C. E. Montague (1867–1928)

Essays of general interest reprinted from the Guardian concerning all things English, - topography, rivers, architecture, history, even the weather - such stuff as would enlarge the patriotic hearts of schoolboys; with occasional observations on current social conditions. He does not develop any topics that might discomfit the reader. There are some remarks relevant to WWI, a topic he deals with more aggressively in other books.

"War is not everything, nor need the best soldier be at all other times the best man. But the points where we made a poor show in the war were mainly points of sheer arrest in development; our youths were relatively stunted; something seemed to have got in their way before they could become, in the proper course of mental and moral growth, as self-reliant and as quick to take new means to new ends as the youths from Canada and Australia who made it so painfully plain that they thought of "Tommy" as undersized in body and mind."

On the extinction of the landed gentry class following the war: "There was an undeniable charm about the idea that you could make yourself a real vertebra in the backbone of your country by hunting on four days a week, shooting on one, and riding in on another to imprint your darling conception of corrective justice upon proceedings at petty sessions. If only the practice of virtue were so agreeable!"

His writing is clear and easy to follow, but I think is too reserved and understated, and lacking in vitality. Read H.M.Tomlinson for a warmer and more poetic style.… (altro)

In prefatory remarks Montague describes this book as a collection of yarns peopled by "ardent cranks".

"...they step up to life, they speak to her first and offer to print their own whims on such talk as may pass between them and her before she consigns them to dust."

And such talk it is! Montague renders fully a third of the book in conversations among characters transcribed in various British accents. Two hapless entrepeneurs in "A propo des Bottes," speak in a melodious Irish/Australian patois:

"It seemed that some foreign woman in London, wan Madam Tussore, had acquired the wealth of th' Indies -- that was Brennan's estimate of the profits -- be keepin' a set of graven images, made up of wax -- eminent burglars an' emp'rors an' all the great ones of th' earth, each in his habit same as he lived, an' admittin' the people at sixpence a time, or a shillin' itself, until they'd be awed an' entranced the way they'd be comin' next pay-day again to the booth an' bringin' the children."

"" 'Think,' says Brennan 'what poverty-stricken old sort of a pitch is London, compared to Australy! Consider th' advantages here. An aurif''rous soil; a simple, impreshnable white population, manny of them with incomes that rush in on them like vast tidal waves, at intervals, same as your own, cryin' aloud to be spent; the pop'lar taste for the arts as yet unpolluted be these pestilintial movies that's layin' waste rotten old hem'spheres like Europe; an', as if made to our hand, a creative genius like Thady O'Gorman beyant, that's the greatest warrant in Sydney for forgin' wax figures of sufferin' saints till he has all th' old women south of th' Equator weepin' tears down on to the floor of the church.' "

Most of the pieces are not tales, really, as they lack the drama and exaggeration of good yarns, but autobiographical vignettes revealing the grim/funny contradictions, the tools of mockery, abuse and friendly sarcasm that keep men sane in the tedium of trench warfare.

In "The First Blood Sweep" they place bets each day on who will be the next one killed, but Montague deflects sentimentality or pathos by playing up the richer concerns of men deprived of the simplest pleasures.

" Ince, that we used to call Coom-fra-Wiggan, had started reading a paper that was all creases and curves from coming by post. I had been watching his lips working, shaping the words as he read to himself. And then he let the paper fall on his legs -- of course he was sitting down on the floor like everyone else, with his back to the wall.
"Fair puts lid on, thot do," he said in the flat, draggy way of speaking that some of them have in the north.
"Ah see in paaper," Ince went trailing on, " 's 'ow foalks at whoam 'as got agaate o' stoppin' futball. Noa raacin'! Noa bowlin'! No whoamin' birds! An it's noa futball noo!" he went on mourning. "Then Tommy Tween must cut in. Tommy would almost take the word out of your mouth. "Ow, gow it! Turn 'em all dahn! Never mind us. 'Ow, naow! Wot'd we wawnt wiv a little bit of int'rest in life? Not likely!"… (altro)

Reprinted articles Montague wrote during and after WW1, mostly for the Manchester Guardian, in which he harshly condemns the judgment and obliviousness of British politicians and military leaders in the early months of war. He enlisted in 1914, even though he was 47 years old, and recorded the entirety of the conflict through Armistice Day. In he initial chapters he castigates military leaders for following rules of engagement they learned 30 years ago, but the Germans had long since abandoned.

" While the appointed brains of our army were still swearing hard by the rifle, and nothing but it, as the infantry's friend, a more saving truth had entered in at the door of the infantry's mind." "...they contumaciously saw that so long as you stand in a hole deeper than you are tall you never will hit with a rifle bullet another man standing in just such another hole twenty yards off. But also -- divine idea! -- that you can throw a tin can from your hole into his."

"It was the fault of the war, the outlandish, innovatory war that did not conform to the proper text-books as it ought to have done; an unimagined war of flankless armies scratching each other's faces across an endless thorn hedge, not dreamt of in Staff College philosophy; a war that was always putting out of date the best that had been known and thought and invented, always sending everyone to school again."

Writing from Cologne following Armistice Day, he expresses his anger at the spiteful attitude of the Allies at Versailles, predicting it would come back to haunt them (it did, as we discovered 20 years later).

"Now all was done that man could do, and all was done in vain. The old spirit of Prussia was blowing anew, from strange mouths. From several species of men who passed for English -- as mongrels, curs, shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are all clept by the name of dogs -- there was rising chorus of shrill yelps for the outdoing of all the base folly committed by Prussia when drunk with her old conquest of France."

""So we had failed -- had won the fight and lost the prize; the garland of the war was withered before it was gained. The lost years, the broken youth, the dead friends, the women's overshadowed lives at home, the agony and bloody sweat -- all had gone to darken the stains which most of us had thought to scour out of the world that our children would live in. Many men felt, and said to each other, that they had been fooled."

It was the men in the trenches who pulled England through (and the Americans coming in 1917), Montague says, not the hide-bound Old Army generals sitting with cigars and brandy at GHQ.

He regrets the involvement of the British press in developing propaganda and misinformation campaigns, because by the time the war ended people in England didn't believe anything they read.

There are extensive passages in which Montague examines the morality of war and the effect it had on the participants, referencing classical sources such as Thucydides and Virgil, and occasionally quoting lines from Shakespeare, not in a pedagogical manner, but in personal efforts to make sense of the stupidity and waste of life he saw.… (altro)