Further Along the Line
Gunner at the Western Front. By Aubrey Wade. (Batsford, 18s.) IN August, 1914, Henry James wrote to an old friend : 'Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and I'm sick beyond cure to have lived on to see it. [We] . . . should have been spared this wreck of our belief that through the long years we had seen civilisation grow and the worst become impossible. The tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara. . . . It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way. . .
Now one says, how quickly people have for- gotten—forgotten not merely the First World War, but even the death-camps and the gas- chambers of the Second! But of course the point is that these experiences or events have been for- gotten precisely because it is almost impossible to say anything about them at all : they so totally defeat the human instinct for order and reason and meaning; they make so absurd the belief of any individual man that his life is a valuable thing. For this reason, again, we owe a more than usually large debt of gratitude to those who, having passed through the centre of the events, yet managed to write down what they have seen. In bearing their witness they have kept alive a continuity not only with what happened in the trenches or the camps, but also with what life was like before the wreck. Through them a little less, a very little less, has been, in James's phrase, undone.
What we know imaginatively of the First World War we know from the memoirs of Graves, Sassoon and Blunden, and from the poems of Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg. To this dis- tinguished company Mr. Wade does not really belong; nevertheless, Gunner at the Western Front is a book that deserves its republication today. Mr. Wade's account of his war is simple and unaffected, and because he served in the ranks, and in the artillery, not the infantry, it fills out the picture offered by the others. The book also contains a selection of some seventy photographs from the Imperial War Museum, which illustrate far more than the text they accOmpany.
DAN JACOBSON
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