Two survivors
DAVID WILLIAMS
Disenchantment C. E. Montague (MacGibbon and Kee 30s) A Life Apart Alan Thomas (Gollancz 28s) These two books, both absorbing in their different ways, have this in common: they serve to emphasise how important it is, if you aren't to go through life with a warped psyche, to shed your illusions good and early.
Montague was forty-seven in 1914. One of C. P. Scott's bright young men, he joined the Manchester Guardian in 1890 after a brilliant Oxford career. He dyed his hair in order to cheat the recruiting sergeant—and also perhaps in order to make it match the bright sincerity of his illusions. Swaddled for twenty years in the comfortable, humanistic, Manchester Guar- dian certainty that men are basically good and kind and nice and that it's just the system that's wrong, he was too old, when his nose came to be rubbed up close to the disgusting truth about his fellow-creatures, to readjust himself, to swing back on to an even keel. Alan Thomas, by con- trast, was only nineteen when he joined the Royal West Kents in August 1915. His illusions were just the natural boyish ones, ephemeral, like pimples on the chin. He Win, of course, like Montague, was due for digenchantment But youth has its wonderful resilience. And if you have courage and emotional stability, as Thomas clearly has, you can live through even the unimaginable horrors of --1914-18 and
emerge at the other end still a whole Fen. Montague, too, managed to remain alive— through Loos, the Somme, Cambrai and the slaughterous rest—and came home to write Disenchantment in 1922.
But his is a sour, almost rancid, book. With him everyone is so wrong: the brasshats, the government, the medical officers—even the chaplains. He is for ever arguing at cross- purposes with himself—about, for example, the moral rightness in war of lying and deception, of selling lethal dummies, of spreading false propaganda. Having accepted the basic idiocy and criminality of war, he is then prepared to set about splitting anguished moral hairs about the exact size and shape of the horrors a decent man in such circumstances should allow himself to perpetrate. He dwells mournfully on the sad differences between the volunteers of 1914 and the conscript replacements of 1916. What did he expect?
He is literate almost to the point of being oppressive. Echoes, adaptations, reminders of proven passages—from Shakespeare, the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, from all over the anthologised place—nudge you constantly, as if to say, 'Look how well-read I am.' Stylistically he burns and burns away a la Pater, and his flame is so conscientiously hard and gemlike you get dizzy looking at it.
This isn't to say that Montague can't be elegant and apt in his own right. He can. His anger can glow in phrases of his own minting. How splendidly his aristocratic temper comes out in this: `NCOS and men in the field . . . assumed now that while they were doing the job they must expect to be crawled upon by all the vermin bred in the dark places of a rich country vulgarly governed.'
And the fundamental truth was in him, no doubt about that His contempt for the miser- able 'peace' of Versailles rings out loud and clear. He prophesies the harsh inevitability of 1939 even though he never lived to see him- self proved right. He has true instincts about the basic rights and wrongs of the society he lived in, about what was wrong—and still in large measure is wrong—with our educational system, for example.
But that surprised, irrational sourness, the bleating variations on the question 'Why are people so awful?,' weaken his book. Why should vulgar governments, and sabre-rattling writers back at base, and incompetent polo- playing regular officers, surprise him so? They were and are the rule. And the answer to the question, I think, is plain. He came to it all too old, too set in his ways.
In the late summer of 1916 Montague escorted H. G. Wells on a tour of some front- line trenches. (Things were quiet.) H. G. summed him up with typical catty Wellsian shrewdness: 'We had confessed to each other about what a bore the war had become to us . . . and we talked as We trudged along very happily of the technical merits of Laurence Sterne . . . Montague was a curious mixture of 6th Form Anglican sentimentality (about dear old horses, dearer old 'doggies, brave women, real gentle- men, the old school, the old country and sound stock : Galtworthyissimus in fact) with a most advenforous intelligence. He was a radi- cal bound, ide-bound in a conservative hide.'
Alan Thomas has written A Life Apart not four but forty years after the events described. He looks back on a personal experience of -the most ghastly war in history in calm. of mind,
passion spent He is personal, detailed, full of humility and compassion, where Montague is generalised, thinly reticent on personal de- tails, and, in his well-bred way, querulous. Yet • . the carnage and the waste lose none of their hideousness, death's swift and casual sundering of youthful friendships loses none of its poignancy through being set down in the muted, unflamboyant prose proper to old age.
Both of these are good books, worth reading and worth keeping. But if I'd only the price of one I think I'd lay out my twenty-eight bob on Alan Thomas.
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