibly a self-portrait of Lawrence himself) had sat in a cow-shed listening to a youth in the north country: he had sat on the corn-straw that the oxen had been treading out, in Calabria, under the moon: he had sat in a farm-kitchen with a German prisoner: and every time it was the same thing, the same hot, blind, anguished voice of a man who has seen too much, experienced too much, and doesn’t know where to turn. None of the glamour of returned heroes, none of the romance of war: only a hot, blind, mesmerised voice, going on and on, mesmerised by a vision that the soul cannot bear.
One of Lilly’s friends, Captain Herbertson, gives a bloody account of his experiences in the war:
“And a funny thing, you know—how you don’t notice things. In—let me see-1916—the German guns were a lot better than ours. Ours were old, and when they’re old you can’t tell where they’ll hit: whether they’ll go beyond the mark, or whether they’ll fall short. Well this day our guns were firing short, and killing our own men. We’d had the order to charge, and were running forward, and I suddenly felt hot water spurting on my neck—” He put his hand to the back of his neck and glanced round apprehensively. “It was a chap called Innes—Oh, an awfully decent sort—people were in the Argentine. He’d been calling out to me as we were running, and I was just answering. When I felt this hot water on my neck and saw him running past me with no head—he’d got no head, and he went running past me. I don’t know how far, but a long way…Blood, you know—Yes—well—”
In Chapter XIII of the novel there is a reference to a large estate being used for the war wounded:
‘But for two and a half years the house has been a hospital for officers—and even tents in the park and garden—as many as two hundred wounded and sick at a time. We are only just returning to civil life…’
Perhaps this is a model for the Downton Abbey use of the house and grounds for officer war wounded?
The novel was begun in autumn 1917 and published in April 1922.
Ian Brinton