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1918: Books and Literature

Oct1

American author Willa Cather published her novel, My Antonia, in 1918. It’s a story about the life of a Bohemian immigrant girl who lives on the prairie in a town called Black Hawk, Nebraska.

His Family by Ernest Poole won the first Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1918.

Booth Tarkington continued to be a popular and prolific author, publishing his novel of the midwest, The Magnificent Ambersons in 1918. I wrote about The Magnificent Ambersons here. Orson Welles made a movie based on Tarkington’s book that I plan to watch someday.

And last but not least, professor William Strunk, Jr. wrote a little book called The Elements of Style, and he published it himself privately for use in his teaching at Cornell University. It was a writing style guide with eight rules of usage and ten principles of composition, and it greatly influenced a young student and writer named E.B. White (author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little); so much so, that White later found the little book, wrote a newspaper story about it, and revised it for publication by Macmillan Publishers in 1959. (Professor Strunk was, by this time, deceased.)

The little book, known informally as Strunk and White, became a best seller, and its influence on the writing habits and style of academic writers and common journalists has been incalculable. You can listen to an NPR story on the history of Strunk and White:

Reading about the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919

Sep30

Hero Over Here by Kathleen Kudlinski. Theodore’s father and brothers are heroes —fighting the enemy during World War I. Theo learns his own lesson about heroism when he must take care of his entire family, mother and sisters, during the deadly flu epidemic of 1918.

A Time of Angels by Karen Hesse. Hannah flees Boston to escape the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, but she must battle both influenza and prejudice in Battleboro, Vermont where she makes a new life for herself.

Listening for Lions by Gloria Whelan. When Rachel’s missionary parents die in an influenza epidemic in 1919 in Kenya, she is sent by scheming neighbors to England to pose as their daughter for a rich grandfather who may leave his estate to his fake granddaughter if she can endear herself to him.

Winnie’s War by Jennie Moss. Winnie has her courage tested when the influenza attacks her small Texas town of Coward’s Creek. The fun thing about this novel is that Coward’s Creek is a pseudonym for the town of Friendswood, Texas just down the road from our home in southeast Houston.

Reading about the Romanovs

Sep30

On the night of July 16, 1918, the Romanov royal family was awakened around 2:00 am, told to dress, and led down into a half-basement room at the back of the house where they were imprisoned. There they were executed by Bolshevik soldiers who feared that the family would soon be rescued by monarchists with the White Russian army.

Many have wondered for a long time what happened to Princess Anastasia and her brother Prince Alexei, children of Czar Nicholas II of Russia who was murdered along with his wife and at least three of their five children on July 17, 1918. Nicholas and Alexandra: An Intimate Account of the Last of the Romanovs and the Fall of Imperial Russia is an excellent 1967 biography of the last royal family of Russia by historian Robert K. Massie, but it doesn’t deal with the mystery of the disappearance of two of the Czar’s children, possibly Anastasia and Alexei. From time to time impostors have shown up claiming to be Princess Anastasia or Prince Alexei. The bodies of the royal family were exhumed in 1998, and it was then that it was discovered that two of the children’s bodies were indeed missing.

However two more bodies were discovered in 2007. DNA tests proved that these were the bodies of Prince Alexei and Princess Maria. If you’d like to read more about the Romanovs (wrapped in a fictional speculation), check out these books.

Children’s Books:
Anastasia’s Album by Hugh Brewster. Reviewed at The Book Nosher.

Young Adult Fiction:
The Lost Crown by Sarah Miller. Reviewed at The Fourth Musketeer.
Anastasia’s Secret by Susanne Dunlop. Bloomsbury, 2010. Reviewed at The Fourth Musketeer.
Anastasia: The Last Grand Duchess by Carolyn Meyer. (Royal Diaries series) Scholastic, 2000.
The Curse of the Romanovs by Staton Rabin Margaret K. McElderry, 2007. This one’s mostly about Alexei, the Romanov brother,and about Rasputin, and it combines science fiction, horror, and teen historical fiction into a rather odd adventure story. Reviewed at Book Dweeb.
Dreaming Anastasia by Joy Preble. Reviewed at Whimpulsive.

Adult Fiction:
The Tsarina’s Daughter by Carolly Erickson. Reviewed at S. Krishna’s Books.
The Kitchen Boy by Robert Alexander. The kitchen servant boy tells the story of the downfall of the Romanov family from his point of view.
The Romanov Bride by Robert Alexander. A novel about the Russian Revolution and Grand Duchess Elisavayeta Feodorovna Romanov, wife of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia. Reviewed at Life and Times of a New Yorker.
Oksana by Susan May Warren and Susan K. Downs. Reviewed at The Friendly Book Nook.

World War I: The Poems

Sep23

Sonnet V: The Soldier by Rupert Brooke. Brooke died in 1915 of blood poisoning due to a small wound, left unattended.
“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.”

In Flanders Fields by John McCrae.
“If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”

As the war dragged on, men became disillusioned, and the poetry became darker and more pessimistic.

Dulce et Decorum by Wilfred Owen. Listen to this poem by a British soldier who was killed in action in 1918 a week before the war ended.
“Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.”

Suicide in the Trenches by Siegfried Sassoon.
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

American Alan Seeger foretold his own death in the poem, Rendezvous.
“I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade . . .”

This Is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong by Edward Thomas.
“I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.”

World War I: What They Said

Sep22

Primary Source Accounts of World War I by Glenn Sherer and Marty Fletcher.

As I looked through this book and the websites to which it referred, some of the words of soldiers and civilians jumped out at me. It truly makes the time period and the Great War itself take on new meaning when you experience it through the eyes of those who were there.

Borijove Jetvic, fellow terrorist of Gavrilo Princip, the man who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and his wife: “Princip made an appeal to the prison governor: ‘There is no need to carry me to another prison. My life is already ebbing away. I suggest that you nail me to a cross and burn me alive. My flaming body will be a torch to light my people on their way to freedom.'” SE: He thought he was a hero and had no idea of the horror that he had unleashed.

French lieutenant: “Humanity . . . must be mad to do what it is doing. What scenes of horror and carnage! . . . Hell cannot be so terrible.” SE: Yet, hell is worse, and we go there willingly and stupidly, just as men went to war thinking it would be an adventure.

American survivor of the sinking of the Lusitania, Charles Jeffrey: “There was a thunderous roar, as of the collapse of a great building on fire. Then the Lusitania disappeared, dragging hundreds of fellow creatures into the vortex. Many never rose to the surface, but the sea rapidly grew black with the figures of struggling men, women and children.”

American poet Alan Seeger who volunteered to fight with the British before America entered the war: “”If it must be, let it come in the heat of action. Why flinch? It is by far the noblest form in which death can come. It is in a sense almost a privilege. . . . If you are in this thing at all it is best to be in to the limit. And this is the supreme experience.” SE: Is there such a thing as a noble death, or is Death always and forever the enemy, to be endured perhaps stoically and even nobly, but always the enemy of the resurrection life that God has for his children? The ‘supreme experience” is not death, but rather Life.

Teddy Roosevelt in 1917 after the torpedoing of two American ships by the Germans: “There is no question about going to war! Germany is already at war with us.”

Joyce Lewis, American soldier wounded in the Battle of Belleau Wood: “The surgeons came out, finally, and seeing me, exclaimed, ‘What, ain’t you dead yet?’ Then they took me to the hospital, fixt me up as best they could, and sent me to Paris in an automobile ambulance.”

Private William Bishop, Jr.: “Pleasure around here isn’t much except reading your shirt, which means to look it over for cooties. An as for rats, they are the size of a five year old tomcat. You can’t scare them. They crawl all over your bunks, and if you knock them down they just come right back again.”

Colonel Thomas Gowenlock on the Armistice and the end of the war: “All over the world on November 11, 1918, people were celebrating, dancing in the streets, drinking champagne, hailing the armistice that meant the end of the war. But at the front there was no celebration. . . . All were bewildered by the sudden meaninglessness of their existence as soldiers. . . . What was to come next? They did not know and hardly cared. Their minds were numbed by the shock of peace.”

To read more about the Great War the book suggests the following website:

PBS: THe Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century.

Reading about World War I

Sep20

Nonfiction for children and young adults:
Truce: The Day the Soldiers Stopped Fighting by Jim Murphy. World War I and the Christmas Eve, 1914 spontaneous cease-fire. Reviewed by Betsy at Fuse #8.
The War to End All Wars: World War I by Russell Freedman. Reviewed at Bookish Blather.
Primary Source Accounts of World War I by Glenn Sherer and Marty Fletcher. From a series on various American wars published by MyReportLinks.com (Enslow Publishers).
Remember the Lusitania! by Diana Preston. A children’s/young adult version of the adult nonfiction title by the same author. The books includes lots of personal anecdotes about individuals who survived the sinking of the Lusitania and stories of some of the people who did not. It’s a solid, brief (89 pages with pictures) introduction to the subject, but it felt a little rushed. I hardly had time to get to know the characters that the author spotlighted before the entire episode was over and done with.
Unraveling Freedom: The Battle for Democracy on the Home Front During World War I by Ann Bausum. Reviewed by Betsy at Fuse #8.

Adult nonfiction:
The Proud Tower: A portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 by Barbara W. Tuchman. I’m working on this one–about halfway through. The author spent about 200 pages on the Dreyfus affair in France, and if nothing else, I feel as if I know a lot more about French modern history than I did before. Reviewed at Resolute Reader.
The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. I started this book once but didn’t finish. I think after I get through with The Proud Tower, I’ll be ready for guns. The Guns of August won Ms. Tuchman a Pulitzer Prize for history. Reviewed at Resolute Reader.
The Zimmerman Telegram by Barbara Tuchman.
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty by Robert K. Massie. I read this classic biography/tragedy back when I was in high school or college, and I remember it as fascinating. It’s since been updated with new discoveries made about the bodies that were found and from information found in Soviet archives.
Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea by Robert K. Massie.
Dreadnought by Robert K. Massie.
To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild. Semicolon review here.
The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age by Juliet Nicolson. Semicolon review here.
Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy by Diana Preston.

Children’s and young adult fiction:
Fly, Cher Ami, Fly!: The Pigeon Who Saved the Lost Battalion by Robert Burleigh. Based on a true story about carrier pigeons used by the U.S. Army during World War I.
War Game: Village Green to No-Man’s Land by Michael Foreman. A longer picture book story of a soccer game during the Christmas truce of 1914.
Winnie’s War by Jenny Moss. Semicolon review here.
The Best Bad Luck I Ever had by Kristin Levine. Semicolon review here.
When Christmas Comes Again: The World War I Diary of Simone Spencer, New York City to the Western Front, 1917 by Beth Seidel Levine.
Rilla of Ingleside by L.M Montgomery.
Betsy and the Great World by Maud Hart Lovelace. Betsy travels through Europe instead of going immediately to college after high school, and she sees the arms build-up and the beginning of World War I. Reviewed at Library Hospital.
Betsy’s Wedding by Maud Hart Lovelace. Reviewed at Reading on a Rainy Day.
Kipling’s Choice by Geert Spillebeen. I read this book a couple of years ago, but never got around to reviewing it. It’s a fictional account of the death of John Kipling, son of Rudyard Kipling, near Loos, France in 1915. Here it is reviewed at Chasing Ray.
War Horse by Michael Morpurgo. Joey, the farm horse, is sold to the army and sent to the Western front. Reviewed at Another Cookie Crumbles.
Without Warning: Ellen’s Story, 1914-1918 by Dennis Hamley. Ellen Wilkins becomes a nurse to follow her brother to war.
A Time of Angels by Karen Hesse. In 1918 Boston, Hannah Gold must face her own wartime suffering as the influenza epidemic sweeps through her family and town.
Eyes Like Willy’s by Juanita Havill. A French brother and sister, Guy and Sarah Masson, and their Austrian friend Willy are separated by the war.
After the Dancing Days by Margaret Rostkowski. We read this YA novel for my English/History class at homeschool co-op last year. Annie is a thirteen year old girl living in a small town in Kansas at the end of World War I. As she begins to visit the returning soldiers at the veterans’ hospital where her father works as a doctor, Annie is at first repulsed and frightened by the severely injured men. However, she comes to be friends with them, one in particular, even though her mother is opposed to Annie’s hospital visits and wants her to forget about the war and its consequences.
My Brother’s Shadow by Monica Schroder. This YA novel is brand new, published in September by Farrar Straus Giroux, and I got an ARC from the publisher. It’s about a German boy, Moritz, towards the end of the war in 1918 and how he comes to see the war and its results differently as he grows up in its aftermath. Moritz’s brother comes home severely wounded from the front, and Moritz must choose between his loyalty to his brother and his mother’s new socialist way of seeing politics and the world. I thought the story was good, but the fact that entire books is written in present tense distracted me. I suppose the intent is a “you are there” feel, but I would have preferred the distance and objectivity of past tense.

Adult fiction:
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.
To the Last Man: A Novel of the First World War by Jeff Shaara.
No Graves As Yet by Anne Perry is the first in her World War I mystery/suspense series. I don’t like her writing in these books as much as I did the Victorian Charlotte Pitt mysteries, but if you’re interested in the time period, they’re worth a try.

Of course, there are many, many more books about and set during World War I, but these are the ones with which I have some familiarity.

Armistice, November 11, 1918

Aug21

“The Armistice was signed in Foch’s railway car at 5 A.M. on November 11, 1918, to go into effect six hours later. Senselessly, to no military or political purpose, Allied infantry and artillery attacks continued full steam through the morning. On this final half day of the war, after the peace was signed, 2738 men from both sides were killed and more than 8000 wounded. The first and last British soldiers to die in the war—16-year-old John Parr of Finchley, North London, a golf caddy who lied about his age to get into the army, and George Ellison a 40-year-old miner from Leeds who survived all but the last 90 minutes of fighting—were killed within a few miles of each other near Mons, Belgium. It was recently discovered that, by coincidence, they are buried beneath pine trees and rosebushes in the same cemetery, Saint-Symphorien, seven yards apart.” To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild, p. 341.

And what if one of those 2738 men who died after the peace was already signed were your son or husband or friend? I would be a pacifist for life.

War and Remembrance: Armistice Day

Nov11

This day was known as Armistice Day because the armistice ending World War I was signed on November 11, 1918 at 11 AM. On May 13, 1938, it became a legal holiday in the U.S. to be observed every November 11th. In 1954, many held that the heroic struggle of the veterans of World War II and Korea needed to be acknowledged. Therefore, the term “armistice” was removed and replaced with veteran. In other countries this day is known as Remembrance Day.

HERE DEAD WE LIE
Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.
Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.

by A E Housman

IF I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

by Rupert Brooke

Veteran’s Day is really for remembering and appreciating those who have served and protected us, those who are living and those who died. So this last poem is for those who didn’t die in war, but who served and loved and tried to bring us through war to peace.

Peace
by Henry Vaughan

My soul, there is a country
Far beyond the stars
Where stands a winged sentry
All skilful in the wars:
There, above noise and danger,
Sweet peace sits crowned with smiles,
And One born in a manger
Commands the beauteous files.
He is thy gracious friend,
And (O my soul, awake!)
Did in pure love descend
To die here for thy sake.
If thou canst get but thither,
There grows the flower of peace,
The rose that cannot wither,
Thy fortress, and thy ease.
Leave then thy foolish ranges;
For none can thee secure
But One, who never changes,
Thy God, thy life, thy cure.

Texas Tuesday: Joseph A. Altsheler

Oct6

In 1918 Joseph A. Altsheler was voted by the nation’s public librarians the most popular author of boys’ books in the United States.

I had never heard of him. Had you?

Altsheler, who lived and wrote around the turn of the century until his death in 1919, wrote historical adventures stories set during the Civil War and the Westward movement. One of of his adventure series was set in Texas:

The Texan Series
The Texan Star, the story of a great fight for liberty (1912)
The Texan Scouts, the story of the Alamo and Goliad (1913)
The Texan Triumph, a romance of the San Jacinto campaign (1913)

I was able to find the middle book in the series at the library, and so I ordered it and read it. It took a few pages for me to get into the story of a teenaged “scout” and his two adult companions who are scouring the countryside for signs that the Mexican army under Santa Anna is coming to invade Texas. Of course, they find exactly what they’re looking for. Ned, the teen protagonist, accidentally runs across the Mexican army at least six or eight times over the course of the book. He’s captured and escapes three times; he conceals himself in a serape and makes his way through Santa Anna’s army as a spy at least twice. Ned witnesses the fall of the Alamo and the massacre at Goliad. He becomes friends with Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, and he confronts both Captain Urrea (General Urrea’s nephew) and General Santa Anna multiple times. In short, it’s an unbelievably adventurous tale with barely room to breathe and turn the page between major historical events for all of which Ned has a ringside seat and a major part to play.

Ned is brave, somewhat hot-tempered, but wise beyond his years. Santa Anna and almost all of the Mexican officers are portrayed as courageous, but also cruel, deceitful and vain. The Texans are woefully outnumbered, but they are sure the righteousness of their cause will enable them to prevail. Even Ned’s horse is a heroic figure, responding to Ned’s least command and helping Ned to escape his enemies more than once.

OK, it sounds totally hokey. It is definitely one-sided. The Mexican peasants in Santa Anna’s army are dupes and ignorant cannon fodder. The Texans are all brave and honest and true. Nevertheless, the more I read the more I enjoyed this un-nuanced, bigger than life version of the pivotal events of Texas history. After all, it’s a good thing to know the myth before (if) you start debunking it. And Santa Anna was a villain.

The same, mostly homeschooled, boys and parents who have made a market for G.A. Henty’s historical fiction accounts of boyhood bravado in the midst of historical events would love these books, too. Altsheler’s Texan series is available in paperback reprint editions at Amazon and since it’s no longer subject to copyright it’s also available for various eReaders. His other series set during the Civil War, the French and Indian War, and other places and times on the American frontier are also available.

Especially if you have boys to please, I recommend you check one out from the library and try it. The language is early twentieth century, but not too difficult. Maybe read aloud at first and stop at a strategic moment. (Yes, I have been known to pull such tricks.) You might inspire a boy to become a brave, independent, resourceful (Texan) patriot.

Other Texas-themed posts from around the web this week:
Gautami Tripathy reviews Lonestar Secrets by Collen Coble.
Melissa Wiley on The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly, a juvenile fiction title which takes places on a Texas pecan farm.
Melissa at Book Nut interviews Jacqueline Kelly.
Jen Robinson reviews The Sweetheart of Prosper County by Jill Alexander.

The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington

May23

The only other book I’ve read by Booth Tarkington was Penrod, a story about a mischievous boy growing up around the turn of the century. I remember it as funny and profound upon the subject of boyhood, kind of like Tom Sawyer.

The Magnificent Ambersons, aside from the time period, the early 1900’s, and the setting, the American Midwest, is not at all like Penrod. As an under current in the book, Tarkington preaches about the general nastiness and inevitability of urban sprawl and how the automobile and the factory have destroyed community and cleanliness and all that makes life worthwhile. Preaching aside, Mr. Tarkington still manages to tell an engaging story, a sort of family epic, the rise and fall of the Ambersons.

Georgie Amberson Minafer is a spoiled rich brat, reared in luxury and with a sense of entitlement. The Ambersons, George’s mother’s family, are the center of society in their “Midland town.” From the beginning of the novel, the author sets Georgie up for disaster; the entire town is waiting for George Amberson Minafer to get his “come-upance”. As George grows up the reckoning is delayed again and again, but the most casual reader must know that George’s pride goeth before a fall. George’s favorite word for other people, all others who aren’t Ambersons, is “riff-raff”. His attitude can only and always be described as condescending, even with the young lady with whom he falls in love.

So, The Magnificent Ambersons is first of all a cautionary tale. Pride is destructive. Things change; no one stays on top forever. Fortunes come and go. Only those who are strong, wise, and flexible, and maybe even lucky, can persevere to enjoy the good life.

However, the book is not just a preachy, moralistic fable. It’s a picture of life at the turn of the century, of how change affects different personalities. It’s a love story about a mother who idolizes her son, and a young man who loves his family pride more than he cares for the woman who is willing to overlook many of his faults and who could have made him happy. And the ending is about forgiveness and hope and the possibility that broken things can be, if not mended, perhaps made new.

I’ve not seen the Orson Welles movie based on this book, but I plan to do so. After reading the novel, I can see how this book would make a great “old movie”. No modern remakes, however, nowadays a writer and director would most likely ruin the movie version with gratuitous sex and a plot in which only the characters’ names were borrowed from the original book.

A Work in Progress review of The Magnificent Ambersons.